๐บ The Goddess I Was Afraid to Meet
How the fierce Mother I feared as a child became Amma
โค๏ธ Stories of Devotion
I was four years old when I first heard of Maa Kali
and became afraid of her.
Our home stood across from the Kamakshi temple, and going there each evening
was simply part of the rhythm of my childhood.
I don't remember having to be taught that we went to the temple.
We just did.
I would enter the temple premises and, as was customary, walk around the garbha griha in circumambulation.
Somewhere around me, Aigiri Nandiniโthe Mahishasura Mardini Stotramโwould be playing,
its familiar cadence becoming part of the soundscape of those evenings.
Then came the little rituals that were perfectly ordinary to me then, but feel precious to remember now:
stopping for theertha, the holy water;
applying chandanam, kumkumam and thirunuru before Kamakshi Amman;
and eventually finding the other neighborhood children.
Because if we were fortunate, the temple priest would tell us a story.
He was well known to our families and was the family priest for many in the neighborhood.
In those days, he often slept on the temple premises.
I loved listening to him speak about the Divine.
Gods and Goddesses entered my childhood imagination through stories long before
I knew enough to call any of it philosophy.
One evening, he told us that he had hardly slept the night before.
Naturally, a group of curious children needed to know why.
He told us that Goddess Kali had appeared in his dream.
As I remember his story, a puja that was supposed to have been performed for her
had been delayed by a few seconds, and Kali was displeased.
She was a keeper of time, he told usโnothing on her agenda was to be delayed.
And in his dream, she had danced around him.
Wildly.
Her anklets ringing so loudly that he could hear them all around him.
I don't know what the other children carried home from that story.
I carried the anklets.
In my four-year-old imagination, they were terrifying.
What if Kali came into my dreams?
What if she danced around me with those anklets ringing?
The images I had seen of her did little to reassure me.
Dark, wild-haired, tongue extended, powerful and seemingly untamedโ
she was unlike the gentle form of the Divine Mother to whom I instinctively gravitated.
Kamakshi felt safe.
Kali felt like someone from whom I should maintain a respectful distance.
And so, for much of my life, I did.
I could not have known then that decades later, thousands of miles from that little temple of my childhood,
I would stand before Kali for the first time with my eyes closedโ
and feel the Mother dancing around me.
Nor could that four-year-old child possibly have understood the strangest part of what would happen.
She would still be fierce.
And I would feel completely safe.
โThe Goddess didn't need to become less fierce for me to love Her.
I had to live long enough to understand what Her fierceness meant."
The Question I Carried With Me
As I grew older, my childhood fear of Kali did not entirely disappear.
I simply learned how to avoid it.
There were so many other forms of Devi toward whom I could turn,
and I instinctively chose the ones whose presence
felt gentler to me.
Kali remained somewhere at the edges of my spiritual worldโrespected, certainly,
but preferably from a comfortable distance.
There was, however, one person who made that distance difficult for me to understand.
Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa.
I was very fond of his teachings and books while growing up.
Here was a saint whose spirituality seemed filled with tenderness,
simplicity and an almost childlike love of the Divine.
And yet the Divine Mother he adored was Kali.
I could never quite reconcile the two.
How could someone so gentle love a Goddess who frightened me so much?
It was a question I carried for years without realizing that perhaps life itself would eventually answer it.
When Kali Began Appearing Again
Many years later, something began to shift.
My teacher would sometimes speak of Kali with great affection.
There was none of the fear in the way she spoke of Her that I had carried since childhood.
I began listening differently.
At some point, she spoke about Bhadra Kali and explained Bhadra to me
in the sense of the auspicious, protective Mother.
Something inside me rearranged itself.
For years, in my own mind, I had associated Bhadra Kali primarily
with Kali's frightening or angry aspect.
Now another possibility opened before me:
What if her fierceness was protective?
What if I had spent all these years looking at the intensity
without understanding the love behind it?
After that, what appeared to be coincidences began accumulating around me.
An article about Kali.
A book.
A hymn.
A reference that caught my attention.
Then I came across an interview with Anuradha Paudwal,
whose devotional music had long been familiar to me,
speaking about her own encounter with the Goddess.
I listened, fascinated.
The Goddess I had spent much of my life avoiding was suddenly
the Goddess I wanted to understand.
I have since heard it said that Kali comes into your life when you are ready for transformationโ
not a moment earlier and not a moment later.
I cannot say whether that is true for everyone.
I only know something about myself now that I could not have known then:
I could not have understood her at four.
I had to live LIFE first.
I had to know something of love and loss, fear and uncertainty, responsibility and motherhood.
I had to discover that life cannot always be made safe
simply by keeping frightening things at a distance.
As a child, I thought safety meant staying away from what frightened me.
As a woman, I was about to discover another kind of safety:
I can be safe in the middle of it.
Not because nothing difficult will happen.
Because I am held even here.
๐บ
The Goddess I Was Afraid to Meet
Photo by Stirred By Spice
The First Kali Temple of My Life
There is something I still find remarkable about where I finally met Her.
After growing up in India and spending most of my life deliberately avoiding Kali temples,
the first Kali temple I ever entered was in America.
It was November 1, 2024โa new moon day, Amavasya
traditionally associated with Kali worship.
By then curiosity had overcome enough of my old fear that I wanted to go.
But when I actually arrived at the temple, some of that little girl's apprehension came with me.
I stepped inside not quite knowing what to expect.
And then, almost immediately, I saw someone familiar.
Ganesha.
My Ishta Devata.
I cannot describe how reassuring that felt. It was almost as though
someone I knew had met me at the door.
You're all right. Come in.
So I did.
I moved farther into the temple.
I prayed before the Shiva Linga.
Then my eyes found Durgaโthe warrior Goddess, another form of Devi
whose presence was familiar to me.
A little more reassurance.
Known faces, so to speak, in unfamiliar territory.
And then I turned.
There She was.
Dakshina Kali.
For the first time in my life, I stood face-to-face with the Goddess
whose name I had first heard as a four-year-oldโ
and whose very first story had frightened me.
And what happened inside me made no sense according to the story
I had been telling myself for decades.
I wasn't frightened.
A rush of warmth came over me.
The Goddess I had expected to experience as fearsome felt intensely,
almost overwhelmingly, loving.
I went a little closer.
And somewhere between prayer and conversation, I whispered to Her:
Do you know I have been waiting to meet you all this while?
There was, of course, one part I didn't need to say aloud:
I just never had the courage.
And somewhere within me came an answer:
You only get to meet me when you are ready.
I am ready now, I said.
I thought that was the encounter.
I didn't yet know what would happen when the lamps were lit.
๐บ
When the Deepa Aradhana Began
I happened to be standing directly before Devi when the deepa aradhana started.
I closed my eyes.
And then something happened for which, even now, I do not have adequate language.
I seemed rooted to the spot.
Tears began flowing.
Not the tears that come because one has deliberately summoned a painful memory.
I wasn't consciously thinking about anything sad.
I wasn't asking Her to solve anything.
They simply would not stop.
It felt as though something inside me were being washed clean.
And with my eyes still closed, I had the overwhelming sensation
that Devi was no longer contained within the form standing before me.
I felt Her around me.
She was still Kali.
Wild hair.
Fierce movement.
Intensity.
She seemed to be dancing around me without diminishing herself by one degree.
She did not slow her dance for me.
She did not become gentler so that I would be less afraid.
And yetโ
I was not afraid.
Even with my eyes closed, I could see Her in whatever mysterious way we sometimes see without our eyesโ
wild hair, intense, smiling, dancing round and round me
until I felt completely enveloped by Her energy.
At one point, She seemed to stand directly before me, looking at me, so close
that I could feel Her breath on me.
It almost felt as though She were daring me to open my eyes and look at Her.
But my tears were flowing, and I remained there with my eyes closed.
I did not need to open them.
I could already see Her.
The experience was so palpable that even now I struggle to put it into language.
The fragrance of incense seemed everywhereโaround me, upon me,
filling the space in which I stood.
And through it all came the strangest, most comforting feeling of all.
Safety.
I cannot tell another person exactly what happened in that temple that day.
I can only tell you, truthfully, what I experienced.
I felt held inside Her fierceness.
The very intensity I had spent most of my life fearing
now seemed to surround me like an embrace.
And somewhere within that embrace was a feeling so unmistakable that,
if I were to put it into words, they would be these:
From now on, you are under my care.
You have nothing to fear.
Her fierceness had not disappeared.
I had finally discovered what it felt like to be loved by it.
Perhaps this is something I could only have understood after living enough life.
At four, I thought I would be safe if Kali never came dancing near me.
Decades later, with my eyes closed and the Mother seeming to dance around me,
I discovered that the closeness I had feared was precisely what made me feel protected.
The little girl had been afraid the Goddess would come too close.
The woman discovered that closeness was the blessing.
๐บ
When the Goddess Became Amma
Something changed after that first encounter.
I went back.
And then I went back again.
Somewhere along the way, the Goddess I had spent most of my life avoiding
became the Mother I wanted to visit every weekend.
Her temple began to feel less like somewhere I went to worship and more like
somewhere my Mother was waiting for her daughter to come home.
Perhaps that is the part of my relationship with Kali I find hardest to explain.
People see her fierce formโthe sword, the wild hair, the extended tongueโ
and understandably speak about her
power, destruction, transformation and protection.
I see those things too.
But now, when I look at her, another word rises before all the others.
Amma.
I arrive at her temple carrying all the identities adulthood has given me.
I am a grown woman.
I am a mother myself.
I have spent much of my adult life being the person who notices what others need,
who cooks, cares, remembers, worries and makes sure everyone is all right.
But before her, there is still a part of me that gets to be somebody's daughter.
And however grown we become, perhaps we never entirely outgrow
the need for a mother's lap.
A place where we do not have to be the capable one.
A place where we can simply arrive and say:
Amma, this is what happened this week.
There are things I can tell her that I might hesitate to tell another human being,
wondering whether they would understand or judge me.
With her, I simply talk.
Sometimes I sit quietly.
Sometimes I ask.
And sometimes, in the most ordinary ways, I feel that she answers.
Because of my egg allergy, eating outside is difficult for me, and
I cook my own food nearly every day of the year.
But when I visit Amma's temple, I am often sent home with prasada packed as food.
It is such a simple thing.
Yet every time it happens, some very daughter-like part of me smiles.
Amma has fed me. I don't have to cook tonight.
Someone else may simply see a container of temple prasada.
I receive it differently.
My Amma packed food for me to take home.
Perhaps motherhood has always spoken through these ordinary questions:
Have you eaten?
Do you have something nice to wear?
Come here. Tell me what's troubling you.
Go. Enjoy yourself. I'm watching.
And Kali, of all the forms of the Divine Mother I had once imagined I could never approach,
began speaking to me in precisely that language.
Then, just before Navaratri one year, I sat before her and told her something
I had not even asked of my own birth mother.
Amma, it has been twenty years since I bought myself a saree or had one gifted to me.
I would like to wear a new saree for Navaratri.
It was such a small, almost childlike thing to ask.
Perhaps that was precisely why I could ask her.
There is a freedom a daughter has with a loving motherโ
the freedom to ask for something not because it is essential,
not because the world will stop without it,
but simply because her heart would like it.
By the time Navaratri arrived, I had nearly seven new sarees.
Suddenly my problem was no longer whether I would have a new saree for the festival.
It was deciding which one to wear on which day. ๐โค๏ธ
I wore the brightest colors and went to celebrate Navaratri in her presence.
Did Kali send me seven sarees?
I cannot prove such a thing.
Nor do I need to.
I know what it felt like.
It felt like being somebody's daughter.
It felt like a Mother saying:
Of course you will have something beautiful to wear for the festival.
And there I was, dressed in those bright colors, walking through her temple,
feeling watched over by the same Goddess whose very image I had once been afraid to see.
Sometimes she even seems to have a sense of humor about it.
There are days when I arrive at the temple, look at herโand realize
we are wearing the same colors.
I look at her.
She looks at me.
And I smile.
I know you are watching. โค๏ธ
Whether she chose her colors to match mine or I somehow chose mine to match hers,
I shall leave between Mother and daughter. ๐
I call it the Kali wink.
These little moments are perhaps why the relationship became so much more
than that extraordinary first encounter.
The tears and deepa aradhana introduced me to her.
Life with her taught me to call her Amma.
And on weekends when I cannot visit, I feel an ache that still surprises meโ
the feeling of having gone too long without seeing someone very dear.
How did the Goddess I feared for most of my life make me fall so completely in love with her?
I still don't know.
But perhaps, after all these decades, I finally understand something
that puzzled me for half my life.
I think I understand Sri Ramakrishna a little better now.
As a girl reading about this extraordinarily gentle saint and his profound devotion to Kali,
I could never reconcile the two.
How could someone so gentle love someone so fierce?
Perhaps I was asking the wrong question.
He knew Her as Mother.
And now, finally,
so do I.
๐บโค๏ธ
The Anklets I Once Feared
Sometimes I think about the four-year-old girl who first heard the name Kali
in a little Kamakshi temple across from her home.
I can still see pieces of those evenings in memory.
Walking around the garbha griha as Aigiri Nandini played through the temple premises.
Stopping for theertha.
Chandanam, kumkumam and thirunuru.
Finding the other neighborhood children and gathering around the priest,
waiting for another story.
And then, one evening, hearing about a Goddess I had never known before.
Kali.
Wild.
Fierce.
Unstoppable.
And dancing around a priest in his dream with her anklets ringing.
Of everything he told us that evening, somehow it was those anklets that followed me home.
For years, I hoped the Goddess who wore them would keep her distance from me.
How strange life can be.
Decades later, thousands of miles from that Kamakshi temple,
I stood before Dakshina Kali in America during deepa aradhana
with tears streaming down my face.
My eyes were closed.
And the Divine Mother danced around me.
She did not slow down.
She did not tame her wildness.
She did not rearrange herself into a form I would find easier to love.
She did not become less Kali so that I could love Her.
What changed was me.
Somewhere inside that inexplicable experience, I finally understood that
I was not standing in the path of Her fierceness.
I was standing inside its protection.
The little girl had believed safety meant keeping the frightening Goddess at a distance.
The woman had lived enough life to understand another kind of safety.
I can be safe in the middle of it.
Not because nothing difficult will happen.
Because I am held even here.
Perhaps that is why we meet Shakti in different forms during different seasons of our lives.
The little girl knew how to love Kamakshi.
She wasn't yet ready to understand Kali.
I had to live LIFE first.
I had to learn that sometimes what we need from the Divine Mother is not the promise:
Nothing frightening will ever happen to you.
Sometimes what we need is the Mother who stands in the middle of it with us and says:
It may happen. And I will stand here with you.
Perhaps that is why I could not understand Sri Ramakrishna's love for Kali when I was younger.
I was looking at Her fierceness.
He was looking at his Mother.
It took me decades to see what he saw.
And now, when I enter Kali's temple, I don't see the frightening Goddess
from my childhood story either.
I go to see Amma.
The Mother who protects fiercely.
The Mother who listens without asking me to explain myself.
The Mother who sends her daughter home with food.
The Mother to whom I can whisper that I would like a new saree for Navaratriโ
and somehow find myself with seven. ๐โค๏ธ
The Mother who occasionally seems to look at my clothes, dress herself in the same colors
and give me what I have come to think of as the Kali wink.
The Mother whose temple feels like home.
And the Mother I miss with an ache when I have been away too long.
I don't know how the Goddess I feared for most of my life made me fall so deeply in love with Her.
Perhaps some relationships with the Divine are not meant to be explained.
They are meant to be lived.
But sometimes I think again about that four-year-old girl.
She heard about Kali's wild dance and hoped those anklets would never come near her.
If I could sit beside her now, perhaps I would not tell her not to be frightened.
She was four.
I would let her have Kamakshi.
I would let her grow.
I would let her live.
Because one day, when she was ready, the Mother would introduce Herself.
And when She did, She would still be wild.
She would still be fierce.
She would still dance.
But the little girl who had been terrified that Kali might someday
come too close would finally discover:
Closeness was the blessing.
Perhaps that is what those anklets were trying to teach me all along.
The Goddess didn't need to become less fierce for me to love Her.
I had to live long enough to understand what Her fierceness meant.
And somewhere between the little girl who feared Her and the
woman who now misses Her when she cannot visitโ
Kali became Amma.
๐บโค๏ธ
๐บ A Quiet Reflection
Perhaps the forms of the Divine we understand change as we do.
Sometimes what once frightened us reveals itself differently after life
has given us the experience to see it with new eyes.
Is there somethingโor someoneโyou understand differently now
than you did when you were younger?
Perhaps transformation is not always becoming someone new.
Sometimes it is finally being able to see what was there all along.
โค๏ธ
๐ฃ Walk a Little Further
Food and devotion have always belonged together in my kitchen.
If you would like to continue exploring the traditions, offerings and
festival foods that accompany these stories,
wander into my Temple & Prasadam Collection.
Explore the Temple & Prasadam Collection โ
๐ฅฃ
โค๏ธ A Few More Stories to Savor
๐ Temple & Prasadam Collection
๐ช Part of Temple Prasadam Collection
A growing library of sacred offerings prepared for Hindu temples, festivals,
and home worship throughout the year.
๐ผ Krishna Janmashtami Collection
๐ Ganesh Chaturthi Collection
๐ช Navaratri Collection
๐ฅ Deepavali Collection
๐พ Pongal Collection
๐บ Varalakshmi Vratham Collection
๐ฟ Ugadi Collection
๐ Meet the Heart Behind the Spice
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