Tiny Tots Register for Classes as Others Petition the Lord with Prayers

By Jawahar Malhotra

LEMONT, IL: It was a overcast, drizzly Sunday last September 15, with just a slight chill in the air hinting that cold weather was around the corner, but the parking lot was busy with a steady stream of cars driving  around to the cul de sac in front of the classroom building. Tiny tots and little kids were running up the stairs and to classrooms, jostling for space at the desk, their proud and dutiful parents in tow, and to register for the Fall semester Hindi and religion classes.

Just up the stairs was the auditorium which had classes and lectures for adults; and beyond lay the Ganesh-Shiva-Durga Temple and the ornate entrance from the second cul de sac at the top of the hill. In the other direction, down one flight of stairs was the temple store selling religious artifacts and silk saris once draped (and so, blessed) on the deities and just beyond the dining hall, up three flights of stairs was the main entrance and the access to the Rama Temple, which is the largest in the complex.

Both temples had pujas being conducted by at least two priests, with bare bellies and a dhoti and sacred thread, who were reciting verses, tag team style, in rapid fire succession as the pious and dutiful party who had commissioned the rite sat crossed-legged on the carpeted floor. The amplified sounds of recitation reverberated through each temple, even as other people walked by each deity and paid their obeisance.

Off one side anteroom to the Rama Temple, in the Balaji temple, a small class of young adults sat on the floor around a teacher, in discussion. In the opposite anteroom to Radha Krishna, older adults on chairs listened to a discourse on the Gita by a learned teacher.

Down the stairs, the dining hall was packed with temple goers and their young kids who stayed for the South Indian food prepared in the kitchen one level below. A temple organizer spoke out loudly to explain that the opening of the new kitchen had been delayed due to the permit checker’s schedule but it would surely be open by the following weekend. Other organizer’s were proudly giving tours of the stainless steel kitchen with an epoxy floor and one mentioned that the next project would be an elevator to assist the elderly, like my 85 year-old mother, get up all the stairs to the temple above. “We are in the process of raising money for that now”, he smiled in explanation.

The Hindu Temple of Greater Chicago has evolved since it was first established in 1977 and continues to expand with newer structures like the yellow Swami Vivekananda Spiritual Center and next to it on the same hillock, a canopied statue of the great sage, modeled from a photograph of his taken at the World’s Parliament of Religions in 1893. It is the first statue of Vivekananda installed in a public place in the US. The large white rectangular cone of the Rama Temple soars up 100 feet in the Chola architectural style prevalent in South India. The smaller Shiva Temple is built in the Kalinga style.

The temple complex lies just two miles south of Interstate 55 west (that heads off to St. Louis, Missouri), down a long incline off the gently rolling hills that are so characteristic of this part of the Des Plaines River Valley, and about an hour’s drive from downtown Chicago.  A white, ornately Indian archway drapes the two lane entrance and a wrought iron gate that slides shut after hours. The Rama Temple at the top of the hill, behind a dense row of trees is hard to miss as it rises up along a sweeping curve in the main road.