**5. Conclusions**

We can see how, through the social space of the gurdwara and the forms of prayer within it, women cope with the continuing confrontation of loss and trauma in their everyday lives. We see too how women have utilized the male-ruled space of the Shaheedganj Gurdwara for their own purposes and turned it into a sort of gendered counterpublic. These employments of place, prayer, ritual, and forms of embodiment have allowed collective forms of memory-making that enable women to remember the past in ways facilitating healing. The Shaheedganj Gurdwara, then, helps women heal from their grieving as it provides a social space for a ffective prayer—prayer that is performed and shared with other women who have gone through similar hardships and traumas. The relationship between prayer as a performative social ritual, belief, and trauma allows us to better understand how women in Tilak Vihar continue to cope with long-term grief. While women's belief in God provides an explanatory ground for the happenings in their lives and allows them to situate their life experiences and loss as karma, the gurdwara operates as a space for women. Performative prayers, in the form of ritual, form as a bridge between place and belief. Based on my conversations with women and observations of their practice in the gurdwara, we see how religious places such as Shaheedganj Gurdwara bring women together, how belief allows women to feel closer to God, and how social, religious rituals bridge places and belief. These intersections between gender and religious practice are further enmeshed with the lived experiences of Sikh widowhood.

**Funding:** This research was funded in part by a doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

**Acknowledgments:** I gratefully acknowledge the sta ff and board of Nishkam Sikh Welfare Organization for their assistance, the women and families of Tilak Vihar for allowing me into their homes and lives, and Gaston Gordillo for his mentorship.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.
