What the Child in Me Still Wonders – of Faith and Gods

 

                                                       The Road Towards Awakening.

What the Child in Me Still Wonders – of Faith and Gods

I grew up surrounded by faith, not just one, but many.

My childhood was threaded with the fragrance of sandalwood and ghee, the rhythms of tabla and temple bells. Hindi movies brought gods to life on the screen—Krishna dancing, Hanuman flying, Shiva in serene meditation. And offscreen, too, I lived among them. My uncles and aunts were Hindu, my neighbors celebrated Deepavali and Thaipusam with color, music, and devotion.

As a boy, I watched bodies pierced by hooks and skewers walk barefoot to Batu Caves, not in pain, but in rapture. I walked among kolams drawn on the ground like blessings made visible. I heard bhajans as often as Quranic verses, and I never once thought to question it.
Back then, God wore many faces—and I trusted all of them.

But as I grew older, something changed.
The world began to ask questions that I had never thought to ask:

                                                      Or is it a Road to Perdition?

“What are you?”
“Which faith do you follow?”
“Do you believe in the One God or in many?”

Suddenly, it wasn’t enough to simply feel faith—I was expected to declare it, define it, defend it. The open sky of my childhood began to close into boxes, each with its own rules, prophets, histories.
To belong to one, it seemed, meant to disavow the others.

And this, even now, is what the child in me still wonders:
Why must love for one path mean rejection of the others?
Why must faith be a wall when it was once a window?

I have carried these questions quietly, like folded notes in my pocket.
I have prayed in mosques with a bowed head.
I have sat in temples with still breath.
I have lit candles and incense without asking who they rise to.

I have cried to Allah
and felt peace in front of a statue of Ganesha and the Buddha.
I have read the Gospels and found echoes of the Dhammapada.
And I have spoken to no one, in silence, and felt heard.

It is not confusing. It is memory.
Not a lack of belief, but too many moments of awe to settle for only one shape.

The world is made of thresholds.
Some walk through one door and close it behind them.
Others—like me—keep many doors open, and sit quietly in the space between.

I do not know if that makes me a heretic or a mystic.
I only know that the child in me, still watching the Thaipusam procession,
still humming a bhajan after watching an old Hindi film,
still wondering how many ways there are to kneel in gratitude—
has never stopped believing.

                                             It is a Path of Woorship in Love and Compassion

Not in one God.

Not in many.
But in the sacredness that lives in everything.

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