India Taught Me To Stop Chasing Ghosts
India taught me
that I don’t have to chase ghosts anymore,
that I don’t need futures
that abandon the present.
India taught me to listen to what still lives,
to stop dressing up
inhertied history as destiny.
I walked into mandirs,
masjids,
gurdwaras,
churches with peeling paint
and marble floors.
Head covered.
Shoes off.
Hands folded.
I did what good brown kids do, participated.
But it felt the way it has for a while,
hollow.
At first there is excitement
the hope of arrival,
the thrill of proximity.
But soon you realize
you’re just orbiting absence.
And somehow, always,
capitalism slips in sideways:
VIP darshan,
god packaged for export.
Faith with a receipt.
Spirituality with tax.
Just chasing ghosts.
Like calling out to something
that already left the room.
I was born Sikh.
Sikhi raised me
before I ever questioned it.
Its rhythms are in my spine,
its politics in my pulse.
My art, my ethics,
my refusal to bow quietly
all shaped by it.
But saangat started to feel scripted.
Simran felt like static.
Waheguru
a word I love
began to echo
without landing.
Like chasing ghosts.
And then I went to India.
I have carried India with me my whole life
in suitcases of story,
in my parents’ nostalgia,
in the diaspora’s endless remember when.
I imagined a homeland
that would recognize me.
A return that would make sense.
A place where belonging
would click into place.
Ludicrous now.
Because none of it asked
who I actually am.
What I believe.
What I refuse.
I believe in humanity.
I believe in love; as a practice,
without ledger,
without caste,
without condition.
I believe spirituality
should feel like choice,
not surveillance.
Like breath.
I believe in people
their contradictions,
their softness,
their survival.
I believe Maya is loud.
A drum we all march to
without meaning to.
And most of us get pulled under
distracted,
seduced,
tired
forgetting the real work
or the writing on our palms.
I believe religions
were meant to guide us back
to that work.
And I believe humans
got in the way.
Still
I believe in humanity.
Flawed.
Trying.
Failing forward.
But as the world burns
as rivers dry,
as borders harden,
as gods get louder
it has become harder
to believe in religion
as it is practiced.
It has felt like chasing ghosts.
Chasing a divinity
too polished for this moment.
Chasing purity
in Kal Yug.
Chasing a future and past so far away
forgetting to tend the soil today.
India taught me
it’s okay to let the ghosts rest.
To take what feeds me.
To leave what doesn’t.
To keep moving (in my own hybrid)
without asking permission.
Because, I was born in the West
where everything must be named,
branded,
broken down to theory
explored beyond exhaustion.
India taught me that I don’t owe language my loyalty if it cages me.
India taught me
I can be many things at once.
Sikh-adjacent.
Spiritually unruly.
Politically awake.
Rooted without worship.
My spirituality
lives in humanity
in care,
in refusal,
in showing up.
And if modern religion
cannot meet me there,
then it is not my failure.
India reminded me
that I am not lost
only done pretending.
That loving this world
means staying with it,
getting my hands dirty,
refusing escape routes
dressed as salvation.
