After my first year of college, something rearranged.
I had spent a genuinely embarrassing amount of my adolescence wanting a girlfriend. Not a person — a girlfriend, the category, the proof. I would have told you it was about love. It was mostly about being chosen.
And then at some point it landed, not as a revelation, more like a slow leak:
Which was awkward, because I did not know Him.
the Indian kid at Mass
I grew up Hindu, in a Hindu house, with a Hindu grandmother who prayed in a way that was so ordinary and so daily that I did not recognise it as religion until much later. It was just what the morning was.
And I went to a Catholic school. Mass once a month. Everybody filing in. The same songs coming back around — the one about giving thanks with a grateful heart, which I could still hum before I could have told you a single thing about what it meant.
Here is the part that surprises people: I never once felt like an outsider there.
I don't say that to be sunny about it. I say it because it is evidence about children. Nobody had told me yet that these were teams. So I sang the song, because it was a song, and I liked it, and it was Tuesday morning.
Memory
Monthly Mass, twelve years old, Indian, Hindu, singing along. Nobody found this strange, including me.
What I learned later
Somewhere between then and being twenty I acquired a full vocabulary of divisions — denominations, sects, which things are heresy to which people, who is allowed to marry whom.
What I thought it meant
My own reading, and I hold it loosely: God did not hand me those divisions. People did. I am aware that a person from any of those traditions could tell me why I am wrong, and might be right.
looking, badly
So I started looking. Poorly, at first, the way you look for something when you don't know its shape.
I read. I asked people questions that were probably rude. I went to things. I sat in the back. I looked up words. I compared what I was reading to what I had grown up inside, and found that some of it rhymed and some of it did not, and that the rhyming parts unsettled me more than the differences did.
I want to say clearly that this was not a rejection of my family's faith. My grandmother's mornings are still, to me, one of the most credible religious things I have ever witnessed. I was not running from something. I was walking toward something I could not yet see.
two people, one verse
The thing that got its hooks into me early was this:
Two people can read the exact same sentence and come away with two different lives.
Not because one of them read it wrong. Because a sentence lands in whatever is already in the room. Your father, your losses, your language, what you were doing that week.
same words.
different lives.
different meaning.
That could have made me a cynic about the whole enterprise. Instead it did the opposite. It made the thing feel alive — like it was not a document to be decoded correctly but something that met you where you actually were.
I was, at this point, very deliberately not looking for a relationship. I had just worked out that a person was not the missing piece.
Which is, of course, exactly when someone showed up.
Everyone in this story except me is unnamed — her, a friend, my father, someone. It is my story to tell and theirs to keep. Names are not hidden in the page source either; they were never written down.