Graphic by Asyrique Thevendran/The Gazelle

“Om mane padme hun,” chanted my Grandmother as she kissed me for the last time that year.

It was the spring of 2004 and I was seven years old. Because of the havoc of Nepal’s civil war at the time, my parents had decided to send me to a boarding school in the hills of Darjeeling, India. As a child traveling outside the country, I was excited to go on a new vacation. Little did I know that a hotel was going to be my new home for the next ten years.

The morning I woke up and realized my parents had left me forever was the same one in which the school’s matron woke me at 5 a.m., told me to kneel down and recite Psalm 21 of The Bible. It all happened so quickly — morning prayers, a quick bath with all of the girls, prayer before breakfast, breakfast, prayer after breakfast, church, school and choral practice. The cycle repeated itself every day.

My first visit to church introduced me to the world of Christianity: a new religion. As a child, I grew up with my grandmother, a devout Buddhist, who took me to visit many monasteries, taught me chants in unknown languages and, most importantly, taught me how to use prayer beads to calm myself. To me religion was Buddhism, but now, religion was also Christianity. There were new props — a Bible and a rosary. Among 40 girls reciting prayers loudly three times a day and attending Sunday school every week, I absorbed all of it like a sponge, from the stories of Noah’s ark to those of the twelve disciples, always absorbing more and more. To a young mind, the only difference between the two was that Lord Buddha was the hero in Buddhism and in Christianity, it was Jesus Christ.

As the days went by, the memory of my home in Nepal and its nighttime prayers felt so distant, as if I’d left that part of me a long time ago.

Returning to Nepal felt like déjà vu — I knew I’d been there before but it seemed unreal. Something had happened. I now recited the Our Father prayer in the monastery in front of my grandmother. She did not understand English, so she applauded my efforts at translating her prayers into a different language. How could I tell her that they were preaching a different religion in school? How could I explain to her that there are different methods of attaining peace, and I was practicing the one she wasn’t? I felt guilty. Had I betrayed her? Or was this natural?

My religious experience, which had initially been guided by emotion, soon took a more philosophical turn when I began to ask questions about religions and their similarities. By engrossing myself in academics, I soon started to wonder if science itself was a religion. I never had definite answers for any of these questions, and neither do I have them now, though the questions continue piling up.

In my life, I’ve encountered two religions, and although my ways of acquiring them were drastically different, each one has taught me the same values.

However, I do not identify myself with any religion and neither do I call myself an atheist. My reasons for this go back ten years, to when I first encountered Christianity — the moment that sparked all of my questions. At that time I opened myself to everything that came my way, absorbing, questioning and reflecting, but never finding answers. Until I find answers, my questions will be the mini-missions of my life.

Sometimes I wonder: if a supreme god does exist somewhere, can he or she ever answer these questions for me?