“මෑණියෝ, can you hear me?”

Every other day, precisely at 11:11, I play the regular charade of being a superstitious agnostic. God may be a Sumerian folktale, the final boss in our desire for an authoritarian system greater than our own, or my sister’s mother in the room next door. He knows I don’t respect him beyond the tell-tale bounds of “maybe if I pray, it’ll come true” and “I’ll just do it for the pirith noola.” He knows I’m using faith as my backup hard drive — a contingency I conveniently seem to keep forgetting.

None of this matters because in the same hypocritical fashion that I drink French toast lattes amidst an ill-reported ethnic cleansing, I ponder the scientific fidelity of an omniscient being in a cesspool of “for Christ’s sake can you bloody focus on what is happening right in front of you.” Is God on sabbatical? Is he even a “he?” Who are his unpaid interns — corrupt monks like Gnanasara or the Catholic ajumma that paid for my samgyetang?

Whether I’m dealing with demons, saints or the classless in-between, the real God in my life doesn’t settle for coincidences. For Lord-knows-what reasons, Ammi still blesses me with පින් every morning at 7am. I love my mother more than myself, but I doubt she’d love me very much if I wasn’t her daughter. Thaththi disagrees, although he’s a bit biased himself.

Lankans are a funny breed; we are patriotic in all the useless ways — elections, cricket matches, Nicki Minaj lyrics  — only to immigrate to the colonizer’s lands we gossiped about at tea-time. Who can blame us? Our presidents keep ditching us for dead and I’m sick of getting catcalled by the Mozart-wailing bread van man. Dear Anura Kumara, let’s just say I don’t have the same faith in you as my parents do.

Back home, it’s easy to brush off God. He’s so everywhere that he becomes the backdrop and the faceless context within it all: I see him in my late grandmother’s araliya flower offerings, the moth-eaten New Year lanterns down the street, and the poorly designed maze of temples we like to call “Colombo” — our infamous capital-city-that’s-not-really-the-capital-city. I’ve watched my mother get scammed by punic soothsayers time and time again and passed by limbless children upon summer pavements. Does God not care for them? Who is worthy of his refuge and why must I seek it?

Sometimes I think that if God exists,  then maybe he’s not so great after all. But I also think I have a self-diagnosed tendency to look at things the wrong way: half-memorized prayers, questions before conviction, twice the cynic, and none the wiser.

He has many names and doesn’t seem to love publicity. Classic avoidant-disorganized attachment style. I like to picture him as an overworked security guard peering into the monitors of 8 billion cameras – but this merely sends me into another cerebral spiral as I begin to wonder who on Earth (and beyond) gives this poor man his wages (surely no one is working that hard for free). Every theory, no matter how theoretical or lack-there-of, trumps me. God forbid any of it makes sense!

The good thing is that I’m equidistant from being your token Gen Z atheist and a Yale Divinity School applicant. God’s conceptualization inhabits a cobwebbed attic in my brain, one that I always lose the keys to and exclusively enter through a broken window. Is this too many metaphors? Have I lost my message? Did I ever have one to begin with?

God, if you’re out there, please leave this on read. Thanks.

මෑණියෝ: female guardian deity [maniyo, Sinhala]

Pirith noola: blessed string to protect from bad luck [පිරිත් නූල, Sinhala]

Ajumma: married or middle-aged woman [아줌마, Korean]

Samgyetang: Korean traditional ginseng chicken soup [삼계탕, Korean]

Ammi: Mummy [අම්මි, Sinhala]

පින්: good karma or virtue [pin, Sinhala]

Thaththi: Daddy [තාත්ති, Sinhala]