In the Langar hall, the free community kitchen of a Gurdwara (Sikh place of worship) in Southall, Ram Kaur saw everyone sitting the same and eating the same meal. Then she saw where the pots and pans were being washed, and she came to her own conclusion about the people doing it.
“I thought actually it must be a job that people do,” she says, “and they come there and then have to go at a certain time and arrive at a certain time. Employed.”
She was in her late 20s, and this Gurdwara on Park Avenue was the first she had ever been to. She had found out that Langar was for everyone. How the rest of it ran, she says, she did not know.
For years before that, she had thought there was no God.
Years on an atheist path
She was born in northeast London, the middle child of five, and grew up on a council estate. Her father is from St Lucia and her mother from Jamaica. He went back when she was one or two, and her mother raised the children on her own.
There was church on Sundays, with a Sunday school, but over the years it became occasional and then they stopped going. She missed some of her schooling. She calls it “quite a hard upbringing”.
“I don’t really have that belief in God,” she remembers thinking as she grew up. “I think there is no God.”
She stayed “on an atheist path” for years. She worked in supermarkets and did cleaning, to make ends meet and so that she was not relying on her mother or anyone else.
Then one day in her 20s someone told her that deep down she did believe. They pointed to the miles she rode on her bike and the times she came back on her own by bus or train, and asked her to think about who had been making sure she reached home safe.
“There’s got to be that bigger, stronger force,” she says. “But where and how was unknown. How to connect was unknown.”
So she did her research, visiting a Church of England church, a Catholic church, a Methodist church and an American church in central London. Everybody was friendly, she says. She did not feel a connection, though, and she stopped going. “I didn’t feel, oh, I’m home now.”
She read about different faiths in libraries and visited Hindu temples, where she was welcomed in. As she tells it, she did not feel at home there either.
A quiet late morning in Southall
She had seen Sikhs out and about and had never stopped one to ask about their faith. She did her own reading instead, on websites and in library books. “You go in, you take your shoes off, wash your hands, you cover your head, the basic stuff,” she says of what she found out. She also found that “everyone’s welcome in there, no matter where they’re from”.
She was working in Southall when she went. It was a quiet late morning, she says, with few people there because most would have been at work. She washed her hands and covered her head, went into the hall and sat down at the back.
She could not understand what was being said. “It was just emotional,” she says.
“It’s like you found home now,” she goes on. “You found home now. It’s like it’s fine now, child. You’re safe now.”
She still could not follow what was going on, and she wanted to stay sitting there and not move. “I can’t get off from here,” she says of that feeling. “I need to stay there.”
“I have to go back the next day and the next day,” she told herself. “And if I go twice a day, when I finish, I’ll go again. I need to be there.”
Where the plates are emptied
She kept up her research, and that is how she learned what she had been watching in the Langar hall. It was Seva (selfless service), in which, as she puts it, “you don’t look for any reward”.
“I said to myself, you know what, I want to try that,” she says. “I’m going to go help. I’m going to go see what I can do.”
On a different day she went. Everyone was welcoming, she says, and she decided for herself which job she would do: emptying the waste from the plates.
As I was scraping that out, I felt like I was cleaning my heart, cleaning everything.
She went back to do it “all the time”.
By her own account she still could not understand anything. On the notice board she saw Punjabi classes advertised for children, and wondered whether an adult would be let in. She went and asked, and the aunties, as she calls them, told her that if she wanted to come and learn, she could. That was many years ago, she adds, and things have changed since for safety reasons, with adults and children now taught separately.
She brought an exercise book, “the one with the lines in it”, and sat with the small children to learn from the beginning. “No one treated me any different,” she says.
The letters had to sit on the line, and she practised to make sure each one did. “I was struggling at first. I’m not going to lie,” she says. Over time she began helping out there as well.
She took Amrit (Sikh initiation) in November 2008, at Park Avenue. When she saw a date for it in Southall, she says, “my eyes were just watering with joy and excitement”. On the day she saw her past go quickly in front of her, from growing up on the estate and missing school to the jobs she had worked.
She is in her 40s now and has since moved away from Southall. She works part time in a nursery. Her twins go to Punjabi classes, and on Sundays she helps the two main teachers there.
She had taken the washing up for a job, with a time to arrive and a time to go. Scraping the plates, she says, the feeling she got was this: “Wow, really, I have found home. Really, I have, and this is it.”
To hear her tell it, from the estate in northeast London to the day she took Amrit: Watch Ram’s full conversation
This article is drawn from Ram Kaur's conversation on Finding Sikhi. Quotations are Ram's own words, lightly tidied for reading.
