From there we could see both the eternal snows to the north and the sweltering plains to the south far below. On that sacred site at the age of eleven I knew what I too was good for.
But I failed my BA exams at St. Stephens College in Delhi. I was on my own in New Delhi on Parliament Street and ill-prepared for this new life and brand of education in the big city. My personal life had lost whatever grounding and skeleton it had had in the boarding schools with their dormitory life, their joint study and dining, their sports team and camaraderie with teachers and friends. My father lived with me, but he was himself a solitary figure, frequently gone. Pilgrim, I do not do well when I am alone.
One day my father and I were bicycling back from a meal at my Aunt Dorothy’s small apartment in Gol Market, where my mother and younger brother and some in-laws also lived. At the entrance to a bazaar he told me his side of the back story with my mother. Amid the bustle of bicycle and motor rickshaws and taxis and pedestrians, a shameful family secret was told. It was the lightning flash that brought everything into focus. My father was giving me the key to the world. It was painful for him to share it, and it was impossible for me to hear it. By then I had learned to live with the order that had emerged without asking questions.
On all accounts New Delhi was the place to be at midcentury soon after independence. I experienced those Jawaharlal Nehru days, however, as a disjointed figure gawking from outside the gate. The new 1956 Thunderbird was showcased in a window at Connaught Place, part of the elegant British buildings designed by Edwin Lutgens and Herbert Baker in the early 20th century. The jazz combos from Portuguese Goa, featured by some of the night spots, were as good at the standards as any I have ever heard since then. I listened standing at the door, my mind body become a finely tuned instrument vibrating to the romance and rhythm of Someone to Watch Over Me. Then and there I was an American GI, handsome and tall and unbeatable like Tab Hunter.
To advertise the movie, the bridge over the river Kwai swung physically across the street to the Regal Cinema. No postmodern disillusion here, but a modernistic private sector optimism about the bridges that can be built, the waters that can be crossed. New winds from the West were sweeping the land. People were talking. The private buzz everywhere was about owning a telephone, air conditioning, a refrigerator, a stereo set. Television was on its way, and cars with the sleek, flashy designs of the brave new world were about to arrive. Cinerama was already here, just around the corner from The Bridge on the River Kwai.
The reading room at St. Stephens College was packed every morning, not a spare newspaper or magazine in sight. I watched with admiration and no small envy those wellborn young men with strong families and roots, sons of prominent politicians and successful merchants, who knew exactly what information they needed, where to look for it, and how it could be used to advance their life. The wide-eyed ebullient history professor lectured conversationally, without notes, often looking out the window at the Anglican architecture and grassy courtyard as the great Mughal thrones of Babur, Akbar, Jehangir, and Shah Jahan passed by. Nonetheless I had no background or inclination for the subjects I studied, nor did I know how to study them.
Emotionally I was quite close to Aunt Dorothy, who taught at a Christian school close to Gol Market. Sometimes I accompanied her when she went shopping for fabrics and saris in historic Chandni Chowk in Old Delhi, not far from the equally historic Red Fort. Slums and tall dark-looking apartment buildings with brothels extended on both sides of the ancient bazaar. As a family we were socially marginal, though we were deeply religious. Next to the St. Stephens students, however, I felt culturally derelict and psychically uninhabited.
Oh, I tried to put on an upscale front, pleasing to the cultured eye, but it was plain I was good for only one thing, religion. I felt airy, rootless in this big city, and religion was the key to my consolation, the doorway to my survival. Life had been hard enough in the boarding schools. Here anxiety found no harbor, desire could not be patient for the right match, hope scrabbled in vain for a future. Love was unhinged and jealous from the start.
The young woman who waited for me on Parliament Street down below was radiant, vibrant. Love like a vulture reached deep into the core of me, pulling at my bowels. Torrential waves of wanting and jealousy tortured me. I was sinking into a quicksand in an emotional jungle that I did not know. What was happening to me? Was I uncommonly and incorrigibly shy? Was I hobbled by the Himalayan scale of my insecurity? Did I have no maturity or inner strength? Did I mistrust women that profoundly? Was I torn between heart and mind? Did I know intuitively and instinctively the slow simmering secret of love?
I dropped to my knees. It was the re-conversion that calmed the tumultuous sea, just like the first time up at Kellogg Church in Landour. It reconnected me on the inside, gave me a sense of freedom, of strength. It made it easier to navigate the choppy waters of my personal life. With the discipline of prayer and Bible study I was something of a fuller being with more of my faculties in place. An important and innate part of me, whoever or whatever I was, had been missing.
And it was good that I attended the Christian ashram of E. Stanley Jones in the Himalayan foothills with my newfound college friends Gilchrist and Mohit in the summers. The seventy-year-old missionary, writer, and silver-tongued preacher and lecturer, dressed in white kameez and dhoti, emboldened me as to what I myself could do and be. His eloquence, conviction, and the transcendent force of his character and message opened up possibilities that I had not imagined.
Back in New Delhi I handed out in Connaught Place the individual Gospels in the form of attractive little booklets. I prayed on the rooftop about the woman I was mad about. My emotions were yet raw. Suddenly I was still a boy standing scared at the edge of the deep country well outside the Railway Hospital in my home town Ferozepore, and I could see the black water far down. I could not understand this bottomless new madness that afflicted me. I took refuge from the abyss in my Bible, marking up the assurances and promises and comforts as Brother Stanley did with his.
In the meantime my father was writing letters, making connections, his eye on the raging sea.
2 | Mount Tamalpais
Listening to the night sounds of San Francisco in Montgomery Hall
In Tokyo the foreign student population of the ship got much larger, and on the ocean the diet of soup with noodles got tiresome. To my surprise, none other than Norman Vincent Peale addressed us on Sunday. I had heard of him and other New York City preachers like Harry Emerson Fosdick and George Buttrick in my mid-teens from my father. He had some of their books in his small library when we were living in Ambala, and I think I remember seeing The Power of Positive Thinking in that cabinet. I do not remember what Norman Vincent Peale said to the foreign students on the open seas, but it does not matter. I sat riveted. He was a red rubber ball of vitality and inspiration.
I also remember trying to read Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization and Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Nature and Destiny of Man, both of which I found in that cabinet. During World War Two my father had done graduate work at Columbia University and Union Theological Seminary, where he had taken classes with Niebuhr. He would talk frequently about Niebuhr, how knowledgeable he was, and filled with ideas, how effervescent he was in his seminars. And also about New York City, how tall were the skyscrapers and colossal the department stores, where you could buy anything from a safety pin to a battleship.
My father’s name was Daniel Khazan Singh then. During the partition of the country and the horrific religious riots, when he was called back quickly, he and the whole family after him changed our last name to Stephens to distinguish ourselves as Christians. Stephen was my grandfather’s first name. It was he that was converted by missionaries.
No, Pilgrim, the books by Mumford and Niebuhr were beyond me. I did read E. Stanley Jones’ daily devotional books, the most popular among them being Abundant Life. I also became engrossed in the Captain Marvel, Superman, and Batman comics which I bought from the English language bookstore. Since I was under age, I tipped the quiet and aloof one-eyed cleaning person to bring me the Scandinavian nudist magazine I had just seen in the shop and keep quiet about it. I gave him a brown paper bag to bring it in.
Ambala had an air force base and an English language movie theater, where I fell in love with Doris Day and waited patiently for movies with Gary Cooper,