Early on I saw the repression and idolatry of Stalinism, and when it cracked, I was open to religion again.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
My mother had been educated at a convent, and she had been converted to communism by my father during Stalin's most rampant period, at the beginning of the 1930s. So she had two gods, God in heaven and god on earth.
Stalinism is linked with a cult of personality and massive violations of the law, with repression and camps. There is nothing like that in Russia and, I hope, will never again be.
It was during my time at secondary school that I abandoned religion.
In the early '90s, I was disillusioned after the blasts and riots in Mumbai. I was in college and started thinking that religion was the root cause of all these evils. While my father told me not to blame religion because of a few bad people, I wasn't convinced. The faith was restored after I started writing my first book.
After much soul searching I was able to renounce my past Islamist ideology, challenging everything I was once prepared to die for.
For some years I deserted religion in favour of Marxism. The republic of goodness seemed more attainable than the Kingdom of God.
When I was young, I was religious.
I was part of a generation that believed in socialism and finally found that belief corroded and destroyed. That is not renouncing Communism or socialism. It's reaching a certain degree of enlightenment about what the Soviet Union practices.
I've been a little bit obsessed with religion, without being a religious person, for about a decade.
I was just then going through a healthy reaction from the orthodoxy of my youth; religion had become for me not so much a possession as an obsession, which I was trying to throw off, and this iconoclastic tale of an imaginary tribe was the result.