I was fifteen the day my faith collapsed. It was an ordinary day in October. I was done with my academic exams and spending time with my mother and my elder sister, who was visiting over a festive Diwali weekend.

After a hearty lunch together, my mother mentioned a bit of chest pain, nothing dramatic, nothing that warned me what was coming. I was a teenager who couldn’t clearly differentiate between indigestion and what was actually happening to her.

Eventually, my sister made the call and together we bundled my mother into a cab and rushed to the hospital. I remember the eerie quiet of that waiting room, how my mother looked at me and said the last thing she would ever tell me: “Keep studying.”

Minutes later, she was taken by hospital staff to the ICU. I stood outside in the corridor while my sister handled all the necessary paperwork. Anxious and confused, I did what my mother would always tell me to do: “Pray to God.”

My mother was a Zoroastrian, but she believed in respecting every manifestation of divinity. She would take me to the fire temple she loved, but also to nearby Ganesh temples and even to churches during festivals. For her, God wasn’t confined to one place, it was all the same light, just different doors leading to it.

I prayed, “God, the day started really well, but I’m not happy with how things are going. Please make things right for me. I know you’re merciful and loving, so guide me and my mother through this.”

Then came the doctor. Then came the word that shattered my world and my belief in God in one breath: “Sorry.” While my sister broke into tears, I was in a state of disbelief. Just a year earlier, we had lost our father. Now, both parents were gone.

Every prayer I had whispered, every conversation I had had with God while the doctors worked on her, suddenly felt like a cruel joke. I wasn’t angry at life. I was angry at God. Deeply, fiercely, absolutely. How could He do this to a kid? For weeks, I felt like an empty shell. Schoolmates hovered around me with sympathy I didn’t want. Teachers softened their voices when I walked in. Everyone’s kindness somehow sharpened the loneliness.

The idea that God can be absolutely cruel germinated inside me, drowning out the faith I once had and every sympathetic voice trying to console me. That single question filled me with rage, and there were no answers yet. But pain doesn’t just sit quietly; it reshapes you, slowly, stubbornly.

Pain is like a song playing over and over until you break completely. Whether we want it or not, those scenes repetitively haunt our minds, making us feel guilty, tearing us into pieces, reminding us of every minor detail we overlooked.

With my final exams nearing, I realized I had to study because my mother had asked me to. So I temporarily channeled all my grief into topping my class and making her smile, wherever she was. After that mission was successfully accomplished, the loneliness returned. I stopped praying. I stopped visiting the fire temple, except once a year on my mother’s death anniversary. I removed everything religious from my life.

The following year, the grief in me only worsened. My focus scattered. I didn’t repeat my academic performance. And I felt guilty, like I had let her down. This only made the distance between me and God feel wider.

At this point, my faith was at its lowest ebb, and I had no idea where my life was going. I started college, though I had no clear idea why. I made no real friends.

So I did what I knew: I wandered alone. I walked seven or eight miles along Mumbai’s roads every evening. I sat beside Marine Drive for hours, listening to sad songs, staring at the city lights and the evening rush hour and the darkening water of the bay. I wasn’t searching for God. I wasn’t searching for anything. I just wanted to breathe, for a moment, without hurting. I wanted answers to my questions.

For two years, I went on like this. Sad songs, evenings at Marine Drive, watching the sun go down, watching the world go by – with no answers. It was just another evening at Marine Drive when I felt something.

I was sitting, watching the sun sink into the Arabian Sea, when near me, I heard someone weeping quietly. No, more than one person. Maybe these people were always there, but I never noticed them before.

I didn’t know their stories, but their pain was familiar. For the first time in years, I wasn’t angry. I wasn’t bitter. I was simply human.

My mind whispered, “Sharukh, everyone suffers. You’re not alone.”

And another voice countered, “But your pain is bigger. You lost everything.”

Then came the third voice, clearest of all: “How do you know their loss isn’t as great as yours?”

Seeing someone else cry shattered me again. The idea that maybe I’m not the only one carrying something unbearable arrived without warning.

I sat there for hours. The crash of the waves, the glow of the sunset, the hum of the city behind me – everything felt like a quiet conversation. That was the first crack in the wall I’d built around myself.

In subsequent visits to the promenade, I had more questions. This time, different ones. While I didn’t suddenly regain faith, I now wanted to know more about God. I was no longer numb, but curious. Is God the judge, jury, and executioner? Does he live in certain assigned places? Is he really impressed with all our rituals and rules? Or have we humans reduced something vast into what is convenient to us?

My mother had taught me her version of faith, but what was now growing inside me was something very different. My observations and experiences of the world around me started restoring my faith, but in a completely new way. I was meeting people who had their own challenges, some quite similar to mine. My heart was starting to learn empathy again. At this stage in life, I also stumbled into my first true friend.

With my faith restored, my concept of God changed too. He was no longer the one I had to impress with rituals, as my mother believed. For me, He was around. The wind on my face, the crashing waves, the tiny wildflowers that grow in the cracks of concrete all spoke of his presence. A divine presence, not an authoritarian personality. A light, not a law.

Years after her death, I finally walked back into the fire temple my mother loved and visited the most. Not out of obligation, not out of fear, but because something inside me felt ready.

There I said something I had never dared to say before: “I don’t know the prayers anymore. But I know you won’t judge me for that.” And for a moment, it felt like my mother was standing right next to me.

When I stepped out, I carried two feelings: peace, because the anger was gone; and a quiet sadness, because what I believed now was not what my mother had taught me. I had grown into a different kind of faith, shaped by loss, shaped by questions, shaped by long evenings at Marine Drive.

Looking back, I often think that if my mother were here, I might never have learned this. Her teachings would have held me, protected me, but they would not have stretched me. Losing her broke me into a thousand pieces, but it also rebuilt me, slowly, painfully, beautifully.

My faith is no longer the faith she knew. It’s the faith life shaped in me. And I think she would understand, wherever she is.