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AI: I also wanted to ask about how your parents discussed religion, or, and the part, you wrote about that in your book. And if you could say a little bit about from that time, that you were becoming aware of things, and here you were, again, not in India, but being raised in some traditions, some religious traditions. If you can talk about that...

PJ: Yeah. I always felt that we didn't get enough of an explanation. I would always ask why. You know, "Why is it that way?" And they'd say, "Just, that's just the way it is." Or I'd say, well, what does this -- this prayer that I started reciting: "Namah Shivaya, Narayanaya namah, Achuthaya namah, Anandaya namah." And I'd say, "What does that mean?" And my mother would say, "Well, it's names of gods." And I'd say, "Well, why am I saying all these names of gods?" And I never felt like I really was able to get -- and I don't know if it's because I didn't ask the right questions, or because it was, they had never asked those questions. You know, I really think that, sometimes I think that they didn't know the answers to those things, either. So we were always raised, you know, I was taught that we were Hindu, but it was a very open-ended concept. I mean, we had the puja room at home, just like my grandmother did, except we had a whole room, and we would have to go and do puja in the morning, and in the evening we had these prayers that we chanted. We would go to a temple when my, when we would go home to India, we would always go visit the temple. My grandmother would write, and she would always write, "I pray that Devi holds you," or, there was a lot of language, in her, in her language there was a lot of Devi, kind of god, religious language woven through. But, and my father -- and so I, that was just sort of a persistent, it was just always there. And I think I didn't necessarily think about it as religion, I'm not sure that I thought about it as religion, it was just sort of the way that we were. And it wasn't until people would say, "Well, how come you believe in a lot of gods?" And I'd say, "Well, because there are a lot of gods." And there's, there's all these different facets. And, but it was, that's when I would come then and started asking questions.

And I went through this period where I wanted to convert to Christianity, and I was Jesus in this play. [Laughs] And I came home and told my mother that I was Jesus in this play and she just had a fit. She said, "You can't play Jesus. You're not Christian." And I said, "Well, why can't I play Jesus? He's got a really great song." It was a musical. I said, "There's a really great song and there's a solo I get to sing, and I want to play Jesus." And I just remember having a long conversation about that, and about how, "Well, we're Hindu, and you can't say you believe in Jesus Christ, 'cause you don't." And I said, "Well, what if I do? What if I want to?" And so it ended up being this -- but it was more from an, I mean, it was, I think she was really threatened by the idea that I might actually convert to Christianity. And so we talked about it some then, but there was never really an explanation of Hinduism, and as I've gotten older, I've realized why. Because it isn't, there is no explanation, really. [Laughs] I mean, there are no books, there's the Bhagavad Gita, and there's the Upanishads, and I've read all of those texts now, the religious texts. But Hinduism is a way of life. It really is. And there, there are now kind of the fundamentalists who are making religion into a religion versus a way of life, in an exclusive way in India. But that's not how it was intended.

But we talked a lot about Devi, I mean, I remember having this conception of our goddess and how my, how she became our goddess. My great-grandfather had struck an axe and found a statue that was the, was the manifestation of Devi, and that's how he -- and he build a temple there to her name, and that's how she became our family goddess. Great-great-grandfather. And so some of those things I remember hearing, but there wasn't a, "You cannot do this, you -- " and we ate, I mean, I remember eating beef, my family ate beef, so that wasn't, we didn't seem to stick to kind of the "traditional Hindu ideals," in whatever way you might define them. And then later I realized there just aren't that many of them.

AI: Well, I thought that was so interesting to, to read some of that in what you were writing and to hear about, hear you talk about it. It is very, it seems like a very open, well, more than a concept, but something that is, would be very difficult to explain to a child, certainly.

PJ: Yes, I think that's right. And I also think that a lot of the things that get associated with Hinduism now are not actually religious, they're cultural. Like the caste system, people say, "Well, Hindus believe in the caste system." But, you know, Hindus are people from the land of Hind, people from the land of India, and the Indus Valley, and so the caste system was introduced as part of the culture in the Indus Valley, but it wasn't, nowhere in the, any of the holy books -- not that we really have, you know, we don't have a definitive one -- but there isn't a caste system outlined in the holy books. So that was a cultural concept or construct that was introduced that's been combined with Hinduism now. And there certainly was -- as everywhere, the priestly class was higher, and so maybe that's part of the way it gets incorporated into religion.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.