Marigolds, modaks and memories

THE other day, I found a man getting himself clicked, standing in a stall shimmering with idols of Lord Ganesha. The sight stopped me mid-step. Rows upon rows of golden gods gleamed under dim lights, their unblinking eyes reflecting centuries of devotion. The air was thick with the mingled scent of brass polish and sandalwood, as though time had slowed to bow before these miniature mountains of divinity. He stood in the middle — slim, silver-haired, wearing a pale blue shirt — hands loosely folded in front of Him. The faint smile on his lips seemed both proud and shy, as though he knew he was in the company of greatness yet did not wish to intrude. In that instant, he looked less like a shopkeeper and more like a priest guarding the sanctum of memory.

I was suddenly back in my grandmother's courtyard during Ganesh Chaturthi. She would place a small clay Ganesha on a low wooden stool draped in fresh marigolds, her hands moving with a grace that came from decades of devotion. She'd anoint the idol with sandal paste, tuck a sprig of tulsi behind its ear, and lean close — whispering her wishes as if speaking to a friend. "Even gods deserve to be spoken to gently," she once told me.

The stall before me was crowded with every possible form of the divine: Ganesha dancing, Ganesha reading, Ganesha playing the mridangam, Ganesha riding his mouse. My eyes kept returning to the Ganesha seated with a palm raised in blessing, a faint smile on his lips, the very image of my grandmother's brass idol that once sat on the windowsill. I could almost hear the temple bells of my childhood. But somewhere between then and now, devotion has changed its dialect. We have filled our homes with gods, yet emptied our rituals of quietude. The wisdom of Ganesha — the remover of obstacles — often gets drowned in loudspeakers blaring film songs, processions choking traffic and glitter idols that crumble into polluted rivers.

We are now also surrounded by other idols — ideas, ideologies, even AI — that begin as our creations and end up commanding our choices. They tell us what to buy, whom to follow, how to think. We feed them data and, in return, they feed us definitions of ourselves. Somewhere, we've moved from holding conversations with our gods to taking instructions from our gadgets.

Looking at the man in the stall, I wondered if he, too, had a memory tucked behind his careful arrangement of idols — a Ganesha gifted at a wedding, a mother's prayer that came true, a festival that smelled of fried modaks and fresh rain. His stillness seemed to say yes.

Perhaps, that is the quiet truth of devotion — we think we are looking at the idols, but it is they who are quietly watching us, measuring not our offerings but our becoming. And in that silent exchange of gazes between man and deity, I realised that sometimes the most enduring idols are not the ones cast in metal, but the moments that cast us in memory.