As his father picked up the pen and again began making entries in the ledger, Sundar turned and left the room. And that was when he saw it. Right there on the sideboard in the living room was his father’s money pouch. At first Sundar tried not to think about it, but an idea formed in his head and would not let go. No, he told himself, he could not steal money from his father’s money pouch. But then a picture of the beggar woman flashed through his mind. She needed his help. Before he knew it, Sundar had picked up the money pouch and slid a ten-rupee note from it. Father will never notice that it is missing, he reassured himself.
Sundar ran all the way back to the bazaar. He was out of breath when he spotted the frail form of the beggar woman. He stopped short, thinking about what he was about to do. Suddenly he was confused. How could he steal from his father? Surely that one wrong would undo all the good he was trying to do for the beggar woman. If he followed through with this action, he might find himself farther away from God, not closer to Him. Despite desperately wanting to help the beggar woman some more, Sundar turned around and began winding his way through the streets toward home. Less than half an hour had passed since he had taken the money, too little time, he reasoned, for anyone to notice that the money was gone. He would just slip the ten-rupee note back into his father’s money pouch, and no one would ever know what he had done.
Sundar was surprised when he walked through the gate into the family compound. His father was storming back and forth in the yard. “Ah, there you are. Some money is missing from my pouch, ten rupees to be exact. Do you know anything about it, Sundar?”
Sundar wanted to say yes and hand over the banknote, but he could not. He could see the anger in his father’s eyes, and he feared the punishment that would be meted out to him. Then Sundar heard himself say, “No, I know nothing of the missing money.”
“Then it must be one of the servants,” Sundar’s father said in a determined voice. “I will get to the bottom of this. We cannot tolerate a thief in the house.”
Hardly able to comprehend the situation he had gotten himself into, Sundar turned and left the compound. This time he went to the woods on the outskirts of the village to think and be alone. What a mess he had made of things. All he wanted to do was help the beggar woman at the bazaar, but now he was nothing but a liar and a thief.
The sun was beginning to set when Sundar finally began making his way home. When he arrived, he learned that his father had had the house servants beaten as punishment for stealing money from him. Sundar’s mother explained that since none of the servants would own up to the crime, Sher Singh was left with no other option but to punish them all. Sundar was horrified at where his actions had led.
That night Sundar could neither eat nor sleep. As he tossed and turned on his sleeping mat, his conscience gnawed at him. How could he ever look his father in the eye again? Or the servants, knowing that they had endured the punishment that should have been his? Finally Sundar could stand it no longer. Even though it was midnight, he had to set the matter straight. He stumbled to his feet and went to wake his father.
Sundar trembled as he shook his father awake. Sher Singh looked surprised and then shocked as Sundar handed him the ten-rupee note and confessed what he had done.
When he had finished his confession, Sundar stood tensely, waiting for the beating he knew would follow. But to his surprise, instead of telling Sundar to get the whip, his father reached up and put his arm around him. “Sundar, I have always trusted you. And your confession convinces me that I was not wrong in that trust. Now run along to bed, and we will talk more in the morning.”
The following morning when Sundar awoke, his father was waiting for him, his money pouch in hand. Sher Singh pulled the ten-rupee note from it and handed it to Sundar. “Take this and buy the beggar woman some food and a blanket,” he said. And then he pulled out a one-rupee coin. “And here, take this and buy yourself some sweets while you are at the bazaar.”
“Thank you, Father, thank you,” Sundar said, taking the money, scarcely able to comprehend his father’s kindness. He quickly dressed and headed for the bazaar.
Soon after this incident, Sundar began attending the American Presbyterian mission school near his home. Most of the other boys in Rampur were forbidden from attending a Christian school, and they would not have wanted to anyway. Sikhs were taught to despise Christians because Christians believed that God had come down and taken on the form of a man. But Sundar’s mother was different. She had made friends with two of the foreign female missionaries and decided to enroll her youngest son in their school.
Sundar was happy to attend the school. Indeed he enjoyed it greatly, until he was fourteen and a terrible thing happened—his mother died. Sundar was devastated. All of his religious acts—his praying, visiting the temple and the sadhu, reciting the Bhagavad Gita, even learning about God from the Christian Bible—had been encouraged by his mother. And now, unexplainably, she was gone.
Sundar’s mother had also taught him about the Hindu belief in reincarnation, how each soul is destined to pass through an almost endless cycle of death and rebirth until finally it attains the merit needed to once and for all pass from this world. Sundar had accepted his mother’s words, but now he found no comfort whatsoever in reincarnation. The thought that her soul might be reborn as someone else whom he would not recognize saddened and distressed him.
The missionaries tried to comfort Sundar with words from the Bible, but he spat their words back in their faces. He thought bitterly about the fool he had been for hoping in God and trying to find and serve Him. His heart grew hard, and within a month of his mother’s dying, he was impossible for the Christian teachers to control. He argued with them at every turn, using his quick mind to refute anything they said in Bible study. He quoted long passages from the Hindu, Sikh, and Buddhist scriptures to back up his points.
Finally Sundar announced to his father that he would not be going back to the mission school. He would rather walk three miles each way to the public school. His father let him go, and Sundar did everything he could to purge the Christian teaching from his mind. On his own, he found this more difficult to do than he had anticipated, so he gathered together a group of young hooligans to harass the Christians in the village. Sundar’s hatred for Christians grew, and he vowed not to rest until the Christians were driven from the village. Sundar’s father tried to reason with his son, but Sundar would not listen. Now that his mother was dead, he did not care what anyone thought of him.
Finally summer arrived, and with it the relentless heat of the plains. Sundar soon found it more and more difficult to walk the six miles to school and back. He realized why one morning, when he could not get up from his sleeping mat. Despite the summer heat, his entire body shook, and he felt very cold. He had caught malaria.
Chapter 3
The Biggest Shock of His Life
The malaria Sundar had contracted wracked his body for most of the summer, leaving him feeling listless and depressed. As fall approached, when school would start again, Sundar could not imagine walking six miles a day to school and back. Reluctantly he allowed his father to make inquiries about reenrolling at the nearby mission school.
Despite Sundar’s previous disruptive behavior, the school principal, the Reverend Newton, agreed to have him back. And so Sundar returned to his old school. He no longer heckled his teachers or threw stones at them, but he did not learn much from them either. After suffering through malaria, Sundar now found that his mind wandered easily, and he often slept between classes. He became convinced that the lingering effects of the malaria would kill him before he ever graduated from school, and that prospect made him gloomier than ever.
His gloom quickly turned to anger, which he did not direct at his teachers this time but at the Christian God. Finally, one day after Bible study, Sundar asked his teacher to sell him a copy of the New Testament. The teacher readily agreed, and his smile told Sundar that he was hoping for a change in attitude as Sundar read the book. But Sundar had no intention of reading the New Testament. He had other plans for it.
That evening Sundar called his friends together in the yard of the Singh house. He disappeared into the kitchen and emerged a few minutes later with a bundle of sticks and a can of kerosene. He piled the sticks on the ground and then doused them with kerosene. When he was satisfied that the sticks had soaked up enough of the accelerant, Sundar laid the tin aside and struck a match. He dropped it onto the sticks, and with a whoosh they leapt into flames. The glow of the fire filled the yard and danced on the faces of the boys standing around it. When Sundar was sure he had everyone’s attention, he stepped forward and dramatically held up the New Testament. Without saying a word he opened the book and began tearing the pages from it one by one. He dropped them into the fire and watched as they burst into flame.
At first Sundar felt elated, but as the flames curled around the edges of the last pages of the New Testament, he felt a surge of remorse pulse through him. He could picture his mother’s face. He wondered what she would think of his burning the Christian scriptures. She had taught him that every religion had value. Sundar reminded himself that he doubted this was true. Besides, the Christian God had not struck him dead for burning the New Testament. Obviously the Christian God was not a live God. He was just a collection of lies gathered in a book. But then another thought hit Sundar. What about the Hindu gods and the Sikh gurus? Were they true, or were they just lies as well?
Suddenly Sundar was gripped with the need to know for certain. He was still sick and depressed from the malaria, and he felt he could no longer take his mother’s word on anything. After all, God, whoever or whatever He might be, had taken his mother from him. And unlike his older brothers, Sundar did not think life was worth living unless he had answers to the God question once and for all. As he thought about this, he heard the whistle of a train in the distance as it passed close by Rampur, and it gave Sundar an idea.
It was a strange idea, but it would not go away. On the third night after burning the New Testament, Sundar lay awake thinking about it. Finally he decided he had to act. He climbed off his sleeping mat, pulled his robe around him, and silently made his way to the bathing room at the back of the house. Mechanically he drew water from the well and poured it over himself. He shivered with cold, but that was the point. Tonight was the night he would know for sure whether there was a God. There was an inevitability about his actions as he put his robe back on and retreated to his room. Sundar sat on his sleeping mat and prayed. “God, if You are there, reveal Yourself to me tonight. If You do not, I will kill myself in the morning, because I cannot live another day with all of these unanswered questions.” Then he sat and waited.
Sundar’s decision to kill himself was not an idle threat. At five o’clock every morning the train to Lahore rolled past Rampur. If he had not received an answer from God by then, Sundar was determined to lie on the railway tracks and wait for the train to roll over him. He had decided that it would be better to be dead than to continue his meaningless life.
One hour passed, and then two. Sundar was still wide awake and listening for any sound, any sign that God might be there. Four thirty rolled by, and Sundar’s mind began to think about the train and what he would have to do. He had decided the easiest and quickest way to end his life was to rest his head right on the rail and let the train crush it. But right in the middle of this morbid thought Sundar became aware of a glow in the room. At first he thought it was something outside shining through the bedroom window. But the shutter on the window was closed. The glow grew brighter and brighter until it became a piercing white light. Then the figure of a man appeared at the center of the light. Whether the figure was actually in his bedroom or just in his imagination, Sundar could not tell. All he knew was that what he was seeing was real to him. He strained to see the figure in the light, and that is when he received the biggest shock of his life. He had expected it to be Krishna or perhaps Buddha, but it was neither. Instead he recognized the figure as Jesus Christ. But how could it be? Sundar was convinced that Jesus Christ was long dead. Yet here He was, His piercing eyes burrowing into Sundar’s heart.
