Discovering Christ and His Church in India

The woman whose story I am about to share, Annapurna, came from the highest varna… Annapurna came from a devout Hindu family. Her father, grandfather, and great-grandfathers for many generations were all Brahman priests. Her brothers were expected to follow in the family tradition, and she and her sister were expected to marry young men from their own varna, or social caste, who would qualify to become Brahman priests. Again, I am not expert on the practices of this religion, but, as she explained to me, she had spent much of her life memorizing and learning all the rituals and sacred prayers, or Vedas, that were a part of the practice of her religion. She said:

“I always felt like the many steps that had to be taken in order to reach deity were so complicated and took so long that I wished for an easier or better way. I yearned to access enlightenment, or what I know now as a loving Father in Heaven, more directly and immediately, but I didn’t know how and never shared my thoughts with anyone because I knew that kind of thinking was unacceptable in my family.”

When Annapurna was 17 her wonderful grandmother—the light of her life—died. Annapurna’s grief was immense. She told us:

I desperately wanted to see my daa-dee-ma again and was struggling with accepting that she was gone. Imagining her essence going on into another form just wasn’t comforting me. I kept feeling like my grandmother was near. I wanted to believe that I could talk to her as I had known her—my daa-dee-ma.

Annapurna yearned to pour out her heart in grief and find comfort or hope but had no one who understood the way she was feeling. Then she was befriended by a member of the Church. She discovered that Mormons pray every day, often several times a day, to a loving Father in Heaven. They don’t have to attend a shrine or travel to a far-distant temple and follow a series of long, specific Vedas, offerings, and steps to reach God. He is always there ready to listen and comfort. Annapurna wanted to know more about this way of praying. She began to pray like a Mormon prayed, and that was the beginning. She knew this was the answer she had been looking for all of her life. She studied the life of Jesus Christ, read the Book of Mormon, and was taught the gospel. She was baptized a couple of years later but did not know how to tell her family.

Now the story really gets interesting. Annapurna’s sister, whom I mentioned earlier, had attended school in another city, and they had been separated for a number of years. Like Annapurna, she had been devastated by their grandmother’s death. In a country where less than 3 percent of the population are Christian and in 2001 less than 5 percent of those Christians were LDS, the odds of two sisters meeting two different Mormons in two different cities within a month of each other are extremely low. But that is just what happened. Annapurna’s sister was drawn to the LDS belief that families are forever, that through Jesus Christ and His gift of resurrection she could not only see but also be with her grandmother again. Without the other sister knowing, each of them had been baptized within a short time of one another. I remember how Annapurna said that she told her sister, “I have to tell you something very important and I hope you will not hate me.” Her sister responded, “I have to tell you something and it may mean that we will never see each other again.” Each confessed at the same time: “I have been baptized into the Mormon Church.”

I met Annapurna only a few years after her baptism. She shared with me that most of her family ties had indeed been severed. She no longer had the privileges of the Brahman caste in her social life. Everything in her life had changed, but she was grateful to have found the truth of the gospel because of her lifelong desire and feeling that she could and should be able to communicate with God more directly. She discovered prayer.