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Try asking awkward questions at the macro level about how each faith needs to retune itself to contemporary reality. Orthodox Muslims get angry if you express even the most reasonable query about Islam, while their brothers in Hinduism crow and say, We told you so. The opposite is equally pathetic. Many Muslims don’t know that Hinduism is dedicated to the Formless One, who is Ahad, Samad and neither born nor begotten. But we, as frail mortals, are allowed to approach this great concept through the imaginative route of an ishta devta, a personal deity. So if you critique anything Hindu, there is unwarranted H rage and M glee.
Let us, instead, turn to the “micro level”, to individual relationships between H and M. Out here, I, like so many of us, have nothing to report but the sort of affection and goodwill that the avatars and prophets must have wanted. My Bombay landlady from six years ago is in Delhi to spend Ramzan with her daughter. “Come and break our fast with us,” say Habiba Aunty and her daughter, Ghazala Apa, lovingly. Of course, I’m going. Meanwhile, I take my silver “Mashallah” pendant from Iran to the pirohiwala, a Hindu, to be strung on a double strand of tulsi beads from Vrindavan, which itself means “forest of holy basil”. When he’s done, the pirohiwala, whose forehead is daubed with a Navratra tilak, turns it over admiringly. “What a lovely idea,” he says in Hindi. It’s such a small incident, but it reassures me a little that “Hindu” India’s heart is not closed up yet, despite all those politically angry people who have infected us.
Such thoughts, alas, always buzz in our heads now. Aptly, it is a Sikh friend who uses a phrase that suddenly electrifies me: “and then I said, when can I come by and do Ram-Salaam?” she says in casual conversation. Maybe you are familiar with this greeting, so breathtaking, it could happen only in India — but I have never heard it before. Ram-Ram and Salaam Aleikum combined as Ram-Salaam? I hug my surprised Sikh friend, eyes blurring with sudden, strong emotion. Ram-Salaam. What a lovely idea.
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