Category: Travel

The pandemic has resurfaced to my view an unlikely life, someone I met in North India 25 years ago.

India’s sights, sounds and smells overwhelm a first-time visitor from the West. On my initial trip, 1995, everywhere I looked riveted my attention, especially the sheer numbers of people—children, women and men in south Asian dress doing interesting things.

Cars, buses, trucks, human-powered rickshaws, scooters, oxen-drawn wagons, bicycles … a tangle of vehicles snarled the roadway as pedestrians darted through the gaps with care. Trucks bore strange signs at the back: “Honk, please.” Pairs of laborers stood on rickety, ascending platforms passing cement-loaded trays up three stories of a construction project. Cattle tethered on short leashes languished beside tiny homes lining narrow, dusty streets.

Of course India boasts lots of world-class tourist sites, especially the Taj Mahal, and a list of lesser-known Mughal architectural wonders including the Red Fort and Fatehpur Sikri, all splendid, enchanting, spectacular.

But the people, the God-image bearers, made the deepest impression. One, especially.

My agency had sent me to observe a church-leadership training seminar, a three-day affair hosted by Baring Union Christian College in Batala, Punjab, a city of over 100,000. The teaching was conducted in Hindi, one of India’s 14 official languages, 13 of which I spoke equally well (which is to say, except for English, not at all).

One can abide incomprehensible speech only so long before restlessness overcomes patience, and so it was, a couple of hours into the session, that I slipped outside for a look around. And because I did, my life is richer 25 years later.

Swept up in a crowd

Following the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Ghandi by Sikhs in 1985, Punjab state, home of the Sikhs, had been closed to foreign travel until a few years before my visit. A Westerner was a rare commodity in Batala in 1995. I didn’t know this; it might have prepared me for what was about to happen.

I walked a few steps from the seminar room and came to a ten-acre lawn dotted with clusters of students segregated by sex; groups of guys, bunches of girls. I greeted someone and a throng of young men quickly formed around me, pressed in on me. From where have you come? What is it like in America? What are you thinking about India? Other questions followed, some not suitable to publish but unsurprising considering that young men everywhere are interested in “the way of a man with a maid,” as Agur put it, and perceive Americans as experts in such matters.

Any opportunity for meaningful conversation quickly dissolved as I started to answer a question only to be interrupted by another shouted from the edges of the crowd as additional students joined the fray. It occurred to me what Mark the gospeler meant, “Jesus could no longer openly enter a town, but was out in desolate places, and people were coming to him from every quarter.” It was a rush, but wanting to avoid a spectacle, I had started moving away, when one young man stepped up with a direct request. Could I meet with him later to talk? We agreed on a time and place, and I returned to the seminar.

One courageous invitation

At the appointed time I found the rooftop of a three-story building where my supplicant, Ashwani, and two friends waited. “Will you come to my village?” he immediately asked.

“How far is it?” I envisioned a journey my schedule would not allow, but he assured me a twenty-minute rickshaw ride would get us there. I secured permission from my host and it was set. We left the campus by bicycle rickshaw, stopped to meet his father selling shoes by the road, and again to have tea with his friend minding a wedding-supply shop, before arriving at an agricultural hamlet on the edge of the city.

Children encircled us as we walked into the community along the narrow street between houses. One young man took my hand to walk beside me. I was perplexed by the energy and celebratory spirit. Ashwani saw that on my countenance. “You must understand, sir. You are the first Englishman to visit my village.”

Ashwani’s neighbors blessed him for his initiative to deliver joy to an ordinary day. As for the “Englishman,” he was having an out-of-body experience. Every household fed me. Ashwani offered milk, a food I had been warned to avoid, but it arrived in a gleaming stainless steel tumbler, sweet and pure and delicious. These rural villagers on the outskirts of Batala provided astonishing hospitality to a stranger. To recount it in detail would overrun my readers’ patience, perhaps.

Okay, one detail. I had just finished telling the story of David and Goliath to the assembled children when Ashwani quietly inquired, “Sir, would you like a comb? Your hairs are scattered!” I still smile at that memory, but the fact is, he cared about my dignity enough to risk my disapproval. Only selfless love overcomes fear of rejection.

God uses unlikely people

Good deeds often come from unlikely sources. Seven thousand miles and 25 years have not erased the impact of that day (and the next, when Ashwani approached me on the campus begging me to return, “Those who did not see you are considered unlucky.”) All this wonder, both for the hamlet and the visitor, was made possible by a student’s courage to approach a foreigner on behalf of his community, a stranger whose only meaningful credential was his place of birth.

And after I returned home, Ashwani wrote me repeatedly, even spent precious rupees to call me on several occasions. Sometimes, when he couldn’t muster enough cash to call, he would dial my number and hang up after one ring, somehow reassured by the mental image of his “Englishman” friend on the other side of the world holding a phone and thinking about him, and his village beside Batala.

Over the intervening years, the calls and cards diminished and almost stopped. Time and responsibilities intervened. Ashwani graduated, got a teaching job, married, sired two children.

But in September 2001, when the towers fell three thousand miles from me, he called to be sure I was okay.

And earlier this month, Ashwani phoned to check on my welfare in the pandemic. From his native land, where day laborers are starving in the Covid storm, he reached across the Pacific once again to be sure I was okay.

When we think we’re too small and insignificant to be of much use, we need to remember Ashwani. He scorned intimidation and risked rejection to extend himself into the life of another, and a little bit of history was created as a result.