Religion HW

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Shilpa Toolsidas is a Hindu woman who has lived in three continents: Africa, Asia, and North America. As an adult, she has worked to bring her Hindu beliefs and traditions into her family and personal life in a meaningful way while forging an American identity.

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I am a Hindu, of Indian descent. But I was born in Africa. We—my grandparents, parents, four sisters and I—lived in Jinga, Uganda until I was five and a half years old. My sisters and I left two years before Idi Amin came into power, murdering hundreds of thousands and expelling all Indians from the country, but even before then the government had started to take over our businesses and property, which is why we left.

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I don’t remember too much about living there, just a few things. I went to a British school called the Victoria Nile School for first grade. I was in the first class where they took Asians. They were still not taking blacks. This was in 1968, and even though the Ugandans had gained independence a few years earlier, there were still white-only schools. They did not allow the locals to come in. I can see why the locals were resentful.

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My paternal grandfather immigrated to Uganda when he was fifteen years old to lay railroad tracks, because there were no jobs in India and the British needed cheap labor in Uganda, which was a British colony at the time. My grandfather went over in a sailboat with a whole bunch of Indians. They ate only rice and lentils boiled in salt water, and it took about a month to get to Africa because they depended on the wind. He and my grandmother, whom he married in India a few years later—she was a child bride, only 13 or 14 years old—had it very hard in the beginning. He began by making salt and then rented and operated a cotton gin.

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Imagine my grandmother, going at age 14 to live in the jungles, living with Indian women while the men went away for nine months at a time to work in the fields. My grandmother told me that they would put fire around their huts so the animals wouldn’t come for the babies. Of course, while they started out living in a hut, my grandfather eventually built two cotton ginneries and became a multi-millionaire. They gave a lot of money to help build the Hindu temple there. It was severely damaged during Idi Amin’s regime, but I’m told it is still standing.

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I was close with that grandmother because she was the one who took us children back to India a year before my parents were able to leave Uganda. She continued to live with us back in India. My mother was a little too ritualistic for my taste, and the five of us sisters rebelled. We would go to that grandmother—my father’s mother—and she would always take our side.

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While this grandmother was religious, she wasn’t as orthodox as my mother’s mother, who had always lived in India. It was crazy. Even though both of my grandmothers were Hindus, they were from slightly different branches of the religion. And my maternal grandmother wouldn’t even drink the water in our house because the grandmother who lived with us, my father’s mother, wasn’t as religious as she was.

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But while some people, like my mom’s mother, were extremely orthodox, overall, Hinduism is a very loose religion. It’s not strictly structured like Catholicism—and I know this, because I went to Catholic school in India for years. For most mainstream Hindus, anything goes. Like you can go into any temple, and you don’t have to belong to it. You can donate whatever you want to the temple or you don’t have to donate. You can cover your head, or you don’t have to cover your head. The only thing they do not like is you wearing shoes inside a temple, because they feel that it’s clean and you’re bringing in some impurity in. But every house is like that too, so maybe it’s a cultural thing.

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So where I come from they say, “You want to worship a stone? Go for it. You want to worship a tree? Go for it. Do whatever you have to do, but make sure that you meditate or pray or give your thanks to the Lord of the Universe.” Now, that’s pretty loose.

Also, many people don’t know that even though there are tons of different Hindu deities—just like there are many different saints in Catholicism—we are in fact monotheistic. Like the trilogy of Christianity, we have a trilogy too, which is all part of the same whole: Brahma is the creator, Vishnu is the preserver, and Shiva the destroyer.

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For boys there is a big production, like a wedding, when they come of age. Girls are like second class citizens in a way. You do the same thing, but it’s not celebrated like a wedding. It’s called kanthi, and it’s a little religious ceremony for girls when they are formally indoctrinated in the religion. You are given a necklace with a brown or tan beads that you’re supposed to wear every time you say your prayers. But we took it off the next day. Nobody wore it, and it was fine.

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But we participated in all of the holidays and festivals in Gujarat, the state in India where I grew up. They were timed with the cycle of the moon and often involved complicated rules about what you could eat. For example, one was for fertility and to marry well, and also for the harvest. There was a five day “fast,” where you would eat no salt; wheat only once a day—and only if you’re under 13; and then only fruits, nuts, and dairy.

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And during those five days, you worship, say thanks for the harvest, and light the lamps in your temple at home. And you grow wheat grass. You sow your wheat at the beginning and water it diligently. By the fifth day there’s a competition to see whose grass grows the tallest. By then everyone is starving for food but you can’t eat more until midnight. The movie theaters are open late, and the kids stay up and watch movies together. Finally you go to the temple, give the priest some money, and put your grass into a river or any flowing water. And feast.

That was actually kind of fun because my friends and I all did it together.

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Many of the other Hindu holidays are great fun too. There’s a kite-flying holiday, which celebrates the arrival of spring. It’s just like in that book The Kite Runner, where you make or buy kites, and then crush glass and glue it on the thread. You fly the kites and have this competition where you cut each other’s kite strings. Then at night, you put lanterns on the threads and the whole sky lights up. It’s gorgeous, but the lanterns also fall and start fires, so you have to be very careful where you’re walking.

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Then there’s a holiday called Holi where the whole town has a big bonfire and you go around the fire to do your prayers while tiny little cobs of corn are thrown in and start popping—which is fun for the kids and delicious. The day after, you throw tons of water balloons with colored water at everybody. Then you go to the temple and give thanks. Usually all my friends would come over to my house after. We would wash ourselves out in the yards and eat together. My mother would prepare the food. It was a great day to hang out.

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And also there’s Diwali, which is such a big holiday that it’s like Christmas. You have a month off. There are fireworks and all the trees are lit. The villages whitewash all the houses in town and then make murals on them with sand or flowers. There would be a competition of whose mural is greatest. The murals are called rangoli, and every house entrance would have a rangoli. All the kids do it, and it’s gorgeous. Then you gave to go to temple.

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Today I live in America. But we do a lot of the same holidays at home with our kids. It brings back good memories! My mother used to make me light a fire every morning, a form of worship, and I rebelled for a long time and didn’t do it. But I do it now. My mother said to me, “Shilpa, it’s the most beautiful ceremony. You do it every morning and you have a sense of your inner self. And you’re with G-d. You get a fine sense of connection with the flowers and the bell and the light and the incense. What is bad about that?” And she said, “There’s a reason why this has lasted 5,000 years. Don’t do it if you don’t want to. But put yourself in there and see how you feel.” And now I love it. And my kids love it.