Opinion The Ram we need

These days, those are rare. For, sooner rather than later, during one of those moments — I always think of this being dusk, the hour before dark, before parents beckon and school work — someone may slip to you a horizontal metallic thing, which will fit snugly into the palm of your hands. A mobile phone is the closest thing to what goes for a miracle now on Earth, transporting one at the click of a button to anywhere around the world.

If mobile is the miracle, you will find, Google is our “god” equivalent, omniscient, omnipresent, everyone, everywhere. You may see on it that history is full of bloodshed in your name — or rather, names.

Your Ayodhya home figures right at the top, how you were “exiled”, then “reclaimed”, the demolition and the construction, the law and the politics, and everything else that went into sustaining the demand for it. And for all that is being swept away now as new gods adopt the shape of your halo. But, history weighs heavy, and it is not easy for me to put all this aside, even — or especially — on this day. And it is a decision I have long grappled with — is the story of the Babri Masjid something that a five-year-old (including mine) needs to know? What do I tell, and what do I leave out? Isn’t it the truth that I owe to my god, or whoever else I believe in?

Over the passing years, as god has lost innocence for me, I did my best to lose god. Again, always gripped with doubt. In doing so, am I closing for my children the doors that should ideally have been theirs to open and stumble through? Is all that talk of raising independent-minded children little more than my own discomfort at explaining something I could not understand? Is there even anything like the ‘middle ground’ that I tell myself I stand on —where god can be tucked away out of sight but easily reached out to, during hard times or festivals?

I know the ship has sailed as far as my two children go. They are now very much adults who have discovered the power of another three-letter word: Why? It requires god-like patience to answer those whys, and not all of us have it. That’s why I find my comfort elsewhere.

Like, come that hour of dusk, when childhood is all around me, I remember that it is not all bad. January 22 may barely register for my kids, but I see that god is not entirely lost to them either: in their belief in kindness, in seeing all beings as equal, in their faith in good over evil, in their efforts to do good unto others and, most importantly, in their concern to not do bad unto any — the very same things that you, your 51-inch frame in the glittering new home, also ask of the devout.

National Editor Shalini Langer curates the She Said Column