Design by Ingrid Frahm
The summer I turned 11, we moved from Wisconsin to Maryland and my father found religion.
Back in the Midwest, my father was a whiskey-drinking atheist and an unapologetic Anglophile. Our bookshelves burst with Wordsworth and Shakespeare; our CD player permanently rotated every album the Beatles ever made. If not for the framed kalamkari prints in our living room, a stranger alone in our house would never know we were Indian, let alone Hindu.
But on the East Coast, everything changed. My father reconnected with his friend from medical school, a fellow Tamil Brahmin who was religious so religious, in fact, that he was a founding funder of the Sri Siva Vishnu Temple, now one of the largest Hindu temples in the country. I don’t know if it was the joyful shock of finding an Indian community, or some other inciting incident, but after years of treating Hinduism with condescension, my father suddenly became deeply and profoundly interested in God. And if m
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