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of John’s Pizza when he was visiting America and earning money scooping Italian ice out of a cart marked Italian Queen.
    â€œSurrender,” my Western Tantric teaching told me.
    With no instruction from me, my boyfriend did the things Charles had instructed the men to do to worship women. It was both painful and ecstatic. But my boyfriend hadn’t gone to college, he was nine years younger than I, and his father couldn’t read or write. I pressed upon my heart chakra to release my fears. No surrender could transcend doubts about a career in Italian ice.
    I returned to America for my friend Sumita’s wedding. She was marrying a Muslim friend of mine from Iran whom I’d introduced her to after meeting him on the volleyball courts on the Washington Mall. Her grandmother didn’t know she was marrying a Muslim, but it mattered little to Sumita, who always lived with a pure heart, transcending the judgmental tendencies that seeped into our immigrant culture from India. In her home, appropriately, I experienced my first puja, not the kind I’d seen in Santa Cruz, California, where singles paired up, but a prayer to a Hindu god, Ganesh. As others used their hands to waft smoke from the fire ritual upon their faces, I hesitated. “Go ahead,” her father encouraged me. I did and breathed in my first blessing from a Hindu prayer.
    I discovered the mysticism of my roots through Sufi poetry, especially that written by the poet Jalaluddin Rumi, born in 1207 in modern-dayAfghanistan, sparking even more of my experimentation with surrender to the mystical. A man of Colombian descent followed, leaving me to reread his love poetry to me while his former girlfriend visited from her native Madrid to surprise him for his birthday.
    My casualties accumulated with an intern I met when I arrived at NBC studios for an on-air interview by anchor Brian Williams. The intern called me to go out. I dreamed great thoughts about his rise on TV, my book, our future. I used my Tantric principle of surrender to release my soul to him. While I daydreamed about our future, he rose from bed. “I’ve got to get up early in the morning.”
    â€œHow are you getting home?”
    The subway, he said. I figured it would be too dangerous at that late hour. He said he was out of money. I reached into my wallet and pulled out a twenty for him to get a taxi. I remembered another twenty-something I’d dated in Washington. We’d rendezvoused in front of the Lincoln Memorial. We were breaking up. I cried. He cried. When we parted, he asked me if he could borrow a twenty to get home. As I gave the bill to this NBC intern, he turned away from the doors with the words, “I’ll call you.” I never got a call.
    I still believed in love. Though I wept over these men, I was grateful to them for teaching me lessons of dharma, what Buddhists call “knowledge.” They crystallized for me a realization that I had been approaching for some time now. This path upon which I was treading was not the one I wanted for myself. Every few months I met a man with whom I thought I could start a relationship. But, sure enough, each time my judgment was wrong. American Tantra taught surrender, but the philosophy of surrender as I understood it was foolish and filled with suffering.
    I was ready to leave this life. I had departed from family tradition as a woman. I had moved away from home alone at the age of twenty-one, earned my master’s degree, and then pursued a prestigious journalism career at the country’s largest newspaper. I’d set up homes for myself in San Francisco, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and finally New York, crisscrossing the country, jetting into strange cities for assignments, renting cars and navigating my way for everything from interviews in aMinnesota maximum security prison to the crash site of TWA Flight 800 off the coast of Long Island. While I had broken new frontiers, my life of