My First Visit to the Sri Venkateswara Hindu Temple

The following is an excerpt from a short memoir I drafted about my early cross-cultural exchanges during college. Here I talk about my first visit to the Sri Venkateswara Temple in Pittsburgh.

My personal photo of the temple was accidentally erased, and it's quite a pilgrimmage to get there without a car (though I've done it once), so for now I am shamelessly borrowing this picture, and with a citation

"Bharath... first brought me to the Sri Venkateswara Hindu temple in Pittsburgh, and I followed him like a shadow through the rituals.

The entrance inside the temple. You're not allowed to take pictures beyond this hall.

We removed our shoes at the entrance, we bowed first to a murti statue of Ganesh, the elephant-headed god for overcoming obstacles, whose invocation precedes all other worship. Then we thrice circumnavigated the heart of the temple before we joined the lines of worshippers and approached the shrines of Sri Venkateswara, Lord Balaji, and shrines of two others, one at each side, each of them surrounded by wreaths of flowers, gold-colored bowls, and food offerings of fruit. Bharath bowed with his hands and knees on the ground. He took the red powder from the dish and dabbed it on his forehead. After a moment’s hesitation I did the same. We sat before the main shrine. Sri Venkateswara is embodied in an ebony black statue whose eyes were covered with paper, metaphorically sparing us the intensity of his gaze. We sat as yellow-robed priests chanted long verses in Sanskrit. I could only discern a recitation of his incarnations. The priests blessed the people, even me, asking each of us for names of family members, and then placing a bowl over our heads. I left pondering what I had seen, a red bindi on my own brow.

This was the painting I saw in the entrance hall - Krishna and his mother, Yashoda. Here I realized how amazingly beautiful Hindu art is - the combination of realism, mysticism, and fantastic beauty astounds me.

 I was enamored of all the rituals, and I tried to compare them to what I knew of Christian Lutheran worship, my own religious foundation, close to Catholicism. Just inside the temple there was a painting on the wall of baby Krishna in the arms of his mother, both of them painted angelically like Madonna and the Christ child. The priests were robed too, but in yellow, and their Sanskrit chanting was like the Latin Kyrie. The priests gave blessings, the people gave offerings. Instead of God the Father, Son, and Spirit, the Trinity here is Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. And yet the infinity of differences between Hinduism and Christianity are more profound than I could have realized or understood. Although the stories of gods and rituals of worship are more complicated, I think Hinduism is arguably more free. One need not take the straight and narrow path that leads to Heaven as in Christianity, but any path toward enlightenment. Hinduism for Hindus is more literally understood as philosophical experience – darshana. Divinity also embraces a wider meaning - why, Advait challenged, should God have one specific, human form? A Hindu "idol" is not an idol in the biblical sense, but it is a representation made to form a connection between a deity and one’s self.  Later, further challenging ideas of divinity, eternity, and the self, Buddhism, literally and ostensibly, emerged as an "awakening", partly a reaction to Hinduism (also, as with the development of other religions, as a political challenge, taking a stance against things including the caste system). According to some forms of Buddhism, maybe there is no god, no eternity, and no self, and thus one finds enlightenment. Although I do not pray to Christ, Krishna, Buddha, or Allah, I hope someday to realize in myself a universal sense of spirituality that transcends the specifics of East and West. I want to understand how these different stories and values complement each faith and culture.

Religion, like language, is a vehicle for communication and understanding. I felt marked by the temple experience in a way that was much more permanent than the spot of powder. I entered the temple afraid of being out of place, but I have been brought there with enthusiasm, and the Indians there were so quietly welcoming. When I later brought an Indian friend to a church, he joked about being worried of catching fire. But in the Hindu temple, I was just welcome as anyone else. Bharath said I looked good with a bindi. 

 I knew that even besides the temple visit, I would always be in debt to him. He introduced me to India, by sharing his food, his music, and some of his stories. I used to sit with him in the restaurant while he talked about his family, his life, and the lives of other Indians like himself. Like Bharath, many Indians were raised to be engineers or doctors, and then many come to the United States for graduate school, and then to find a job for supporting their families back in India. Coincidentally somewhat near to New York’s Chinatown, the highest concentration of an Indian population is in Edison, New Jersey, through which most of Bharath’s own friends passed through at some point. Bharath introduced me to Kiran, Raghu, Kiran P., and Nikhil, who all became my friends. I broke bread with Kiran (literally, Subway bread) and we talked about each other’s families as we worked the quiet summer night shifts. He was nicer than anyone I'd ever met. Nikhil showed me his silver Sikh bracelet that a North Indian friend had given him, and I noticed, on the other wrist, a scar. He explained with a sad smile that it was from an attempted suicide, after his girlfriend of six years was forced into an arranged marriage. I was speechless. And yet such tragedy blurs when I remember watching him sing and dance to songs in Telugu and American hip hop, and how he yelled at me playfully in his fast-talking South Indian accent, and then taught me to counter with “Angle chupistunnavu kaddha!?” – “Are you showing me an angle (literally: Are you making fun of me)!? 
And one by one they moved on with their lives. Bharath moved to New Jersey, and then left his search on the job market to go back to Hyderabad, India. Kiran found a job in New York City shortly after his graduation, which Maria and I attended wearing his gifts of colorful, Punjabi Indian dresses. Raghu is in Florida. Nikhil and Kiran P. are in Michigan. And I've been such a poor friend at keeping in touch..    

And though my Indian friends from Subway had moved away by the time of the crisis of failing the Japanese program, I was still given by hope by my new Indian friend Advait, the only one who could tell me that I wasn’t a failure. Advait came to the United States as an engineer who decided instead to study Physics. It might seem like the quintessential American sense of independence, and yet his own philosophy is quintessentially Hindu. His name A-dvait means “non-dual” representing a school of thought that divinity of deity and self are manifestations of one entity. Such a manifestation, he realized, is similar to that of mass and energy. When I first asked him what his name meant, he wrote E=mc². Once while he was studying the laws of the universe, I had approached him admitting I couldn’t grasp a second language. Advait, who speaks Hindi, English, Marathi, and some Telugu and Sanskrit, answered gently, “I know that pain.”

For these friendships and these experiences, I wanted to forever honor my Indian friends. I owe them so much, and I wanted to speak their language, write with their letters, and appreciate their sense of aesthetic. I first wanted revenge, and now I wanted my own redemption. My college didn’t have a class teaching their language of Telugu, but there was a class for Hindi, India’s national language. And so I had changed sides again. To switch from Japanese to Hindi was to switch from short grain rice to long grain rice, and from anime to Bollywood. Even my ideal of feminine beauty and mystique portrayed by traditional courtesans flowed from the kimono-robed and white-faced geisha to the bejeweled and sari-swathed tawaif. I went from austere Shinto shrines to decorous Hindu temples – and to the source of Buddhism."

\Since this draft of writing, I have become further indebted to and inspired by Indian friends and Indian culture. The relationships and experiences have been invaluable. Throughout college, a small group of Indians have been my close friends when I otherwise have had very few, and they gave so much. My Hindi professor and my former partner are among the most personally inspiring people in my life, and I will never forget my other friends, nor the others I have looked up to more distantly, such as Harish Saluja and Azam Ali (Ok, she's Iranian, but she introduced me to Urdu poetry). 

Lately, I have been watching more Indian movies, reading more Indian-based novels, and studying more of the language - as if I am afraid of losing that small part of India in my heart. I really hope to make it there someday, somehow.