18-05-2025
I Searched the World's Holiest Places for a God
For the 330 million Hindu gods said to be worshiped in India, and the many others besides, you'd think my family might have gone in for at least one.
All my friends had a dedicated sacred space in their homes: a puja room or altar where they could pray and lay out flowers for their favorite deities. My best friend even had photographs of her God on the wall. His name was Aga Khan. I remember asking my mother, 'How come Maj's God wears a suit and is alive?' The fact that God didn't need to be dead blew my mind. God could be in the pots and pans, in a rock, the sky, the earth, even the polo field. Still, somehow, my family didn't have one.
Believing
The New York Times is exploring how people believe now. We look at Americans' relationship to religion, moments that shape faith and why God can be hard to talk about.
My mother came from a Welsh Calvinistic Methodist background, and my father's family were practicing Jains. Their coming together meant that we celebrated Christmas and Diwali in a secular fashion — heavy on feasting, light on religious instruction. The few times I was taken to temple or church I never knew what to do: how many times to circumambulate or ring the bell, when to close eyes or open them, sit, stand, kneel, bend.
The choreography of ritual bound people together, and not knowing the steps marked you as an outsider. I used to have nightmares about my mother's God and my father's God — one on the cross, the other meditating under a tree. Jesus and Mahavira: lanky, lugubrious men, asking me to choose between them.
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