The Shibboleth

JUL 12, 2026

Dear Anu,

I am not a religious man. You know this about me. What you may not know is that in the decade before this April, I had not once walked into a temple willingly. So no one is more surprised than I am that I have spent every Saturday morning since April standing in a queue outside the Mukteshwar temple in Juhu, or that my week now feels incomplete without it. This letter is my attempt to explain what happened. It begins, as you already know, with you.

For the longest time, you and I were two acquaintances who shared a pilates class. Somewhere in the last two and a half years, that changed, and not only between us. The whole pilates family began to feel like an actual family. In the India Life Blueprint, I wrote a personal aside about exactly this: that a health community is not a directory of providers but a network of relationships built through consistent presence, and that the studio where you show up twice a week for a year will give you more than the one you visit ten times in six months. I was thinking of our pilates family when I wrote that, of how the people in that room have quietly become a significant part of my life. In other words, I was thinking of you. What I did not know was that the same law of consistent presence would turn out to govern faith.

Some of the credit goes to scheduling. You and I are the only two who show up to class ten minutes early, and those minutes before the others arrive have quietly become the place where we tell each other what is actually going on in our lives. So when you saw the distress on my face that day in April and asked, I told you. I was in the final homestretch of launching my coaching practice, the new beginning I had been building toward for years, when a bureaucratic demand arrived from a chapter of my life I had closed three years earlier. It was a useless exercise that wanted my money and my time in service of nothing I could understand, and it landed at the worst possible moment. It felt like plain bad luck, the kind that arrives uninvited precisely when something fragile is trying to form. It was weighing on me more than I had admitted to anyone else.

You did not give me advice. You made an offer. You said you would go to the Mukteshwar temple that Saturday and do the Shani Archana pooja for me. Then you told me something I had never known: you had been going every Saturday you could, for years, doing this pooja to protect your family. You knew exactly what you were offering a man like me, and you offered it anyway. My logic in saying yes was simple. If this helped my family by even 0.01%, there was no harm in it. Janvi and I had used the same logic when we let Neelu, who has fed our family for years, do the nazar utarna for our kids. Just last week, I came across a post by a writer named Shashank Sharma and felt he had put into words what I had been feeling all along: that nazar was never superstition, and that every culture built shields for the same reason, because new things are fragile and need shelter before exposure. “Even light, when focused too hard, can burn,” he wrote. Back in April, I could not have said it that well. I only knew I was starting something new, and I decided to guard it. So that Saturday in mid-April, I told you Janvi and I would come along.

We knew nothing that first Saturday. We had to ask a priest what to do. The ritual, it turns out, begins at a counter, where you buy a paper coupon, sixty rupees then, eighty now, with your name and your family's names handwritten on it. The coupon can carry any names you choose, which is how I have since stood in that line holding one for you and your family, and how you once stood in it holding one for ours, on a Saturday when my mother's health kept us at home. Then you join the queue meant for this pooja and hand the coupon to a man who gives you a basket of offerings: flowers, a coconut, a couple of bananas, and a small black potli, a cloth pouch holding the things sacred to Shani Dev: black sesame, black gram, an iron nail, camphor, and mustard seeds.

The priest calls ten or fifteen devotees at a time. He performs a short pooja and a shorter aarti, recites every name from every coupon, gives the offerings to Lord Shani, and sprinkles fragranced rose water into our cupped right hands. Then come the pradakshinas around Shani Dev, who at Mukteshwar faces all four directions: seven times clockwise, twice anticlockwise, with temple bells to ring at every corner. And at the back, a fire burns continuously in a furnace. You circle the potli around yourself from foot to head, letting it collect whatever has been clinging to you. You think about your loved ones, or the ones whose names are on your coupon, and circle the potli for them again. Then you dip it in the oil that Shani loves and give it to the fire. What the potli absorbed, the fire destroys. You carry the coconut and bananas home as prasad, which is the part my kids consider the entire point of religion.

Janvi felt the change first. She has always been more attuned to these things, and she came home from that first visit lighter, peaceful in a way I could see from across the room. She spent that whole weekend lifting my parents out of the gloom their health troubles had put them in. For me, nothing moved. The matter went on ruling my mind for another month while I worked hard to hide the stress from everyone, pouring myself into the practice instead. It eventually broke me. One Friday in early May, on the eve of recording the first episodes of the podcast that would accompany my practice, I broke down in a way I had not broken down in more than a decade, and for a frightening moment I questioned the state of my own mind. What broke me was not the fear of any outcome. It was the worry about the process of getting it all resolved, and watching what that worry was doing to me and to the people who count on me to do well and to live well.

The Saturdays kept their appointment, and the one that came a week later, May 16, was unlike any other. It was Shani Jayanti, the birth anniversary of Shani Dev, and it had fallen on a Saturday, Shani's own day of the week, and on the new moon, which made it a Shanishchari Amavasya. Vat Savitri Vrat fell on the same date. Devotees consider a convergence like that a once-in-many-years event, a day when prayers to Shani are said to carry a hundred times their usual weight. Half of Juhu seemed to know it. The queue stretched all the way past the entrance of Beach House, the society where my friend Gaurav lives, and I remember smiling at that. Gaurav has been the biggest pillar of support I have in Mumbai outside my immediate family, and here was the line to my newest source of support running right past his gate. I sent Janvi and the kids inside and joined the line alone.

I stood there for what felt like hours, drenched in sweat, in the traditional Indian clothes I almost never wear. I knew nobody around me. And I was at peace. The regulars were all there, patient as ever. Some had come with family or friends. For some, it was Saturday morning time with their office colleagues. Others had come straight from a run or the gym, and one man stood with his bodyguard, another with his driver. Whatever their weeks looked like, they all had this ritual, and every one of them was carrying the same quiet faith that this small act of belief would make their tomorrow slightly better than their today. I was happy simply to stand among people who wanted exactly what I wanted. It was not about my physical comfort that day, but my mental one, and for the first time in weeks, my mind was quiet.

When my turn finally came, Janvi and the kids were waiting inside, and the four of us performed the ritual together, our two tiny human beings doing it right alongside us. The visit was worth every minute of the queue. Something settled in me that morning, and it has not come loose since.

After that visit, my head was suddenly clear. I knew what needed to be done and which step to take first, and for the first time in weeks, I trusted myself to take it. I blocked the whole matter out of my mind and decided to flow with whatever came my way. I returned to my center, which has always been gratitude for what I have. It was as if I could finally see what those five or six Saturdays had quietly been building in me. We have gone every Saturday since, and the ritual has started travelling with us: the Saturday before last, it was the Pashupatinath temple in Kathmandu.

And yesterday, it grew again. We missed our usual morning visit, so I asked my friend Mohnish to come with me in the evening. You have not met him. He is a newer friend, and he has quickly become one of my standards for what a spiritual life looks like: ten days of silence at Vipassana, Everest Base Camp, a wife, Aanchal, devoted to Buddhist practice, and a lightness about all of it that I envy. He is a life member at ISKCON, right across the road from Mukteshwar, and visited both temples every Friday for years until new fatherhood interrupted the habit. Here is the funny part. Mohnish has been to Mukteshwar many more times than I have, but he had never done the Shani Archana and had not even known of it. So, at a temple he knew far better than I did, he followed my lead. We did the pooja for both our families and offered oil to Hanuman ji, Saturday being his day.

Then he asked if I would cross the road with him, and it was my turn to confess: in all these Saturdays, I had never once been inside ISKCON, never even properly seen the temple, though it is the famous landmark my humble queue sits across from. So, this time I followed his lead, a first-timer guided by a life member, and it was fantastic. We arrived just as the evening aarti began. It turned out to be Yogini Ekadashi, an auspicious day for removing suffering, and the temple was festive and raucous and somehow peaceful all at once. We did the darshan and the pradakshina, and he told me about his long association with the place, down to his parents sometimes staying in the rooms there. Afterwards, we sat in the verandah while families milled around us, women and men circling a tulsi plant, everyone in festive clothes, a rare breeze taking the edge off the July air. Neither of us spoke for a few minutes. That is when I knew I wanted to write this letter.

What I felt on that verandah finally had a name, and it came, of course, from television. Most people who know me know how much I love The West Wing. It has been my favorite show for more than two decades, and I have quoted it at people who never asked. It was also one of the quiet influences behind my decision to go to law school; a show full of idealists arguing all night about how to serve people made the law look like a calling. There is some irony in that. The career it nudged me toward is the same one whose leftover paperwork set this entire story in motion. And yet, sitting on that verandah, it was a West Wing scene that gave me the words for what these Saturdays have become.

‍ ‍The episode is called Shibboleth, and midway through it, President Bartlet explains the word to his staff. A shibboleth is an ancient password from the Bible, used at a river crossing to tell true members of the tribe from impostors, chosen because the enemy could not pronounce it correctly. The episode then stages the modern version of that test. A ship of Chinese refugees arrives on American shores seeking religious asylum, and Bartlet must determine whether their faith is real or rehearsed before he risks a standoff with China. He summons the leader of their house church, a chemistry professor, to the Oval Office and quizzes him. The professor names the disciples one after another without pausing, and then gently tells the President that his answers prove nothing, because belief is not demonstrated through a recitation of facts. What the President is looking for cannot be tested, only recognized. “Faith is the true shibboleth,” the professor says. Bartlet grants him everything on the strength of that one sentence, and then quietly moves heaven and earth for the people on that ship, because only a believer would have known that the facts were beside the point.

I think that is what I have been trying to tell you, Anu. I am still not religious. I could not recite the rituals or explain the theology of what we do on Saturdays. Religion is a vocabulary, and I speak it badly. But faith is a language underneath the vocabulary, and standing in that queue, I discovered I had been speaking it all along: faith that showing up matters, that small acts compound, that what is growing deserves guarding, and that tomorrow can be made slightly better than today. That is the language of everyone in that line. It is the password that let me in. If President Bartlet had quizzed me in that queue, I would have failed every question about ritual and scripture. I’d like to think he would have recognized the shibboleth anyway.

My parents, of course, speak both the vocabulary and the language, and always have. In their home, no new beginning starts without the gods. Every venture and every journey has always been placed at their feet before it was allowed to face the world. I recently dedicated my new practice to my mother in another letter. But I know it would please her and my father equally to learn that I have also, in my own roundabout way, offered it to the gods we grew up praying to. So consider this letter part of that offering. I am guarding what is growing, the way my parents always have, one Saturday at a time.

So, thank you, Anu. You saw a friend struggling and you offered what you had. You could not have known that on the other side of that offer I would find my calm again, along with a queue full of quiet believers who taught me what I actually believe. The practice I was guarding launched last week. The other practice, the Saturday one, continues. Both are yours in part now, and I will keep doing the pooja for your family on the weeks you cannot go.

It seems to be how this thing works: somebody stands in line for you until you can stand in it yourself.

With gratitude,

Rumit