That story had taken me by surprise when I first heard it. My father was not a religious person. I had never known him to set foot in a church, let alone in an ashram. He’d hated his own father, who’d been a Methodist minister, and it was impossible to imagine my father praying to anyone. He was not a joiner or a meditator or someone you could imagine chanting or swaying or doing whatever they did in an ashram in India. He was a man of the physical world. As long as I could remember, he had worked for himself as a carpenter and as a builder, and, more generally, as a handyman, though no one taught him how to do any of it. He had taught himself, and he was good at it. He built things to last. If anything, he over-engineered them, as if he was afraid they would fall apart as soon as he turned his back. He did not trust that things would stay together. He did not trust authority, either. He hated authority. He swore at the television every time a politician opened their mouth to speak. He had strong hands, and tattoos of skulls on his arms. He liked to gamble and to drink and to win against the odds, even if it meant cheating, and, on more than one occasion, I’d seen him threaten to smash someone’s face in with a hammer. And if you were to ask me what sort of father he had been, I would say that he was a good one, that he’d loved us, though I also know that I was terrified of him, that he had a rage we all feared, and that he was a troubled person, with a loneliness that could not be cured.

Above all, my father had seemed extraordinarily happy in that photo, and this, too, did not fit any idea I had of him. He was smiling in a way that I’d never seen him smile in real life. I’d never seen anyone smile like that. Much more than the robes or the hair, it was that smile that made the image strange: my father’s extraordinary happiness.

But what had happened to that photo? We’d lost track of it in the weeks after he died, amid the numb chaos of funeral arrangements and police interviews. It had been too strange to even contemplate. I pushed it away and forgot about it. Suddenly, more than twenty years later, it had returned.

It took me a second to realise that I was the one who was whispering out loud. The images beside the altar changed again. My old friend was standing somewhere else now. The slideshow repeated itself. What are these moments? I kept thinking to myself. The priest was still speaking, but people were turning to look at me. What are these images? Can religion ever approach them?