My Son Asked Me If God Is Real
Six years old, direct question, and both my answers felt like lies.
My son asked me if God is real while I was cutting an apple, and the knife went straight into my thumb. He was six, sitting on the kitchen counter in his dinosaur pajamas, heels drumming the cabinet door, and he asked it the way he asks everything: like a customs officer who already suspects you are lying.
"Papa. Is God real?"
I said "ow," which is not a theological position, and put my thumb under the tap. I remember the water was too cold, the radio was playing an old Kishore Kumar song, and the apple sat on the cutting board in half moon slices, one of them slightly pink now, which I quietly threw away.
I am not a religious man. I am also not a brave one. So the first thing I did was stall. "Why do you ask, beta?"
"Aryan said his nani went to God's house. But Papa said..." and here he paused, because the Papa in that sentence was me, from two years ago, explaining thunder. "Papa said clouds are just water."
This is the problem with children.
They keep receipts.
I tried the first answer. "Yes," I said. "God is real." It came out in the same voice I use to report that the tooth fairy left the coin, a voice he has already started to recognize, and I watched something in his face go careful. He nodded slowly... He did not believe me, and worse, he knew that I knew he did not believe me.
So I tried the second answer. "Well, actually, some people believe..." and out came the small lecture. Different religions, many names for one light, nobody knows for certain, be kind to everyone. It was a good lecture. It was tolerant and modern and completely dead on arrival. He picked at the sticker on his pajama knee the whole time. When I finished he said, "Okay," in the voice children use when an adult has failed them and they are being polite about it.
Both answers were lies, and I want to be precise about why. The yes was a lie because I do not know. The lecture was a lie because it pretended his question was about religions, and it was not. He was not requesting a survey of world beliefs. He was asking whether Aryan's nani is somewhere or nowhere. He was asking, sixty years early, the question I still ask at 2 a.m. with the ceiling fan for company.
Then he looked at the apple slices, and then at me, and asked the real question, the one underneath, the one they always carry in second position: "Will you go to God's house also?"
There it was.
Every parent knows this moment is coming. You imagine you will be wise inside it. You imagine yourself lit warmly, saying the sentence that gets quoted at your funeral. Instead I stood in my kitchen with a bleeding thumb and Kishore Kumar singing about the wind, and I said the only true thing I had.
"I don't know, beta... Nobody knows. Not even the people who say they know."
And my six-year-old, freshly handed the great terrifying uncertainty of human existence, exhaled like a man whose loan just got approved. "Okay," he said, and this okay was different. This okay had its shoulders down. "Aryan said everybody knows except me."
Six-year-olds do not want answers. They want to know whether it is safe to keep asking.
That was the whole thing. He had not come for theology. He had come to check whether not knowing was allowed in this house, or whether he was defective. And both of my beautiful adult answers, the confident yes and the balanced lecture, had quietly told him that everyone else had it figured out and he had better catch up.
He ate his apple. He asked if dinosaurs go to God's house and I said that if the place exists it definitely has dinosaurs, and he said "obviously" in the tone of a boy whose father has finally said something intelligent, and went off to brush his teeth.
I slept badly that night. Not because of God.
Because of my father.
I was eight when I asked him something similar, at the shraadh ceremony for my grandfather, all of us cross-legged on white sheets while a priest chanted and a bowl of rice sat in front of a photograph. I whispered, "How does the food reach Dadaji?" It was a sincere logistics question. My father pressed my knee once, hard, which in our family was a full paragraph, and later in the car he said, "Some questions we don't ask."
He was not angry. He looked out the window when he said it.
It took me thirty years to understand that he did not have the answer either, that this embarrassed him, and that the press on my knee was fear wearing the costume of discipline.
He died without us ever finishing that conversation. For a long time I could only write around it, never through it. What finally cracked it open, embarrassingly, was a one-line exercise I found on a page of poetry prompts: write the question you were not allowed to ask. I wrote about the car and the window and the knee in twenty minutes, crying at my desk like a man chopping onions, and later I put the poem up on a community wall for poets, where a stranger commented that her mother used to press her knee the exact same way. Two continents. Same knee.
I mention this because I almost became him in that kitchen. The confident yes was my father's knee press, translated into English. A way of closing a door gently so the child does not see that you are afraid of what is behind it.
My son is seven now, and the question has not gone away. It has grown limbs. Does God see everything. Does God like dogs more, or cats. If God made everything, then who made God, which he asked in a public swimming pool with such casual devastation that a man in the next lane laughed out loud and swallowed water.
I have a policy now, arrived at with all the rigor of a man inventing it as he goes: I am allowed to say I don't know, I am allowed to say what I hope, and I am required to keep the difference clearly labeled. So when he asks where Aryan's nani went, I say: I don't know where she went. I hope she is somewhere the tea is always hot. And he adds to it, she probably has a swing, and we build the place together, both of us aware it is made entirely of hope, neither of us calling it a lie, because it is not one. Hope stated as hope is the most honest sentence in the language. I have read enough poems about hope to know it does not require proof. It only requires a witness.
Last month at bedtime he offered me his own theology, unprompted.
"I think God is maybe real," he said, "but shy."
I asked what he meant. He shrugged into the pillow. "That's why we can't see him. He's like the house lizard. He only comes out when the lights are off."
I do not know if God is real. I know that when I switched off his bedroom light and stood in the doorway a moment longer than necessary, the dark room was full of something... Call it whatever you want. I called it good night, and for once it did not feel like a lie at all.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.