Nirpal Dhaliwal with his mother, Surinder. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian
Nirpal Dhaliwal’s Mother Was Born Into The Sikh Religion In The Punjab. After Decades Of Living In West London, She Suddenly Converted To Christianity. How Did This Unexpected Change Of Faith Affect Her Relationship With Her Son?
My mother, deeply rooted in the peasant culture of her native Punjab, was always immersed in the supernatural. She was born into Sikhism, but – like many Indians of her generation – her knowledge of her religion was never strong. She could never name its 10 founding gurus; nor had she any interest in its monist theology which encourages an internal experience of God through meditation.
Her Sikhism was an emotionally driven, personal mish-mash of various customs from across the subcontinent – most of it Hindu. She visited temples daily, prayed each morning and chanted Sanskrit hymns – without understanding a word – while wafting incense through the house. And she fasted – a lot.
She often fasted for Shiva, the dancing wild-man god of destruction, and his first wife, Shakti. When her children got chicken pox, she fasted for the tiger-riding, demon-slaying goddess Durga. And she fasted, in vain, for Santoshi Mata, the goddess of domestic happiness.
Mum’s supernatural thinking – her certainty that creation was shaped by divine beings and magical forces, and influenced by spells and curses – was, I felt, a link between myself and my ancestors stretching back millennia. I loved talking to her about the stories in the Puranas, about Krishna battling snake-devils and Shiva churning the oceans for the nectar of immortality, on her terms – as things that actually happened – and seeing her light up with excitement at the tales.
But last year she found Jesus – and all her fantastical pagan ways went out of the window. She had begun to seek Him in earnest the year before. My mother works for a catering company in Southall, west London, cleaning the dishes that come off the planes at nearby Heathrow Airport, and it was an evangelist colleague, a former Sikh, who invited her to a Christian prayer service in a local church. “I felt peace straight away,” Mum said. “From the first time I went and listened to people’s testimonies, about how Jesus had healed and changed their lives, I felt peace.”
Picture: Surinder Dhaliwal, with baby Nirpal.
She continued visiting the church, which has a north-Indian congregation and conducts its services in Punjabi, and lost interest in her old ways. Then Jesus came to her in a dream: “He held my hand,” she told me.
“He said he was with me and wouldn’t leave me. I woke up and I could still feel it.”
So she gave away all the Sikh and Hindu iconography that decorated her home, replaced them with crucifixes and was baptised into her new faith. She now reads a Punjabi-language Bible every day and watches Christian cable-television channels.
This Article “Jesus Saved My Mother” Is Written By Nirpal Dhaliwal Of The Guardian Featured On August 2015 Used With Permission.
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