Why I Don’t Pray Anymore (Or Sometimes Do)

I grew up in a house where there is a diya lit in the morning as well as at dusk without fail. My mother would recite in soft murmurs to a line of idols in the puja room. A tulsi plant in the courtyard.

Like in majority of households, manifestations of faith woven into the scaffolding of ordinary life.

My father played along. He wasn’t explicitly religious. He did what was expected of a man in a house where god was a woman’s responsibility: to ensure peace, prosperity, and the appearance of virtue.

I watched both with a mixture of curiosity and indifference.

As a child, I tried to believe. I folded my hands when I was told to. I stood in long temple queues in Banaras heat, watching stone faces adorned with marigolds and vermillion. But inside me, a quiet rebellion bloomed.

I couldn’t make myself believe that an idol held anything for me. That rituals performed out of habit or inherited fear meant anything more than performance.

I don’t pray anymore. Or sometimes I do.

But my prayers don’t have names. Or faces. Or rules.

I can’t ask. I don’t know how to beg the sky for outcomes, for mercy, for things to turn out okay.

What I can do is extend gratitude. Not to a god, but to a morning that didn’t crush me. To a sentence that arrived just in time. To my mother’s resilience. To my own stubborn pulse.

I envy people who find certainty in belief. Who can lean into ritual without interrogation. My rebellion was never loud, but it was consistent.

Now, I find divinity in accidents of kindness, in the generosity of strangers, in the way language survives us.

And when I do light a diya on Diwali, it’s not for Lakshmi, it’s for memory. For the women before me who needed something to kneel to in order to keep going.

I won’t pretend faith is absent. It is not.

It’s just no longer housed in places of worship for me.

It’s in poems. In grief. In resilience. In whatever unnamable thing keeps me here, again and again, learning to survive without needing to be saved.