[RF] Unanswered Prayers — a story I wrote when I started questioning God

I wrote a short story some time ago and I’ve been thinking about sharing it for a while. It’s about faith, karma, suffering, and a boy who slowly begins to question everything he was taught to believe.

The story revolves around a boy named Abhi and his grandmother. After Abhi’s parents die, she is the one who raises him. She is deeply religious — the kind of person who fasts regularly, prays every day, and genuinely believes that God is always watching over everyone.

One day they decide to go to a temple together. The temple is a little far from the road, so they have to walk some distance to reach it. While walking, his grandmother tells him she is fasting that day and will only eat after seeing God.

Abhi gets worried. He tells her she should focus on her health first because she already has health problems. But she just smiles and says God will take care of her.

On the way she asks about his college. One of his lecturers had called her earlier and complained that Abhi had been skipping classes.

Abhi explains that the classes feel meaningless to him — most lecturers just ask students to memorize textbooks instead of actually teaching anything useful.

While they’re talking they reach the temple gate. Outside the temple there are two beggars sitting near the entrance. Abhi overhears them talking. One of them asks why God gave them such a miserable life and what they did to deserve it. The other beggar replies that it must be punishment for sins committed in their past lives — karma.

That small conversation stays in Abhi’s mind. Inside the temple his grandmother prays with complete devotion. Abhi just stands there quietly. He doesn’t pray.

After the prayer they sit on a bench inside the temple compound.

His grandmother eventually asks him what his problem with God is.

Abhi tells her honestly that he doesn’t think there is anyone called God in this universe. She is shocked and tells him that God created humans and watches them from above.

Abhi then asks her something that has always bothered him. If God really exists, why are some people born rich while others are born poor? Why couldn’t everyone be equal? Just outside the temple there are beggars struggling to survive, while rich people come inside and donate huge amounts of money.

His grandmother replies with what she strongly believes — karma. According to her, God writes everyone’s fate based on the sins and actions from their past lives.

But Abhi can’t accept that explanation. He asks what the point of punishing someone in this life for something they supposedly did in another life is. To him it feels like punishing a ten-year-old child for something the child did when they were one year old.

The conversation slowly turns into an argument. At one point Abhi asks something that deeply hurts her. He asks why God made her suffer too. She is one of the most religious people he knows, yet she lost her son and daughter-in-law and had to struggle alone to raise him.

The grandmother gets furious and slaps him. Both of them are emotional after that moment. Abhi has tears in his eyes. She has tears too. Still angry and frustrated, Abhi continues questioning. He talks about tragedies he has seen in the news — children dying from food poisoning, girls forced into marriages, brutal crimes against women.

He asks what kind of sins those victims could possibly have committed in a past life to deserve such suffering. For a moment his grandmother has no answer. Maybe she truly believes he simply cannot understand.

Abhi finally tells her not to blindly believe everything people say about God and karma. Then he leaves the temple and goes home. A few days later, still disturbed by that argument, Abhi leaves for a short trip with his friend Bhargav just to clear his mind. He leaves only a small note at home.

But when he returns two days later, he learns something devastating. His grandmother had suffered a paralytic stroke and was taken to the hospital. When he rushes there, the doctor tells him she is paralyzed and will need constant care. Abhi is completely shattered with guilt. He tries to take care of her, but within a few days she passes away.

Her death breaks him. One day, struggling with grief and anger, Abhi goes back to the same temple where they had that argument.

A beggar approaches him asking for money. Irritated and bitter, Abhi tells him to ask God instead.

Nearby he notices the temple priest sitting under a tree with several framed pictures of gods beside him. It almost looks like he has been removed from the temple itself.

The priest tries to talk to Abhi about faith. But by this point Abhi is completely disillusioned. All his anger and pain explode at once. He grabs the framed pictures of the gods and smashes them onto the ground.

Then he takes a flower garland and places it around his own neck, sitting where the gods’ pictures were kept. At that exact moment a small boy comes there to pray.

Abhi tells the boy that those pictures are not God — he himself is God.

The boy is confused and says gods only exist in pictures.

Abhi walks away for a moment and returns with a mirror.

He gives it to the boy and asks him to look. The boy says he can only see himself. Abhi smiles and tells him that exactly. “You are God for yourself. And I am God for myself.”

The idea behind the ending is simple: maybe humans created the idea of God to make sense of the world. And maybe the only real “god” we have is our own mind, our actions, and our responsibility toward others.

I actually tried to turn this story into a short film titled “Unanswered Prayers.” My friends and I shot it for three days using a Nothing Phone (2). We were just experimenting and trying to bring the story to life with whatever resources we had.

Interestingly, the final confrontation with the priest was not originally in the script. It happened spontaneously while shooting. The man who played the priest was actually someone who had left his family and was staying in that temple area in real life. While talking to him we felt his presence naturally fit the story, so we added that scene on the spot.

But after finishing the shoot, the friend who acted as Abhi felt that releasing the film might put us in a difficult or controversial situation because of the themes. On top of that, the technical quality we achieved was honestly not great.

So in the end, we decided not to release it. Still, the story stayed with me. And I just wanted to share it somewhere.