The most unlikely people go to ashrams. Only recently a friend, who I’ve always regarded as the epitome of common-sense and practicality, confessed rather shamefacedly that she found going to a well-known ashram in South India, of great comfort. I stared at her, struck dumb for once. I remembered with acute embarrassment, mocking this particular godman in her presence, wondering with very little tolerance in my tone, why people needed a medium between God and themselves.

I’ve often thought how easy it must be to invent, if not a religion itself, then a cult or a sort of mass movement, which would draw people into some fantasy of instant salvation and spiritual manna. Watching the Sanskaar Channel may give you some ideas. Set yourself up as self-proclaimed guru with direct access to godhead, hint at miraculous powers, or have people spread rumours of visions granted, spout clichés with enough mystical vagueness, borrow bits and pieces from other religions…above all you must have a super-sized ego and enjoy telling people how to live their lives.

What did the Emperor Akbar do when he founded the Din-e-ilahi? Listened to a lot of wise men from all possible religions, took what he considered the best of the philosophies in a nutshell, including Jainism and Zoroastrianism, a good dash of the mystical, offered his personal idea of heaven after a lifetime of good deeds, and there you were… one ready-made religion served up! The fact that this new philosophy was opposed tooth and nail by most and had only about nineteen adherents is beside the point. If Akbar had had today’s media powers and its razzle-dazzle, the Divine Faith would have been with us still!

Fortunately or unfortunately for the rest of humanity, I do not have enough belief either in myself, or in a supreme deity. I do not think that humans en masse have enough vision to even begin to comprehend a vast Other reality. In fact, the clearest memory of my childhood was of a day, when literally out of the blue, I looked up at a clear summer sky, and said aloud with complete certainty to whoever was listening, “You don’t exist.” Later when describing the intensity of that realisation to a cousin, what seemed overwhelmingly clear was that there was no such thing as a personal God; someone who oversaw every second of one’s existence, who knew every breath you drew, and who was the keeper of your destiny.

Like anyone who lives in India, I have been dunked in an ocean of religiosity from childhood, watching my mother fast herself sick, the ritual feasts, the daily lighting of the lamps in front of the sacred idols, the weekly payasam offered first to the deities before we could partake of it, and after puberty, being warned not to approach the gods while we had our periods. And once when I deliberately disobeyed this injunction and watered the tulsi plant, was aghast to see it shrivel and die, and suffered acute guilt as a consequence, for a long while.

But the strangest thing, I realize now, is the lack of absolute moral precepts being handed down. Oh, one was whacked when caught out in a lie, or caught stealing petty cash, but it was just assumed that I would understand why what I had done was wrong. There was never any explanation about falseness of any kind being an impediment to growth, anything scriptural, or strict codes handed down to us. It was only in school, a Catholic institution that one spoke of God and what He (no question of a She) expected of us that was made explicit in the Moral Science class. We learnt the Paternoster in Hindi and English, and the Hail Mary, which I still find myself reverting to in moments of crisis. The idea of sin being hateful to God was impressed upon us with due rigueur.

At home the pictures of gods and goddesses on the walls and in the puja room were taken completely for granted. They were, I realize now, entirely my mother’s realm. We learnt in Sanskrit, by rote, the significant mrityunjay, the gayatri, (even though we were girls!), the paean to Saraswathi which we would repeat after my mother at bed-time. I loved the fact that they were prayers to the universe, to forces that were silently accepted if not named.

The life we lived in Bombay where I was born, was the one set by my father’s example whose fairly impoverished beginnings and subsequent rise as a government officer by dint of hard work and complete integrity was held up to us as the standard. This still works for me. He lived largely within himself, a gentle, reticent man, whose principles of behaviour have profound resonances for his children.

He adored Gandhi, adopted his simplicity, celibacy (after I the youngest, was born), his complete openness where religion was concerned. The stories passed down by my mother concerned his having mainly Muslim friends in school and college, among whom he enjoyed feasting and keeping the Ramzaan fast. He loved the Urdu language and long after we were grown, practiced its prescribed courtesies when guests entered the house.

The other remarkable thing as we were growing up was that there was never a mention made of which category of caste we belonged to. It was only when we went South for family weddings etc. that the discrimination became clear. So when we later had to fill in forms for various institutions, there was always a moment’s pause to think, before we complied.

Nothing can quite match the gaiety of a household-full of young girls getting dressed for a festival or wedding, the flowers, the silks, the pretty jewellery, smiling friends and family, knowing that one is on display and must be on one’s best behaviour. Quite early, the idea that our marriages would be arranged, and that unquestioning obedience was the standard we lived by, still puzzles me now. There seemed to be no idea of individual priorities: why did we never argue, or discuss issues or just simply assert what we would like to do? Why for instance did I never mention that I wanted to be a writer, which I think I knew fairly early?

There seemed to be an unspoken rule that our parents knew better than most about the way our lives were to be lived. But again, very little if anything was said about what marriage meant, what the essential differences were between men and women, what sex meant, what going into another family would mean, and how we were expected to strengthen those new relationships.

The greatest freedom we experienced was being able to read whatever we chose. Almost everything I’ve learnt in life seems to have come from reading. There were great and minor writers in my father’s bookshelf and he would bring home books from one of the city libraries and of course we had the school library with a wonderful collection. My sense of the right and wrong way to live came from the books I read, and then began to apply to the world around, to the people whose lives I saw unfolding.

As a child, I seemed to live in a kind of dreamscape. I would observe people act in a particular way, or threaten violence and strike out, or cheat and lie; I would register the falseness of their expressions and smiles, the tension in the air and these undercurrents appeared normal for most people. The discrepancies between how people appeared to be and what they actually were, struck me with great clarity. Casual cruelty on the streets towards animals, women and children or the licensed violence with which the police behaved, hit me with great force. The political life of the country too presented a theatre of duplicity and embedded violence which seemed to be an intrinsic part of the patriarchal nature of our society. Then as the religious right became more powerful in our country, I began to question everything about the religion and the community I had grown up within.

I cringe at the overt and obtrusive way in which religion now permeates every aspect of life in this country and how wrong-doing is justified as being for the larger good. The transcendental plays a very small part in our lives. Instead the individuals and families scratching their way through the thorns and swamps of society is most apparent. If there is one thing I would wish for our country and then the rest of the world it would be freedom from religion. To live by the highest ethical standards I would consider is enough, one doesn’t need the bogey of an all-powerful, judgemental God sitting over every aspect of our lives.

I have also been witness to individual lives of the utmost simplicity and kindness, compassion to the insignificant and weak, arising out of faith in a common humanity. Living nobly and well in a totally non-materialistic sense is thankfully still an ideal worth striving towards.