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Little Miracles

I have found it difficult, even impossible, to rationalise the presence of God. Definitely a more intelligent being than us existed and he or she or it created us and everything around us. However, he was in my opinion more likely to be a casual programmer who created this random simulation that we called the world than an all benevolent person watching over us and judging us on our thoughts and deeds. 

Though ever now and then, I have come across stories that seem to corroborate him as a benevolent and all powerful. In Born a Crime by Trevor Noah, he speaks about how his devout mother had a gun placed against her head by an abusive ex husband and how after one shot it failed to shoot despite multiple tries (she survived eventually). Even a liberal like him admitted that it was a miracle  

Mine was much smaller in scale and impact and perhaps it was just a coincidence. On my recent visit to India, my wife had gone to her hometown in Kannur while I stayed in mine after the wedding of a cousin. I was to join her in a few days when she messaged me if I was holding onto her passport. I remembered seeing an Indian passport in my file, so it came as a bit of a surprise when my mum told me the passport was hers when we were about to depart for Kannur. I assumed my wife's passport was probably then still with her.

However on reaching Kannur, that appeared not to be the case. My wife swore she had given me the passport and naturally I had lost it, a thesis that was not helped by the fact she had watched a movie on the way to India that had a case of a missing passport too. What followed was a lot of futile searching and re-searching in the baggages we had brought over that ended with the conclusion that I had dropped her passport back in my hometown and would have to go back and check, which was not a straightforward task given my hometown was almost 8 hours away by car. My wife obviously did not give me an easy night.

The following day, my family decided to head to a famous temple in Kannur called the Mridanga Saileswari Temple. The temple had been made famous by a social media post by a former police officer who claimed that the rather expensive sculpture of the diety inside could never be stolen. The story (or legend) went that when thieves stole the sculpture on multiple occassions, they ended up experiencing hallucinations and lost a sense of where they were going that they would eventually drop it and flee. 

My father had told me this legend and that due to these stories, the temple committe did not even bother to have security around the temple. This though was not the case as I saw a bored looking police officer near the entrance. However, just when we were about to enter the temple, my mother was searching for some money to conduct a pooja at the temple when my wife also reached out into her handbag which she searched for the passport the rpevious night. And voila, out came the passport, right at the entrance of the temple.

Coincidence? Probably. Personally, I found it more than coincidence that it had to happen just at the temple's door. Almost felt like there was someone looking down on us and having a little laugh.

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