The temple was smaller than most, enclaved in an inconspicuous spot off the side of the main road. Auntie visited the temple regularly to offer prayers. This time, she took me along and gave me a little steel pot of milk to hold on to as we queued up along the narrow stone path.
The inner sanctum it led to, was dimly lit, little diyas dotting the shelves that were built into the wall. The supplicant at the front of the queue stepped up with their offering in hand. The pundit smashed a coconut and offered the broken pieces onto a plate in front of the Shiv lingam, its tripund– three stripes- painted on the front, feeling like passive eyes, watching, waiting, judging. Heady incense filled my nostrils and permeated my skin. It was disorienting and divine. The next supplicant moved forward with a little steel pot in hand as well, and tilted the pot over the black figure, the white liquid flowing onto its shiny black surface.
Auntie grabbed my hand and pulled me further along the path, my senses reeling as I patiently waited for my turn to do the same. Pundits clanged the manjira as they chanted, the reverberating sounds filling the air, intensified by the high pitched ringing. Every sensory perception felt activated and struggled to parse the stimulus around me. I would have been overwhelmed had I not felt safe. Held.
Our turn arrived.
Aunty beckoned me to follow her cue.
She tilted her steel pot.
I did the same.
Milk flowed out and coated the Shiv Lingam, thick white rivulets forming a stream over the obsidian rock and pooling at its base like a cosmic river finally finding its flow at the feet of its god. Dimly, in the back of my mind, I knew that this was one of those moments that had been etched into my memory forever. A psycho spiritual lesson that superseded any church sermon I had sat through previously.
Auntie put her hands together and bowed, I followed suit.
A brief thought flickered, the reminder of sacrilege, a broken vow to another God somewhere– but it didn’t matter because the pundit was handing us the prasad, a little laddoo and some coconut and all thoughts of sacrilege fled my mind. It was frankly, the reason why I remained tethered to the numerous gods that I came to learn about, each time bowing for prasad as I wondered how I could possibly be sliding into some satanic inferno for disrespecting my God when someone else’s god was willing to give me such delicacies for offering respect.
It’s painful and punishing to withhold all this within you at all times, hence one must compartmentalize.
Learning to live with this sacrilege was a liberating skill. It gave me questions that no textbook could answer and no adult really wanted to engage with. When you are raised in India, you either learn to live with this non-duality or you petrify. Your heart, closed off and resistant to anything that is not in the scope of your immediate vicinity.
Especially in Mumbai, It’s not possible to live in a state of ignorant comfort not knowing the other. You either know it and choose to engage with it, or you choose to cut it out of your periphery. Either way, it’s an active choice.
If you choose to unknow the other, you must learn to compartmentalize. Compartmentalization comes with the experience of being raised as an Indian. It is impossible to behold Mumbai as a single entity or a monolithic experience. Its prismatic allure based on its ability to encompass advaita or non-duality, its maxim comprising a million truths. It was impossible to deny juxtaposing forces when you beheld the roadside tarp tents many people called home, raised children and lived full lives in, alongside expansive mansions that comprised of a single family unit. Extreme wealth and extreme poverty, all living under the same brutal sun. It’s painful and punishing to withhold all this within you at all times, hence one must compartmentalize.
When the fabric of reality was always in flux, when one person’s happiness comprised of another suffering, you simply created your own shade of reality.
“That is them, we are us” my mother said to me whenever I petitioned for something new and trendy.
Things I saw my friends do, wear and believe. Whenever I questioned the differences in our realities; gods, skin colour, traditions, all varying shades of the rainbow and never the same experience, I was resolutely reminded to highlight our circumstances.
My mother enforced this distance, less a gap and more of a hairline fracture, by informing us of our insular nature. We were not them, they were not us, even as we lived and died together.
The parochial space we created to which no invitation or entry existed other than by birth. Even as our edges frayed, bled into each others spaces as we celebrated festivals, danced with our friends and neighbors, ate their food— mixed it with our own, and married their sons and daughters. Our physical differences as Sino Indians served as a constant tripwire that we lived and thrived on the cultural fabric of India like oil on water. Not quite repelling, but not really mixing either. Our realities shifted forms and followed the movements of our adoptive country but always remained resolutely oily.
Yet for us, the newer generations of Sino Indians who have no recollection nor connection to the Sino-Indian war, our reality is much less like oil and water and more as that of a snowball on a hill.
Thanks to the ambitions and far-reaching arm of the western God, we found a new direction to roll our snowball towards. The pictures of our ancestors placed on wooden shrines, now replaced by pictures of Jesus. Our Lunar Year celebrations found new ways to circumvent the sacrilegious tradition of bowing and offering incense before your ancestral shrines. Then eventually our snowball found a western home with fellow settlers on old land that did not belong to us and spoke of no personal historical misfortune.
We are us, was our mantra, even as we gave up the home our forefathers had adopted and took up a new identity as Canadians, and brought our spaces with us. After all, the snowball must keep rolling or it must cease to be.
An officially middle-aged me finds relief in an entirely different space now, completely removed from the nest that brought me into existence and from the garden that nurtured my capacity to exist and move with confidence in this world.
So far, it has taught me value in consistency, in stability despite not belonging and in showing up for your community. I have chosen to move on from seeking intimacy and a distorted sense of belonging based on my identity as anything other than a human being. I have expanded my definition of communal belonging, honoring what the world has always known but we have forgotten to value. I realize now that I am not interested in being progressive as much as I am in encompassing social righteousness, goodness and sensitivity.
Meanwhile my brother seeks a new identity in another continent elsewhere and we continue to roll down that proverbial hill, leaving behind some and gaining others.
We are us, but we are also them— I think, is the new core of the snowball that has since shed its identity with the debris of immigration and generational change.
But for me, personally, as a first generation immigrant the seed of truth that has been infused into my very existence by the space that birthed my identity is all contained within the aphorism “Mumbai meri jaan”.