On his sixteenth birthday, in the parish church in Shimla, at the foothills of the Himalayas, he was baptized. They sent him to a nearby boarding school. Sundar explained himself to the missionaries at his school – the ones he had mocked. You shall be no more my son. … For us, you are as one who was never born.” His father, grief-stricken, spoke a vow: “We reject you forever and cast you from among us. He cut off his hair, the long hair that is the mark of a Sikh man. In the morning, though, Sundar didn’t budge, despite his father’s pleadings: he was going to be baptized.

He immediately went to tell his father that he was going to be a follower of Jesus now. I was filled with deep sorrow and remorse for my insults and my irreverence, but also with a wonderful peace.

It was then I saw the marks of blood on his hands and feet and knew that it was Yesu, the one proclaimed by the Christians. “Sundar, how long will you mock me? I have come to save you because you have prayed to find the way of truth. Should I receive no answer by morning, I would place my head on the railroad tracks and seek the answer to my questions beyond the edge of this life.”Īn hour and a half later, he saw something like a glow in the room. “I prayed,” he wrote later of that moment, “that if there was a God at all, he would reveal himself to me. And this Christianity was the religion of the colonizers. He was full of frustration and rage: the gurus his mother had taken him to meet had themselves been hunters after God, seekers of the peace he himself craved. Three days before, at school, he had horrified his father by burning a Bible. His mother had taught him the prayers: she had been, he said, “a living example of the love of God.” And now she was dead. Creative being personified. … Image of the Undying, beyond birth, self-existent. … How can you become truthful? And how can the veil of illusion be torn away? The fourteen-year-old boy wakes up at three in the morning, bathes, and chants the Sikh morning prayer:

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