How my childhood friend found her god

My childhood friend Ishita is a teacher. Steady and peaceful, she has had a stable relationship of 21 years with the same school. She loves teaching and has refused offers of promotion that would have taken her away from the classroom to administration.

Mother of a 14-year-old, she doesn't have the time to breathe on any given day: teaching, preparing for class, attending calls or WhatsApp messages from colleagues and students, running a household, taking care of her ailing mother, and catching a movie in between with her husband. You don't expect her to "find her god" just like that. But she has: on the streets of her city.

Every morning as she goes to school, her car stops at a particular traffic intersection. And there a man comes to her window, a beggar, every day. He never asks for money. But Ishita believes in spreading prosperity and gives him something. The man goes away. This has been going on for the last 21 years. A piece of personal time between two strangers, that no one else is privy to.

But 21 years is a lifetime. Over the years, as Ishita changed from a sprightly young 20-something to a more serious mid-life professional, so did he. And, in course of the daily ritual, they befriended each other - in a manner of speaking.

She still doesn't know his name, nor he hers. But she has seen him through his thick and thin, and he hers. She has noticed his fingers slowly turning blue, and then full-blown leprosy striking, eating up his flesh. She has learnt about his village in Tamil Nadu, the family he has left there, his children. And she has cried with him, when one day he showed her a piece of paper: his son's class 10 board exams mark sheet. She, in turn, has told him about her father's death, the critical surgery her son went through.

Ishita asks: "Why?" She has been asking herself: Who is he? Is this a coincidence? Why did we meet? Why does he come to me? Twenty-one years later, she told me last week that she believes she has found her god in him: "He is my Daridra Narayana," god in the guise of a beggar.

Awakening to one's soul and hearing it speak is never easy. But sometimes, just sometimes, we do recognise that voice. For Ishita, it's her inner journey - recognising god in humanity - to bliss. Who is to question her? She believes, therefore, it exists.