When they first moved into Essex from North London in the 1970s, Dhirajlal Karia, an electronics engineer from Uganda and his pretty teacher-wife Sushila from India, faced one major problem in an otherwise lovely seaside country. It would take 90-mile round trip to the nearest temple in London and the pious Hindu family was often miserable when unable to ‘reach God’. Like the typical Indian story of God delivering salvation in a dream, Dhirajlal one day came up with a brainwave and announced he would convert the spare bedroom, barely 9ft by 6 ft, into a pooja place.
That was some 29 years ago and since then, the worshippers grew from just the Karia family, which included a son and a daughter, and a few relatives and friends, to a mind-boggling 50,000-plus devotees pouring in from all over England and even Canada, Nepal and India as well. During festivals and weekends, the Karia couple would lovingly play host to over a hundred worshippers, offering them quiet ten-minute sessions of prayer and meditation, a little prasad from Dhirajlal and perhaps a cup of freshly brewed tea brewed by the kind Sushila in the kitchen.
Neighbours have been very understanding as busloads of worshippers come from far and form serpentine queues that stretch from the end of the lovely garden and wind up through the staircase inside the house to enter the first-floor pooja room, which now is actually a temple housing 17 marble statues of gods brought from India.
“We flew in five priests from India, who washed the gods in the sea and conducted the prayers for installation, so that the gods become alive and worthy of prayer. In course of time, people heard about our temple and began to come from all over England,” said Dhirajlal, now 68. “We always pray to God to protect the Queen and the English people, who have been so good to us,” said wife Sushila.
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