SPECIAL REPORT: FROM FARAWAY LANDSReligion

Priest guides area’s faithful followers

By: Emily Craighead
   SOUTH BRUNSWICK — The mother goddess, Durga, sits majestically on the back of the lion she rode to the top of a mountain where, according to Hindu legend, she defeated an army of demons.
   From the far end of the great hall in the Durga Mandir Temple on Route 27, the goddess, represented by a marble statue clad in gold and pink robes with a glittering crown, gazes straight ahead with the hint of a smile in her eyes. At her feet, worshippers have left puja — flower offerings — and food.
   Ram Sharma, one of three priests at the temple, sits on a stool nearby. His wife sits on a stool a few feet away.
   He is 76 years old and became a priest after answering a classified advertisement in "India Abroad." He was living in New York City at the time.
   "This is my first job as a priest, and maybe my last," he says.
   The temple grew out of the Central Jersey Hindu Association’s desire to create a community center where members could teach their children about their religious and cultural values.
   Gatherings first took place in people’s homes, then at the Veterans of Foreign Wars hall in South Brunswick before the temple was built.
   Mr. Sharma says his dream is to found a Hindi-language periodical focusing on spirituality. During a nearly 40-year career in publishing, he worked for the Delhi Press and Bennett, Coleman & Co., publisher of The Times of India.
   Before moving to New Delhi in 1947, just before the partition of India and Pakistan, he lived in Lahore, which is now in Pakistan.
   "When I left, that side, it was still India," he says.
   Growing up, he studied divine texts in Sanskrit, which prepared him for the role he would assume much later in life.
   "Religion was always important," he says.
   Now, his life is punctuated by the rhythm of daily religious rituals at the temple.
   Each morning at 6 or 7, he leaves the trailer where he and his wife live to go into the temple. A fire last year left the house where two of the priests lived uninhabitable.
   He rings a bell to awaken the deities, and washes a smaller statue of the god made of precious metal.
   Then, with a red powder or paste, he places a tilak, a mark, on the statue’s forehead. The gods then receive offerings of food brought by worshippers. Finally, an Aarti ceremony is carried out to welcome the deity, with lamps waved gently in front of the image of the god.
   Throughout the day, worshippers, some clad in traditional Indian clothes and others in slacks and a jacket, come to the temple to pray and bring offerings.
   With Indian grocery stores in nearly every town in Central Jersey, obtaining Indian food or incense or other items used in religious ceremonies is not a problem.
   "Whatever we need for worship, we get easily," he says.
   He patiently explains Hindu traditions, pausing every once in a while to give parsad — food offered during the worship — to people leaving the temple.
   From beneath his tunic, he pulls three sacred threads representing his debt to man, the sages and the gods.
   Organized services at the temple, followed by a meal, take place on Sundays.
   Ram Sharma came to the United States relatively late in life, when he was in his late 60s. Three years after retiring from the publishing business, he came to join his son, who lives in Florida. He also has a son and two daughters who still live in India.
   He has lived in Florida and New York, and he came to New Jersey in 2000.
   He understands English well, but occasionally he cannot find the right word to express himself, or he asks his wife in Punjabi to help him recall a detail from his past.
   To be a priest, he says smiling, "English is not a must — but Sanskrit is."