The day after we returned from Congo in the summer of 1986, I asked Daddy about the statue I saw in the corridor. He requested me to fetch my siblings. My 5-year-old younger brother trotted, his little mouth sticky with Quaker oatmeal, while slender my ten-year-old older sister followed with long strides. Toast smell filled up the space.

Sitting on the old brown leather couch, I slipped my hand into the tear in the seat under my leg and played with the soft padding.

As the sunlight warmed up the living room’s worn-out off-white wallpaper, Daddy explained that the statue represented Buddha, a religious leader. It was like the Pope, but a long time before. During the summer break, Dad went to Germany with his spiritual leader to finalize a transformative journey he’d started five years before.

Father had been raised in Christianity. His beloved, devout-Protestant grandmother reared him from the age of five after his father died and then his mother got sick.

My paternal great-grandmother was a powerful clan traditional healer who’d given up her practice to comply with Christianity under the pressure of Swedish missionaries during colonial times. “The invisible spirits’ worlds are the devil’s deeds!” the priests had told her. So were any activities unrelated to attempts to serve Jesus Christ, the only soul savior. Consequently, she banned my father from any form of entertainment and sports. His life would have been limited to school, house, and church chores if he hadn’t been mischievous.

When Dad’s protestant grandmother became too old to care for him and even later lost her sight, my father moved in with a reluctant Catholic uncle who accepted the burden out of tradition. As the two adults held to their rigid faith, clashing with each other, the child became the innocent victim of the family’s troubles, echoing Northern Ireland’s fifties.

The orphan received a roof and food most of the time. Meanwhile, the rest of the family scraped their pockets to pay for his expenses when possible. He got caught between the two adults’ faith disagreement until he left for France and Christianity with my great-grandmother’s blessing.

Indeed, the day she miraculously recovered the sight she had lost due to an undiagnosable disease, years before my father left, she acknowledged the argument made her blind. She told Dad, “Now I see; it doesn’t matter what religion we follow. Only our good hearts count. Be whatever you want to be.”

Father never understood why a man’s self-sacrifice, which had happened in a faraway country long ago, became his problem today in Congo. “I never asked that guy to do that: his decision, his problem,” Dad said. Relieved from his forced commitment to Jesus, Dad went on his search for spirituality, from Buddhism to Zen meditation and other Eastern spiritual trends introduced in Europe with the seventies’ hippy movement. Eventually, he found his way to Kundalini yoga, energy yoga, and Sikhism.

“Sikishm’s mindset reminded me of the Kongo philosophy,” Dad said. It has a likeness to Kimuntu, the Kongo notion of humanity togetherness. It’s also close to Animism belief that animals, plants, and places have spirits too.”

 In Sikhism, God was like Kongo God, Nzambe. Besides, both believed in “reincarnation,” another life on earth after death. An indescribable sheer wetted his eyes as Dad’s voice shivered, “So when the Bakongo die, they live with us again. They live in you and me, no matter where fate cared them away.” I replied I didn’t understand. “You will grasp it when you grow up,” he said. Thus, I wanted to grow up even faster. Meanwhile, I absorbed all the knowledge Father wanted to give me to navigate the confusing reality around me called “society.”

When I turned three, Daddy explained to us he was vegetarian – he wouldn’t eat meat anymore to avoid hurting animals, and he stopped drinking alcohol. Staying away from the body and mind toxicity like anger, greed, and envy kept the mind clear. “So, we can make good decisions with the third eye, the eye we look at when we die,” he said. It was the gate to insight, enlightenment, higher consciousness, and God, meaning a divine, profound. He explained, “It’s prejudice-free knowledge.” I knew prejuidice was when like schoolmates mocked my dark skin color and didn’t want to play with me.

After returning from Germany, Father informed us he wouldn’t beat us anymore to discipline us, preferring to talk things through. All sentient beings were connected and deserved respect. “Hurting one is hurting all,” he said, “even in the invisible reality. Words are as powerful as fists.” From that, I believed that even not respecting food or objects could hurt the humans who made them because those people put their time into them through the indelible connection between the visible and invisible worlds, as Kongo elder Coco I met in Congo, and my Sikh Father believed.

Daddy’s trip was the final stage of his conversion; his name, “David Bonga Bouna,” would now be followed by Sat Kartar Singh. His name was difficult to translate into French because Sanskrit was contextual, like Kikongo, our ancestors’ language.

Sometimes, I didn’t grasp Dad’s teachings. I liked it when Dad explained life with simpler words. He said, “Understanding context is like seeing the full picture. It’s like seeing a dot, zooming out, and realizing it is only part of a drawing. People who don’t understand context see dots, those who draw. And we need to understand the context of all my names to understand who I am. We need to see the drawing.” As I nodded, he squinted as he tested me and added, “And the entire picture with the dots, the background, the subject, the color, and the design makes a reality.” I wasn’t sure I grasped his last words.

Still, I understood that for the Indian part, his spiritual leader named him Sat because it meant absolute truth, reality. Then, the guru added Kartar, meaning universe, because Daddy could see clearly. Kartar meant Master of all creation. “It’s because I create my life path outside people’s ill-minded influences,” Dad said. And Singh meant lion. It was a traditional Sikh male name. It symbolizes courage, confidence, power in challenging times, and unity in the community. Daddy said, “The Master gave me all those names because I was meant to return to the truth, to myself, after an enduring journey.”

Father added, “It’s funny. When I was a child back in Congo, I told my family that I wasn’t from there. I came from a country far away, over the seas, from India. I even didn’t know what that meant, then.”

Daddy started wearing a necklace with a sword pendant, a “Kirpan,” to honor compassion. He was now a holy soldier, defending the oppressed, whatever their religion, caste, or creed. The turban he donned protected his long, sacred hair and helped the persecuted to identify him in case they needed his protection. His “Kara” iron bracelet reminded him of the permanent bond with God. He told us he preferred wearing loose white clothes for modesty and wore a “Kachera,” an undergarment symbolizing self-respect.

Sikhism was more than a religion; it was a “philosophy.” It meant love of wisdom in Greek. Daddy clarified a mindset translated into a way of life, attitude, and behavior. All religions have a philosophy.

Since I wasn’t obliged to practice the Sikh religious rituals, I told him I wanted to follow the Sikh philosophy because it seemed to help me be kind. Moreover, kindness was good Karma, Dad said, clarifying that each action put in the world influences the future, and present fortunes and misfortunes could be an effect of past actions. “That happens in the invisible reality where everything is one,” he said. His confusing words sounded like Coco’s, the elderly woman I met in Congo.

Dad also taught me about India’s rich religious culture. With almost 400 languages shared amongst more than thousands of ethnic groups, India was one of the most diverse countries in the world. It welcomed Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and other religions with peace and sometimes wars for millennia.
When Father referred to India and the Indians, Father often meant Sikhism and the other Dharmic religions. Buddhism was the middle way, avoiding the extremes. Jainism was the path of non-violence and respect for all forms of lives, “even the gnats,” Dad said.

Besides, 4,000-year-old Hinduism birthed all the Dharmic religions. It was one of the oldest world religions. It had castes, unlike Sikhism. The origin of castes had different stories. Dad believed that the Aryans invaded Northern India from Central Asia with this system to control the population. Then, the most powerful men used the Vedas, the religious text, to justify this injustice. Castes were originally a flexible system: a king could become a beggar, and a beggar king could become a poor king. When Britain colonized India, as France colonized Congo, it fixed reality according to its needs to facilitate the colonial administration and the country’s exploitation. “When Europeans decided what reality was, it became humanity’s reality. And the Indians benefiting from this unfair system have kept it until today,” Dad said.

Likewise, Indian religious misinterpretations and British colonization lead to women’s submission in India. Dad stressed Sikhism provided equal treatment to women and men. They were one light in two bodies when a man and woman united. “The Kongo people have the same concept. It’s called Fu-kiau, the divine completeness of the being,” Father said. Unlike many Indian girls, I never felt treated differently by my Sikh Kongo father, maybe because of our ancestral matriarchal traditions.

India had the oldest democracy recorded in Sanskrit in Rig Veda, the oldest book in the world, dating between 1500 and 1200 BCE when Europe was in its self-described prehistoric age. Dad emphasized that along with 5000 years-old Tamil, 3500 years-old Sanskrit was the oldest spoken language in the world. It was known as “the mother of all languages.” Indeed, according to Western linguists, Sanskrit birthed many languages, including European ones.

Daddy said, “Sanskrit and the Vedas, the sacred texts, are complex. We need all the invisible information related to a word or text to understand them. It’s called context. It’s the picture’s background, while only the dots are the facts. In the Dharmic culture, context is as important as the facts, like in the Kongo one.”

Meanwhile, Europeans focused on the dots that interest them and often overlooked context. It was how they harmed most humankind during colonization: they destroyed many contexts. Dad added, “They have been forcing their culture, one technology after the other, to help humanity and forget the environmental impact. Now Earth is becoming less livable.”

My mind blew away. Indeed, we didn’t learn all those key facts about India at school. TV often portrayed it as a so-called underdeveloped country. To the Western media, India was a backward place with simple-minded people and an inferior culture to the superior Western one, as they did with Africa.

These were the secrets I wanted my parents to unveil to let me understand reality design, as Father said. Even if my 8-year-old mind felt confused because the reality gap between the mass media and Western narratives feeding my schoolmates and me widened, the world became clearer at each precious drop. I liked it when Dad connected the dots, the facts, and the background. It was a complete picture with context, as he said. A satisfied bulb turned on: I wanted to know more.

(To be continued…)