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I am not a Sufi, but I follow the Sufi.

I had a Guru. He was a great saint and most merciful. I served him long - very, very long; still, he would not blow any mantra in my ears. I had a keen desire never to leave him but to stay with him and serve him and at all cost receive some instruction from him.

I was sort of born into a Subud cult that has ties to Islam and Indonesia and Middle Eastern spiritualism. My parents were kind of trial-and-error when it came to religion.

The concept of spiritual healing was something I was raised with.

My sister had some ailment and convulsions that she suffered from, and she had been sent to some place to go and get healed there. She was brought back and prayed for by those people. She recovered; in fact, she grew to be an evangelist in her own right, healing people and traveling around.

I'm a spiritual person. I'm not very religious. I was raised Catholic, but I am influenced a lot by Buddhism and Hinduism.

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.

I grew up in a religious community, and like everyone, I went through a period of doubt and later made a conscious choice to embrace the faith of my childhood.

My own faith was nurtured by my grandmother and her clinging deeply to her faith when she was dying a painful and slow death from cancer.