Om Tat Sat

Well, unexpectedly, my kids never came home from the bus stop. After a few minutes I thought I’d fish my phone out of the bottom of my “suitcase” to see if there were any missed messages. Boy, were there…

Apparently some hoodlum (quite literally in a hood according to the description: suspect is young, male, average build, about 5’11”, brown hair, gray hoodie, red shorts) is thought to be on a bicycle and has broken into a nearby home.

The protocol is to put the school in lockdown: draw the shades, get into hiding positions, reaffirm that you have the pee bucket, and stay quiet until further notice. This last bit, I imagine, is incredibly difficult with 24 elementary school students - especially as I know one of my kids has a substitute teacher today.

With any luck, the sub will turn out to be the sort of steely-eyed veteran who’s seen everything. Perhaps one of those rare gems who can quell a riot with a single arched eyebrow, having survived decades of inner-ring urban teaching where lockdown drills are as routine as fire alarms and the phrase “active shooter” no longer causes a break in cadence.

Perhaps this whole drama is a sign to go ahead and give myself permission to log off early. To be fair, the day had gotten off to an unusually early start.

I had an early meeting at 4:30 p.m. IST. This meeting had almost entirely slipped my mind. Luckily, my phone chirped, and my business partners were graciously willing to keep their cameras off, which is one of the great mercies of international business.

This week marks Ganesh Chaturthi, the 10-day festival celebrating Ganesha (the elephant-headed god associated with wisdom, prosperity, good fortune, and the removal of obstacles). Homes and public spaces fill with flowers and brightly decorated figures of Ganesha. Avinash tells me that lamps glow, incense burns, sweets are offered, prayers and music spill into the streets. It seems a particularly lovely time to worship a god whose specialty is getting things out of the way.

It is, therefore, a difficult week around which to schedule work. But I have a solid team. And on this particular project, I have my very best designer, so I am considerably less worried about the removal of obstacles than I otherwise might be.

All this talk of Ganesha reminded me of a recent conversation in which I blurted out that Hinduism was among the most memorable things I studied in college. Not my favorite class, mind you. As previously discussed, that course belongs elsewhere, safely within the realm of my major. But memorable? Absolutely.

My liberal arts religions professor looked precisely like someone who taught liberal arts religion. She was, at a glance, a kindly, elderly woman. Her posture stooped just so, her spectacles perpetually smudged, her tightly wound curls an elegant riot of salt and pepper. But most arresting were her eyes: a brilliant, almost phosphorescent green, incongruous with the rest of her understated appearance.

She barreled into every lecture hall with the kinetic force of a wind-up toy set loose, her gait a rapid shuffle that almost always preceded her voice: “Good morning, seekers!” She called us seekers, not students, not even by the humdrum academic formality of “class.” Seekers, as if we were on the cusp of some profound mystical discovery, as if the crumbling cinder block walls of that generic campus building might give way at any moment to reveal an Upanishad in waiting. Her energy was so prodigious that you never doubted she drank her coffee by the cauldron, and if she ever sat still, it was only to better launch herself into the next tangent.

I remember the first time I walked into that classroom and was confronted with a wall-sized overhead projection of Kali in all her furious glory. Her tongue lolled, her necklace of skulls jangled, her many arms flourished swords and decapitated heads. My Midwestern conservative mind had no compartments for this kind of cosmic imagery, no gentle Sunday School parables to catch the fall. Instead, I was throttled through worlds of blue-skinned gods, elephant-headed saints, lovers entwined in postures that would have made the Catholic nuns clutch their rosaries until their knuckles turned white.

We would spend hours parsing the symbology of gods with extra appendages, animal faces grafted seamlessly onto the torsos of men and women, the uncanniness of it all heightened by the professor’s scattershot enthusiasm, as if she were barely restraining herself from skipping ahead to a more familiar Abrahamic narrative. My attempts to make sense of these stories left me exhausted.

The textbooks didn’t help. They were dense, full of unfamiliar words and ideas. The footnotes explained everything with cross-references to tomes I couldn’t find in the library. None of my classmates fared any better. After each class, we would stagger out into the corridor, blinking at the fluorescent sterility of the fine arts building, and wordlessly disperse, as if we’d all survived the same abduction but made a pact never to discuss it.

It was almost comical how much the iconography unmoored me. There was a cartoonishness to the gods that made them seem infinitely more unsettling than anything I’d encountered in my own tradition, where even revelation images were subdued by centuries of Protestant restraint. The more I tried to intellectualize them, to file them neatly away with all the other mythologies I’d crammed for exams, the more they resisted categorization.

When all was said and done, I scraped by with a passing grade. And a soft spot for the poetry of parakīya, viraha, and anurāga.

We learn remarkably early what the world is supposed to look like. Family, religion, language, ritual… all of it gives us a kind of cultural framework to navigate. What feels “normal” can have less to do with being inherently natural than with being the thing we are socialized to. The map we hold can be mistaken for the world itself.

I still find Hinduism profoundly foreign to my own way of understanding things. Proximity hasn’t magically turned it into mine. One of the privileges of getting older is discovering that understanding isn't a prerequisite for respect.

Anyway, this is getting suddenly too philosophical for my taste. I should check to see if the kids are alive. And whether I am supposed to wait patiently here or go find them.

Mere priya, tumhārā din bahut sundar ho