Homes With a Bit of the Homeland

Six Hindu priests chanted in the solarium at their crowded housewarming party, Balasubramanian said, and the air fairly hummed.

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"I'm a big believer in creating positive energy," he said one recent evening as he and Bharathi, 42, who works for a local information technology firm, prepared dinner for their 13-year-old son, Mukundh, and other family members. (The couple's other son, Arun, is a sophomore at the University of Virginia.)

But the construction journey was not always peaceful. Bharathi Balasubramanian said it would have been easier and cheaper to put the prayer room in the basement. "I bugged him about it because I was not comfortable keeping God's room downstairs and walking on top of God," she said. "It didn't feel right."

They ended up carving a space for the prayer room, called a puja room, from the upstairs guest bathroom. It's her favorite place, where the family mediates or prays together. That evening, her sister-in-law, one of the dinner guests, knelt before the prayer room to pour rice flour on a board to draw an intricate pattern called a kolam, which she then drew again outside on the slate steps of the house, a Hindu tradition.

"It reminds you of your own childhood," Bharathi Balasubramanian said of the prayer room. "In India, everyone had their own puja room. It's a part of who you are basically . . . wherever you find your own niche, what's in your heart, invariably that's something from your childhood."

Staff researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.