Sundar nodded. “Yes, it means lion, my lord,” he answered respectfully.
“Then if you bear the name of a lion, why is it that you behave like a jackal?” snapped the maharaja.
Sundar said nothing, and the maharaja continued in a more restrained voice. “Give up this strange religion and return to the faith of your race and of your forefathers. Live up to the name Singh and all it means. If you do this, I am sure a position of honor and power, such as that your cousin Spuran Singh holds, can be found for you here at the palace. Now go and think seriously about what I have said.”
“Yes, my lord,” Sundar said as he turned and left the palace.
Sundar did think long and hard about what the maharaja had said. And he decided on a course of action. The words the maharaja uttered, “Your hair remains uncut in the fashion of the Sikhs,” played over and over in Sundar’s mind. When he arrived back in Rampur, Sundar took a pair of scissors and disappeared into his bedroom. Within minutes Sundar had cut off his long locks of jet-black hair.
There was no going back now. Sundar knew that, and that was precisely why he had decided to cut his hair. Every Sikh male was obligated by his religion not to cut his hair—the long hair was curled up tightly in a turban. But under Sundar’s turban there was no longer any long hair.
When Sher Singh learned what his son had done, his eyes grew black with rage, and Sundar trembled.
“We reject you forever,” his father said.
Sundar knew what was coming next; the words were those of the formal denouncing of a child. They were the most dreaded words a father could say to his son or daughter.
“In the name of the whole family, I declare you are no more worthy to be called our son. We shall have nothing to do with you. We shall forget you as if you had never been born. You will leave this house with nothing but the clothes on your back and never return,” his father continued. Then he paused, turned, and pointed to the door, and snapped, “Now go.”
Sundar’s head was spinning as he opened the door and walked out of his childhood home. At fifteen years of age he was now alone, without family connections or even a place to sleep for the night.
It was twilight, and Sundar wandered in a daze until he came to the edge of the forest, where he made a bed of leaves and lay down. He passed the night fitfully, and in the morning he examined the contents of his pocket. He had his New Testament and enough money to buy a one-way train ticket. But where should he go? Sundar puzzled over the question until finally he decided he should return to Ludhiana and continue his schooling.
The train to Ludhiana was due to pass through Rampur in half an hour. Sundar quickly got up and began making his way to the station. As he walked back into the village, people spat at his feet and cursed him. One woman made a big show of washing herself at the well after Sundar’s shadow fell on her. But Sundar hardly noticed the people. He was hungry, and for some reason his stomach was hurting and he was beginning to feel weak.
Sundar had just enough money for the fare to Ludhiana. He took his ticket, climbed onto the train, and found a hard, wooden seat, where he flopped down. How he wished his stomach would stop hurting, but the pain only seemed to get worse. Finally, half an hour into the train trip, Sundar felt the urge to vomit. Quickly he pulled down the window. No sooner had he stuck his head out than the contents of his stomach burst from his mouth. As the vomit ran down the outside of the carriage, Sundar noticed it was mixed with blood. Then the sad realization hit him: his family had poisoned him before they sent him away, and now he was dying.
Sundar was sure that he would not make it alive all the way to Ludhiana, and he prayed that God would show him what to do next. Suddenly he remembered that one of the Christian teachers who had been run out of Rampur when the school was closed had settled in Rupar, the next stop for the train. Sundar decided he would get off the train at Rupar and find the teacher, the Reverend Uppal, and his wife.
It seemed like forever before the train pulled into the station at Rupar. Sundar stumbled from the carriage and made some inquiries as to how to get to the mission house. Somehow he managed to stumble there and knock on the door. The Reverend Uppal opened the door, and Sundar slumped unconscious into his arms.
Sundar was not sure how much time had passed, but when he regained consciousness, he was aware of two men talking outside the room in which he lay on a bed.
“There is nothing more I can do, Mr. Uppal,” he heard one of the voices say. “The boy will surely die soon, before the night is over, I expect. There is no point in my giving him any medicine; there is nothing I can give him that will help his condition. I will call again in the morning, and we can make arrangements for his funeral then.”
“Yes, thank you very much, Doctor,” Sundar heard the Reverend Uppal say.
Die? I am not going to die. God has work He wants me to do. This new resolve swept over Sundar as he lay semiconscious on the bed. And in those moments when he became fully conscious, he prayed fervently that God would heal him.
As the morning sun rose over Rupar, Sundar opened his eyes and began to sit up. His stomach had stopped hurting, and he was beginning to feel his strength return. Mrs. Uppal, who had sat with Sundar throughout the night tending to him, looked shocked. She looks like she has seen a ghost, Sundar thought.
“It is all right, Mrs. Uppal,” Sundar said in a weak voice. “God has healed me. He has things yet for me to do, and no poison shall stand in the way of His purpose. Now, please help me outside onto the veranda so I can lie in the sun.”
Two hours later Sundar was well enough to laugh when the doctor came to visit him. The doctor had come to arrange a funeral, and instead he found his patient sitting outside in the sun well on his way to making a full recovery.
But now that he was feeling better and was not going to die, Sundar had to plan his next step.
Chapter 5
Sadhu Sundar Singh
Now that he had recovered from being poisoned, the obvious choice to Sundar was to continue on to the boarding school at Ludhiana and try to fit in there. And that is what he did, but more problems soon developed. Despite the fact that Sundar’s father had declared him dead, when members of his family learned that he had not died from the poison, they followed him to Ludhiana and stormed the gates of the boarding school. They demanded that Sundar return to Rampur with them. The situation was dangerous, and the school principal asked Sundar if for the safety of everyone involved he would be prepared to leave the school.
Sundar agreed, and he was secreted away to the American Presbyterian mission’s leprosy hospital at Sabathu, located twenty-three miles from Simla, where Sundar’s family had sometimes vacationed when he was a small boy. It had been a tumultuous nine months for Sundar since becoming a Christian, and he was glad to have a place where he could get some rest and peace at last. During the day he helped look after the lepers staying at the hospital, and in the evenings he read the New Testament and prayed about what the future held for him. Some of the American doctors and nurses at Sabathu urged Sundar to go to seminary and train to become a missionary himself, but Sundar was not so sure about the idea. The more time he spent around Indian Christians, the more concerned he became about how they imitated American and English ways of doing things. They wore Western clothes and sang hymns put to English tunes instead of their own Indian melodies. And they seemed to think that it was somehow more Christian to eat Western food and to speak in English.
Sundar looked at Christianity differently. To him the message—the good news that Jesus Christ had come to earth in the form of man and then sacrificed Himself so that humankind could have a relationship with God—had nothing to do with the clothes people wore, the food they ate, or the tunes they sang. He longed to see Indians take Christianity and make it their own, not just an imported religion but something that resonated with their own heritage.
In thinking about this, Sundar was reminded of a scene he had witnessed on a train. At a particular station he watched as a Brahman priest was carried onto the train and placed in a seat near him. Sundar could see that the priest was suffering from heat stroke. The stationmaster must have noticed this too, because he brought the priest a cup of cold water. Sundar watched as the priest refused to drink the water because it came from the unclean cup of a stranger and not from his own brass cup. One of the men who had carried the Brahman onto the train then took the brass cup and poured into it the water that the stationmaster had brought. Then the priest had eagerly taken his brass cup and drunk all of the water.
As Sundar thought about the scene he had witnessed, he realized that Christianity was like the water inside the cup and that it had to be given to the Indian people in a way that they could accept it. Of course he had no idea how he, a fifteen-year-old boy, could make that happen, so he prayed and waited.
Over the next several weeks, Sundar found himself looking northward, toward the snow-covered Himalayas. The majestic mountains glowed pink and gold in the evening sun, and something about them attracted him. The mysterious land of Tibet lay on the other side of the mountains, and although Sundar knew very little about Tibet, he felt that his destiny somehow lay over those high mountains.
On his sixteenth birthday, the day he was legally free from his father’s authority, Sundar sought to be baptized in the nearby town of Simla. A Church of England congregation was located there, and the local minister interviewed Sundar and agreed to baptize him. The text chosen for the service was from Psalm 23: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.” There was no going back now. To Sikhs and Hindus, baptism was the absolute point of no return.
Following his baptism, Sundar retreated to the pine forest beyond the hospital. He needed time to think and pray, and he stayed in the forest for a month. At the end of that time he emerged confident of where his future lay. Sundar would become a sadhu, a holy man, like the one his mother had taken him to see so often as a child. The Indian people respected sadhus and would stop to listen to what they had to say. However, unlike the Hindu sadhus Sundar had known, he would tell the story of Jesus and urge the Indian people to seek Him as the bearer of all truth.
This was a bold idea. Sundar did not know of any Christian sadhus. And his idea did not gain the support of many of the English missionaries he knew; the whole concept seemed strange and irrelevant to them. But Sundar was confident that this was the way God was directing him, and so he bought himself the saffron cotton robe and turban that were the hallmarks of a holy man.
On October 6, 1905, sixteen-year-old Sundar, now introducing himself as Sadhu Sundar Singh, set out on foot across the plains of North India. He had no shoes, no money, and few friends, and he was determined never to beg for anything. “I am not worthy to follow in the footsteps of my Lord. But, like Him, I want no home, no possessions. Like Him, I will belong to the road, sharing the sufferings of my people, eating with those who will give me shelter and telling all men of the love of God,” he told himself as he set out. “The Lord is my shepherd, and I shall accept whatever He gives me.”
Sundar headed toward Simla, stopping in each small village he passed through to share the gospel. Seeing that he wore the saffron robe and turban of a holy man, the people welcomed him into these villages and showed him hospitality and friendship. However, when it became known that Sundar was a Christian and not a Hindu holy man, more often than not he found himself roughly ejected from these villages. As a result he spent many cold, hungry nights sleeping out under the stars. Despite this treatment, Sundar refused to get discouraged. Each morning after a night on the hard ground, he would get up and set off in search of another village in which to share the gospel.
