“Our suffering is our religion”

“Our suffering is our religion” is a phrase associated with Sapna’s revolutionary poster, but Lin gives it a different force when he raises it in discussion. The words become a way to ask why people suffer, and why hardship seems to burden the poor and good more than the powerful and bad.

Source and First Encounter

At a meeting attended by Lin, Abdul Ghani presents a poster bearing Sapna’s commands. The text invokes the hunger and deprivation of ordinary people, contrasts them with the wealth of the privileged, and calls for violent retaliation. Lin initially finds the tract absurd, but the attentive silence of the men in the room makes clear that they take it seriously.

The poster also recalls earlier traces of Sapna’s influence. Lin remembers the name painted on a wall at the Village in the Sky, twenty-three floors above the ground, and remembers Prabaker and Johnny Cigar speaking of brutal murders committed in Sapna’s name. In this context, the expression belongs to a message that turns suffering into a justification for violence.

Lin’s Reframing

When Abdul Ghani invites Lin to choose a topic for the group’s discussion, Lin recalls a line from the poster, qualifying his memory with “something like that.” He connects it to a recent demolition in the slum: while police were smashing houses, a woman nearby had described work and suffering as a duty. Lin says he cannot understand the resignation with which she seemed to accept that condition.

Rather than endorse Sapna’s answer to deprivation, Lin makes suffering itself the subject of inquiry. He distinguishes the hardships he has brought upon himself, and those he has caused others, from the suffering endured by residents of the slum. His questions—why people suffer, why bad people seem to suffer little, and why good people suffer so much—shift the phrase from a revolutionary slogan toward a problem of moral and social inequality.

Significance in the Discussion

The expression holds two meanings in tension. In Sapna’s poster, suffering is named as a shared condition and made an argument for violent action. In Lin’s account, it prompts attention to people living through poverty and the destruction of their homes, without resolving why their burdens are so heavy. Khaderbhai’s warmly approving smile after Lin’s suggestion marks the question as welcome within the group’s discussion, but the evidence supplies no answer to it.