Sunday at almost exactly 2 a.m., I was in the middle of a particularly bad dream when the phone rang. Everyone hates phone calls in the middle of the night, and ever since I moved to the States, I’ve been convinced that if the phone rings late at night, it can only mean that my parents are calling to let me know my grandmother has died. (She’s fine, in case you’re wondering where this is going.)

I stayed under the covers and waited to hear the answering machine pick up. I don’t know if it was the relative quiet in the middle of the night or something else, but the machine filled the apartment. It wasn’t my parents, as I said, but this instead:

I understand that it’s not exactly heavy breathing, or someone asking me what my favorite scary movie is. But when the loud, random beeping started sounding like Mary Had a Little Lamb (it’s about 35 seconds in), I admit I was scared shitless. By then, I had woken up Kris, who had slept right through the ringing phone.

“Hon,” he asked softly, “Where is that noise coming from?”

I realized, of course, that as scary as it had been for me, it must be even more nerve wracking for Kris to wake up to a strange, computerized version of a nursery rhyme booming through the house. The message ended and Kris got up to check the caller ID (there was a name and a local number) and make sure all the doors were locked. I thought about calling the number back, but I realized that either drunk kids were fooling around and were hardly likely to sound apologetic, or (what seemed more likely) the evil monsters that were calling me in a horror movie-like way might be less likely to kill me during the day.

We both slept fitfully. At dawn this morning, Kris (who usually can sleep through anything) woke up, rattled that the phone was ringing again. I told him he was just hearing birds chirp, because I had been awake for a while and knew what woke him.

The number turned out to belong to a residential address just a few blocks from us, and after work today, we tried calling it back. Ironically, the machine always picked up– it had voice of an old man cheerfully announcing his name. There’s no chance that the old man died, and his ghost was trying to call us, is there?

This is a picture of a Gurudwara, a Sikh temple across the street from Pulao’s family’s flat in Delhi. Pretty, no? Majestic and holy?

No. Sorry. Wrong answer.

It may look nice, but the Gurudwara has loudspeakers — two speakers on each corner of the temple, pointing out. Pointing across the street. Loud loudspeakers.

At five in the morning our first day here, it seemed that people from the Gurudwara were shouting in my bedroom. The Sikh priest was leading a call to prayer. Not just to the faithful inside the temple, mind you, but to any stragglers in the neighborhood, too — maybe the guys who got up a little late, or anybody who just wanted to enjoy the services streetside. I didn’t understand a word, but the voice had quite a commanding tone, and I sat up in bed, ready to act.

It was something between a call and response and (to borrow some religious terminology from my childhood) an opening hymn. It had a nice tabla backbeat, actually.

I was pretty annoyed the first few days (there’s a service every morning — no “Sunday-Sikhs” at our Gurudwara). I was fairly peeved at Sikhism in general. But the more I listen to the prayer, the more I realize it has a little groove to it. I find myself humming the tune in the shower. By the end of my trip, I might convert . . .