(The cops are the guys in beige. It is hard to see how big this all was, but I didn't want to be to obvious about taking pictures.)
My last Sunday at work I took a ric to the station, as usual, but the driver couldn’t get me up to the train station’s drop off point because there was too much traffic. No one could get through the congestion. It was Eid,(rhymes with weed) a Muslim festival. (Right at the end of Ramzan, but I don’t know that the two are related. I guess I could look it up.) There were so many guys there. Oh wow. Like four times as many as I have ever seen at that mosque. And they were all wearing gleaming white clothes and it was early, 8:30 in the morning, so the sun was shining all over, turning them into this bright, clean, snowy mass. -Really, it was more than I was prepared to deal with at the time.

I guess you have to have to have to go to mosque for Eid, so people go to whichever one is closest, and the mosques have to accommodate them because the Muslims have to have to have to go to mosque. So the whole road in front of the station was lined with guys in white praying. It was sort of eerie walking through all the guys praying, like I was intruding, wandering down the aisle at their church while they are trying to have a service. But then, they did set up their church in the middle of the train station’s parkway. I think the Eid service must take about as long as my train journey, because when I got off the train downtown one of the mosques near my station was pouring out guys in white. They were about the only ones around that morning. Just me and the Muslims. They were all in white because everyone is supposed to be equal before God- no signs of wealth. So you have to wear the same white thing as everyone else. But of course some guys had nice embroidery and stuff on their white kurtas. .

I heard that in Egypt someone said that the white clothes thing was a misinterpretation and that you don’t have to wear white, you just have to not be ostentatious. You can wear white if you are able to, but only if you are able to. So there they wear regular clothes to mosque, on principle.

One Friday, when I got home, I walked out of the station through the Muslim prayers while reading a newspaper article about some Jewish festival that had been celebrated by the small but entrenched Jewish community in Bombay. The ric I took home that night had a bunch of Catholic crucifixes plastered all around the dashboard, along with the requisite Hindu deities. As we drove by all the Muslims praying, the driver started blasting Hindi music to drive to. It almost felt like culture shock, but it was more like a bizarre cultural hodgepodge confusion. India is weird. Lots of flavah.

It was like when I asked my friend why we had gone and paid respects at the Hindu mandir, before going to her Sikh place of worship, the Gurudwara. (guru=god, dwar=door) Is she Sikh or Hindu? And, come to think of it, why we had hit a mosque the day before? Pick a religion and stick to it. I kept asking her why she could go to each one, I was trying to figure out if there was some religious overlap or something. She didn’t understand my confusion; she didn’t even get my questions, initially. “What.” she said. “It’s all god.” Oh, ok. That’s cool. She was surprised that in the US, a Jew wouldn’t go to a Protestant church to worship. I don’t know if this bleeding of religious stuff is typical or unusual or how far it goes, but it isn’t just with her. I saw at least some of that blending of cultures and beliefs in other places too. But at the same time, people seem to prefer marriages to take place within the same religious group. (Here I use the word “prefer” to mean anything from an expressed opinion by parents to absolute- no discussion- you are dead to us otherwise- requirement by family.) So there are differences. Recognized, clearly delineated differences. But then there is also deep mutual respect. Except, of course, when the riots happened in the nineties and people of different religions tried to kill each other. And perhaps excepting the occasional bomb blasts. And the fact that when the Muslims pray at the train station, there are cops around. But besides that there really is lots of tolerance. From some people. But there are pockets of crazies. I am still not sure I get it. It’s a complex issue.