Sundar crossed the border into Nepal at a high pass where there were no soldiers or border guard patrolling and began his trek into the forbidding country. The journey was incredibly difficult. Sundar was so cold that his hands and feet swelled to three times their normal size, and he was constantly hungry and thirsty. Still he climbed up one mountain after another, descending each one and fording the icy, fast-flowing rivers at the bottom as he continued on his way.
To his surprise, Sundar received a warm reception in many of the small villages dotting the mountains. Most of the inhabitants of these villages had never seen a foreigner before, and they had certainly never heard the gospel. Sundar was grateful that the Nepalese language was much like Hindustani, which he spoke. He thus spoke in his native language to the Nepalese people, who understood most of what he said.
Eventually, toward the end of June, Sundar reached his destination, the town of Ilam, one of the largest towns in Nepal. A garrison of the Nepalese army was stationed there. Well aware of the risk he was taking, Sundar entered Ilam and began preaching in the marketplace. A crowd soon gathered around him, staring wide-eyed at this man who dared to come into their midst and talk about a God who had risen from the dead and was going to judge them all one day. As the people asked questions, the crowd grew to several hundred.
Sundar was explaining Jesus’ death on the cross, when six soldiers burst through the crowd accompanied by a high-ranking officer.
“Who gave you permission to preach this strange God in our kingdom?” the officer bellowed.
The crowd cowered, but Sundar drew himself up tall.
“I did not come on anyone’s orders, except those of the Head of all officers, the Raja of all rajas, and the Creator of all that is created,” he declared.
The officer turned red with anger, but Sundar continued in a firm voice. “The one true God has called all nations to eternal life, but the Nepalese people are unaware of this wonderful fact, so I have come to tell them. This eternal life is possible because of the death of God’s Son, Jesus Christ. If you will not have faith in Him, a day will come when you will stand before Him and give an account of your life, just as I am standing before you right now.”
“Well, we will see about that later,” the officer snapped. “But I can tell you what is going to happen to you right now. You are going to be put into our jail, and we will all see if your Christ will come to your rescue.”
Sundar was not surprised. “I am not afraid of this imprisonment. If I had been afraid, I would never have come here in the first place. Though you nail my feet to a log so that I cannot walk, I will still be free in my soul. If you do that to me, I will consider my feet not on wood but on rock that cannot be moved.”
“Do not talk anymore,” the officer ordered, glancing around to see how the crowd was reacting. The people stood passively watching.
But Sundar continued. “As long as I have life in me and a tongue to speak, I shall not stop talking about my Christ. In custody or not, I am ready to give my life that you may hear the good news.”
The officer grunted and turned to one of the soldiers. “I have heard enough. Take him away and throw him in jail.”
“But, sir,” the soldier said, “if this Christ-God follower enters our jail, he will pollute it.”
“You are right,” said the officer. “We would be better to be rid of him completely. Take him to the edge of our territory and send him on his way.” Then he looked at Sundar. “I forbid you to ever enter this territory or the town of Ilam again.”
Rough hands grabbed Sundar’s arms, and Sundar was marched from the marketplace and taken beyond the city wall.
“Go and do not come back,” one of the soldiers told him as he pointed to the south. “If you are ever seen in this region again, you will be thrown in jail.”
Sundar walked on a mile or so and then sat down on a rock, wondering what he should do next. The people in Ilam had been attentive as he preached in the marketplace, and he was sure that if he could just talk to them a little longer, some of them would understand what he was saying. He had no doubt, however, that the officer and soldiers meant what they said. He would be thrown in jail if he returned to the town. But that was a consequence Sundar was willing to face. Suddenly he felt a peace come over him. If he was thrown in jail, that would mean he could spend many days or even months sharing with the Nepalese prisoners. Perhaps God had sent him to Ilam to reach out to these people. With fresh enthusiasm, Sundar gathered his saffron robe about him and set out to return to Ilam.
A short while later Sundar was once again preaching in the marketplace at Ilam. This time, though, the people were more cautious about stopping to listen to him. Sundar was sure it was because they did not want to be arrested by the soldiers for showing an interest in this new religion that their leaders obviously feared and despised.
Sundar had been preaching only a few minutes when a group of soldiers surged into the marketplace and once again arrested him. This time they followed through on their threat. Sundar was dragged off to jail.
At the jail Sundar had his robe pulled off, and he was made to lie face down on the stone floor, where his hands and feet were shackled with chains. Then a soldier appeared in his cell carrying a large earthen jar. With a smirk he emptied the contents of the jar onto Sundar’s back. Sundar gasped when he realized what the jar had contained—leeches. He braced himself as the creatures burrowed into his back and began sucking his blood.
The pain was excruciating, and Sundar found himself biting his lip as he silently prayed and asked God for the strength to bear the torture. But the leeches were not the only torture his captors had in mind for Sundar. Soon a mob of people, whipped into a frenzy by the soldiers, gathered outside the bars of his cell. They hurled abuse at him as well as garbage, rotten fruits and vegetables, waste, and any other vile thing they could get their hands on.
After two hours of abuse and torture, the pain of the leeches sucking blood from Sundar’s back began to subside. A peace swept over Sundar, and he began to sing and praise God. At the sound of his singing, the mob grew and pressed harder against the bars of his cell. It was too good an opportunity to miss, so Sundar began to preach and tell the people more about Jesus Christ and the Christian message. No one hurled anything at him now, and a calm settled over the mob as they listened intently to the words of the man chained up in the cell in front of them. Sundar could see the confusion in their eyes and knew exactly what they were thinking, and he addressed their concern.
“I know what you are thinking,” he said. “You are fearful and wondering what power it is that allows me to preach to you while my body is being devoured by leeches and you hurl all manner of vileness at me. That power is Jesus Christ, and I am privileged to suffer for Him.”
Finally the soldiers had had enough of his preaching, and four of them stormed into the cell. Sundar could see fear in their eyes. Without saying a word, the soldiers unchained him and dragged him to the outskirts of Ilam. There one of the soldiers threw his robe and New Testament at his feet and once again warned him not to return to the town.
This time Sundar did not reenter Ilam. He knew that the people there had seen and heard the gospel that day. Instead, dizzy from the loss of blood caused by the leeches, Sundar staggered away from Ilam and began the long, weary journey back home.
Once he had crossed the border back into India, he met up with a man named Tharchin, a Tibetan Christian who had worked with the Moravian missionaries. Sundar was glad to see him. Tharchin bathed Sundar’s leech-ravaged back with iodine and watched over him while he recovered from his ordeal in Ilam.
Even though Sundar was in severe pain for many days, he considered his first missionary trek into Nepal a success. Hundreds of people had heard about Jesus Christ for the first time, and he determined that he would return one day to continue his preaching in the country.
Chapter 11
To the South
Christian men, both Indian and European, had often asked Sundar if they could accompany him on his missionary journeys into Tibet, but he normally turned them down. However, in April 1917, he set out from Dehra Dun for Tibet with four traveling companions, two Europeans and two Indians. The men planned to reach a barren area of Tibet known as Kailash. Their first stop, ten miles north of Dehra Dun, was Mussoorie. It was a steady climb there, but it was a lovely spring morning, and Sundar enjoyed the walk. However, when they arrived at Mussoorie, two of the men declared that they were exhausted and too unfit to go on. This surprised Sundar, as he felt as though he had been on short stroll.
The three remaining men, Alexander Judson, a schoolteacher, Mohan Lal, a leprosy-hospital chaplain and Indian Quaker, and Sundar, left the other two men and continued on with their trip the following morning. The terrain became more rugged as they climbed farther into the Himalayas. The temperature dropped twenty degrees as a severe storm blew in, dumping ice-cold rain down on them. Soon all three men were soaked to the skin. As they climbed higher, the rain turned to sleet, and then to snow. Despite the fact that Alexander and Mohan wore heavy, padded jackets and leather climbing boots, the two of them shivered with cold. They complained that their feet were numb, while Sundar’s bare feet felt perfectly fine. Even when he caught his toe on a rock and it started to bleed, Sundar hardly felt it, because over the years his feet had become so hardened to walking.
Eventually Alexander and Mohan announced that they could not go any farther and begged Sundar to guide them back to Mussoorie. Sundar agreed; he could see that the men were in no condition to continue. When they arrived back in Mussoorie, Sundar offered to lead them into Tibet by a different, less arduous route, but the two men were much too exhausted to contemplate continuing.
The following day Sundar set off again for Tibet, this time alone. Soon another traveler, a Tibetan man, joined him, and the two of them walked on in companionable silence as they summitted the sixteen-thousand-foot-high pass, with its thin, icy air, and began their descent from the heights of the Himalayas.
Suddenly, halfway down, the weather turned bitterly cold. Sundar pulled his cotton blanket tight around him and picked up his pace, praying that he and his companion would not freeze to death along the trail.
As the two men edged their way forward in single file along a narrow, slippery ledge, Sundar looked down, carefully gauging each step. Far below, sprawled in the snow at the bottom of the ravine, was the body of a man! As Sundar peered at the body, he saw an arm move—the man was alive!
Sundar tugged at the fur jacket of his traveling companion. “Look down,” he yelled into the howling wind. “A man has fallen down there. We must try to rescue him.”
Sundar’s traveling companion refused to help, protesting that they themselves would die if they delayed getting to the small village at the bottom of the trail. Sundar knew the Tibetan was right. On previous trips across these mountains, he himself had come upon the bodies of men frozen to death by a sudden change in the weather. But as his traveling companion continued picking his way along the ledge toward the village, Sundar stayed behind. He prayed out loud and then carefully began edging his way down the side of the ravine, aware that he was one careless move away from sharing the same fate as the man he was trying to save.
Finally Sundar reached the man and carefully lifted him onto his back. Then he draped his blanket around them both and tied the man to him like a baby to its mother’s back. Through blinding snow and fading daylight and on bleeding feet, Sundar carried the man slowly but surely along the trail.
Then, as quickly as the snow had blown in, it stopped and the visibility cleared. It was then that Sundar could see the stone houses of the village a few hundred yards ahead. Relief overcame him. They were going to make it to safety! But his joy immediately turned to shock when he spotted the rigid body of his traveling companion who had gone on alone lying dead by the side of the trail, practically within shouting distance of the village.
