Illuminated by a skylight at the center of a small factory-turned-Hindu temple in Queens sits a murti of the Divine Mother — a 1-ton, 6-foot-tall icon of the South Indian village goddess Mariamman, an incarnation of Kali, the deity of time and death.
Smoke from cigarettes and incense fills the room, and bottles of rum sit next to fruit at the altar. “Our religion is very rural, very villagelike,” said Chandni Kalu, 31, a priestess at the Richmond Hill temple. “It’s very raw.”
