My God

Mary, for so she was named, became first aware of the existence of God sometime in her third year on earth. She must have heard Him mentioned before that, but memory is fickle, and it is accepted truth that we do lose the first few years of our life as we grow older. She remembered the day very clearly, and she supposed she always would. It was a clear winter day, shortly after her afternoon nap. It was the time of day when the sun rays slanted friendly golden beams into the living room, draping the sofa in warm January light. Mary was sitting on her grandmother's lap, and the old lady, as old as Time itself, had been drinking steaming tea in a pristine white china cup, with a blue oriental design running along the rim. When Mary had clambered onto her lap, Evelyn (for theirs was a family who believed in the power and significance of names) had been forced to keep the tea cup on the sofa-side table, with its tablecloth of hand-woven lace. But she wasn't displeased about it, or she didn't seem so to little Mary, then or even later when she thought back upon that day. Her grandmother's hands never seemed rough to Mary, even though they were wrinkled and crinkled and often looked to her like the bark of the Banyan tree outside the second floor window of their living room. Evelyn's face too betrayed the passage of the years.. like a skirt folded callously beneath an over-stuffed wardrobe closet, but her eyes were the darkest black, and glimmered and shone with seemingly unfathomable depth whenever Mary had the occasion to look into them. They were serious eyes, set in a serious face, and betrayed no real emotion, but the little girl often fancied she saw lights dance in them, distant lights glimpsed from the window of a train moving through the dark countryside at night. She did laugh at times, Evelyn did, throwing back her coiffure of moonlight coloured hair, and then the laughter did spread, like slow ripples on water, from her pearly false teeth to her eyes. Grandma Evelyn always had a medium-sized black book nearby,' B-I-B-L-E', the cover of the black leatherbound book said in gold letters. All the books that Mary had seen so far (and she had started reading some six months ago) seemed to have two names on the cover, the book title and the writer's name, along with some sort of colourful illustration, caterpillars, dogs, other children who she would have wanted to play with had they leaped off the page and into her room. But this book had no obviously revealed writer, nor did it have any pictures on the cover, so it had never really intrigued Mary, who had seen it from time to time but had never peered inside it, somehow certain that the book would have lots and lots of words, types in very small print on cold pages of paper, and no illustrations to leave matters somewhat. But this afternoon she would receive an introduction, and she would, over time, due principally to that introduction, grow to love that leather-bound black book even though her unseen impression of its internal appearance would turn out to be remarkably accurate.

Mary's grandmother had had to be strong, for she was the centre of the family, and she had this position enforced on her by the various vicissitudes of fate. Her father had died when she was seventeen, making her the sole earning family member, through her tutoring and sewing. Then, when she had finally met a man to support her, he had left for the hallowed lands just beyond the curtain a month after inseminating Evelyn with what was to be her only son. Somehow, through all the trials and travails that life kept offering her to weather, she had never lost courage or hope, and faith had played a large part in this. Her faith had been almost entirely her own, for after her father's death, her mother had been too busy weeping and cursing God to ever remember to pray to Him. Evelyn could have done the same, turning away from a Creator who stayed silent all through, only showing Himself in symbolic, obtuse and often unpleasant ways. Instead she had chosen to embrace Him, and his book. The Biblehad helped Eve (as she was called affectionately by her father when she was young) put things in perspective, under the unshakeable belief that everything she was going through, every dark night, every new tragedy, every new beginning that crumbled to dust as soon as she set her best foot forward, was part of a greater whole, a plan. A plan for her, for the greater good. The closest she'd ever come to relinquishing her faith was the death of Mary's parents, when the child was just a year old, in a car accident on the freeway. Couldn't God have turned that truck away just in time? Couldn't they have started out on the journey a little late, five minutes later than they had? Could God not have caused them to get a flat tire somewhere along the road, before they met their Fate. But that last word was what she believed, in the end. Fate, and once again, the notion of some greater, higher purpose, beyond Evelyn's merely mortal scope of comprehension. And so she had not turned away, but, if possible, embraced her faith in her all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful yet resolutely silent God even stronger than she had embraced it before. She had prayed to Him to at least allow her the joy of raising her grandchild in her way, to not interrupt that at least. And so far things had gone well. Two years had passed by as happily as they can in a family deeply and frequently affected by crippling loss, in a family that looks upon any uneventful period of time gratefully as time in which something bad has not happened. And to show her appreciation for these two happy years, or perhaps to keep an often vengeful God content for a few more years or for reasons which she alone was aware of, maybe just a natural extension of her unshakeable faith: Evelyn decided that January afternoon that her three year old grand-daughter Mary needed to understand the ways and whims of the person who governed His creations the best way He saw fit. It was never too early to know, Evelyn felt, He that was kind and cruel and inscrutable and answered to no one but Himself for his decisions, no matter how earnest the queries and entreaties.

She looked down at Mary, and Mary, with a clarity of thought quite unlike someone that young, felt momentarily that her grandmother's face must have been carved out of light. With all its wrinkles and defects, Evelyn's face, a steady silhouette with its back to the sinking Sun, had been that way since time which her granddaughter's little mind could hardly fathom. Still cradling the girl in her left, she reached out with her free right hand and picked up the Bible from the sofa-side table.
“Well, little Mary, I do believe it is time. “
“Time for what grandmama?”
“For an introduction. The biggest introduction that you will make for as long as you live”
“But who will I meet?”, asked the girl, who already knew what an introduction meant.
“Him. The creator. The All. The one who made everything and controls everything and knows everything. The one to whom we are all answerable for our actions. The one who looks us after all. And the one who punished us when we do wrong. ”
“Even you grandma?”, said Mary in the dubious and slightly bewildered tones of someone who had not figured that there was a higher tier in the organization of heaven and earth than the wrinkled all- knowing woman who she had come to regard, though of course she could not articulate this in these words if you asked her then, as a God figure, a figure of absolute complete control and power over if not all the world, at least the world as far as young Mary's horizon extended. The world of their two room apartment, and her toybox, and her colourful books and the nursery school and the neighbourhood playground, with its infinite trees and creaky swings. To fathom that her grandmother was not absolute was no easy task for her tiny mind, but she accepted it even then, in a hazy sort of way. She did not have much more time to think about this for Evelyn continued to speak, gently opening the black leather-bound Bible that she held in her hands. And so Mary learnt of the genesis ofthe world and the universe, and in subsequent days often wondered what exactly it was that God did on his seventh day, his rest day. She learnt of Adam and Eve, and the perils of crossing God's express instructions, and she learnt of the great deluge, as her grandmother's narrative wound its way past the antediluvian ages. She wondered if Noah had felt as happy upon seeing the rainbow of promise as Mary herself did when she saw the first drops of rain after a parched summer. She learned of Moses, and God's powers even when channeled through one of his prophets. The Old Testament came to a close, almost cued perfectly with the setting of the Sun, splashing bright orange streaks across a steadily darkening sky.. with the tale of endless hardships, for even those who were loved by this strange ambivalent unpredictable master. Her grandmother made herself a cup of tea, which smelled like leaves and lemons, and she gave Mary a little chocolate flavoured milk to drink. They both sat silently, sipping their beverages, lost in the sort of deep thought that only theology and religious instruction can bring.

The Sun had settled deep below the horizon, giving light to the people in the Southern half of the world, when Mary's instruction resumed. They had both stayed silent for awhile, listening to the chatter of the birds as they flew home to their nests, and the sounds of the city below their second storey window, muted cars passing in the distance. Now Evelyn talked about the Son of God, of the New Testament, and how no one was special, not even His own child. Mary liked this man immediately, this thirty three year old carpenter, but far wiser and wearier than his years, and she could almost see the last scene in the garden, the last lingering doubt in the mind of the Christ, before the resignation and peaceful acceptance of his Fate (the same word had befallen Mary's parents too), and even the forgiving of his primary betrayer, Iscariot. Mary liked him a lot, this Jesus of Nazareth, and she was upset when he met his end on a wooden symbol of lasting Christianity. So upset in fact, that her grandmother had to put down her holy book for a few minutes to cradle her little grandchild in her arms.
“There there little Mary. I feel sad too. It is a sad tale, one of the saddest ever told. But it is also a necessary tale. To help understand and love Him better too”
And Mary could not see how such cruelty to one's only son could make anyone very endearing but she said nothing. She was happier though when she heard of her hero's resurrection, and his ultimate ascension, though a part of her did wonder whether God, sitting in his immanent form in Heaven, would be able to look His son in the eyes, after having condemned him to a painful death for the sins not his own but of other people. God, Mary vicariously learnt, was also omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent. He was all-powerful, he knew all and he was everywhere, supervising everything simultaneously. He was the Lord, God, and master of this universe, of everyone's life, Mary, Evelyn, even the sparrows who came chattering to their window for a handout of rice each morning. God would do as He saw fit, and it was not upto anyone on Earth to question his decision. God was to be feared and respected, but, Evelyn added, he was to be loved as well, for he was kind, if only when you followed His instructions exactly. Thus concluded Mary's instruction for the day, and indeed grandmother and granddaughter never explicitly spoke about any of the topics of that January discourse again. It was as if everything that could be said and discussed had been done, and the remaining inferences and epiphanies were up to each individual separately, to find God's ways or to lose them, it was a decision to left to Mary now, Evelyn had done her bit. Of course, little Mary did not learn about the Book of Revelation that day. Even in the midst of her theological fervour, Evelyn knew well enough to steer clear of eschatological discussions with a three year old child. The time would comewhen she would know, and learn, but that time was not now, another catechism class perhaps. And so the day and the day's lesson ended, with the night falling gently from the sky, and the only sound being that of the crickets chirping in the bushes outside their house.

And time passed, as it is wont to do. Evelyn grew older while Mary grew into a thoughtful teenager, if perhaps a little bit too much into The Bible. But no one judged her, “Ah, the poor child, what a lonely and sad life she's led, she needs solace. “. In truth however, Mary did not herself feel, nor had she ever felt that her life was particularly sad or lonely. After all, she had not known her parents, so their loss was incapable of affecting her deeply. And she had had her grandmother as a stern, affectionate guide through her formative years. Mary was an introvert, but she was happy enough. She spent most of her time poring through books, mostly of the Biblical variety and by the time her thirteenth birthday came about, she was a rather well-versed scholar of Christian literature. Grandma Evelyn, into her eightieth year, had mixed feelings about the way her granddaughter had turned out. On one hand, she was happy that Mary was as into the whole God thing as she was, but on the other, Eve did wonder occasionally if it wouldn't be better for Mary to go out and play with the people her age, indulge in the usual activities of childhood. She had suggested it to the young girl too at times, only to be met with mildly reproachful glances, as Mary looked up, almost contemptuously from the pages of whatever book she happened to be reading at the instant the question was asked. So Evelyn had broached the subject no more but had been content to let Mary choose her own path, because it too was , after all, guided and decided and supervised by Him. And those lingering doubts as to the wisdom of teaching Mary so much on a whim (or an invisible subconscious dictum from the Man himself) that January afternoon nearly a decade back, well, Evelyn had swept them away as one does so many cobwebs built painstakingly by spider artists behind a hanging mirror. It was blasphemous, she reckoned, even to entertain such a thought. She had only been spreading His word, and that could, by definition, never be a bad thing. So after a few hesitant attempts to get Mary to see the world outside the confines of her religion and her room, Evelyn had resigned it to the will of God and gone about her life as peacefully as she could have. Mary did go to school, like most children her age, but her principal education was at home, by herself, in the company of books whose subject matter was handed down through time immemorial. And the facts of life, well, she had picked up most things from the Bible. When her cycles of the monthly Moon had begun, she had been mildly surprised, but had accepted it and got used to it, like eating and sleeping and praying. She knew that sex existed, and that God did not frown upon the act of consummation between man and woman, as long as they were married. The exact details she had never pondered about, she figured that God or the school education system would inform her when the time was right. Evelyn was a little prudish on this matter, and had never summoned up the capacity for embarrassment tolerance she felt would be requisite to talk to her granddaugher about the birds and the bees and the educated fleas, as heard in that old Sinatra tune. And so life, as directed by the divine will, went on.
And then one afternoon in late January, when the days start to lengthen their lifespan once more, grandma Evelyn went to sleep and never woke up. Mary discovered this when she came with a cup of tea for her grandmother, prepared the way Evelyn always liked it, smelling of lemon and of leaves. She thought the old woman was asleep, and called her softly once, twice, before her voice started acquiring a tremulous nervous sound. Finally, she gently pushed the old lady, sleeping, as it appeared, so very peacefully, her head on her breast, and her head lolled over, like it was a doll's head. Somehow her mind never, even for a moment, entertained the possibility that her grandmother might be ill. She knew, with absolute certainty that she was gone, from this world, that Evelyn had floated up into the arms of her master. Of course Mary knew about death, and she had, though not emotionally, been affected by her parents' death when she was an infant, but this was different. This was like someone suddenly blotting out the noonday Sun. Her hands were trembling as she laid the cup of tea, lemon and leaves and memories, on Evelyn's bedside table and the room seemed a lot colder than it had seemed when she had been there last. Mary ran out into the hallway, and still almost in control, knocked on the door of their nearest neighbour, related the life-altering happenings of that afternoon in a couple of coherent sentences, then broke down crying. Whatever followed in the next couple of weeks was a blur, a hazy vision seen through rainy glass. She vaguely remembered some relatives coming over, and acting busy making all the funeral arrangements. For the first time in her life, Mary felt overburdened by emotion, and neither her faith nor the consolations of what seemed like an endless procession of sympathizers seemed to help all that much. Her God was silent to her prayers, and she spent a lot of time, in that fortnight, looking out of windows, wondering what lay beyond the steel and glass jungle that obscured the horizon beyond. Her Bible, that constant companion of her youth, stayed largely unopened, and her only source of comfort in those days was the firm conviction that hr grandmother had departed for a better place, and that she would be happy there. Much happier than she had been on Earth. But nothing would change the fact that she was gone, and everytime Mary realized this the force of her loss came back to her with even more crippling intent. The afternoons spent talking over tea and milk, the sweet frailty in Evelyn's voice as she sang a hymn during her morning washing, and the largely unspoken of affection that grandmother and granddaugher had shared over the years, everything was now a memory, to be written about, thought about, dreamed about too perhaps, but never again experienced. And Mary felt another emotion which she had never had much cause to feel during her thirteen years on God's green planet, anger.

The funeral came and went. Just another inhumation. February lingered for longer than usual, it seemed to Mary, who was now living, temporarily, with an aunt of hers. She would go off to boarding school when the new academic year began in April. Her aunt's place was in the middle of the city, with its cars and street-vendors and incessant noise and bustle. Mary had never really been out of her suburban surroundings before and everything here struck her as new, and, given how her worldview had been effectively shaped by her grandmother's sermon one afternoon when she was three, not necessarily pleasant. Then, one evening, when her aunt had gone to the cinema with her husband, Mary found herself reflecting on Evelyn, and all the things she had told little Mary on her lap all those years ago. Ever since her grandmother's passing, Mary had relinquished God to second spot in her mind, behind the all-enveloping flood of intermingled memory and parting sorrow. But now, God came rushing back, and in a way, His return into Mary's active thought was through memory. The memory of that January afternoon, her grandmother's timeless face, with the texture of wrinkled summer curtains, carved out of light, and the recollection of the little child's awe and wonder at the power and kindness and unbelievable cruelty of this being, this all-powerful creator and controller of the universe. She remembered too her grandmother consoling her when she, toddler that she had been, had been upset nearly to tears by Christ's ignominious departure. And she was nearly in tears now, but she didn't let sorrow stop the flood of thought, as she went over, as best she could recall, every word that Evelyn uttered that day so very long ago. She traced the movement of her grandmother's lips as Evelyn spoke,almost silhouetted by the Sunlight falling on her head, her sharp features thrown into even sharper relief. In Mary's mind, the Sunlight behind Evelyn's head took on the appearance of a halo, brighter with each recollection. Her mind, Mary's mind, stopped tracing the outline of her grandmother's lips after she had spoken her final few words of that definitive introduction. And the closing words of the introduction had talked about God in all his glory, this God who was omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent. This God who was all-knowing, all-powerful and present everywhere at the same time, in spirit, if not in body. And Mary, as the evening wore on, found herself thinking increasingly of this particular quality of God. She had always accepted the fact that he was all-powerful and all-knowing, well, of course, he made everything, and everyone, and so it came to some sort of reason that he would be. But present everywhere? How could that be possible? He was a man-shaped being was he not? Try as she might, Mary could not reconcile the thought of God to some all-pervading nearly phantasmagoric invisible fog, but she decided, in the end, that omniscience must refer to God's spirit, roaming about freely everywhere, overlooking and knowing everything, while God's holy body sat on his throne from which he ruled his kingdom, the upper echelons, where grandma Evelyn too now resided, the middle ground of mortals with all their fleeting joys and sorrows, and even the realms down below, though the beings who supposedly ruled those realms might object to such an assessment. Night came, as did her aunt and uncle from the movies, and Mary went to bed that night, pleased with her conclusion, though she couldn't help but feel a little uneasy. There was, after all, no one at hand from who she could clarify her doubts. She wished she had asked Evelyn while she still had the time. She would ask God himself but she knew He never answered.

As the days slowly rolled into a pleasant Spring, Mary found herself pondering God's omnipresence even more and more. What was his spirit like? And how did his spirit, in its transcendent form, communicate or combine with the immanent form of God, seated on his throne high above all things great and tiny. And how far did this ever-presence facility of His go? Did that mean that God was present all the time, everywhere, and that He saw every single thing that Mary or anyone else ever did over the course of their lives? Was God there, benevolently watching over Mary's parents, as the life that He had allowed them slipped away from them, inside their own car on a lonely freeway populated by death and rain. Was God there when Evelyn lowered her haloed head down and looked into little Mary's eyes and told her all about Him? Was God there, too, then, when Evelyn had taken her last rattling breath, and how had He felt when he saw the sheer devastation in Mary's eyes at the realization of her grandmother's death? If he felt anything at all, if he felt any pain, then why did he let the bad things happen, if they all happened, as it seemed, in front of his own eyes? Mary's head whirled with all the questions and she started thinking obsessively about this capacity that her and everyone else's creator possessed. If He did possess it at all, what was the use if He was always, eternally, the silent observer? Sometimes Mary rationalized for God, and sometimes against Him, and this debate raged on endlessly within her thriteen year old mind. Maybe everything was part of a much greater plan, her parents' deaths, grandma Evelyn's passing away were all relevant, necessary, in some way, perhaps in the unimaginably long term. Perhaps they were all little pawn movements in this incomprehensibly massive chess game that God was playing with Himself, black versus white, and the possible outcomes of the game were beyond the grasp of the tiny minds of tiny mortals like Mary and her ilk. While other girls her age were starting to appreciate the additional pleasures of growing up, Mary lay on her makeshift bed in her aunt's spare bedroom and wondered and wondered and wondered. And she asked of God the same questions she had often before, And He, as was His way, never answered, not even in oblique signs, starfalls or giant floods, nothing that would help Mary find herway through this personal Daedalus construction of faltering belief. And it was at the nadir of Mary's faith, when she was almost at the point of giving God up as a lost argument, that He chose to answer. And it happened in the strangest of ways but the ways of the Lord are, more often than not, mysterious. Mary was in the shower, when she heard a noise, which, at first listen, had seemed really close. She had never been prone to the fits of paranoia which often grip city people, so she figured it must have been something outside the bathroom, or maybe a pigeon sitting on the window-sill, she couldn't really tell above the noise of the falling water inside the cubicle. She continued to shower, and closed her eyes as the wave of cleansing warm water washed over her. Then she heard the noise again, unmistakeably near this time, and opened her eyes. Through the pale translucence of her shower curtain, Mary thought she could see a shape, standing in front of the mirror above the wash-basin, illuminated by the pale neon lamp that hung overhead, shrouded in light. There was a moment's struggle, a lopsided battle between crippling terror and exhilarating anticipation and then it was over and Mary realized everything in perfect crystal clarity. She knew, without any room for doubt, who it was that had come to her at last, even in this very strange of ways. Her faith, so tenuous over the past few days, beat loudly in her veins once more. She turned down the shower, so that the soundtrack of her revelation changed from a flowing waterfall to a gentle drip. “Are you finally here?”, she asked, already certain of the answer, and the figure behind the hazy curtain nodded in an almost imperceptible way, and Mary's heart felt lighter and happier than it had ever done. “Where were you all this time when I called you, I asked for you I have been so very lost”, and the shape outside the curtain, it seemed to Mary, hung his head, as if in shame and sorrow. She thought of grandma Evelyn and how happy she would have been had she been there that day. And she knew that all the answers she had ever searched for were close at hand. Then she parted the shower curtains and stepped out into the light.