My Hinduism

My Hinduism has no depth, says W. He can't really believe in it. – 'Convince me', he says. 'Convince me you're a Hindu. Of what does your Hinduism consist?'

He still remembers when I told him of my Hinduism. I'm a Hindu, I said, and he laughed until beer came out his nostrils. And it's as improbable today, my Hinduism.

'You know nothing about it!', W. says. If he drew a Venn diagram called Hinduism and a Venn diagram called Lars, where would they intersect?

'You were never religious, were you?', W. says. Im a Hindu!, I tell him. 'But you were never really religious, were you?'

My Hinduism seems all too easy to W. It seems to bring me no anxiety. It fails to push me further. I don't struggle with faith, or with the idea of faith.

W.'s relation to religion is fraught, he says. It's a daily struggle. Sometimes he feels on the brink of a great conversion, to what he doesn't quite know. Sometimes he feels as far from religion as possible, and the word faith is ashes in his mouth. Faith! he says, what need have I for that?

Of course, he as born a Jew – he's Jewish through his mother's line, but his father's family were Catholic converts, and he was baptised. He went through a great religious phase, W. remembers, at the age of thirteen. He demanded to be taken to church! And he was taken. Thirteen!, W. says. That's when he was most pious, W. says. Most pure.

My indifference to the idea of God has always disappointed W. He likes to imagine me in another life, he says, as a young priest wandering around in the fields, raising my fist at God's absence.

Sometimes W. thinks we should write a book on God. On God! Imagine! Of course, W. doesn't understand why people believe in God, or even what they mean by this word. But at the same time, his own absence of belief seems to him entirely a matter of a blockage of thought, and what he can only describe as a kind of dullness and opacity.

He doesn't have the insouciance of those who call themselves atheists, W. says; he doesn't know what that means. When it comes to God, he keeps feeling he's come up against something immovable, something through which he cannot pass. It's not because he thinks there's some mystical knowledge which he cannot quite reach – quite the contrary – but that there is something he cannot think, something he cannot see that is called God, and it is all because of some personal stupidity.

But what would I contribute to our book on God?, W. asks. What would I bring to the project? – 'You could explain your indifference', W. says. 'And then you could draw some cocks'.