I didn’t lose my religion. I outgrew it — not all at once, but over time. Quietly, the way a dupatta catches fire when you’re not paying attention.
A dupatta — the long chiffon scarf South Asian women drape over their heads during prayer, among other things. A garment that exists, in part, to signal modesty and devotion. Mine, it turned out, was flammable.
But we’ll get to that.
Growing up in Chandigarh, India in the 90s, questioning God wasn’t rebellion. It wasn’t even a thought. Religion was the water you drank — handed to you fully formed before you were old enough to ask where it came from. We offered prayers before exams, during illnesses, when moving into a new home. God was the silent guest at every milestone. The one you really didn’t want to upset.
Especially not on Saturdays. On Saturday mornings a man came door to door collecting mustard oil and dry rations — donations for Shanidev, the God of Saturn. The one you didn’t want to anger. We had the offering ready. Everyone did. Nobody asked why.
I was good at all of it. Every Monday morning, buttermilk offered to the Shivling at the temple — Lord Shiva’s sacred form. On Tuesdays, the whole city observed Lord Hanuman’s day — barber shops stayed shut, and no one ate meat, eggs, or drank liquor. Not just our family. Everyone. The streets knew what day it was. Thursdays followed a quieter version of the same rule — no meat, no eggs. By the time you got to the weekend you’d practically forgotten what normal eating looked like.
The Monday fasts had a specific purpose — to marry someone of your choice, someone as charismatic and devoted as Lord Shiva himself. I did marry a man of my choice. He is a wonderful human being and a genuinely excellent partner. So perhaps the fasts worked. Or perhaps what I was really doing — without the language for it yet — was deciding, very clearly and very young, exactly what I wanted. Manifestation dressed in ritual. The intention was always mine.
And at night, when the lights went out and the house made sounds houses make, we didn’t call for our parents first. We recited the Hanuman Chalisa. Forty verses committed to memory specifically for this — for darkness, for fear, for the unnamed things children imagine in corners. The prayer was the protection. The words were the wall.
Then a few small moments arrived — starting around age ten — that left me quietly bewildered. Not rebellious. Not angry. Just — wondering. The kind of wondering you fold up very small and put somewhere quiet because you’re ten years old in a traditional Indian home and some thoughts are not said out loud.
The wondering didn’t disappear. It waited.
For years, belief became something I performed rather than felt. I knew what to say, when to pray, how to appear devout. Fear kept me in place longer than faith did — fear of being wrong, fear of consequences, fear of disappointing everyone who had taught me the words in the first place.
Then London in 2005. I was nineteen. Away from the architecture of expectation I had grown up inside, I met people who were kind, grounded, purposeful — and completely without religion. Not damaged by its absence. Not morally adrift. Just free in a way I hadn’t seen modelled before. They ate what they wanted, washed their hair on any day of the week, and somehow the sky didn’t fall.
Something that had been quietly waiting in me since childhood finally exhaled.
Then Canada. Then Ottawa. Then motherhood — twice over. Which asked entirely new questions I hadn’t thought to prepare for.
Now I have an eight year old who has never offered buttermilk to anyone on a Monday morning. When she asks why things go wrong, I don’t tell her to pray. I tell her we’ll figure it out together. I tell her God isn’t real — and then, because that’s only half the conversation, I tell her that’s nothing to be smug about. That belief does real things for real people. That you can hold your own truth without needing to take someone else’s apart.
We still light diyas at Diwali. We still put up a Christmas tree in December. We carry the culture — the food, the language, the festivals. We just left the mythology behind somewhere between Chandigarh and here.
I don’t whisper prayers into their ears. I whisper questions.
If any of this sounds familiar — the rituals you performed without feeling, the doubt you carried quietly, the home you’re building differently — you’re not reading the wrong blog.
This is where that story begins.
GodlessGhar.ca 
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