So Sweet a Changeling: A Novel of the Terribly Acronymed Detective Club (Book 6)

Chapter Fourteen: Sunny, Wednesday

Sunny hadn't attended the funeral for a Catholic before, and hadn't known that the funeral rite, just like the marriage rite (and in some cases the baptisms of adults, Joe later told him) was tucked within the confines of the mass, and that everything that normally happened in a mass, including readings from the Bible, the sermon and, most importantly, the rite of Holy Communion, still happened, even if half the congregation was weeping. There was a dignity about the service, something reassuring in the fact that, though someone had died, nothing got in the way of the rest of the congregation worshipping and being in communion with their creator. 

The Communion rite, where everyone went up to the priest and received their wafer (and sometimes drank wine from a chalice, Joe later told him, but not today), reminded him, at least symbolically, of langar in his own faith. In both cases, congregants ate and were nourished as a community, and in both cases they partook regardless of what they were celebrating, be it wedding, funeral or, in Sikhism, Amrit Sanskar, the initiation rite where Sunny had taken on his five Ks, the name Singh, and drunk the sweet nectar, or Amrit, a ceremony often called a baptism but not quite the same. 

The difference between Communion and langar lay in how the congregants were nourished; in the Catholic faith, the nourishment was spiritual, the actual eating of a god (which he still found rather cannibalistic), whereas in his, the nourishment was very physical, the spiritual nourishment provided by the words of the Guru Granth Sahib alone.   

Thinking of Amrit Sanskar reminded Sunny that he'd broken the vows he'd made when he'd become Amritdhari; or, to be fair, one vow, but it was a doozy: to refrain from adultery. He'd broken it twice or, more accurately, with two different women (more than once with each), and he wasn't sure what he should do about it. Technically he wasn't Amritdhari anymore, and to be considered one he had to be reinitiated. He'd done it once, back in 1985, when he'd broken the vow to refrain from cutting his hair and beard following the Air India bombing, and that time he'd been in mourning for his faith; it had taken Tej's gentle, loving encouragement to convince him to return to the fold, grow his hair back and be reinitiated.

Of course, to be reinitiated he'd have to announce why he needed to be reinitiated, and that would mean having to admit what he'd done, at least to his family, his parents and children. It had been easy enough back then, not so much now. A crisis of faith, in his mind, anyway, seemed less unseemly than the fact that he'd had sex with two friends on whom he'd had crushes for years, and that he didn't feel sorry about it at all; on the contrary, having the sexual attention of Rachel and Lauren made him feel like he could fly. The prospect of admitting this to his family, however, filled him with cold, clammy dread. 

Of course, Tej knew all about it, so no worries about telling her; she'd participated in her own acts of adultery with an unnerving amount of enthusiasm and, ironically, because she wasn't Amritdhari, no reinitiation was needed, and thus no admission she'd done anything wrong. She could happily keep boinking Joe and never have to feel bad about it, as long as Lauren kept allowing it, and it seemed she fully intended on doing so.

It was probably best not to be thinking about what he'd gotten up to with Joe's wife (her enthusiasm for trying different positions was her best attribute in bed), or imagining what his wife got up to with Joe, while Joe was up at the front of the church, most likely not thinking at all about Sunny's wife, in mourning as he was. He couldn't help it, though; everybody in the LSDC was entering a new relationship paradigm, a perilous one, where it was so easy for one of them to fall into a pit of jealousy and obsession. The only reason this was working at all, he thought, was because the original five members were all married, as was the first new member. Three couples, all secure in the family and home life of their coupledom, willing to take on new sexual partners from among the other two couples only because they felt secure enough to return home at the end of the day and not need to worry about recrimination, because they all played by the same rules. It only worked because they all liked and trusted each other.