Am I a Hindu?

Are you a Hindu? I'm often asked that question. And I say, We-ll, I was raised a Hindu at home and a Christian at school and I have been curious and excited about all other religions on the bus ride home. My mother was all accepting and my father was all denying, and for a child you can imagine how bewildering it must have all been. It was up to me to be whatever I wanted to be.

Words my mother said kept coming back to me over the years. Hinduism, my mother said, was structured on tat tvam asi and she would translate the Sanskrit words to English, Thou Art That.

My mother said that as thattu. Whereas, when my father said, that, there was not even a hiss of breath after the letter t. Since he was the one who had studied in Cambridge, I naturally admired his that and not my mother's thattu. I found my mother's thattu very funny and every time she said, thou art thattu, all I could do was burst into laughter. It would take many years for me to fully understand what she was saying.

To even say, I am a Hindu, would be to separate oneself from another and therefore that person would no longer be a Hindu. Such was the great wisdom behind those words, tat tvam asi, my mother would say. It was like the way Krishna disappears from a gopi the moment she believes that he is hers. I never understood anything she said back then.

But I would later understand.

So when someone asks me if I am a Hindu, I say, We-ll, I was raised a Hindu at home and a Christian at school and I have been curious and excited about all other religions on the bus ride home.