In my oldest memory of god, I am standing in front of a banyan tree in my grandmother’s farm in Mangalore. It is pitch dark. My family is standing around with their hands joined in prayer. My grandmother twists the neck of a chicken and tosses it. The headless chicken is running around. When all life leaves the chicken’s body, it falls. The direction of its legs determine whether the gods are happy or unhappy with us. Any position except both feet up is bad. But we are lucky tonight, the gods seem happy and everyone is relieved. The headless chicken gives me nightmares for days.

For most of my childhood, I didn't grasp the idea of a god. But the first time I saw my dad cry, I realised that there were things at play that even he couldn’t scold into submission. It was the first time I felt scared. It dawned on me that even my parents needed someone to look after them. From that day, I started praying.

My prayers were, ‘Please take care of my family and me. And please listen to my mother’s prayers.” A prayer that felt all encompassing. My relationship with god existed through my mother. For some reason, I thought she knew them. She knew their context, she knew their stories. Gods were in charge of the world and my deeply religious mother, their representative.

As I moved out of my parents’ house and grew independent, I saw my mother’s dependence on god as a crutch. I realised that the world was not sure gods existed. Every tribe, every culture, every civilization has come to its own conclusions on who it thinks runs the universe and we all disagree with each other. Like every twenty something that believes in their own power and agency, my relationship with god got weaker. No gods occupied any walls in all the homes I lived in alone. Neither did I pray.

When I moved into a new house after marriage, as a Diwali gift, my mother brought me a photo of her ‘Devi’ from Kateel, Mangalore. I transformed a shelf in a cupboard into a makeshift mandir and kept the photo there with a diya. I got two ganpatis and a krishna during my wedding as gifts too. They joined the ‘Devi’ from Kateel on the shelf. Every Diwali, I buy some flowers, I light a diya and I pray for my family. I send a photo to my mother when I decorate it and she sends me a photo from her mandir.

This year, as I lit the diya, I wondered what I would tell my children about god. I am not absolutely convinced like my mother is. And I am barely as effective a medium as her. If someone asked me, is there a god? I would confidently say ‘nobody knows.’ We are just animals at the end of the day that somehow broke consciousness. We think it separates us and we will go to a special place where the chickens that die don’t go. We think we deserve a god.