Searching for solace: A requiem for Rizwan

In the deeply religious Hindu household in which I grew up in Kolkata, there were at least 132 photographs of various gods adorning the dilapidated walls of our ground-floor home. The most prominent of them, in our multipurpose living room, were the standing trio of Ram, Lakshman and Sita along with a genuflecting Hanuman, enclosed in a glass chamber with a light fitted inside.

At dusk, like a ritual, before turning on the lights in the other rooms, we would first turn on the light for this photograph. Ash smeared on my forehead, every evening I would pray to the ensemble of gods as my sisters sang the Hanuman Chalisa. The melody and rhythm of every version of this song that I heard later in life seemed off. For peace and for humanity to be free of strife, my grandmother read the Sundara Kandam in Tamil everyday.

My ill-tempered father worked all his life at the Allahabad Bank with a patriotic zeal for nation building and took great pride in his uncompromising integrity. A deeply religious man, he would fondly recount how our forefathers had constructed a Ram temple in our ancestral village in Tamil Nadu.

Our home, with a daily deluge of visitors ranging from the priests of the...

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