Growing Up Between Two Religions
One home, two gods, and a child learning to fold hands both ways.
In our house, God had two addresses. One was a wooden shelf in the kitchen corner, crowded with small brass figures, a bell, and a photograph of my mother's guru garlanded in plastic marigolds. The other was a crucifix above my parents' bed, next to a palm frond folded into a cross that my father replaced every year and never once explained.
My mother rang her little bell at dawn. My father murmured to his rosary at night, the beads clicking like a slow clock. And I grew up in the hallway between them, learning to fold my hands both ways: palms flat together for her shelf, fingers laced for his church.
Nobody taught me this was unusual. Children accept the physics of their own house. Rain falls down, milk boils over, Amma fasts on Tuesdays, Dad kneels on Sundays. It was only at school, in second standard, that a form arrived with a blank that said Religion, and Mrs. Pinto stood over my desk waiting, and I looked up at her and asked, with complete sincerity... 'Both?'
She sent a note home. My parents fought that night, in the low, hissing register parents use when they think the walls are thicker than they are. It was the first time I understood that the two addresses were not one country. There had been a treaty, signed before I was born, somewhere between a temple in Guruvayur and a parish in Mangalore: no conversion, no baptism, no thread ceremony, the child decides at eighteen. Both extended families had opposed the wedding. Both had predicted, with great confidence, exactly this moment at exactly this kitchen table.
The grandmothers ran their campaigns anyway. My father's mother slipped a small tin medal of Our Lady into my pencil box every time we visited, the way other grandmothers slip in ten rupee notes. My mother's mother tied a black thread on my wrist against the evil eye and told me stories about Krishna stealing butter, which honestly made him sound like the most relatable god on offer. I kept the medal and the thread in the same pocket. They never fought in there.
I loved both addresses for entirely selfish reasons. The temple had drums and the sharp sweetness of tulsi and camphor, and prasadam you ate off your own palm. The church had stained glass that threw colored light on the floor like spilled candy, and a choir aunty who sang half a beat behind everyone with total conviction. Diwali meant my father on the terrace lighting sparklers, his sleeves rolled up. Christmas meant my mother making the crib scene with real sand, arranging the shepherds, muttering that the wise men were coming too early, it was not yet Epiphany. She knew his calendar better than most of his cousins did.
People assume a child in a house like mine grows up confused.
I was not confused. I was bilingual.
What I actually learned, in my bones and long before I could say it, was this: certainty comes in more than one flavor, and two people can hold opposite certainties across one small kitchen and still pass each other the salt with tenderness.
The year I turned fourteen, the treaty was tested.
My father collapsed at his office desk in June, and the word the doctors used had too many syllables to be harmless.
He was in the cardiac ward for eleven days. Relatives arrived in waves, each wave bringing its own god and its own certainty about what should be done, whispered instructions about novenas, about archanas, about which deity handled hearts.
On the eighth day I skipped tuition and took the bus to the hospital, and on the way, on an impulse I still cannot fully explain, I got off early at his church. I wanted to light a candle for him because I had seen him do it, and doing what he did felt like keeping him alive.
The church was almost empty, dark except for the candle stand flickering near the side altar.
And kneeling in front of it, in her office saree, was my mother.
She had a candle in her hand... She had clearly been there a while. She was not experimenting, either: she crossed herself in the correct order, which is more than some of my father's cousins manage. I stood in the aisle and watched this woman, who rang a brass bell at dawn her whole life, who fasted on Tuesdays, light a flame inside her rival's house and bow her head to it.
She saw me eventually.
She did not look caught.
She moved over on the kneeler to make room, and we knelt there together, and she said quietly, 'Your father would do the same for me. He has done the same for me.' Then, after a pause... 'When you were born late and blue and not crying, he was outside the operation theatre doing my japa. Badly... But doing it.'
Faith, in my house, was never about which god was real. It was about who you were willing to kneel next to.
My father came home thinner and slower and lived another way of being himself for many more years.
Nobody ever mentioned the candle.
Some things in a family are load bearing precisely because they are never discussed.
At eighteen, the famous deadline arrived and... nothing happened. No ceremony, no announcement, no choosing. The treaty had imagined a fork in the road, but by then I knew the road did not fork. It just widened. On forms I write whichever word causes less paperwork. In my chest it stays 'Both?', asked in Mrs. Pinto's classroom, still waiting for a better form.
It took me until my thirties to write about any of this. A writing site I follow once posted a prompt that said, simply: describe your first prayer. I sat down to dash off four lines and got ambushed by the smell of camphor and candle wax arriving together, the way they always had. The poem that came out was not about theology at all. It was about family, about two stubborn certainties orbiting one small flat, held in place by something stronger than agreement. I read it now and realize it is also about hope, which is the only religion my parents indisputably shared.
They are old now. The two addresses still stand. The brass shelf has more gods than before, because my mother's faith is acquisitive, and the palm cross above the bed is fresh, because some parish somewhere still knows my father by name.
And this is the image I will keep when everything else goes: a power cut on some monsoon evening years ago, the flat gone black, and my mother lighting the lamp on her shelf while my father lit the candle he kept for exactly these occasions. Two small flames in one dark room, one in front of Krishna, one in front of the Virgin, burning with identical light.
From where I sat, doing homework between them, I honestly could not tell you which glow was whose. It all just looked like fire, doing what fire does, holding back the dark from every direction at once.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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