Keeping Faith

Rashida Murphy

My adolescence was marked by itinerant friendships, in a town by the banks of the mighty Narmada. It was an army town, with new girls at school every year, girls I knew I mustn’t anoint ‘best friends forever’, because they would be gone before I could claim heartbreak. Which is why long-term residents acquired a special poignancy, especially if they were also like-minded souls.  

I think about the friendships that lasted beyond the restrictions of army life. One such was at the home of one of my father’s legal colleagues. When I was growing up, families were as important as individuals in the way we interacted with each other as kids. A long and complex system of class, religion, caste, education, and social standing was a measure of which friendships were encouraged and which ones dismissed. Families needed to be vetted before children were allowed inside homes. You didn’t just bring home a friend; you needed to explain whose daughter or granddaughter she was and which area the family lived in. If they were recent arrivals, who else knew about them and who would vouch for their honour? And this was before our brothers and male cousins were told to keep an eye on the ‘new kid’ to make sure she passed the inexplicably intricate tests of family values. It worked both ways, of course. We were subjected to the same scrutiny at the homes of our friends, the same narrow-eyed appraisals, the whispered judgements. 

As India currently battles a deadly outbreak of the plague that has already claimed too many lives, my attention turns inwards in an attempt to contain my horror. My sister informs me of the death of someone else we knew very well, someone who was a big part of my life, in whose home I spent several happy years. He was my father’s friend, a fellow lawyer, and his daughter was, for a time, my ‘best’ friend. A smart, irascible man, somewhat unusual in that he was actually interested in the inner workings of the adolescent female mind. We were, as girls, used to being ignored in favour of our brothers, but this clever, funny, compassionate uncle wasn’t just happy to talk to us; he also challenged our perceptions of self and pointed towards a future we couldn’t see for ourselves in small-town, mid-70s India. 

He called my father ’Mullaji’ with that mixture of derision and affection only allowed to a select few. The tag was a reference to my father’s Muslim faith, and it was a term he disliked intensely, but tolerated from his friend, an observant Hindu. My father’s home was a meeting place for several smart men from competing religious ideologies. Lofty ideas and words were vigorously contested, loudly proclaimed and contemptuously dismissed.  

Once, I was invited to accompany my friend and her family on a pilgrimage to a nearby Hindu temple, reputed to have 500 steps that only the pure of heart could ascend. My father struggled with the concept of allowing his non-Hindu daughter to undertake such a mission, but I suspect he couldn’t find the words to dissent either. At the famous temple, my friend and I easily scaled the stone steps to the top and laughed while Uncle and Aunty wheezed and struggled behind us, eventually abandoning any attempt to keep up with us. We declared they weren’t ‘pure’ when we met them on the way down. Later, back in my own home, I heard Uncle tell Dad that I was now ‘as good as a Hindu’ and that ‘Mullaji’ had lost his daughter to the true faith. He also said he may as well adopt me, a thought I found irresistible in the manner of recalcitrant daughters everywhere. 

Now this man is dead, as is my father, his senior by almost 20 years. Both men remained ideological opposites to the end, each claiming their faith to be true, each unable to convince the other of his truth. 

I had not spoken to Uncle for many years, relying instead on occasional stories passed on by family and friends still in touch with him. When my friend, his daughter, married at eighteen, I remembered the shock of knowing our adolescence was finally over. We cried then, because she was leaving for a new life in America with a stranger. We cried because the stranger was chosen by that progressive man we’d learned to love and trust in a way we knew most adults couldn’t be. She never forgave him the betrayal and as far as I know, she never spoke to him again. 

The complex and complicated issues around faith and family still fester in modern India, more than forty years after I was part of such things. Narendra Modi has made a career out of division, dissension and fear. As my ‘other home’ descends into Covid-hell, the devil who is taking her there is unconcerned with the cost, the toll, the horror. His rallies continue to attract large crowds and his Hindutva rage continues to punch a hole in the fabric of a once secular nation.