Faith is an inexplicable thing. I believe it is the last resort of a person who is utterly devastated by the blows that life has dealt him -- arbitrarily, unilaterally, cruelly. It is the hope that there is something beyond the human race, situated somewhere among the stars, that can take a stand where man cannot. Something that can fights when one's own will and ability stand shattered. Something that cares.

What a joke. There is nothing out there. No one who cares. No one who can intervene. The stars they shine, and the moon stands alone, and there is no reason whatever for the things that happen to men. They just happen. One day you're playing with your child, happy with your job, your husband, your work; the next, you're decapitated in an automobile accident.

There was a boy I knew called Ashok, who lived in our neighbourhood in Bangalore. When he finished school, he asked me for advice on what to do next. He was a gregarious type with a lot of friends, and although there was a gap of 10 years between us, we got along very well. He knew he could tell me things that he could tell no one else, and that I would laugh and not go all gooey and say, "How could you?"

So I told him to go to Bombay and have a ball. I even said that you only live once, so do what you want, and the hell with your father's plans for an engineering career in the deep South. So he did. He wrote me six months later, saying that he had never had so much fun, that he would owe me one all his life.

The thing was, he didn't have one. A life, that is. One day his uncle, who was a doctor, noticed a lump on his neck. For months after that he went through the earthly equivalent of having faith in God chemotherapy and radiation. He told people that his bald head was a fashion statement and he kept to himself the fact that he spent the nights vomiting. He told me the worst thing was having people know; their pity and awkwardness was unbearable. He died the same year, suddenly. Today, almost 13 years later, his family still carries his death in their faces. You look at them and you know that they know. And they know what I know.

And people say: "There was a reason for that. God works in mysterious ways." It must take enormous courage to make such statements; to be brave in the face of horror without meaning. I am not brave. I have chosen the Dostoevskian path, where you undergo a daily torture because you know you are completely alone; where you wish with all your heart that you could pray and lessen the burden that you carry but there is no one to pray to; where you take your own decisions without guidance, or signs, or knowledge that you are right.

I have a daughter who already walks alone. In school, she will sit in a corner and watch the others, and interact only if someone cries. then she will go to the child and repeat what I always tell her: "Little babies should never cry. They should be happy." She will always listen to the teacher; she doesn't like making waves. She thinks our home is the best place. She thinks I'm wonderful; the anchor in her life. She thinks too much. After a death in the family she said to me: "Mama, if you die, I'll be all alone. I'll miss you," and she wept. She's five years old. If I cannot take care of her until she is grown up, if I could not protect Ashok, what does faith matter? What does God matter?

I do not follow the Dostoevskian path in one respect: I do not believe in arguing about faith (I refer, of course, to The Brothers Karamazov). I think if you are waiting to get into a heated dialogue over whether God exists, you are vulnerable to faith. In an argument over God's existence, you may be waiting to be convinced by the other guy, after which you can throw in the towel in relief. What luxury! i wish I could afford it.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.