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.
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.
I wanted to find my own God. As soon as I could, I went seeking places that exuded certain energies of the spirit, as though the world were a giant Ouija board. In order to get answers, I’d need to position myself in houses of God and resting places for the dead. Dargahs in Delhi, burning ghats of Varanasi, torii gates in Tokyo. I became the kind of person who made every trip into a pilgrimage. In Ethiopia, I clambered up toothlike mountains to gawk at centuries-old frescoes in Coptic churches. Once, in Mumbai, I tried to get into the Parsi Towers of Silence to see their sky burials. I got as far as the gate, where the keeper said, “But you are not Zoroastrian.” No kidding, Nietzsche.
In each of these places I felt a deep connection to time and landscape, what D.H. Lawrence referred to as nodality — the power you feel in certain places that makes them seem final, the beginning and end of the world. Places that are the great beating hearts of the earth. Places where spirits dwell. I sensed how small human life was compared with geological time. And yet people across civilizations had thwarted oblivion, creating monuments, stories and songs from their religious persuasions. In doing so, they wove an enduring web of belonging.
When I was a child, a famous painter visited our school and said there were two things that you inevitably breathed in the air if you lived in India: God and tuberculosis. I believe that was the moment I became a poet.
Faith surrounded me, inspiring my poetry. But I wanted to participate: I wanted to believe in belief, the religious kind, the God kind, and find my own way into this sacred landscape. Mostly, though, I remained a stalker of other people’s devotion. The Bhutanese monks with whom I sat practicing lotus mudra 108 times, the Tamil pilgrims I followed who put skewers through their cheeks as an act of devotion to Lord Murugan. I was a religious voyeur, trying to feel a charge from other people’s worshiping currents. But faith? I didn’t have it. Faith requires no evidence, and I was still seeking.
Perhaps the closest I’ve come to any spiritual revelation was a solo adventure I made more than 20 years ago to Dharamsala, a town in the Himalayas, the headquarters of the Dalai Lama.
It was meant to be a Virginia Woolf type of writing trip, but the room I had found for myself was poky and cold. It rained all week, and I produced zero poems. I’d hoped for blessings from the Dalai Lama, but he wasn’t in residence, and while the views of the mountains were stunning, the town itself was filled with garbage. It felt distinctly uninspired, un-“nodal.” Still, I had been shown kindness. A Rinpoche, a Buddhist teacher, lent me his umbrella and invited me to a chanting ceremony in his monastery. A fellow solo traveler shared stories of heartbreak and endless plates of dumplings with me. Then I tumbled down a hillside.
It was dusk. I was walking along the side of a winding mountain road to catch a bus. I was dragging a suitcase behind me on the gravel, laptop bag slung off one shoulder, when I saw bright headlights coming toward me. This is the end, I thought. I stepped off the side of the road and fell roughly 10 feet into a ravine. A primal sound emanated from within me that was neither poetry nor prayer. I tried to pick myself up, but everything hurt. And then, from above, a voice emerged from the mist: “Are you OK?”
The man who rescued me turned out to be from my hometown, the coastal city of Chennai, all the way down south. He’d been standing at a tea stall on the road and saw me fall. He helped me back onto the road.
On the long journey home, I thought about what had happened — the shock of the bruises, the relief of being alive. Over the years, I’ve returned, again and again, to the memory of my fall. It is, I believe, the closest analogue I have to faith. A step into the darkness. The hope of a safe landing, of salvation.
I haven’t stopped believing, like the tuberculosis-ridden Lawrence, that the world’s sacred, nodal sites offer us flashes of transcendence. A moment for our souls to be attentive and still. But I know now that an encounter with the sublime can happen in the most ordinary of places.
I’ve come to understand as well why poets so frequently address the invisible in their poems, something or someone they do not know and cannot see. Call it God, fog, the future. It is our need for connection that makes us speak into the void. Not so much for a reply, but simply as an expression of belief that someone is there, and is listening, and may even stretch out a hand.
Tishani Doshi, a writer and dancer, is the author most recently of “A God at the Door,” a book of poems.
Read the rest of “Believing” here.
The post I Searched the World’s Holiest Places for a God appeared first on New York Times.
