The Faith Paradox

The year is 2027 and Maureen finds herself back in Rishikesh, back on the shore by the Ganges, with yet another pouch of rice. A cow sleeps on the sand a few metres away and a scruffy, white dog—that’s been following her since she left the astrologist’s—sits beside her. She’s quite sure it’s a stray and yet it has no fleas or injuries and is smiling up at her with an endearing silliness, its tongue dangling from the side of its mouth as it smile-pants. There’s a smudge of orange dust on its forehead, the orange glow of the sunset in its sparkling eyes, and too much promise in its presence, for today everything feels like a sign. Masala, she’ll call him Masala as in chai.

Maureen sits on the moist, grey sand, and stares into the orange sky, fiddling with the drawstrings on the pouch. It won’t work unless she believes, said Prateek, clicking his Faber Castell pen; it was a granite silver, and needle thin between his stubby and calloused fingers.

“I won’t believe unless it works,” said Maureen.

“It works if you let go, and only you can do so.”

“Then why must I throw rice in the river?”

They looked at one another and shook their heads, amused by their mutual disbelief. They might have sighed had they not seen the humour, might have snorted had they not felt the resonance; they were experiencing the very same frustration.

And perhaps that’s why Maureen finds herself here by that very river with that very rice. Intolerance, she finds, is often eclipsed by resonance; and it is this latter which she clings to, this latter which she holds close to her heart.

She lifts the pouch before her eyes as though inspecting it. The sheer orange fabric catches the sunset, and the brown rice glows with the promise of magic beans. She doesn’t believe; she doesn’t believe in magic beanstalks and giants and golden eggs. She doesn’t believe in fairytales. She believes in sunsets and light scattering and everything else Andy told her. Now she associates every sunset with him, which makes this letting go business all the more difficult; she can’t help but assign this sunset poignance, to romanticise it, to interpret it as an ending. Already she’s internally writing a poem, albeit not a very good one: and the sun finally sets on you and me. Often, she ruins the moment by envisioning it on a page and reducing what is to what it could be.

A wet nose brushes her knee, her arm, and an audible sniffing finds her ear. Maureen’s face scrunches up with delight as Masala licks her cheek, smile-panting with cross-eyed joy. He sits back on his hindlegs, observing her.

Science will eventually demystify superstition, her friend Nora had said. Now we need only pick and choose what to have faith in.

Maureen twiddles a grain of rice between her fingers, and the scratch of fabric causes Masala’s ears to prick up.

Faith guides science. We intuit something, we believe in something, and we form a hypothesis.

Maureen sighs. She rises to her feet—the back of her skirt dampened and sullied with sand—and, to her delight, Masala follows. She hears a voice within debase her joy; how dare she relish in something so trivial? She hikes up her skirt, the jangle of her anklets echoing across the empty space as she walks towards the clear water. It glows pink, reflecting the rosy sky and the fading streaks of orange, but beneath the light she can see the sandy riverbed freckled with stones, a sparkling school of silver fish, an inspiring transparency and composure.

She dips a toe in,

a foot,

feet.

She is ankle deep in this cool tranquillity where she collects herself and empties the rice into her palm. It’s plain and ugly without the deceiving glimmer of the pouch, without the orange warmth of the sunset; it’s shy and ordinary and underwhelming, blushing beneath the pink glow.

“I am freeing myself from the past,” she murmurs, not that anyone but the cow and Masala can hear her. So why does she feel self-conscious?

Andy would find her ridiculous, would shake his head, would snort with derision. But there’s more to it than Andy. On a subconscious level, Maureen suspects the universe or whomever is watching her; it’s the same paranoia that kept her from masturbating when she was ten. Was her duvet thick enough to conceal her from her ancestors’ eyes? from the eyes of God?

She represses the sensation; it’s interfering with the process.

“I am freeing myself from the past,” she repeats, louder.

Now,

now,

now.

She swiftly chucks the rice into the river and retreats, hurrying back to the imprint of her backside; she resumes her former posture, cross-legged on the sand, and Masala sits beside her with a curious tilt of the head. Maureen hesitates before patting him, and then his smile returns. Lilac clouds his wide eyes, and there’s a serenity there, a serenity there in his simplicity.

Maureen sighs—she didn’t do it right—and stares into the violet glow of the river, the fading traces of pink. A full moon has already formed and glitches on the water’s flowing surface. It won’t work unless you believe. She didn’t do it right, she didn’t do it right, she didn’t do it right. It all felt anti-climactic, as though she’d reduced her grief to an instant, but she had, in fact, spent years in its crowded company; what was reduced to an instant, then, was not grief but liberation.

There is now room to stretch her legs and outreach her arms, room to breathe, room to live again.

If she so chooses.

A man squats by the plum river flecked with stars, and scoops water into his mouth.

“Namaste ji,” he says, smiling and wiping his chin with the back of his hand.

“Namaste.”

“Are you doing puja?” he says, gesturing towards the river.

“I think so.”

He chuckles. “You must believe.”

He continues along the shore and Masala dashes after him into the moonlit darkness. Maureen is surprised by the slight pang of sadness it evokes in her. She observes her feelings and smiles, for it is unusually beautiful to feel something and then simply let it go. It’s a beauty with which she’s unfamiliar; there’s nothing in a promise, and that’s OK.

Something stirs in the darkness and startles Maureen; she’d forgotten it was there. The cow kicks its front legs out from beneath it, rising clumsily from the sand. It wanders through the dark towards Maureen who quickly rises to her feet, brushing the sand from her skirt. The cow pauses before her, and its long, shadowy tongue emerges and finds its nostril. Is this too a sign? If so, it isn’t a very good one.

The cow’s starry eyes stare up at her for an instant,

blink,

blink,

blink,

and it flutters its long lashes before hobbling away into the moonlight.

Maureen smiles at its swaying backside superimposed on the wall of stars, and the evening breeze tickles the hem of her skirt. It’s quiet here. She feels suspended in an elsewhere distant from reality, likely owing to the novelty of this place and its culture, but to hear the wind is magic, and the faint brush of leaves, and a cicada’s song. It’s almost unfathomable that her brain not only receives but also interprets these waves into familiar sounds she can identify.

She removes the empty pouch from her pocket, listens to the scratch of fabric between her fingers. She doesn’t believe in magic beanstalks and giants and golden eggs. She doesn’t believe in fairytales. She believes in sunsets and light scattering and everything else Andy told her, but she might also believe in more, in what’s yet to be proven.

Quantum entanglement was first proven experimentally in 1972, said Nora. I mean, nature is magical, but it’s exactly that: nature, not magic.

Maureen trudges through the sand, away from the moonlit river, her anklets jangling in the vast silence. She is alive, here, now; she is alive here in the sunset’s starry aftermath. There’s nothing in a promise, and that’s OK.

We can now explain camouflage and bioluminescence, said Nora, but prior to that it was all a wonder.

Maureen rolled her eyes that night, just like Andy.

But Nora was right, life is a wonder, a concurrence of unlikely variables that created this perfect accident. It doesn’t seem like much of an accident at all, thinks Maureen. Either way, be it intended or unintended, life is impossibly miraculous; and it is simply this, here, now: the jangle of anklets, the breeze, a cicada’s song, rustling leaves.

The year is 2027 and Maureen is back in Rishikesh, leaving the Ganges with an empty pouch and an open mind.