It's October, Happy New Year!

Now, this was something to see. I had no idea what Annakut was and, frankly, I didn’t bother to look it up because, if Hemu invited me, that was enough for me so I didn’t bring my camera. But I did find a few pictures on line... just wait.

By worship you will nourish the
gods and the gods will nourish you in turn;
by nourishing one another
you assure the well-being of all.

Bhagavad Gita 3.10

When I got to the Whittier BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir (temple) in Whittier, Hemu was easy to find. Although crowds of people were talking in small happy groups or wandering in out of the hot late fall sun, I had now her cell phone number and she had mine. I was by her side in a moment and, when I bent down to touch her feet – or at least show some effort to get down there while we were standing on the black macadam- she grabbed me and laughed, “No, wrong person. I should be the one doing that to you!”

That wasn’t true, of course -- the student always bows to the person with the knowledge -- but we settled for a quick hug. Hemu is one of the only people who makes me feel tall. Her neat, shiny hair was parted in the middle and she was wearing yet another elegant sari in honor of the festive occasion. She said, “You know, I really feel like I’ve always known you.”

I knew exactly what she meant. “Me, too, Hemu.”

“Come. Let me show you something.”

I’d finally learned that you never come to a temple empty-handed so I’d brought flowers which, Hemu gently pointed out, was a perfectly fine offering on most days and was even perfectly fine that day as well but, on Annakut, the first day of the new year, what people were supposed to bring was food. As we walked in to the mandir, I found out why.

There are not enough excessive words to describe what was in that room. The entire length of the altar was blocked by a wooden, stepped platform covered with hundreds of individual plates of food, perfectly presented, as if ready for a commercial photo shoot. A second showcase for still more plates was actually a fountain with four separate sprays of water, each lit a different color by underwater lights. The variety of the food was astounding.

I asked Hemu, “What's this all this about?”

“This is the first day of the new year,” Hemu said, “and we are offering all this food to God so he will give it back to us all year. The target was like nine-hundred to twelve hundred items.”

“How many did you bring?”

“I brought like seven or eight.”

“I’ve never seen so much food put out like this.”

“It’s our way of saying thank you to Lord Ganesh for everything he will provide this year. There are about seven hundred items here today.”

And it turns out, seven hundred plates of food requires two rooms, two enormous stepped platforms to display because there was even more food, on an even larger stepped platform, in the main prayer hall where people were sitting, watching a video transmission of the sadhus officiating the service in the other hall – there were just too many people there to use just one.

I loved being there with Hemu, loved that she'd thought to invite me but I struggle in the midst of big pageants like these. It's hard for me to respond in anyway other than as an observer, a parade-watcher, a gawker. I'm certain I'd have a much different feeling about all of this had I stayed up, night after night, probably with family members, making one special dish after another to contribute to the offering. It'd be a family ritual, then, like decorating our Christmas tree or our nearly annual attempt to make a gingerbread house. (It's a good thing ours aren't ever meant to be on display.) But I think Annakut offers more than just annual ritual, if you're open to it.

So much of Hinduism involves treating whatever your idea of God is kind of like a revered corporal figure. Most of these rituals involve the symbolic feeding, bathing and clothing of whatever form of God you worship so there's an opportunity to develop an intimate, on-going relationship - not so easy when I find myself truly incapable of imagining any form that might even serve as a stand-in for the Divine. Not only that, I think I have a hard time with the display portion of organized religion. It might just be that I haven't had enough experience with it to feel comfortable but there may be more to it than that: the moments I've had in my life where I've felt something I might identify as the first rumblings of the sacred have always occurred in quiet, in solitude or something close to it, only on occasion in the midst of an event and usually those events involved a story that made me see things a different way - events like plays or movies, even songs.

I do know I was so much more comfortable being there with my current frame of mind than the one I've lugged around with me all of my life. I sat next to Hemu while she translated the service in in my notebook just trying to understand and to appreciate, to find what I could in it that might have meaning for me while accepting that whatever might not resonate still was beautiful and possibly moving to others. Boy, that hasn't been my natural state until recently. If I'd ended up some place like this decades ago I would have tried to soothe my feelings of dislocation and fear by cataloguing all that was "weird" instead of just taking the time to understand more. What a sad way I've lived some of my life.

As the service continued, I began to wonder if any of the sadhus I was seeing on the big screens (although they were just one hall away)was the one who’d read and written his reactions to my project. I pointed to one and asked Hemu, “Is that the one who answered my email?” Why I needed to see the face of the monk originally shocked by project, shocked by me, I didn't know but I did. I guess I wanted to see the face of someone my upbringing could shock.

Hemu answered, “No. That isn’t him.”

“Is the one who answered here?”

“Yes, I’ll show him to you.” We watched the screen showing the ritual in the other room for a while when all of a sudden Hemu said, “That’s him. He was the one just singing. He was born here.”

Just before the camera panned away, I caught a glimpse of a tall, thin man with a close-cropped beard, probably in his mid-thirties, possibly forty, but I doubted it. He didn’t seem all that shockable but, as alien as Hinduism was for me, my upbringing outside of any faith and practice must have been alien – and even shocking – to him.

I sat on the floor next to Hemu who, without discussion, had taken my notebook and was busily translating whatever was said. Around her right wrist were at least five of the magenta puja strings like the one she'd tied on mine at my very first "puja" or worship service, the string she’d told me was supposed to symbolize our devotion to God. Hers were all different shades: some new and bright, one pale and about to break. My single strand had frayed and faded a bit but was still, more than a month later, strong on my wrist. Hard to believe but, in all this time, no one had asked me about it or even seemed to notice it; it was just a piece of cotton kitchen string tied to my wrist and slowly losing its once uneven shade of magenta. I’d been wondering what I was supposed to do about it. Was I supposed to cut it off or what? But it felt strange to just call Hemu up to ask.

Now I had my answer: it's supposed to stay on until it falls off.

Well, okay.

22 October 2006

More Annakut pictures from various BAPS Swaminarayan mandirs around the country....

Cleveland & Houston....














Boston and New Jersey...

Hemu's Morning Rituals

I tried to practice a bit of the Hindu ritual I didn’t get very far. Using the small morning “puja” kit Hemu suggested I buy from the bookstore at the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan mandir, I struggled, alone in my room.

Inside the tan zippered pouch was: a square of stiff fabric to sit on; red fabric on which the devotional items should be placed; a string of wooden beads; a red velvet, L-shaped pouch open at only one end; five laminated images of Lord Swaminarayan and the spiritual leaders who came after him; a round mirror; a ceramic mortar; an orange pastel-like stick; a tube with a red chalky substance inside; a dropper bottle for water; a piece of metal bent into a U-shape on one side; and a long, streamer-like folded pamphlet with the words “Daily Puja” in brown ink.

When Hemu first walked me through all the items inside, she explained that the L-shaped pouch was for the rosary beads, which were supposed to remain inside it. The meaning and use of all the rest, she said, I’d find explained in the little manual inside; the directions would show me her entire daily morning ritual. I figured if Hemu could do it when she was busy raising two children not much older than my own and running a business with her husband, I could too.

Hah.

Here’s what it said to do: “Awake before six in the morning every day, brush your teeth and …take a bath.” Then, without eating or drinking anything, “do not put on your normal work clothes…but wear… a newly washed set of clothes.” After laying out the cloth to sit on and the cloth with all the other items on it, a devotee was supposed to sit facing north or east. Next, I was to make an orange paste in the mortar by mixing drops of water with the soft orange stick, which the bent metal wire is dipped into it and then pressed “between the eyebrows” leaving behind a yellow-orange U-shape. In the middle of it, I had to “imprint a red chandlo of kumkum” - the red chalk.

Next, there was a brief period of meditation in which I was supposed to contemplate thoughts like: “I am Atma. (God within me) I am not this body.” Followed by “imagining the Lord (Swaminarayan) and His best Sadhu (monk) to be before you. Gently awake Them. Lead them through the daily morning routine. Offer them clothes, ornaments, garlands, aarti (light or fire), thal (food), etc”

At this point three of eleven steps were complete. The remaining steps were: inviting the Lord and his best sadhu to come into the puja; the chanting of various mantras; “telling the rosary” which involved chanting “Swaminarayan” with each bead; standing on one leg with the other crossed and “resolve to offer devotion to God no matter what the hardship”; walking around the mats - in a clockwise direction - eleven times still telling the rosary; prostrate five times, “fully stretched out on the ground” to “show our total surrender to God” and become humble and then, one more time, to ask forgiveness for any mistakes made; then came a period of prayer followed by thanking “the Lord for being present in your puja” and for forgiving “any mistakes you may have made during your puja.” The final steps were cleaning up the puja things, hanging up the special clothes you wore some place where they wouldn’t get touched, cleaning your home temple and bowing down to your parents and anyone else present saying, “Jai Swaminarayan.”

I made a complete mess. The little pamphlet was streaked with red. I couldn’t get the wire to dip into the yellow chalky stuff enough to be able to leave behind the U on my forehead. Instead, I had a smear of yellow between my eyebrows more like a baby with its first solid food than someone in prayer. And, when I got to the directions where it told me to stand on one leg, well, that seemed just plain silly, especially since I’d have to do this while holding on to the pamphlet so I’d know what to do next. I gave up.

Hemu did this every day?

I felt hopelessly inadequate, yet again, to the task at hand. How many working people with families to care for were able to do this every day, to follow every single step to the degree their devotion called them? Did they end up feeling inadequate, too, as though their faith was simply out of reach? Was my inability to charge headlong into such daily ritual significant? If so, of what?


(8 September 2006)

Back to BAPS

It is better to do your own duty
badly, than to perfectly do
another’s; you are safe from harm
when you do what you should be doing.

Bhagavad Gita, 3.35

When I drove home at the end of the day, there was a red dot on my forehead. Here’s how it got there.

No one stopped me at the front gate of the temple this time. I walked in with too much purpose, past the people greeting each other, to put my sandals in the women’s rack before opening the door. Hemu told me the time to come so I was shocked to see a service already in progress and it looked like it'd been going on for a while. I hate being late - hate it - but I was beginning to get that it might not matter here. There was an informality to the services with people coming and going all the time, saying hello, even chatting for a bit.

A man’s voice was coming over the PA system but it wasn’t clear where the speaker was – no one was facing the crowd. Women were sitting cross-legged with styrofoam trays in front of them on the far side of the room while, on the near side of the knee-high divider, two men sat on a special rug in front of a low table draped with silk. A few elderly men watched from plastic chairs along the wall. I felt lost standing there in the middle of the room, wondering where Hemu was so I gave up trying to figure out who was speaking and headed for a small group of women at the back who were sorting through a pile of pink and white flowers.

I bent down to whisper, “Hi, I’m sorry to bother you but...I’m Marley. Do you know where Hemu is?”

One of the women smiled and pointed to the rows of women sitting on the floor.

Hemu was in a yellow sari up front and deep in the rows of seated women. She waved me over when she saw me. I picked my way over knees and trays to sit in the space created when the entire row of women shifted over to make room for me. I felt like a lummox.

“Sorry, I’m late! I thought I was supposed to come at two,” I said. “What’s going on here?”

Hemu said, "We're doing puja.”

There was no time to ask what a "puja" was. Hemu moved the extra tray she'd made for me over along with a styrofoam bowl of water with a plastic spoon in it. On the divided tray, were two piles of uncooked rice, a round nut, pink rose petals and white jasmine stars, some red-pink powder and some white, and a piece of kitchen string that had been dyed magenta. The tray was beautiful to look at, beautiful to smell.

Embarrassed by the commotion I’d made coming in late, causing women I didn’t know to move, mid-devotion, I decided not to ask anything for the moment and just go with whatever was happening.

Hemu grabbed the string on the tray and tied it around my right wrist, whispering, “It shows your devotion to God.” Then Hemu used the spoon to scoop water from the bowl, first into my right hand, and then into hers. I held the water in my palm like she did while whoever was chanting in Gujarati or Sanskrit continued to chant. I wondered what Hemu was feeling, if a particular feeling was what she was after or if it didn’t matter. I longed to feel something, some thud in my gut that felt true, but I also knew there was little chance of that without a willingness to do things I didn’t understand at least until I understood them. But I did know I was afraid I’d forget some of what Hemu was teaching me so I moved the water from my right palm to my left to open my notebook and uncap my pen.

I could feel Hemu tense beside me. “Right hand only?” I said.

Hemu laughed that I got it, then she said into my ear, “Everything on the right side. Nothing on the left.”

A moment later we poured the water from our palms onto the small pile of rice in the center. Hemu then pointed to the magenta powder and asked, “Do you mind?”

I wasn’t entirely certain what she meant but I said, “No, not at all.”

With that, Hemu dipped one finger in the red powder and touched my forehead.

All those times I’d noticed people on the street or in shops with red dots, I wondered what the dots meant. Now I had one. And I had no idea why.

I wanted a mirror, bad.

I wondered what my mother would say if she saw me.

The thought also occurred: if I had done this to myself, I would have felt like a fraud but, since Hemu had done it to me, I guessed there was nothing wrong with a non-Hindu wearing a ritual string or having a dot on her head. I couldn’t wait for the service to be over so I could ask her what it all meant but Hemu had already moved on, picking up a few rose petals and jasmine blossoms and holding them in her right palm. I did the same. A few chants from the disembodied male voice and we put those petals on top of the small pile of now damp rice.

The chanting was so loud and people were coming and going so frequently, I thought I could ask a few questions. “What are we doing?”

“Well,” she said, “Every eleventh day is a fast. But the eleventh day of this month is a waterless fast and a special festival, very joyful. It’s called Jaljirni (This 11th day falls in September during a monsoon season in India and in way of thanking the God for brimming the rivers and lakes with rain, the small idol of Lord is taken for a boat ride in the ocean, a lake or a river. ) The priest is performing a Maha puja over there and we are following along here.”

The two men sitting on the floor before the low table held the microphone I couldn’t see. They were doing the official puja ritual and the women were doing symbolic ones on these styrofoam trays.

When younger men came in during the ceremony, they prostrated themselves before the statues of the deities on the stage, touching both sides of their heads and then their chins to the floor before standing upright and then doing it all over again. Women only kneeled and touched their heads to the floor. I counted the number of times two different men did it figuring, if it was the same, it must be part of the ritual. It was. The number was five. I started to write a note so I would remember to ask Hemu about this later but I got distracted by what one young man did next. He went down the line of elderly men, greeting each one by touching the bottom of their feet and then putting his hands together and bowing.

The elderly men seemed pleased by the attention and smiled back, reaching out to touch his hand when it was finally offered. While all the younger men that came later also greeted each of the elderly men by making some gesture towards their feet, none went quite as far as the first.
Hemu scooped another spoonful of water into my hand.

“But what, exactly, is “puja?” I asked.

We poured the water from our hands into the pile of wet rice.

“We are gently waking God and our spiritual leaders up and taking them through their morning routine just like we do. We bathe them, offer them clothes, ornaments, food – inviting them into our home. We do a similar puja kind of in our mind at home every morning.”

So that’s what was going on: while doing this ritual with the water and the flowers and the food, they were actually imagining a being they could take care of, a being with whom they could have a direct relationship.

Hemu leaned in to help me follow along. “Take a handful of rice, we’re going to chant the 108 names for God.”

A hundred and eight names for God? I could barely handle one.

The chanting began and, with every name, we took one grain of rice and put it down in the pile of petals, rice and water from before. The dry grains made a surprisingly loud sound when they hit the bottom of our trays. Some of the names of God were long and complicated (although all seemed to begin with the sound “om”) so it took almost four minutes to say them all.

What did the rice mean? Was it fertility? Or simply food? It wasn’t either. Hemu explained that rice was used because of its purity. “It is the only grain that is always whole, never fragmented.”

The entire congregation then started chanting “Swaminarayan,” the name of Lord Swaminarayan, the original spiritual leader of the BAPS branch of Hinduism while clapping out every syllable.

Hemu explained, “If we chant ‘Swaminarayan, Swaminarayan, Swaminarayan’ over and over while thinking of God, our problems will be taken care of.”

Seven breaths and dozens of “Swaminarayans” later, there was singing – it sounded like the fragment of a song – and then a loud bell sounded.

“It’s the lighting of the fire. Aarti,” Hemu said.

Across the room, a brass candleholder on a tray was lit and then ceremonially waved from down low to up high.

I asked, “Fire is called “aarti?”

“Yes. In the olden days, there were no lights, no electricity. It was dark so you took the fire closer to God to see each part of God from His feet up to His head. This is our way of giving Him honor, of respecting Him more.”

“And wanting to see Him more?” The tray of fire was coming closer to us. I could see its blaze reflected in Hemu’s eyeglasses.

“Yes, and to see Him more. But then it became a ritual. It’s also a form of welcoming someone.”

The fire was walked around the room, from person to person. Each, in turn, waved some of its heat over their head and then into their heart and then put a dollar on the tray holding the fire. The money seemed symbolic, not meant to be a contribution, as there was an official window near the bookstore set up to process donations and a locked box in front of the altar.

Taking more flowers in her hand, Hemu said, “Now we ask for forgiveness.”

With the perfume of jasmine and rose petals floating out of my hands, asking for forgiveness was lovely but over too quickly for my list. When we were done, those petals, too, were added to the pile of wet offerings on our styrofoam tray.

When the service ended, the men left the room so the women could walk around the table where the main puja had taken place. At least twenty women were already walking around the table when Hemu and I went over. “We walk six times around,” she said. “It symbolizes that you’ve done the pilgrimage to all the temples, all the pilgrimage places that there are. You get the boon of that, the blessing of that, by doing it symbolically right here.”

Hemu, who appeared to be shy and self-effacing, didn’t even try to insert herself in the slow-moving knot of women. She zipped around the outside of the circle which meant she had to step over or around a chair that was up against the wall without bumping into the circle of devotees. Caught between my desire to be respectful of the people in this unfamiliar environment but also wanting to keep up with Hemu, I tried to stay as close to her as I could without knocking anyone down. I’m on the short side of average but Hemu couldn’t be more than 5’ 2” and her thin frame made her seem even tinier, so I couldn’t quite keep her bright yellow sari in sight. Searching for Hemu while trying not to be rude put any kind of devotional feeling out of my reach. My guess was the slow-movers had a better shot at it.

At the end of the circling, someone handed us a cube of cake – “blessed food” – which we ate as we cleaned up after ourselves, tossing our trays full of rice and flowers and cups of water in the trash. We were already late for the only class taught in English at the mandir so Hemu and I walked out the back door and down a driveway along a number of buildings that might have once been homes.

Suddenly, Hemu stopped short and turned to face the wall of the main hall. “The sadhus!” She edged even closer to the building.

On the other side of the driveway, two men with shaved heads were walking towards us, in flying orange robes, fit and confident.

“Are we not supposed to look at them?”

“No, you can look at them but they won’t look at you. We try to be respectful and make it easy for them.”

It's hard for someone who lives for eye contact to avoid it but, out of respect for Hemu, I tried... though I can, of course, tell you that the sadhus bounded up a few steps to one of the buildings and then disappeared inside.

After they were gone and we continued walking to the building on the end, I asked Hemu, “How does someone convert to this kind of Hinduism?”

“You don’t really become a Hindu," she said. "You just start coming. Well, we do take a vow to follow five niyams and those are: never to drink alcohol; never to eat meat; not to kill; not to steal; and not to commit adultery. These are the five things that apply to humanity as a whole.”

“So I could walk in right now and take those vows and I would be considered a Hindu?”

“Well, yes.”

“Isn’t there more I would have to learn before doing that?”

“No. This is basically it. And you wear sacred beads (around your neck) which means you have surrendered yourself to God. And when you surrender yourself to God, God will protect you. That’s what it means.” Hemu’s hands punctuated her words. “Because you have surrendered yourself to God, it is now his total responsibility to look after you.”

Wouldn’t that be great, to have Someone who was totally responsible to look after me? “And those are the beads that you are wearing,” I asked. “could I wear any beads?”

“Yes, you can but these are made from tulsi. It’s like a basil plant. It’s a sacred plant. When you offer food to God, we put a leaf of tulsi plant on it and offer it to God. Well, when we offer ourselves to God we can’t put a leaf on our heads so we just wear these. Ladies give it to ladies and saints give it to the men. So, what we do is we give you water in the palm of your hand and you say these five vows and you abide by those five vows and then we give you the beads and, basically, you practice Hinduism. That’s the initiation.”

We stepped up on the small landing outside one of the houses on the temple's grounds and started to take off our shoes. Maybe I've fantasized the mystical rigors a convert has to go through to join most any faith. Maybe it's as simple as signing up for a club and then just showing, just waiting for the feeling of belonging, the feeling of belief kicks in.

In my very first job in television news, I met Father Miles Riley who was, at the time, the press handler for the Archbisop of San Francisco. Aside from referring to me as a "heathen" - with great warmth - Father Miles Riley told me the story of Father Bob Duryea, a priest who fathered a son, secretly married, but continued ministering to his blue-collar parish which knew and kept his secret. Father Duryea and his brother, also a Roman Catholic priest and Stanford’s chaplain in the late sixties and early seventies, were raised to be priests by a mother who had converted to Catholicism. She'd made it clear to her sons from an early age that no other life choice was possible for them.

Father Miles tried to explain a woman like Dorothy Duryea to me when we really had no shared language. He tried to explain that those who are raised in a religion could, in some sense, take what they like and leave the rest, unlike a convert; converts feel they must accept it all, believe it all, hew to it all, or they shouldn’t make the leap. Conversion is hard. Converts think it must be all or nothing. Father Miles found this absolute thinking amusing, even quaint. All I saw was how destructive it was to the Duryea boys.

Now, I finally understand why Dorothy Duryea felt she had to be absolute once she’d made the choice to become a Catholic. Standing on this side of the chasm, it does seem all or nothing. Accept all the tenets of a particular faith, or what's the point of converting, no matter how simple the ritual? But how can you do that when you don't know anything about anything?

I took off my shoes for the second time that day. What am I was getting at with this idea of mine, am I looking to convert? I know I'm trying to figure out what I believe. I know I want to get at the mystery of why believers go to war with other believers. Academic study just can't get at what I want to understand; it's too clinical, too cerebral, too far removed...I think. Even if I can't figure out what I believe, I'm desperate to understand the connection people feel with their god and with their community of believers, something I’ve never had. Doing seems like the only option, doing what a convert might be told to do in preparation, doing until I can feel, well, something. Some Thing.

Hemu and I walked inside the tan building, inside the hot, dingy room where a small group of truly beautiful young women sat gracefully on the floor - their saris, hair, and skin flawless, even though the floorstand fan was doing nothing to disturb the incredible heat. That Hemu showed up with me elicited no apparent curiosity. Had she warned them?

It seemed like more of a study group than a class; there was no teacher. Sima Patel, a dark-skinned, almond-eyed beauty wearing a luscious green and rust-colored sari, was trying to get the computer she brought to work with the projector and screen in the room.

While waiting for the class to begin, Hemu said she liked the idea of what I was trying to do. She thought it was like Hinduism’s notion of many paths all leading to the same goal, God. “It’s like if you want to get to the Los Angeles airport, there are many, many ways to get there. From anywhere in the world, you can get there, and by many different means. It all depends on where you start and what transportation method you use but you can always get there.” This sweet embrace of difference felt gentle, kind, warm, like someone offering to share their blanket at an outdoor concert.

Sima was finally ready. “Can someone read this section from Gadhada III, 28 out loud?” Sima wanted someone to read from The Vachanamrut, a book containing the spiritual discourses of the founding leader, Lord Swaminarayan.

When I took out the English copy I’d bought at the bookstore to find my place in it, the tallest, most self-assured of the women leaned across a few people to hand me a ring binder to place under it so the Swaminarayan text wouldn’t touch the floor.

Hemu leaned over to whisper with pride. “That’s my daughter.”

One of the young women started to read, “If one has realized God with the knowledge of His greatness…then how can one feel egotism, jealousy, or anger towards a sadhu of such a God? If one still does, then there is a flaw in one’s understanding. …If one understands God’s greatness in such a manner, then egotism is eradicated.”

In the role of teacher, Sima asked, “What does this mean?”

One of the young women answered, “There is no greater glory than to understand the glory of God.”

“How can we attain this higher devotion to God?

“Follow the rules….The easiest way we can show that we are completely devoted is by following the spiritual vows in our every day life.”

“Will someone read the last one?”

The most perfect beauty in the group, Meera, whose elegant whisper of a body was draped in shell pink, complied. “If I would shake the earth with the toe of my foot, the world with its countless (cosmoses) would begin to shake. If one develops the conviction of my form in this manner, one’s mind would become fixed on me, God, and one would never stray anywhere else.”
The women seemed intent on their studies while I was just intent on their intentions, their feelings, their beliefs. Maybe it was all too much to process, the rituals, the languages, the beliefs, the dozens of new people. And it was confusing to know who I was in that room. I'm used to meeting new people and then reporting what they said and did. But, if I am a reporter, who's the subject? Them? Hinduism? Or me? I mean, all my outward actions are the same: I have a pen and notepad; I'm asking questions and writing down answers; I'm observing and trying to see connections between things. But one of those "things" now includes me and none of my training or job experience has taught me how to do that; I'm used to being as invisible as possible. Going ahead without my invisibility cloak is as big a stretch as practicing a faith.

Suddenly a newspaper was put in my hands. I was expected to read the next question and Pramukh Swami Maharaj’s answer. Hemu nodded for me to do it. So I read out loud, “My mind is like Saddam; it is stubborn, it doesn’t obey me.” My eye was desperate to look at the date of the newspaper – could they really mean Saddam, THE Saddam, Saddam Hussein? – but all eyes were on me and I was too afraid I’d stumble over the words I was supposed to read. It was already hard enough, what with all the anglicized Sanskrit or Gujarati words that weren’t written the way they’re pronounced. (Siva, for instance, is pronounced She-va.) So I just mumbled my way unintelligibly through any words I didn’t understand. “Swamiji: That’s why we have to fight with our mind. We should bombard it. What will be our bombs? Constant discourses. Seva and devotion?”

I looked to Hemu for the okay on how I pronounced the words. She gave me an insanely generous nod so I continued on with the swami’s answer to the devotee. “The mind will never be free to retaliate. Then, will it not be destroyed? Aspirant: But my mind is hiding in a bunker. Swamiji: Then we have to use our laser weapons, follow agna.” Relieved that my question was over, I had no idea what I’d said or even really what it meant except that was important to keep reading sacred texts and discussing them with other believers as a way of fending off the mind’s doubts.

During a small break in the class, Hemu introduced me to some of the women. Pointing to the fragile beauty, Meera, she said, “Her sister is serving in Iraq right now.” Meera was so ethereal it was hard to think of her as related to anyone in the real world, let alone to someone fighting in Iraq.

“How long has she been there?” I asked Meera.

Meera said, “About seven months, now.”

Then Hemu added, “And she’s also a marine.”

Much as I tried to imagine Meera in combat fatigues, going through basic training, I couldn’t even imagine her driving a car, lifting anything heavy or, indeed, even walking around. She looked like someone who should float.

I asked her, “Will you have to go?”

“I’m not sure.” But her gaze said, ‘I’m not afraid to go if those are my orders.’

It turned out that the rest of this room was filled with future pharmacists, engineers, medical technicians and doctors.

Near the end of the class came a question – and an answer – that seemed louder to me than all the rest: “Is a guru really necessary?”

The answer: “Swamiji: Absolutely.”

“Are you saying that without a guru one cannot attain God?”

“Swamiji: That’s right. Just like when we go to school, we only acquire knowledge by learning from teachers.”

Teachers. I still need a teacher.

Hemu’s translation of the sadhu’s sermon in my notebook said, “Right, positive understanding is the key to our spiritual progress” and that understanding could only come from “a God-realized guru.” Hemu wasn't that, so it couldn’t be her. And I couldn’t talk to the mandir’s sadhus: they were men who couldn’t talk directly to women and, when they gave public sermons, they only spoke in Gujarati. I was going to have to find someone I could talk to, in a language I could understand. Warmth and acceptance were not enough.

I knew, with clarity and sadness, my teacher was not there.

Driving home, I caught sight of my forehead in the rearview mirror in the late afternoon sun. I was shocked by what I saw. The red dot. It had been there all afternoon long and I had forgotten all about it. I pulled off to the side of the highway to study my face with such a mark in the center. Although I hadn’t put it there, I also knew that it didn’t belong, yet anyway, to me. I felt disrespectful wearing it. How could I when I didn’t know enough yet, understand enough, to let it remain? As I took a napkin from the small pile I kept in the pocket on my car door and wiped it off, I noticed the magenta string still on my wrist.

That, I left on.

Where was my teacher?



(3 September 2006)

Finding people...

However men try to reach me,
I return their love with my love;
whatever path they may travel,
it leads to me in the end.

Bhagavad Gita 4.11


I stood in my closet, looking at my clothes. All of my life I’ve tried to blend in, to belong. Respectful, I was being respectful, I told myself – but I was just plain tired of it. On the left, there were the black and blue suits for the formerly “in-charge” me; next to those were a bunch of fiercely colorful silk tops and skirts I thought I needed to buy in order to live and to work in Los Angeles; beyond them, were a handful of flirty short dresses I used to wear when I thought I didn’t want to be in charge of anything except maybe date night with my husband; on the other side, were the baseball caps, men’s t-shirts and even an Eisenhower jacket for the I’m-so-afraid-I’d-better-look-tough me; and finally, in drawers, on the shelves, even on some of the hangars were the worn, torn jeans, cotton sweaters and loose tops for the at-home me, the no-make-up me. Ever since I’ve given up the running of things, I’ve given up the costuming, too, reverting to what I’ve always worn since college: long cotton and sometimes silk shirts I’d recently found out were called khurtas, Indian khurtas. I hate clothing that grabs at me.

Well, religious services called for more than torn jeans. If it were anywhere else but an Indian temple, I would have grabbed the pale pink silk khurta with white pants that were my current favorites but now I kind of had the opposite problem: Would it look like I was trying too hard to blend in and, therefore, would it be inadvertently disrespectful?

Over-thinking.

I just can’t do that, get caught up in meaningless external details, over-think and over-plan, and end up as something I’m not. Not wearing what I’d normally wear was just as bad as wearing something I thought might please. I went to Whittier in the pink and white.

But first I had to find the BAPS Swaminarayan Mandir in the thick Thomas Guide of Los Angeles I kept in my car. Kevin had given me a plastic-coated version for Christmas as a joke because I keep accidentally shredding and then losing the square we live on in the regular spiral-bound guides. But, after years of use and abuse, many of the laminated book’s pages - maps to places I hadn’t been - were stuck together by coffee that had spilled and baked dry long ago. Sounds kind of gross but it makes going someplace new very satisfying: I get to peel two new pages apart with a great crinkly cracking sound like cellophane on Easter morning.(Yes, my atheist mother and father not only stuffed Christmas stockings, they gave us Easter baskets, too.)

When I peeled Map 637 from the other pages, it showed that the temple was just two freeways away, no more than a half-hour drive.

The only thing I’d known about Whittier before was that President Richard Nixon had something to do with it and so did Quakers. Growing up in Pennsylvania, you know about Quakers. My brothers even went to Quaker school. It always seemed incongruous that Nixon, that imperious, formal man was a member of the Society of Friends which rejected ritual, had no one leading their services, and was devoutly against war but he was. Whittier, itself, was founded by a group of Quakers in 1887 and about 90,000 people live there now.

I got off the freeway exit closest to the temple. If Whittier had a downtown, I wasn’t in it. Within a few quick turns, I was in a tiny, packed-in neighborhood of tan and brown houses. It was a strange place: many of those small houses had horses in their backyards and trailers for them in the driveway. The traffic flow was choked by a couple of men on horseback chatting with their neighbors on foot.

I thought I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere so I was looking for a place to pull over to reexamine my map when, right in front of me, I saw it, the words “Hindu Temple” on a light-brown building.

People, dozens of them, were walking through the narrow opening in the wrought iron gate into the full parking lot. The women were all in saris, the men mostly in light, long sleeved shirts and slacks. As I backed into a parking space on the street, I felt my heart start to slam into my chest. All I didn’t know felt like a brick wall I was about to hit. I wanted to stop, back up, go home, drive, drive away fast while the rest of my head committee demanded that I get over myself and just get out of the damn car. “But,” the balkers argued, “what if you’re in the “wrong” place? What if you’re about to walk into some peculiar off-shoot of Hinduism or an extreme cult?” Well, if it was, I consoled myself, I could get out before talking to anyone, there were so many people walking in, no one would notice me.

I was wrong. One foot over the base of the sliding gate and a man in a dark blue shirt, the only person in a dark color, leapt forward to say, “May I help you?”

I stopped dead. If it hadn’t been more awkward to run, I would have. I said, “There’s a service today, isn’t there?”

“Well, yes.”

“May I come?” I asked. “I’m interested in Hinduism.”

There were only Indians in the crowd. Even the one red-head turned out to be an Indian woman with dyed hair.

The man in blue said, “Come on. I’ll take you to someone.”

The chance to check the place out anonymously, to get a feel for it before going further, was gone. The man in blue politely herded me toward the first doorway. On the landing outside the plain door, a number of women were standing and talking. Metal racks up against the stucco wall on either side of the doorway were filled with shoes, and a pile was on the ground beside each. It was clear that the men’s and women’s were on separate sides of the doorway. Once inside, the man placed me in front of a woman in a beautiful gold and ivory sari.


They waited for me to explain myself. It was the first time I had to describe what I was doing to someone other than an academic or a loved one, the first time I had to lay out my whole strange mission to a practicing believer. I wrapped my arms around my notebook and said, “I was raised without any real spiritual tradition. I mean, I was literally raised with nothing.”

We were standing in a brightly carpeted room that could have once been a school auditorium with a raised stage except that, on it, were red and gold devotional figures draped with flower garlands. The man and woman smiled, confused, so I continued, “With all that’s going on in the world right now, I just didn’t think I could remain ignorant any longer. So I want to understand what each religion teaches its converts. I’m starting with Hinduism. That’s why I’ve come here.”

It still didn’t look like they quite knew what to do with me so I added, “I thought I’d start with Hinduism because, from the little I know about it, it says that there are many paths to God and it was up to each of us to find our path, our way to the Divine, so it seemed like a logical place to start.”

The woman smiled big and warm. “I’m Rekha,” she said and put her hand on my arm. “Could you wait here for a moment? I have the perfect person for you but I must go find her.”

Rekha began bouncing from one woman in silk to another, asking each one something in an unrecognizable language, eventually disappearing down a hallway, leaving me in the center of the room with the gatekeeper. I wondered what I’d said that made Rekha know the “perfect person” for me. Was there someone whose job it was to wrangle strays?

There was an odd padded divider, no more than eighteen inches high, mostly down the middle of the room; the men and women were observing it as an official separation between them. Somehow, without making a big deal of it, the man in blue, who finally introduced himself as Upen, had put himself on the men’s side while I found myself standing on the side for women.

After a moment of just standing there, Upen pointed to a model under plexiglass and said, “This is the temple we’re building in Chino Hills. It will be the third temple in the United States, the other two are in Chicago and Houston.”

The model showed an ornate temple of white stone with many other smaller buildings. Two of the buildings were exact replicas of each other. “What are those?” I asked.

“That’s a school for boys and there’s the one for girls,” he said.

So the separation was a big deal, at least for this sect. I assumed I’d find it in Islam but I hadn’t expected the separation in Hinduism. I didn’t know whether to talk to Upen or not but he clearly wasn’t going anywhere until the “perfect person” showed up so I asked, “So, there are only three temples in this country?”

“Oh, no, those are the mandirs, the large temples. There are many more centers than that. And the temple in London was in the Guiness Book of World Records (in 2000) as the largest Hindu temple outside of India."

Upen was running out of things to say and clearly wanted to return to the gate so he was relieved when Rekha returned with a slender woman wearing glasses who somehow managed to make her pink sari seem simple.

“This is Hemantika Patel,” Rekha smiled. “You’ll never hear this from her because she is very modest, very humble, but everyone here at the mandir respects her more than anyone else. She’s very wise.You’ll be in the very best hands with her.”

Demurely deflecting the words, the woman in pink offered her thin hand, “I am very pleased to meet you.”

The din was growing so I just handed her my pen and notebook, “Would you write your name down here? I want to make sure I spell it right.”

“It’s Hemantika,” she said while writing it down. “But you may call me Hemu.”

As I started to explain, again, why I’d appeared on their doorstep again, a man with quiet authority came up to us on “his” side of the divider to check me out. After we introduced ourselves – he said his name was Peter - I asked him for his card so I wouldn’t hold things up trying to get the precise spelling of his last name.

Peter brightened when he heard why I was starting with Hinduism. “You know, I teach in the Sunday school, the children, and I always tell them: ‘What shape are the planets? They aren’t cubes or pyramids or trapezoids; they’re circles. And what is one of the greatest inventions in the history of mankind? The wheel. And it’s a circle. But, if you push on one side of the circle, it will collapse unless, of course, there are spokes to make it strong. That’s what all the religions of the world are, spokes of the wheel, and it’s important that all the spokes, all the religions of the world stay strong. If any one of them gets weak or collapses, then we will all be affected. But, what’s the most important part of the wheel? The center. The Divine. That’s where all the spokes are connected.’”

I’d never heard anything like that before, a devotee of one religion saying he thought it was “important” that other religions stayed strong. Even Hemu and Rekha were moved.

In the moment of silence that followed, I glanced down at Peter’s business card. It said he worked for a financial services company.

“May I come to your class?” I asked.

“Well, I only teach boys and all the children’s classes are taught in Gujarati.”

Hemu said, “Perhaps you might come to one of the young adult classes for the women. They’re taught in English.”

Comfortable I was being handled, Peter and Rekha left. Hemu hesitated, unsure where to go for a longer conversation. Then it was clear why: she was looking for a chair, assuming that I would need one, but there were none available on our side of the room. In fact, there were only a handful in the large room and they were taken by the elderly and infirm.

“I can sit on the floor,” I said. Anything to stop sticking out. “I really don’t mind.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m completely fine.”

So Hemu, in her sequined sari, and I, in my white pants, sat down on the carpet near the wall beneath photographs of the BAPS temples around the world. “You’ve come on a good day, she said. “Today is the day we celebrate our main deity, Krishna’s birthday. That’s why everyone is so dressed up.”

There was coming and going, greeting and warm touching going on all around us. The closest I’d even been to something like it was a high school reunion.

“May I stay?”

“Of course. But it isn’t in English, you know.”

Not in English? Everyone I’d met so far spoke elegant English. But I said, “That’s okay, if it’s all right with you.” I mean, what else was there to do? Say: Oh well in that case, I’m outta here? Was I going to let language get in the way of my understanding some of what all these people found meaningful? I figured Hemu spoke English and that, for the moment, was enough. “What language are the services in?” I asked.

“Gujarati.”

I’d never heard the word before but, when I looked it up later, I found out forty-six million people spoke it. It was the first language Mahatma Ghandi spoke because he was born in the Indian state of Gujararat. Each state in India is free to choose its own official language so there are more than twenty of them.

I asked Hemu to explain the kind of Hinduism practiced at the temple.

“This mandir has been at this location just since 1984. The founder of our faith is Lord Swaminarayan who was born in 1781. We believe he is a God-realized saint.”

“And is there a current spiritual leader?”

“Oh yes.” Hemu pointed to one of the many pictures of a balding man in orange robes with a kind face and said, “Param Pujya Pamukh Swami Maharaj is the direct spiritual successor to Lord Swaminarayan.”

“Does he live here?”

Hemu looked surprised. “No, he’s in India, but there are about seven hundred “saints,” forty of which live at various temples across North America. They wear orange robes and are complete celibates. They don’t associate with women at all. They don’t own anything or have any money. We say that they have no taste, food-wise, which means they will never ask for anything or say they want to eat a specific food or even ask for something to eat, even if they’re hungry. They are supposed to be egoless and without desire, eating whatever is put before them, practicing complete detachment even from their own most basic needs.”

All I could think was what a picky an eater I could be: cold soup, blue cheese, lima beans - things I still hated - Hemu’s monks would have to eat all of them if they were served, whether they liked them or not. And the excitement of figuring out just what you want to eat and then getting it? I mean, I drive forty-five minutes to go get the cheesesteaks I grew up eating and I love every minute of having and fulfilling that craving. Not for them. They have to get beyond like and dislike. How is that even possible?

But, wait, they didn’t “associate” with women at all? I asked Hemu, “So, you can’t talk to any of them?”

“No, not directly.”

If Hemu couldn’t talk to the “saints,” then I couldn’t either.

Hemu explained that, while this sect’s faith was fundamentally Hindu and used the Bhagavad Gita, the Vedas, the Upanishads and all of the traditional Hindu literature, its Holy Scripture was an “historical collection of 262 spiritual discourses delivered by Lord Swaminarayan in Gujarati” written down by the “saints” at the time. The text, The Vachanamrut, was considered by its followers to be “the essence of all scriptures.”

The room was slowly beginning to thin out.

Hemu said, “It’s about to begin. Would you like to go?”

“Go? Where?” I thought we were already in the main shrine. It certainly looked like one.

“This is a very big day for us, a very big celebration, so we have to go next door.”

Some people were leaving but no one seemed in a particular hurry or even necessarily headed for the same place. After we picked our shoes out from what had become an unruly heap, we walked toward the back of the building, stopping at the bookstore to buy a copy of The Vachanamrut in English and a small travel bag with all the items necessary for morning rituals. We then put our shoes outside another door and walked into an even larger room with hundreds of people sitting mostly cross-legged on the carpet, men and women again on separate sides of the room. Only the very young boys disregarded the separation, taking advantage of a gap between the blue padded dividers to dart back and forth between their mothers and fathers.

A group of men was already performing on the stage, mid-song. Hemu pointed to the back of a gray couch up near the stage on the men’s side and said, “Those are the sadhus, the saints.”

I could just make out a small flash of orange silk draped over the back of the couch and the shaved head of the “sadhu” sitting on the end. From where they were sitting, the only thing the “saints” could see was the stage.

Behind the men singing and playing string instruments on stage was an altar with many large figures and a handful of small ones. In a chair in the center of the stage, I thought I saw the man from all the photographs, sitting in meditation pose with a garland of live flowers around his neck and a lit candle in front of him.

I whispered, “I didn’t know your spiritual leader was here.” Everyone seemed way too calm for that.

Hemu turned and looked at me like I was daft. “No. That’s a picture of him.”

“Oh.” I didn’t know what else to say. “Of course.”

Well, you don’t start something like this unless you’re able to spend a heck of a lot of time being stupid. I mean, it sure looked real from way back there. He was very still but I assumed he was just very good at meditation after all those years of doing it.

Soon a group of men began acting out a scene from Krishna’s life, followed by a sermon, all in Gujarati, while Hemu translated as best she could into my notebook.

The first sadhu who spoke was a tall, rugged man whose shaved head couldn’t quite make him blend in with the others. He had great personal dignity and, even though I couldn’t understand a word of what he said, he was a dynamic and moving speaker.

One part of the monk’s sermon got real belly laughs. I couldn’t wait until later, so I whispered, “What did he say?”

Hemu tried to answer and keep writing so I would miss nothing. “He said, ‘People are afraid to put trust in God, yet every day people get into to airplanes, trusting their lives to men, to pilots they don’t even know.’”

Yes but those pilots are real people, people they can see as they walk off the plane.

After some more singing, another sadhu came to the podium, a thin man with large eyes. Hemu said, “That’s the spiritual leader of this mandir.”

The senior sadhu, Priyavrat Swami, leaned on the podium as he spoke, not much more than his head and shoulders were visible above it. It was odd sitting there, understanding nothing but the emotion of the swami’s words and his flock’s reactions while Hemu took notes in my notebook, trying to turn the Gujarati into words I might understand. Without Hemu, I knew it would be hopeless for me here but, with her? Hemu had the conviction and the clarity I longed to know. Maybe it could work.

The rhythms of the unfamiliar syllables, sentences, inflections and pauses floating through the room began to feel like music, its beats became regular and expected, when I finally looked down at my watch. It was two hours past the time the website said the service would end, past the time I’d told my husband I’d be home. I whispered to Hemu, “I’m really sorry. I had no idea how late it’s gotten. I have to go.”

Without a hesitation, in the middle of her spiritual leader’s sermon on this most holy of days, Hemu got up to walk me out. She wouldn’t let me leave without going to get me a full meal which she put inside a styrofoam container so I could eat it when I got home, along with a plastic container filled with pastries in the shapes of various fruit. One small “watermelon slice” even had “seeds.” Loaded down with my books, pamphlets, food, desserts and Hemu-written notes, I headed back out to the street with a promise to return in two weeks to begin my studies in earnest.


(20 August 2006)