The Temple Queue Where I Lost My Faith
Four hours of pushing toward God, and something in me walked out.
Faith did not leave me in a philosophy class or a hospital or a library. It left me in a queue, somewhere between barricade seven and barricade eight, around the third hour, while a loudspeaker overhead played devotional songs at a volume that made devotion impossible.
I was twenty-six. The trip was my mother's idea, a famous hill temple two states away, the one our family had been promising the deity for years the way you promise a distant relative you will visit. My grandmother had climbed those steps on foot in 1972 with my infant mother on her hip. The story had been told at every family gathering since, polished smooth like a river stone. Now it was our turn, by air-conditioned bus, with laminated tickets.
I want to be honest about who I was in that queue, because the honesty is the whole story. I was not a doubter looking for an exit. I was an ordinary believer, the kind who does not examine the machinery. I fasted on the right days without asking why. I touched the doorframe of every temple I passed on a scooter, a little reflex of the wrist, the body's small talk with God. Faith, for me, was not a fire. It was the pilot light. Always on, never looked at.
The queue complex was a building of its own, a concrete intestine of corridors and cages designed to fold twenty thousand people into a line. We entered at eleven in the morning. The air inside was the temperature of other people. Fathers held children overhead like luggage. Somewhere behind me a man described his gallbladder operation in full for the length of two barricades. Every twenty minutes the line would surge forward without warning, and three hundred bodies would compress like a wave hitting a wall, and you learned to keep your elbows out and your feet under you or be carried.
For the first hour I found it all rather moving. Look at us, I thought, all this longing in one building. By the second hour I had stopped composing sentiments and started guarding my ribs.
It was in the third hour that I saw the side door.
A separate entrance, short and shaded, where families in pressed clothes were walking briskly past our cage, escorted by temple staff. Special tickets. A different price for a nearer God. I knew this existed, everyone knows, but knowing a thing and standing in a steel pen watching it are different organs of knowledge. A man beside me, sweat printing his shirt to his back, watched them pass and said, without particular anger, "They will reach before us," the way you comment on weather. His acceptance did something to me that outrage could not have.
Still, I want to be precise, because this is the part I got wrong for years when I told the story.
The side door did not take my faith. The side door only turned the lights on.
What the lights showed me came later, at the front of the queue, in the fourth hour.
You must understand what the front of that queue is like. After four hours the line turns a final corner, and the sanctum appears, gold in the lamp light and further away than you expect, and the crowd around you goes up on its toes as one animal, and everyone begins shouting the deity's name, and hands grip the barricade rails, and guards stand in the current physically rotating people onward, shouting move, move, keep moving.
I was pushed to the rail. I looked at the idol my grandmother had climbed a hill for. I had four seconds... maybe five.
A guard's hand arrived on my shoulder, hard and practiced, the way you push a turnstile.
And in those four seconds, the exact centre of the pilgrimage, the innermost room of my inherited world, I felt nothing.
Not anger... Not doubt...
Nothing, the specific nothing of checking a pocket and finding it empty. I stood in the holiest place I had ever been granted entry to, and the pilot light was out, and I could not tell you when it had gone out, only that I was now a man peering into the stove, noticing.
I did not lose my faith to an argument. I lost it in a crowd, the way you lose a glove, and I only understood how bare my hand had been when I finally looked down.
The guard pushed. The line took me. Forty seconds later I was outside in the sun holding a laddu in a paper bag, and my mother was beside me with tears standing in her eyes, transformed, fed by the same four seconds that had shown me an empty pocket. She gripped my arm and said, "Did you see properly?" And I heard myself say, "Yes, Ma. Properly."
That was the first lie, and it is the one thing in this story I still cannot decide the ethics of.
On the bus down the hill I sat by the window and conducted a quiet inventory, patting myself down the way you do after a fall. When had I last actually prayed, rather than recited? Could not remember... When had the wrist-flick at temple doorframes last had anything behind it? Could not remember... The queue had not broken my faith. The queue had simply been the first time in years I had stood still long enough, pressed hard enough against the question, to check whether anything was there. Four hours of pushing toward God, and somewhere between the barricades the pushing had squeezed out the truth like water from a cloth.
Years later, past one in the morning, I typed losing faith experience into a search bar, looking for company, and found forums full of people describing thunderclaps: the book that did it, the tragedy that did it, the argument that did it. I kept scrolling for someone whose faith had left the way mine did, without an event, discovered missing rather than destroyed, like a glove. Eventually I stopped searching other people's accounts and wrote my own. It began as an angry essay about the side door and the ticket prices, and it was false the way angry essays about the wrong wound are false. The fifth draft finally admitted the four seconds and the nothing. I posted that version on a community wall for poets, half hoping nobody would read it. A woman from another city wrote underneath: "Mine left in a gurdwara kitchen. Thank you for not pretending it was a war." I have thought about her sentence more than some scriptures.
I never told my mother. She is seventy-one now and still asks, every few years, when we will go back up the hill. I say the roads are bad, the crowds are worse, we will see. That is the second lie, renewed annually like an insurance policy, and I pay its premium with a flat conscience because some honesty is for the writer and some belongs to the reader, and my mother did not sign up to read this.
But here is the part I cannot explain, the part I have stopped trying to file under belief or unbelief. Every evening, in the corner of my flat where other families keep their shrine, I light one candle in the dark room and sit with it for a few minutes before dinner. Not praying. Not performing. Just sitting, the way you sit with a memory that has outlived its argument. The flame stands up straight, minds its own business, asks nothing of me, promises nothing back. My grandmother climbed a hill for her light. My mother queues four hours for hers. Mine fits on a saucer, and it is small, and it is honest, and it is lit, and lately I have begun to suspect that this is what a beginning looks like when it is too humble to announce itself.
The queue took the glove.
The hand, it turns out, still gets cold at dusk, and still knows where the matches are.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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