The God that did not exist

Fiction. Written in haste at 2 am. May contain grammatical errors, spelling errors. Kindly point out if you find one.

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I was blinded for a second. I had used every ounce of my energy on pressing the brake. And now it was as if I was dead from the exhaustion. A little ahead, a crumpled body of a small girl lied in a pool of blood. People were gathering around her. I realised that my car had hit her but then I was too numb to realise anything else. Some young men came to me and spoke something but I could not hear them. The noise in my head was too loud. They nodded their heads, put me in the back seat, picked up the girl and put her head on my lap, and one of them started driving.

It all seemed a nightmare to me that I could not wake myself up from. As I sat there with the girl’s blood soaked head in my lap, I looked at her face. She was beautiful, looking at me as if smiling. Her eyes were closed, as if she was in a deep sleep unknown to everything that was happening around. I had lost my parents in a car accident when I was a kid and a part of me had died after that. A part of me that had so much belief in God. A part of me that had known that God could not be so unkind as to take away the ones I love the most. And it was an irony that now I was involved in the life and death of this small girl whom I didn’t even know, through a car accident. As much as I wanted to look away, that tiny locket on her neck, carrying the image of Krishna, the Hindu God , was attracting me. Swinging like a pendulum, as if to delineate the time left in the little girl’s life, it was like a dagger going into and out of my heart.

At the hospital, the doctor gave me a medicine and I slowly returned back to normal. I thanked the men who had brought us here. They told me that they had informed the police and it would come here any time. I was taken to the police station and questioned. The girl was some orphan, I was rich, I was not drunk and the men had testified that it was the girl’s fault. So, the police said that it would not be a big trouble for me. But somehow, it didn’t make me feel comfortable. As I went back to the hospital, I found the doctor and asked him how was the little girl. He said there was not much he could do and asked me to pray.

Pray! If it had been any other circumstance, I would have laughed. I had stopped praying since so many years that I had forgotten how you did that. It was not easy at first to be a non-believer in this society. People always ask you why don’t you believe in God? I have always avoided this question saying i am a rationalist and not an atheist. Basically, an atheist is a believer too. A muslim does not believe in any other God but his own, his Allah. An atheist does not believe in any other God, including Allah. So, a muslim is an atheist too and atheist is a believer too. Tell an atheist there is God and he will defend his stance with great ferocity. But as a rationalist, there is no question of presence or absence of God as everything is based on reason and science.

I had been to the church many times with my father, as a kid. The one thing that struck me most about the church was its silence. Like a lonely tree, it often stood out with its high ceilings and painted glass windows. Entering the church was like entering into another world, a world of serenity, a world of grandeur, a world that instilled fear nad respect at the same time. Whenever I heard the toll of the large bell at the church, a shiver ran down my spine. My father, a devout Christian himself, would always take me to the masses. When he met with the accident, I prayed for him day and night. I prayed with all my heart but when he died, i realised a simple truth about the world. And I have lived with that truth till now.

A child is always a non believer. He never understands hate, jealousy, danger and evil. He just understands one language- Love. Nature, even animals, understand this language. Strangely, we don’t. But then he grows up and when he keeps his tooth under his pillow for what seems like forever and does not get the moon he had always wanted, he realises life is not fair. He realises the fat man he had always believed in is just a fictional character. Then, he is told by his parents about God. And about the greatest excuse mankind ever intended- Fate. That day, he loses himself. He starts to realise he is just a mere puppet, he belives in his destiny and blames it if he goes wrong. Its strange that whatever he wants to do coincides with what God wanted him to do and whatever he could not do was not written for him by God. Man, who is so intelligent is not able to recognise that if there had been a God, he would have never the world bear so many misfortunes. He would have never let anyone to be born crippled, He would have never let so many innocents die in the name of terrorism. Man actually understands that but still clings to the belief because believing in yourself is very difficult. And that innocent child is somewhere lost in this belief in God.

But today was different. I had to pray. That image of Krishna on the swinging locket kept haunting me. I decided to pray for the little girl, as I had done for my father.

In contrast with a church, a Hindu temple is a dark and dingy place, most of them in caves. Beggars line the entrance of the temple, with outstretched hands asking for alms. On the inside, you see a fanatical celebration of God, people singing praises of the Lord called bhajans, people, with vermillion smeared on their face, wearing holy robes dancing to the cries of Hare Rama Hare Krishna. As I went inside the sanctum, the air was suffused with the smell of burnt oil, garlands of flower lay on the statue of Krishna as people came and knelt on the ground and prayed. I stood there, my eyes closed, my palms joined on their own, as I heard the continuous toll of the bell. It made me uneasy as the church bell always used to do. Still, i stood there. Images of the girl’s face, the swinging locket and the stone statue of Krishna raced through my mind. And it was then that I knew the girl would be alive. I was alive with a new hope I had never experienced all these years. I realised hope was not a string of dew drops which faintly clung to reality as I had known, but that hope was a force. It was a force strong enough to move mountains. If there had been no hope, there would have been no world. Its only the hope of a better world that keeps us living and working in the first place. I realised what my father meant when he said during prayers, he was closer to God. I felt God coming down and saying to me that the girl would be all right. I felt relieved. I spent the entire night at the temple.

The next morning, when I went to the hospital, I was feeling good because I knew the girl would be all right as God had said me that. I searched for the doctor. When I found him and asked him about the little girl, he hung his head low. I did not hear what he had to say because I knew that the girl was all right.


Epilogue

I cremated the girl at Haridwar, a shrine for Hindus. That locket with the image of Krishna is placed alongside a small Jesus in my room. I always take my children to the church and to that Krishna temple. And I often tell them this story about a small orphan girl who made me see God again.