Tree of Prayers
Three years before publishing one of my earlier books, Meeting God, I was taken to visit a little-known temple outside , a major sacred city in South India.
Within the small compound, but standing by itself away from the central shrine, was an unusual structure: a small freestanding room whose walls were built of a latticework of widely spaced bamboo.
Each of the open squares between the bamboo frets had been filled with tiny rolls of paper, hundreds and hundreds per section, hundreds of thousands for each eight-foot section of wall.
Each of those rolls of paper contained in the tiny handwritten script the name of the Goddess to whom the temple was dedicated, repeated 1008 times (1008 is a particularly auspicious sacred number for Hindus).
Each had been placed there as a part of an offering by a different devotee during his or her prayers to the Goddess. Like so many other experiences in India, the potent magnitude of this devotional expression was overwhelming, leaving my mind reeling for days.
is an art historian, author, cultural anthropologist, and photographer conducting a lifelong survey of the art and people of India. His memoir , was released in India in January 2025, and is now available for preorder online before its publication in the UK on June 2 and in the US on August 26 by .
