I don’t believe in much. But when I do, it’s only after it's delivered. Love, because I’m with someone who makes life seem a little less absurd. Science, because it keeps the world turning, keeps us breathing. Religion? No – it’s never done much for me. I’m not one for blind faith. I’ve always preferred the kind of belief that comes with a receipt.

“Why” is my best friend— always there, nudging me to probe, to seek out the rationale behind every conviction.

So you can imagine my surprise when I was wandering through faith healing sites in India. These places were as far from my comfort zone as I could get.

But it wasn’t until I found myself at the Nischintapur Kabibabar Mandir that I really started to question the nature of belief—what I believed, how I believed, and why.

They asked me to perform the rituals, just like everyone else. Stand in line, pray to Goddess Kali, tell the baba (healer) what was ailing me, and then follow his instructions. This sent my mind reeling – What if this harms me? What if it’s all nonsense? My head spun with “what ifs,” and in that moment, I felt more like an outsider than ever, surrounded by people with unwavering belief.

It’s strange, because belief had never been something I questioned in the past—at least not in the same way. It took time for me to understand that my disbelief (in faith healing) too was just another form of belief.

I remember when I first went to college – it was almost fashionable to have a diagnosis. Depression and anxiety were proof that you had a mind deep and dark enough to need pharmaceuticals to keep the demons at bay.

It wasn’t until much later that I realized that this belief too came with its own paradoxes. We wore our diagnoses openly, but there was still an unspoken rule: if you were really struggling, you kept quiet. We talked about mental health constantly, we shared memes and reels. But the minute it got real, we shut up.

That’s what struck me the most when I visited these faith healing sites—the openness. People here spoke about their symptoms, their struggles, with a kind of ease that I hadn’t encountered before. There was no shame, no stigma. They weren’t interested in diagnoses or labels; they just wanted to get better. They didn’t care whether their healer wore a white coat or a tattered robe, as long as they could sleep at night without being haunted by demons, real or imagined.

Sunita Saini’s story stayed with me long after I left the Mehandipur Balaji temple. You’ve read about her in the earlier parts of this series. She believed a spirit had taken control of her life, and the only way to get it out was to bang her head against the wall. I listened to her with the same skepticism I reserve for ghost stories, but there was something in her eyes that made me pause. This was survival.

There was a time when I might have dismissed all of this as superstition, pure and simple. But after talking to the people there, I realized that they weren’t choosing faith healing over science—they were choosing it because science had nothing left to offer them. They had tried the pills, the therapy, the endless doctor’s visits. And when that didn’t work, they turned to something rooted in a different kind of logic.

Skepticism was my starting point, the armor I wore as I entered temples where people sought the miraculous because the ordinary had failed them. It was easy, almost reflexive, to doubt.

Disbelief came next. Disbelief is what happens when the stories you hear begin to conflict with the neatly organized world in your head. I didn’t expect to be moved by Sunita’s desperation or to feel a pang of empathy for Uma Shankar Mishra, who had spent thirty years battling spirits with no relief from modern medicine. Disbelief is where you start to see the cracks in your own certainty, where the things you thought impossible start to demand your attention.

Curiosity followed. It’s the stage where you stop just listening and start asking questions. What if? What if these people, who have been through so much, have found something real in their rituals and prayers? I found myself wondering about Shakuntala Devi, who, after exhausting every possible medical option, found herself here, seeking solace in rituals that had no place in my world of logic. Curiosity is dangerous because it means opening up to the possibility that maybe, just maybe, there’s more to the world than what we can measure or quantify.

Resistance was inevitable. The rational part of me pushed back hard. How could I, someone who prides herself on logic and reason, entertain the idea that banging yourself against a wall could drive out a spirit? Resistance is the last line of defense, the stage where you cling to what you know because the alternative is too unsettling.

Engagement was the turning point. This is when you stop being a detached observer and start engaging with the people and their stories. It’s when I sat with Shakuntala Devi, listening to her daughter recount how doctors had found nothing wrong, and yet here she was. Engagement is where belief becomes less abstract and more tangible.

Reckoning was the hardest stage, the one where I had to confront the fact that my neatly ordered world didn’t have all the answers. Reckoning is realizing that for someone like Uma Shankar Mishra, it doesn’t matter whether science can explain his suffering—what matters is that he’s found something that eases it. Reckoning is where you come face-to-face with the limits of your own understanding, where you have to admit that your skepticism isn’t as airtight as you thought.

Integration is where I find myself now. Integration isn’t about becoming a believer. Rather, it’s about making space for the things you can’t explain, about accepting that belief and reason aren’t always at odds.

He is particularly worried about how this affects children, pointing out that normal behaviors often seen in kids are being labeled as medical conditions.

"We have wild overdiagnosis in attention deficit disorder and autism," he has pointed out.

According to Frances, “their immaturity is being turned into a disease, and kids are being treated with medication for basically just their immaturity.”

(This is the last part of a four-part series on faith healing in India. To read parts one, two and three click here, here and here.)