Nair.
In the beginning was disbelief. An arms folded belligerent stance of god is an abstract I wanted to have nothing to do with. And rightly so. For faith has to be acquired. Otherwise we are confusing faith with merely habit. A Pavlovian response to places, priests and aspects of worship.
So how then did that first stirring of faith happen? Was it perhaps when I was pregnant and was beset by unknown fears for that life burgeoning within me? Perhaps it was then the abstract began to acquire a shape. That there is someone to watch over me. God. Whom I see in the iridescent black of the crow's wing, in the whorl of a pattern on a piece of marble, in the strength of a sapling trying to put down roots in the middle of a busy highway. The will to live and be became god.
My god is a benign being without a face. My god has neither religion nor home. Instead, my god rides on my shoulder, showing me that pebble with the imprint of a flower in a garden of sand. Leading me towards what I may have dismissed as inconsequential. My god helps me distinguish between spirituality and my own religious conditioning. Between an act of faith and deacons of a religion safeguarding their territory.
My god isn't the kind who sulks and throws a tantrum if I don't make ritual appeasement. My god doesn't frown at pictures of icons on bikinis. In fact, my god doesn't condemn designer clothes or a good home. For god is as much a sybarite as I am who appreciates all things beautiful just as I do. A splendid bottle of Barrolo as much as a perfect fluffy idli. And god doesn't rule that material pleasure cannot co-exist with spiritual content. Leave that to us humans. But there comes a moment in a day when I tell my god: "The mind is restless, god, my mind is restless."
And then my god asks of me that I make the effort to commune with that presence. So when I sit down to write and stare at the blank page, my god speaks to me from deep within and from a point far beyond all human reach.
I am often asked how can I, an intelligent rational woman, accept the childish theory of god? That what we see is what there is.
Now I came up that path once. But I have sensed as the mind fed the hand and words emerged the undertow of a greater power. I call it my hand of god. Page after page, book after book, it is only that presence that prompts the inner voice and helps me delve deep into the human condition.
It is easy to dismiss god especially as writers of fiction play god again and again in the stories they write. But it is a writer too who understands how the dynamics of plot and characters can carry forth story development in a manner which stays resolutely out of authorship or writer control.
I knew it first in my novel The Better Man ; man cannot change the movement of the planets with a sweep of his hand. Every man is guided by a force that is individual and unfathomable. For man is not god. And fireflies are not stars.
Every night as I lie in bed, I pause to think of the day. Of time spent. But there is time waiting ahead too. Time that I seek to fill with magical moments and the best of what I can do. And I take comfort in the thought that my god goes with me.
(Anita Nair is the author of the novels The Better Man , Ladies Coupe and Mistress .)
