Between the diya and the doubt

I’ve been thinking about prayer a lot lately. What it is, what it does, why I keep going back to it when so much of me still resists.

I grew up in a home where God was part of the calendar, not the conversation. Diwali meant diyas along the balcony and the smell of ghee and camphor during aarti, my mother humming something under her breath while she arranged flowers in front of the small mandir at home. Ganesh Chaturthi meant modaks and a small clay idol we welcomed and then let go. There was love in all of it, and never any fear. My parents were progressive, secular in the truest sense. Faith was something you were free to pick up or set down, and for most of my life, I set it down. I didn’t reject it. I just didn’t think I needed it.

Then I got sick in my thirties. Not the kind of sick that passes in a week. The kind that settles in and slowly rearranges your life. It took my energy first, then my plans, and then something harder to name, the feeling that I was in control of anything at all. Doctors gave me reports and timelines. Friends gave me kindness. None of it reached the place where the fear actually lived.

I can’t point to a first time. It crept in slowly, somewhere in the middle of being unwell, when the fear got too big to hold on my own. I started praying because I didn’t know what else to do with it. And it helped. It gave me somewhere to put the weight. It gave me hope when I had very little, and I’ve learned that hope isn’t a luxury when you’re unwell. It’s a kind of strength, maybe the only kind I had for a while.

Since then prayer has become a habit, though habit feels like the wrong word. It’s more like a place I go to. Some nights I talk. Some nights I ask for things, for my health, for strength, for this to end. Some nights I just sit with my hands folded and let my mind go quiet. I come away lighter. I can’t explain it any better than that.

And still, every time, there’s a part of me standing at the edge of it, unsure.

I don’t know what to do with religion. I never have. I see how it gets used to divide people, to decide who is worthy and who is impure, who gets to enter and who has to stay outside. I see it turned into a weapon, a vote bank, a reason to shut people out. I see rituals done out of fear, out of obligation, out of wanting to be seen doing them. I read the epics and I love the stories, but I can’t hold them as literal truth. I don’t think a god is going to appear in a chariot and fix my life. I’m not sure I want one who works that way.

The girl who grew up questioning everything hasn’t gone anywhere. She sits next to me when I pray, one eyebrow raised.

So I pray, and I doubt, and I pray anyway.

What am I praying to? I’ve asked myself this more times than I can count. I don’t have a name for it that fits. Sometimes I picture Ganesha because he was the god of my childhood, the one we welcomed home every year. Sometimes I picture nothing at all. What I believe, when I strip it down, is that there is something larger than me. Something that holds things together when I can’t. Something that, in some way I don’t understand, is on the side of what’s good and what’s fair.

Maybe it doesn’t intervene the way the old stories say. Maybe it shows up in smaller ways. A doctor who takes the time to listen. A friend who texts on a day I didn’t tell anyone was bad. A morning where the pain is a little less. I’ve started to wonder if that’s where it lives. In the small things I would have missed before.

I used to think faith meant certainty. That you either believed or you didn’t. Now I think faith and doubt can live in the same heart, even in the same prayer. Mine is full of questions. It argues with itself. It walks into the prayer room and then second-guesses the prayer. And somehow it still holds me up. Maybe that tension isn’t a crack in my belief. Maybe it’s just what my belief looks like. Unfinished, and mine.

My parents gave me the freedom to choose. I didn’t know then that the choosing would come so late, or that it would come out of pain.

I don’t know where this goes from here. I’m still unwell some days, better on others. I still roll my eyes at a lot of what gets done in the name of God. I still don’t have a clean definition of what I believe. What I do know is that I’m less afraid than I used to be, and I think prayer has something to do with that.

Maybe that’s all prayer is. A way of admitting you can’t carry everything alone. A way of hoping out loud. It doesn’t have to come with rules or a rulebook, or the right words, or the right god. It just has to be honest.

I don’t know if anyone is listening. Most days I think someone is. And on the days I’m not sure, I’ve realised it doesn’t change much. I still come back. I still fold my hands. I still ask for strength, and for things to be set right, in whatever way they can be.

I light the diya anyway.