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DURING summer holidays spent every year at my ancestral home in Malabar, I gathered from the rural poor, several misconceptions regarding religions other than mine. I was told that to be born a high-caste Hindu was a stroke of fortune.

The Muslims and the Christians were to be regarded as mlechas because they ate the flesh of animals, a practice that made their breath stink.

Marry anyone you like, said my father one day, when all his four children had assembled in the dining hall.

“But do not marry a Muslim,” he added, peering into my eyes, as though I had been entertaining the thought. I was only fourteen then and marriage had not entered my thoughts.

In the coastal village of Punnayurkulam, we did spot some Muslims, Moplahs as they were called, striding with confidence, clad in white lungis with a panel that hid half of the wearer’s posterior.

They wore tight white ‘singles’ and green belts that held not only their cash but also their sharpened knives.

Afterwards, when a Moplah walked along the rice field, shaven head, belt and all, we did not even glance at him.

Devaki, the buxom maid-servant who escorted us wherever we went, once confided that a Moplah had tried to grab her. It was on a Monday after sunset and she was returning home from the Siva temple after offering prayers for a suitable husband.

Maybe Siva gave the Moplah to you as a suitable husband, I said. She was enraged. I am high-caste Nair girl. Why would I marry a mlecha who eats the flesh of cows, she asked me haughtily. These words I recall today with amusement, for I too belong now to the religion of Islam although I remain a vegetarian for purely personal reasons.

I left my belief in Hinduism, my faith in idols, and, today worship Allah. I do not yet feel that I have come home.

I feel I am swimming midstream between two distant shores.

If anyone finds me acceptable, it is only Allah, to whom I offer prayers five times a day.

No one else recognises my new face, a face rewrought by the religion that wraps me like a second skin.

Am I guilty of romanticising my conversion by hinting that I shall be the bridge between Hinduism and Islam?

Have I convinced the people I met here and outside the country that two dissimilar communities can be made to unite for the sake of world peace?

The rumblings of an imminent war remind me that I have a mission to achieve, that I must persevere to liberate the human mind from the garbage of prejudices, religious and racial.

Kamala Suraiya