II

(continued)

By the time I was beginning to figure out that there were some pretty big loopholes in the insular Jehovah's Witness fold at the age of 9, I was transplanted into Hinduism in Trinidad and Tobago.

Talk about a switch. The Jehovah's Witness folk were pretty big on bashing idolatry, and here I was suddenly dumped into a religion that appeared to do much the same. My father had the presence of mind not to have a hand in this; he let his eldest brother take me to the Mandir on Sundays where my cousins went to Sunday School. There were no options, so I sat around with about the same amount of interest that I wore a bow-tie in the other world of the Jehovah's Witnesses.

This, of course, caused problems.

After a few months of this torture - a torture of going from one insular religion to what appeared to be another - I think everyone involved figured out that no good could come from my going to the Mandir because, for some reason, it stopped. Instead, my father and I would go with a group of his friends to the beach where I was in charge of mixing the drinks. This was a pleasant change. But the questions from going to the Mandir were still there. Things like, "Why are there so many Gods and Goddesses?", "Why do the services in a foreign tongue (Hindi) when I can't understand a word of it?", "What's this about not eating beef?", and so on. My father, in his infinite wisdom, didn't talk to me about these things.

I suppose that it didn't help that everywhere I went in Trinidad and Tobago, I wasn't really thought of as 'Indian'. Anything I did wrong was attributed to being half white, anything I did right was attributed to my being half Indian. I would later wear this quote of Einstein on my sleeve:

If my theory of relativity is proven correct, Germany will claim me as a German and France will say I am a man of the world. If it's proven wrong, France will say I am a German and Germany will say I am a Jew.

Left to my own devices, I settled on my own opinions which were less than fair to what Hinduism really is. My father and I continued to eat beef to the chagrin of just about everyone else in the family. When the rest of the family was off starving themselves to please one deity or the other, we were eating cheeseburgers. He was the black sheep of the family, and I was his only son. His eldest brother one day cornered me on this in a poorly thought out intervention, talking to me during the worst time to talk to any young man: puberty.

And he told me about eating beef being bad, and so forth. And my response was, "If you can't change my father, why do you think you can change the son?" He stared at me. He couldn't discipline me in any way because it would get back to my father. I'd accidentally said the best and worst thing to him that I could possibly say. But he stopped and left me alone, which is what I wanted.

Now that I'd hit a level of stability with all of this that was acceptable, my father decided to marry. And the woman he married, after a Hindu marriage, decided she would study... Hinduism, and become Trinidad and Tobago's first Pandita.

Great. So when I had finally staved off the religious nonsense- because I had come to the conclusion that all the religion I had seen around me was nonsense - my father had let it through the front door. And it dragged me around, kicking and screaming, as her friends children and I became friends. Before you knew it, I was going to Hindu camps for children. And I didn't fit, partly because of my experiences being so different but also partly because deep within me and for a variety of reasons I didn't want to belong. The innocent sacrifice I had made in being transplanted
was to lose 'belonging'; when I first got there this was reinforced. Other circumstances didn't help matters, but that's beyond the scope of this.

When it came to the other things boys do, I was fine and could find at least pretend to fit in. But the whole Hinduism thing just didn't fit. Yet I wasn't given any choice, so at an early age I learned to pretend to conform and, despite my character, to bite my tongue.

At around this time, I passed the Common Entrance examination and ended up in Presentation College - a Catholic school - where we got together every day and listened to Brother Michael Samuel, the principal, talk about the Roman Catholic version of things. He was suitably vague and diverse, encompassing all religions in his talks and dwelling on the commonalities. The school allowed Roman Catholics to go to religious knowledge while the rest of us went to 'Ethics'.

I loved Ethics class because it tried to make sense of all the religious nonsense out there. That the teacher was odd didn't help matters, but Ethics was natural for me (as was English). And there, for 40 minutes a day, we had some good discussions - but these discussions typically ended too soon for me. The stuff that I wanted to talk about was 'off the syllabus', a common problem I had in secondary school and one which has come along for the rest of my life.

So there I was. All mixed up, no answers, and as far as the rest of my life - all mixed up, no answers. This did not lead to the best of behavior, of course, which continued to devolve. But a few things happened that gave me the foundation to move forward.

There was a 'Shakti' run around Trinidad, where young Hindu men and women would be running around the country. It was decided, without my consideration, that I would be a part of it because of the friendly ties between Raviji and my then stepmother and so on. It was also probably to just get me out of the house. So I went. And I ran with the group - we would run from Mandir to Mandir through areas ripe with Hinduism. People came outside - poor people - and would give us fruits to eat as we ran. This run meant something to me, and somehow I had unwillingly become a part of it. We would stop in the evenings at Mandirs and sleep, the boys with the boys, the girls with the girls. And I couldn't sleep one night because of the mosquitoes, so I went outside and sat down.

Morning came. There was a visiting holy man - maybe a Swami, I'm not sure - and he was doing his morning rituals near a mango tree. When he was done, he waved me to come over and he told me I had questions. So I sat with him and gave him the barrage I had been saving for at least 5 years at that point - and that turned out to be a good thing because, unlike most religions, Hinduism's 'right' questions are hard to come by because of all the variations and nuances within it.

He answered many questions well. So I asked him about all of the Gods, and he used the mango tree we sat under as a metaphor - that each leaf is an aspect of God. It was a good answer, but I immediately asked why everyone was busy worshiping the leaves when the tree itself was the root of the leaves. He stared at me. Our conversation was over, he told me, but as I got up to leave he told me, "You asked the right question. But you have to find your own answer."

Now that, as obtuse as it seems on the surface, was a good answer.

The second thing which helped me with my foundation was a rather strange conversation I had with Brother Michael Samuel, who approached me, put his arm around my shoulder and said something strange to me considering I was almost always in trouble with the school's administration and teachers: "Taran, when rules don't make sense sometimes you have to break them." Whether he intended it or not, those words confused the hell out of me - because I had already come to that conclusion and also because I was wondering why he said that to me. To this day I don't know why he said it. Maybe I'll ask him sometime. He likely won't remember. But I remember after that I got into less trouble with the staff. Maybe he had focused my rebellion with those words.

At about this time, circumstances shifted and I was left alone to focus on studying which, at first, I found to be loathsome but once a lot of conflicts around me resolved themselves I focused on that.

Everyone left me alone. And when everyone left me alone, I was able to get myself to the next level of my life beyond secondary school. But at this point, I had decided that I would call myself agnostic when I was really an atheist who simply saw religion as a mockery of rules that were supposed to keep people living together peacefully.

(to be continued)