At first, I knew Hinduism only as an extension of family life—full of order and chaos. Packed tight as atoms, transcendence, superstition, playful affection, and holy terror whirled about one another, clashing occasionally, like hanging temple bells purifying the wind. If Hinduism is the temple of civilization (as my great-grandfather loved to argue), then its daily pujas and seasonal Pujas are the candles, lamps, and fireworks that light up the altar.

At sunrise, like a martinet, before the city of Kolkata grew restive, my grandmother rang her hand bell; then she ground sandalwood into paste. With some of it she adorned our family pantheon, saving the rest for her cheeks. Fresh flowers were delivered along with the milk and reverently tossed at our idols. The day began. Commerce, gossip, traffic jams, cooking, and family feuds did, too.

Everyone knew that on Thursdays between 2:30 and 5 p.m., subtle planetary movements rendered our own stirrings inauspicious; as the sun glared the world into submission, we loosened our pajama strings and fell into a deep sleep. These stupors were different from the siestas we took on other weekdays; on Thursday afternoons, we dared not do anything important, even in our dreams. Was it mere astrology, divine doctrine, or family predilection that also led to bans on trimming our nails after sunset and on learning to swim?
Every evening, when he sat down to eat, my grandfather put a tiny bit of food and water aside. He was a man of the world. He idealized the sixteenth-century Mughal emperor Akbar, cried when President Nixon, Mother Teresa, and Princess Diana died, and railed against Gandhi. As a young Communist enthralled with Subhas Chandra Bose, the Bengali nationalist who brought troops to support the Japanese during World War II, he had flung away his sacred thread. He still hated the stringy caste mark, with its pernicious branding of division. He never failed to feed our Brahmin ancestors, but toward the end of his life, when illness prevented him from carrying out annual rites for his father, he smiled and said, “By now he’s been reborn. He’s playing somewhere—he doesn’t need my devotions.”

Evenings were the best. My grandmother lit incense, did her evening pujas, and supervised the cook, while my grandfather, still in his suit, drank Complan. The rest of us drank tea and ate fried plantains and banana flowers. Sometimes, many people came over, and we used banana leaves as plates. Afterward, we threw away the leaves, as if the banana plant weren’t Kalabou, the wife of Ganesh, the elephant-headed god. We worshipped her during the festivals Durga Puja and Ganesh Puja (a puja is a private act of prayer, a Puja a public rite performed by priests), cladding the plant in a sari and smearing her leaves with vermilion paste. Then she became a polite, well-heeled stranger, and it was impossible to contemplate picking her fruit or spoiling her fronds. Who knew what she might do to us?

At night, my grandfather laid aside with his suit his worries about steel manufacturing, the stock market, and family crises. After a cold bath, he sat cross-legged on the bed, his lower body now swathed in white cotton, water droplets as shiny and surprising as untimely dew peeking out of his chest hair, specks of talc on his brown skin like aromatic dust. Beside him, quiet for once, I breathed in the peace he breathed out. I knew he was doing his puja, but what was he actually doing? To make me laugh, when things weren’t going according to our wishes, he would scold his gods and goddesses, just as he scolded me. Is that all a puja was then? A chance to rebuke your favorite godlings?

After my grandparents had fallen asleep, I would lie awake, chattering with the goddess Kali, mother of death and destruction. Her vivid face, with its bloody stuck-out tongue, was emblazoned on a calendar across from my bed. She and I had a special bond—Bidisha is one of her 108 names, and one of my three. I’d beg her to tell me stories, and sometimes she would.

Kali was a fearsome aunt and easily provoked, but those skulls strung around her neck were endearing. It was sweet how she would suck on them absentmindedly, like lollipops, and she was always good for a bone-chilling story, long after everyone else was asleep. When I finally drowsed off in the dregs of one of these complex, gory tales (which always ended with Kali adding several freshly scalped, grinning skulls to her garland), I felt as peaceful as my grandfather after his bath. An outlier herself, my mother devoted herself to teaching Kansans about standard deviation—painstakingly, she drew the box and whiskers, the stem and leaf; at night, Bhagavad Gita tapes helped her sleep. Before I drowsed off, my first year in the US, I would watch figure skating and practice my splits, then prostrate myself for puja. Bedtime prayers seemed somehow American. But afterward, as the year grew old and my mother slumbered fitfully, I would play country music or Super Mario 4 until dawn.

Transcendence, superstition, playful affection, and holy terror spun apart, their atomic bonds broken, the temple now locked. In high school, I ate beef for the first time (it tasted like stinky goat) and scandalized my grandfather by accepting a job at the Paradise Café, where I built my biceps by scrubbing dishes and toilets. I opened up to the Doors, Nine Inch Nails, and The Doors of Perception; my Bhagavad Gita stayed shut, a jumble of diacritics and morality.

As a girl, I was denied the sacred thread granted to Brahmin males upon adulthood, and I was outraged. Yet, following my grandfather, I would never have worn the thread had it been given to me. I still remembered two all-purpose mantras he had taught me, and used them to fight off fatigue, financial worries, heartbreak, cockroaches, and poor road conditions. One, the ten-word sarvamangala mantra, is an invocation of the goddess Durga. The other is an eight-word zinger: Maha Maya, Maha Medha, Maha Buddhi, Maha Lakshmi! Great Illusion, Great Intelligence, Great Conscious-Awakeness, Great Wealth! The Sri Yantra is, or appears to be, a diagram in which four doors open into two circles. The first has sixteen petals, the second eight. In the center, nine triangles blur into and out of focus. Four male triangles point upward while five female triangles point down. Unlike yin and yang, the Sri Yantra is imbalanced, and this asymmetry is hallucinatory. Although it has been read in many ways—it is an esoteric meditation aid to understanding non-duality; it is non-duality; it is an aspect of the Supreme Goddess; it is a union of male and female energies; it is the relationship between pentatonic scales and microtones; it is a coded map of the world; it is the cosmos itself—the Sri Yantra is not a symbol. Without the mantras to unleash it, without a guru to correct pronunciation of those mantras, the Sri Yantra is nothing. But what else is it?

In honor of my grandfather’s playful religion, I decided to make a game of the Sri Yantra. I enjoyed the difficult task of visualizing it, and with the help of my partner, I created a Flash animation that would allow anyone to trace the diagram. I used an eighteenth-century drawing of the Sri Yantra from Rajasthan. (Since Tantra is a form of Hinduism akin to Gnosticism, my family in Bengal was unfamiliar with the diagram.) I recommend breathing deeply and/or listening to music while tracing it. According to tradition, the yantra should not be traced at night.

Remaking the yantra as pure geometry was a study in signal and noise, an attempt to tease out the vagaries of handicraft from matters cosmological. The Sri Yantra is, after all, the world; a quarter-inch gap might be the Bay of Bengal. The drawing’s right gate was slightly narrower than the left. (The careless hand of an eighteenth-century apprentice or a deliberate and significant choice?) Far more obvious was the extra line, tiny and meticulous, on the upper gate’s left side. It couldn’t possibly have been an error, but, orbiting asymmetrically on-screen, it would have seemed like one. (What if it were the pin that attaches the world to the sky—the very seat of consciousness, the entry point of the goddess?) I didn’t include it.

The point of the first male triangle was slightly set off from the first female triangle’s baseline. This might have been an unimportant imprecision—or did it bespeak a different mathematics, more complex than that of the gross body of bland, overbalanced modern yantras? It did, I decided, and I rewove the inner lines from a different skein of petals. The Sri Yantras out there showed four male triangles and five females—but no, in our ancient version the male shapes were dominant! Two hours of recalculation followed, accompanied by growing suspicions of concealment and conspiracy. Then I realized I’d scanned the book upside down.

As the days dragged on, the juddering and uneven rotation of the layers began to work bad mojo. During the day, my partner and I built little Taj Mahals of code. But by five or six in the evening, minor errors in construction would manifest in three-dimensional fields, wildly whirling outlines, and ghostly inversions. Fault-riddled code yielded nearly the right results; cleaning it up left things worse. The angular pull of the outer petals became more and more visceral—like being picked up and spun—and the triangles, half their points missing, resembled mismatched gears. Perhaps things were going so poorly because I was working at night. Sometimes, very late, it seemed the center would not hold.