I should have anticipated this question, but I didn't, nor did I think about the deeper questions that a couple asked or the new questions asked in Delhi. Ok, let me back up.

The day I got my head shaved, sans shikha, someone asked as I passed if I was Hindu. That is the question I should have anticipated, but didn't. I mumbled some smart-ass answer about me being me, which made to sense to him. Well, it made no sense at all, to be totally honest. So I started thinking about it, and the next time I got the question, or so I thought, I would be ready.

I was sitting in the lobby of the hotel just relaxing, trying to get out of the heat for a bit, deciding if I wanted to walk the 2 kms to the only restaurant I felt sort of comfortable eating at or to go adventurous and try one of the more "Indian" places. Two older Indian men sat further back in the long lobby doing paperwork. I assumed they were the owners of the hotel.  The front boy came up to me, pointed at the man on my left, and told me that he wanted to talk to me. I got up, a little apprehensive and a little curious. (I was apprehensive because I had just checked out and paid my bill for the previous 3 nights, but was going to be staying in the room til 8pm and thought he may want to make me pay for the extra night.) He wanted, instead, to talk to me about how I found his hotel, how I decided to stay there, and why I had come to India. He was an very educated an, and spoke very good English, though his accent was pretty thick.  It turns out he is in the rotary and had made an extensive trip to America (which he relayed to me in great detail) in the year nineteen- hundred-ninety-six (which is how he said it to me). So in asking me about my trip I told him I had come to do pindadan, the giving of food to the ancestors. He turned the question I had been prepared for around.  After asking if I was Catholic and then if I attended church, he asked if I believed in the pindadan. I had not thought about that, not here anyway. In fact, when I talk about religion with others, more often when I was in grad school than here, the importance of belief versus practice comes up a lot. (One of the main differences between Christianity and other religions (and I do realize this is a huge generalization) is that Christians emphasize belief more than practice, what you think more than what you do. So I have trained myself to think about religion as an intersection of the two. Sometimes you do things without worrying about the ideas behind them, well many people do. (Even Christians, though I would be more than willing to let you argue with me about that.) Anyway, his question threw me a little, but I took a second and simply told him I didn't know. I told him that I was curious about how and why people do things, how and why we believe things, and, hinting at the ideas I just mentioned, what the relationship between belief and practice was. He seemed to find that interesting, but we were soon back to talking about his trip to America. Including an interesting assertion on his part, that the only difference between American and Indian people (literally the only difference, he actually said that the cultures are the same!) was that Indian children stay with their parents and American children are separated. This is bad he said. Then he explained why.

Later that day I was standing in front of he hotel, it was about 8 at night, looking for a rickshaw to take me to the airport. A quite old man with a religious mark painted on his forehead stopped and looked at me curiously. I returned his look, determined to try to see if staring back would stop his looking. It did not. Instead he approached me and asked about me visit, about my head. I told him I had come to do pindadan, and was totally surprised when he asked if I believed in the pindadan. As you can imagine from my conversation above, I was not totally surprised that the westernized Indian, probably a Christian (I did see many crosses around necks in town and at least two of the schools I saw in town were Christian schools), asked me this, but here was a Hindu asking it. Others who found out I wanted to, saw me actually doing, or found out I had, simply looked on with curiosity. I told him I did not know if I believed. Interestingly, he had more trouble understanding this than did the hotel owner. When I nodded and indicated I was leaving, he simply looked on me benignly and watched me walk away.

The question changed dramatically when I encountered it in Delhi. One shopkeeper asked if I was connected to the Hare Krishna movement. Now I had had this thought before, making a mental picture of myself, but was still surprised. I told him I wasn't and that I had done the pindadan and he nodded and accepted it.

Much of the way that I experience India is in my head, I am more intellectual than physical most of the time, but it is curious how much our bodies shape our interactions. I thought about cutting off my shikha when I arrived in Delhi to avoid "looking goofy" or getting "awkward" questions. Then I would just be another bald white guy (and there is at least one more here at the YMCA Guest House and then there was the bald white Buddhist monk I saw in Bodhgaya. At least I think he was a monk, he was shaved and wearing white and maroon robes. But he also wore two earrings and had "Om mani padme hum" tatooed on his bicep and some picture on his forearm. btw he was one who intentionally, almost awkwardly, avoided seeing me). I decided that it gives me a chance to work on my Hindi and to find new and interesting indigenous interpretations of a white guy with a Hindu haircut.