The Little Ganesha on my Desk

my experiments with religion

I am not a religious person. To the contrary, I have developed some aversion to rituals and idols, having grown up in a Hindu household. I remember my fascination for the Church when I was a child. I went to a convent school and every year, on the 10th of March, our new academic year would begin with a reading of the holy scriptures. Three texts would be read year after year: the Bhagavad Gita, the Guru Granth Sahib, and the Bible. There was no one to read the Quran, although there were Muslim students at school. In fact, there was one in my class—I never talked to him, although not because of his religion, but simply because he wasn’t my friend. I didn’t talk to a lot of people. But I remember thinking that his name sounded strange—different from us. Perhaps this is how religious, and other kinds of worldly, difference begin to take root in a child twelve years old. In the form of different sounding names, absent texts, lost stories.

To return to my fascination with the Church, I remember listening to all three readings year after year for seven years and I only ever understood the Bible. The Sanskrit of the Gita and the literary Punjabi of the Guru Granth Sahib said nothing to me. The Bible did, through the voice of our Father Manager: “The meekest of the Earth shall inherit the Heaven,” “What is salt if it has lost its saltness?” “You are the light of the world.” There was no one to explain to us what any of this meant or the symbols and metaphors that these scriptures were enriched with. Yet, some part of the reading stayed with me. I understood that God was not too keen on richness, not of the material variety, and that human beings had within them the power to be lights of the world. That was our school motto.

I remember, nevertheless, enjoying indulging in rituals at home, not because I thought they would please God, but because I liked ceremony. One time, I forced my parents to allow me to keep all the seven navratras (at our home, we break fast on the eight day, the ashtmi). Usually, my parents would fast only for one, sometimes two, days. I would accompany them. However, my little but questioning mind found that a fraud. How could you celebrate the Navratras if you weren’t actually fasting for the entire period with the climax at the end? So, because I was insistent or because my parents were always wise enough to let my brother and I speak our minds, they let me fast. Of course, they fasted with me. I remember how each evening, I would go up to the puja room and sing the aarti. I remember sitting down in our mandir and cleaning it, reordering the idols so that the usual Radha Krishna at the centre were replaced with Mata Durga. As if I were telling Radha and Krishna, ‘Not your turn, it’s the festival of the Goddess.’ You see, I had to be precise with things. You could not be doing the aarti during the Navratras to other gods: it must be Goddess Durga.

I remember the eight day, when my father gave us the prasad to break our fast. I always say that Hindu fasts are not serious affairs. Unlike the month long Ramazan, amidst the Hindus, with the exception of the Karwa Chauth and some other fasts where women, mostly, go without water and food the entire day, in all other fasts, we simply make exceptions—exclude wheat and pulses and replace them with other kinds of flour. At least this is what the Navratras were. The fasting of seven days simply meant we did not eat our usual staple. Regardless, that one time when I kept the seven day fast, and tasted the puri and chana with the kheer and halwa on the eight day, I realised how delicious my staple food was. Never had wheat tasted so luscious. Though I cannot fully recall that taste and experience, I sometimes think I can feel it on the tip of my tongue.

Years passed. My visits to our city temple and our home temple became less and less frequent. As I entered high school and studied some political science with a wonderful teacher, my mind began to question. The final nail in the coffin was university with its radical theory and the germ of reason. Each time I visit home now for Diwali and sit beside my parents as the pandit performs the puja, I cannot help but listen the same inaccessibility and futulity of his mantras as I heard every year at school. They say nothing to me. Instead, my eyes travel to my mother’s hand that rests on my father’s knee, while my father’s hands are busy washing the coins that represent Laxmi. My father is the conductor of the ceremonies, my mother and I mere accompaniments. My ears recognise the pandit asking my father to say aloud his gotra so that the correct gods can be invoked. I wonder what the pandit would do if my father suddenly mentioned an unmentionable gotra. Would all the washing and cleaning of the coins and the mantras and ceremony be erased into nothingness? Or perhaps, the shrama-prarthana at the end would save it all?

I know religion is much more than ritual. We sometimes call this, fashionably, faith. I know very little of it. Over millennia and centuries, people across space and time have attempted to reach at something beyond the Here and Now. I am sure some of that wisdom is locked in the verses of the Bhagavad Gita, if not the Vedic mantras of the pandit. I know too that for my parents, the weekly visit to the city temple each Tuesday, and the lighting of the lamp each morning and evening in our home temple lends them strength of a non-earthly variety—a strength I perhaps cannot understand—to go on with life. Perhaps, some of that strength flows in the form of their unconditional love for me such that I cannot seek to run away from it. Their faith, their religion flows through my body and soul in ways I cannot comprehend.

As I write this entry, a tiny idol of Ganesha looks at me from the right. It has been here since my first year. At the end of each term, I pack it with my other stuff, and at the beginning of the next term, I take it out and keep it on my table. Unthinkingly. I do not worship it. I do not think it represents God. I sometimes even forget that it sits on my table. Yet, for four years, in four different rooms, the same tiny idol has occupied some space on my desk along with my devices and table lamp and books. I wonder why. Perhaps because I like its elegance. It is not the usual ornamented stone idol; it is made of metal in a minimalist, almost modern, fashion. Perhaps because it was given to me as a gift by a family friend after I made it to university, and it reminds me of transition from home to a far-away place. Or perhaps simply because on days like these, it reminds me of fond memories of my experiments with faith and religion.

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