As usual, my mother and I sat for breakfast this morning. We ate in silence, like every other day. That is, after I checked if she had slept well in the night, and after she had finished cataloguing her aches and pains at that moment.

We finished and she was set to heave herself from the chair and grab her walker. Before she got up, she started-

Mother: You and I have nothing these days to talk about.

Me: True. Truth is, I cannot be in the same room long enough. Your perpetually forlorn look doesn’t help. I am not inclined to listen to what your parents, brothers, sisters-in-law, husband, your mother-in-law, uncles, aunts, and all others did or didn’t do to you that caused you misery and unhappiness – something that to this day you continue to nurse and recount without a prompt. You slide into these sessions of recollection, and it builds into a torrent that you have no control over.

You have no interest in what is happening around you in the world, be it sports, politics, environment, government, war, peace, policy, …

Your world is larger than mine in a sense. You continue to speak to a lot more people in the extended family on both sides, your friends, fellow religious adherents, and so on. You ask after their family, children, grandchildren, marriages, deaths, hospitalizations, travels, … My world is small – the immediate family and a handful of friends. I am not curious about their daily lives in ways that you are. By today’s standards, it is intrusive, and I don’t do that. I listen if information is volunteered and follow up if I sense that the other person is keen to unload.

We live in the same house.  But I don’t tell you much about what’s happening with me anymore. You share about me with others that makes me feel exposed. Such disclosure is without my active consent, and I don’t feed this process anymore. Call me private, but I like to be in control of what I share about myself, my work, my private life, pursuits, health, my life in short.

You like to talk about your gods, your rituals, and your spiritual progress. Gods are not my thing. I don’t know how to join in. I grow impatient with more of the same.

You please do what gives you joy. What makes you happy and hopeful in the present. All the regurgitating of past hurts only keeps you perpetually bitter and you don’t try and let it go. Over the past 30 plus years that you have been with me, listening to this has become tiring and toxic. I wonder how you live through it each day. It feels like chronic pollution that you have become accustomed to. I don’t know what your pay-off is. But I don’t feel like participating in this ritual and I cry off anytime I see its launch. Maybe like people, some memories should have an expiry date.

Mother: (must have done a quick mental survey of her senior citizen friends in our apartment complex) Of all the women I know, P__ is best: god-fearing, disciplined, cheerful and fit.

Me: Who knows what goes on in P__’s life or in her head. You see and hear what she wants you to. People say this of you: that you are cheerful despite your chronic ailments, you are uncomplaining despite the pain you constantly endure, chatty, and with an intact sense of humour, and so on. This is the part of you that you want people to see. The demons of your past and the depressive states that stay with you when you are not on the phone with someone, or on Facebook, remain invisible to others.

Mother: (switches track) Don’t mind my asking – don’t answer if you don’t want to. Do you have no belief in God?

Me: We have been over this many times, ma. This question is to me, irrelevant.

Mother: But, tell me, do you believe in God?

Me: I do believe there is a force that is beyond my ability to apprehend or comprehend – that shows up in all things around me, in the Universe, as the thing we call ‘life’, life force’, the cause and consequence of all things. I get that it seems abstract. My being fearful or devout, loving or distant, frankly is of no consequence. It doesn’t matter.  I am concerned with what I do or don’t, in this birth. What happens beyond this innings is not something I worry.

Mother: How can you say such a thing? I of course, I keep thinking that I shouldn’t be reborn as ___ or ____.

Me:  What happens to me in the after-life – whether I roam as a free spirit, or am born again a horse, a donkey, a cockroach, or a human being – frankly, I am not thinking about the goodness balance in life’s passbook with an eye on my next birth. I am happy if in this life, on balance, I cause less harm, hurt fewer beings, help those I can, and be content with what I have. Even these seemingly unambitious wishes seem like a tall order.

I quite liked what S N Goenka said in one of his discourses – the fruits of karma are instant and don’t just accumulate to impact later births; the one who does wrong and is stricken with guilt suffers the pangs in this very birth, the one who murders (but has no remorse) and goes into hiding to escape the law too suffers hardships. I may not be accurately representing Goenka. I am just sharing what I took from him.

So mother, it seems our belief systems, our priorities and practices are different. I sense that my lack of devotion puzzles you, worries you.  

Mother: Perhaps true. We were brought up in a certain way that included prayer, ritual, observances, and so on. We always sought protection and blessings that the good should inform our lives under His benign gaze. We beseeched God’s intervention in our times of distress with token offerings of gratitude we promised in advance of delivery. We explained away God’s will when our specific prayers weren’t answered but something else appeared as a silver lining. So, prayer has been integral and invoking the gods has been the way.

Me: God and prayer are not my favoured pursuits. I was once curious and so read up whatever came my way about religion(s). I recall reading about Bhakti. It appears to be your path – no questions to ask, to ponder. Instead, keep the faith. Surrender. Eliminate doubt. You do your bit, and let God do the rest. Seems simple and straightforward. In theory.

I have seen you over the years. You are caught with technique. You are constantly shopping for spiritual experience. I see you caught with comparison – someone reports seeing a deity in the lamp’s flame and you are beset with the desire for a similar experience rather than revel in the divinity around you and in you, during your time in the pooja room. You are guilt laden when your body lets you down and you are unable to, on a given day, do the full drill –service to your gods. Who knows –  the gods may have uncomplainingly accepted a clean prayer room and a few minutes of quiet contemplation. Maybe I am for minimal effort, a non-demanding, easy-going God who is understanding above all else, and doesn’t push me into guilt about self-indulgence or self-deception.

Mother: I know. You tell me to do what I can. To give up on what I have done all these years or offer a truncated version of worship– I am unable. 

Me: Do you believe that ‘God’ is in you and in everything around you?

I understand that all that you do in the pooja room, the shlokas, the prayer, the ritual cleaning, and all of that is to collect yourself, focus the mind to the present, and be in Awareness for a bit.

Are you doing all this for a God ‘out there’- front, above or below you?

Mother: Umm. Not really. Well, I don’t know. I know I find my peace and solace in the hour I spend in the prayer room. It gives me joy to see the idols and framed images decorated with sandal, kumkumam and flowers. I sometimes think that I should put away or give away nearly all of them and retain just a few. My heart doesn’t let me.

Me:  My friend, Raghu offered many years ago, that all the images and idols are the external forms we create and vest in them the qualities of the divine within us; the Infinite within explains the multitude of ‘gods’ we have created. Our prayer to these gods is an invocation of the attributes within us that these gods are a symbol of. Again, this is a way of understanding our gods and worship that appeals to me. It makes it possible for me to put aside my unease with the perennial presence of idols and daily worship that happens around me.

Mother: In principle, that is what I think I do in my daily pooja – I draw from within and imbue the idols with the divine aspects in me and after the prayer, call them back unto myself. But I have not done this with awareness, presence and clarity. Instead, it has been mechanistic and in a language that I don’t understand.

Me: Even so, perhaps all is not lost. It is said the sounds of the chants do the job too even if you don’t quite understand the meaning of all the lines you utter, and the action sequences you have mastered.

Mother: (switching tracks) My aunt developed Alzheimer’s when she approached 90. My mother suffered it earlier in her 70s’. I wonder when it will be my turn.

Me: We will take it as it comes. The only think I can say for now is that when its time comes, you may not be able to recollect the date of its onset.

Mother: (lights up and laughs). I am already so forgetful.

I am tempted to say that there have been similar conversations earlier too. But I think she goes over the same ground not because she forgets but because she is unable to fathom how her son could have turned out so different from her on this aspect of religious faith. It obviously bothered her. In a strange way, it was a quiet source of pride too, I suspect. I wonder if she hopes that someday, I will see the light and be saved.

Mother: (After a few moments of silence, makes to get up from the dining table): You must be a saint.

Me: I am no saint. I am just a human being who can be a rascal, mulish, get angry, be impatient, rude, petty, and many other things that are far from the godliness you wish for me.

A conversation that arose from silence ended.

Note: I have my mother’s approval of this post’s contents and her consent to make it public.