My children used to ask me who our god was, and I could never answer them.

I went looking, and what I found was that the oldest Hindu text says nobody knows. The Nasadiya Sukta, the Hymn of Creation in the Rig Veda, says that before the cosmos there was neither existence nor non-existence — and that the gods came after, so not even they can say how it began. Then I found something stranger. Sanskrit, the language built to carry all this, has no word for God. Not a missing word. The idea is simply not there.

So why do a billion of us light lamps to deities? That question took me through the Vedas, through Sanskrit, through a thousand years of invasion and conversion, through a British census that fixed us into castes and handed the boxes back as though they had always been ours — and, unexpectedly, through the Native Nations of the land I now live on, whose loss showed me my own.

This is what I found. It is not a devotional book and it is not an academic one. It is one Hindu working out what she was handed and what it cost to hand it to her.

In this book:— Why the oldest Hindu text says even the gods cannot know how creation began— Why Sanskrit has no word for God, and what our ancestors concluded instead— What the Vedas share with modern physics, and where that comparison stops— What was done to Hindus over a thousand years, told through the people who witnessed it— Where caste actually came from, and why it is ours to correct— How Vedic ideas are being repackaged and sold back to us today

You were given the festivals and not the physics.