God and me

The only instance I remember of my dad hitting me was when I refused to say my night time prayers. It is one of my earliest childhood memories and a surprising one. Because the person who was most influential in inculcating religion in me was my mother, not my father.

I prayed everyday right through my childhood up until I left home for life in a hostel. Most evenings I sat before a lit lamp in the pooja room, singing prayers I had learnt from my mother and reading religious books. I remember the temples I went to regularly and where I broke coconuts or performed archanas on significant birthdays. Mostly these were rituals I followed quite blindly. But sometimes they were bribes and sometimes deterrents to horrible things. I did not enter the puja room or a temple when I had my period. It was an unquestioning world I lived in. There was no dichotomy in my mind between religion as I practiced it and the books and writers I loved and studied or the politics I followed (I was quite sympathetic to the communist cause).

I am not sure as to when exactly it was that I became aware of a dichotomy. Maybe it was when I met for the first time people who were so confident about the non-existence of god. College mates who thought not going to the temple on your period days was regressive. And family members who used my religion as a means of driving a very divisive political agenda. And by the time I read Richard Dawkins, I had already begun to feel the ambiguity about religion I most definitely feel today.

It is hard to explain. I sometimes find immense peace in reading those thousand names of Lakshmi, the Bhagavat Gita, Valmiki's Ramayan, a ritual I follow by rote everyday. The last time I went to the Padmanabha temple in my hometown, I was quite literally moved to tears when I stood before the idol. My mind still goes to the devi in my ancestral temple in times of stress.

But more and more, I find myself looking at this whole spirituality business as a crutch in an increasingly stressful world. And now there are even more forms of it to tackle - the new age gurus with answers to all of life's problems, the vipassana centres, the strangely hypnotic 'secret' to happiness, all of that multi-million dollar self-help industry. I ask myself when does ritual become superstition, whether it is at all possible to truly know and believe in things beyond the rational, the tangible, the here and now. I ask myself if I would not be better off spending my time and energy in doing things that make me the best me that I can be, today. Honest hard work, perseverance, goodness as human beings - shouldn't these be enough for happiness? Isn't blind belief truly scary? And if belief is not blind, can it really be belief?

It haunts me; this question of religion and its significance in my life. I push it away and it keeps coming back. Years of conditioning do not go away in the face of rational arguments. And reading Nadeem Aslam's God and Me in Granta brought all that ambivalence rushing back. Skepticism is a good thing, I tell myself. At least it gives the world one less thing to fight over.

Granta 112: Pakistan

It's vividly, brutally engrossing. Pakistani writing has been the flavour of the times for a while now. Daniyal Mueenuddin, Mohsin Hameed, Mohammed Hanif are all writers we have read in the recent past. All of them find a place in this edition of Granta that focuses on Pakistan. It's a collage of reportage, short fiction, art, poetry coming together in a rich tapestry of dramatic beauty and vicious horror.

The opening act had me hooked. Nadeem Aslam's 'Leila in the wilderness' is a fable, much in the tradition of Laila Majnu. Except that it has at its heart the brutality of female infanticide and the terrible lengths people can go to in the quest for a son. Leila is magical as the young bride brought home to bear her husband a son he craves, torn apart from her family and her young love. The cruelty of a world that thinks nothing of killing babies because they are female, the incomprehensible faith that leads people to entrust daughters-in-law to lustful old men, the utter powerlessness of a woman in a man's world, the survival of exquisite love even in this brutal world - all brilliantly captured in this story that has echoes of Rushdie's magic realism.

Daniyal Mueenuddin has a short poem, and that is a disappointment after his cool ' In Other Rooms, Other Wonders'. Mohsin Hamid's 'A Beheading' is short and vicious like a knife through skin and snapshots the perils of being an artist in an autocracy. Uzma Aslam Khan's 'Ice, Mating' describes a stunning land in sheer poetry and a story that is neither here nor there. Mohammed Hanif's 'Butt and Bhatti' is a tragic farce of love and guns in the hands of men who don't know much. Jamil Ahmad's 'The Sins of the Mother' tells a story of ancient tribal customs of revenge and honour killings that survive in a twenty first century world.

The reportage and opinion pieces are no less riveting. Declan Walsh's piece on the north west and the forces that are tearing it apart - the Taliban on the one hand and the old feudal tribal system on the other - is a fascinating look at one of the last frontiers of the world. Jane Perlez's 'Portrait of Jinnah' paints us the picture of a man who possibly stood for anything but what Pakistan has ultimately turned out to be. Fatima Bhutto's piece on the Sheedis (a negroid race surviving in parts of Pakistan) is interesting because it tells me of a community I am not aware of. But her writing is less than inspiring, and I cannot read her without the background of her family in my mind.

There is more to discover in this book. But the underlying themes of beauty and horror keep replaying themselves over and over. Some of the horror is South Asian - the obsession with sons, the inability to integrate into a western world. But a lot is peculiarly Pakistani - the tribal customs, the extreme lawlessness, the Islamicisation/ jihadisation of an entire generation, the love-hate relationship with the only superpower in the world. The cover of Granta that features the art of a truck painter is vividly colourful. And so is the material inside.