Gathered at Mallikarjuna Rao’s house on Thursday evening in Aali Village, near Badarpur border, are a dozen people of sundry ages and origins—from a Keralite who has lived most of his life in Gujarat to a retiree from Madhya Pradesh. If there is something in their manner to suggest they are purveyors of Bahá’u’lláh’s message of unity and peace, it is their simplicity and warmth. They are not pretentious mystagogues or sacramental middlemen, but unassuming followers of the Bahá’í faith, which they all “embraced” rather than converted to.

The Bahá’í Month of Loftiness, Ala—the 19 days of which constitute the stipulated period of fasting from dawn to dusk—draws to a close on March 20, making way for Naw Rúz, the advent of the 166th New Year of the Badi calendar of the Báb. The fast being a period of “spiritual recuperation”, as Rao puts it, invoking God is important. “You are welcome to say a prayer to Lord Krishna, Jesus or Allah,” offers Rao, who edits books for the Bahá’í Publishing Trust. His four-and-a-half-year-old daughter Kirtana sings a brief prayer in English, and the others, their eyes shut, take their turn saying theirs in muted mumbles and modulated songs. At 6:32 p.m., as the sun sets, it is time to break the day’s fast—today, with soft drinks, samosas and sweets.

Rao, originally from Hyderabad, has been a Bahá’í for over two decades. After he married Gayatri, she too chose to embrace the faith, and they spent their first years together at the Bahá’í World Centre in the holy land of Israel. “Religion is not a label to be born into. It is a system of knowledge,” says A.K. Merchant, chairman of the Spiritual Assembly of Bahá’ís in Delhi. The “core activities” of the Bahá’ís include devotional gatherings, children’s classes, spiritual education of young adults and participatory studies of the writings of Bahá’u’lláh (1817-1892)—his works have been translated from Persian and Arabic into several languages.

There are over 1.6 million Bahá’ís in India, about 2,300 of them in Delhi, home to the Bahá’í Temple of Worship, better known as the Lotus Temple. Such is the charm of the temple, which receives 8,000-10,000 visitors on a weekday and twice as many on a Saturday or Sunday, that when the chief landlord of Aali Village visited it in the early ’90s, he took a strong liking to the Bahá’í people. He invited Vijay Kumar Mandal, who works at the temple library, to settle down in his village, and sold a plot to him cheap. It was in 1992 that Mandal moved to Aali, where there is now a vibrant community of about 25 Bahá’ís.

“The Bahá’í community in Delhi has grown rapidly in the last three-four years,” says Merchant, married to an Iranian Bahá’í who made India her home three decades ago. On Naw Rúz, the Bahá’ís of Delhi gather at the Lotus Temple for prayers at dawn and a cultural celebration and dinner in the evening. Arun Sinha, a Bahá’í who lives in Gurgaon, says there is another public gathering of about 500 people at the Bahá’í Centre in Gurgaon. “We’re staging a nukkad naatak based on the Russian Happy Hippo show,” he says.

The Naw Rúz, which falls on March 21 this year, is the day of the vernal equinox, when day and night are equal in duration, and the sun moves from Pisces to Aries. “Each of the 19 months of the Bahá’í calendar is named after an attribute of God. The first month is the month of Baha or Splendour, the second of Glory, and the following months of Beauty, Grandeur, Light, Mercy and so on,” Merchant says. Interestingly, the numerical value of the Arabic word “wahid”, which denotes the unity of God, is 19. It is this Tabernacle of Unity that is the essence of the Bahá’í faith, where the waters of disharmony are not permitted to eddy into the peace of mankind.