I know a place where a lion lets you walk right into its mouth. Or at least, that’s how four-year-old me would enter a temple.

As a child, I thought it was one of the most fascinating things I had ever seen. A giant lion’s face, its teeth and tongue, with Goddess Durga sitting inside it. I don’t remember what I thought about the goddess back then, or whether I understood the place's significance. I just remember being fascinated by the whole thing. And the sliding.

I used to slide down the lion’s tongue. Repeatedly, if I remember correctly. There was something about that surface that made it impossible to resist. And somehow, as a child, all that sliding in a temple was sort of forgiven. Maybe nobody minded. Maybe I was too little to be told off. Or maybe nobody expects a four-year-old to understand the difference between a place of worship and a very tempting slide. I didn’t think of it as spirituality then. It was just fun.

Years have passed. I don’t visit as often anymore, but whenever I get the chance to go back, once or twice a year, I find myself wanting to do the same things. I want to sit in that very spot. I want to feel that surface again. I can almost remember its texture, which is a strange thing to remember after all these years.

Of all the things I could have carried with me from childhood, why this?

I don’t remember every visit. I couldn’t tell you what I wore, what I was thinking about on the way there, or what happened after we left. But I remember the lion’s tongue. I remember the urge to slide down it. And even now, a part of me wants to.

Perhaps growing up is just accumulating years without entirely outgrowing the things that made us happy. We learn to be sensible. We learn to behave appropriately, to stop doing things just because they feel good, to make sense of our experiences. We grow into people who have explanations for almost everything.

And then some places ask nothing of us. Places where we don’t have to be the person we’ve spent years trying to become. I think about spirituality sometimes, and what it really means to feel connected to something. Is it the prayers? The rituals? The silence? Or is it also the feeling of returning somewhere and finding a part of yourself waiting for you?

Because when I think about this temple, I don’t just remember a place of worship. I remember being a child, looking at something enormous and extraordinary, and wanting to experience it in the simplest way possible. I wasn’t thinking about whether I was being spiritual enough. I wasn’t trying to find meaning in anything. I was just there, having the time of my life.

And maybe that’s what I miss the most. Not childhood itself, necessarily, but the version of me who could find wonder in something so ordinary, who didn’t need a reason to be happy, who could look at a giant lion’s mouth and see a slide. Maybe spirituality isn’t always about finding something greater than yourself. Maybe sometimes it’s about finding your way back to yourself. To the parts you leave behind as you grow up, the ones that don’t make it into your adult life but somehow never really disappear.

I don’t know if I’ll ever slide down that tongue again. Perhaps I would feel silly doing it now. Perhaps I’d just sit there, looking at it, remembering how it felt. But I know that every time I visit, I carry the same little craving with me.

And I think that’s enough.

If you ever find yourself in Patna, you can visit this place too. It’s Bagh Wala Mandir, also known as the Gardanibagh Durga Mandir, near Road No. 21, Bhikhachak, in Gardanibagh. Goddess Durga is enshrined inside the enormous open mouth of a lion.

You can go there to pray, to admire the temple, or simply to see something quite unlike anything else.

But do look at the tongue. That’s where I left a little piece of myself. And every time I return, I find it there, waiting.

I know a place where a goddess lives inside a lion’s mouth, and somewhere between its teeth and its tongue, my inner child is still at home.