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, Montgomery Clift, and Elizabeth Taylor, glossy advertisement photographs and posters of whom were on display in the lobby. Here I saw An American in Paris, A Place in the Sun, the Tarzan movies, and westerns such as The Streets of Laredo, the original one with that title starring William Holden, Macdonald Carey, Mona Freeman, and William Bendix. After sixty years those names come easily to my tongue. The song from Laredo lives now only in my head and is heard only in my car. “I was just rambling through/ On the streets of Laredo./ I was just a stranger that day/ On the road to anywhere.” The verse I’ve made up goes something like this: She cried when we woke in manana. She knew that soon we’d be parting. She murmured You go Santa Ana, and I to Ol’ Mexico.
It is impossible to explain the depth and expanse of the power that these movies had on me. I began to think differently and see myself differently. They made me cry, they made me laugh out loud, they made me sing. They made me a lone and brave warrior. I was a blank tablet for them. My imagination was ablaze. Would I ever grow up out of Hollywood’s World War Two dramas and musical comedies?
One day during my winter break my father and I were coming through the gate after a walk, and out of curiosity he reached into my back pocket and pulled out the paperback western The Valley of Dry Bones by Arthur Henry Gooden. As we talked he gave me the gut-wrenching news, which I had no choice but to accept: I would not be going back to the American boarding school where I had studied for five years. Instead I would be going to one of the Anglo-Indian schools across the valley, one of the schools against which we competed in sports. They do not want you back, he said, and I cannot afford to send you there anyway.
Strong bonds of friendships had formed at the American school with Richard, Ray, Ramesh, Jeremy, and many others. I had spent a boyhood there collecting ferns and beetles and chasing butterflies, the exquisite colors gleaming in their bouncy, erratic, unrepeatable flight and in the openings and closings of their wings after they alighted. There were so many species then, and the sightings never ceased to be new discoveries for me. Those creatures were manifestations of the resilient, transitory, and fragmentary nature of the earth’s beauty. Furthermore, visions in my head about my being a winner for our sports teams in the interschool Olympics had become part of the reason for my existence.
I also roamed the hillside forest and had secret places in it that were all my own. There was a gentle rhododendron slope with red clay that I loved. There was a shining slope with tall pines and an old abandoned cabin with broken doors in which I loitered. I loved the aroma of the pines and the ground beneath, a thick and soft carpet of pine needles. This second hillside dropped quickly and the trail led down to the stream from Dhobi Ghat, the washers’ village, and up the next mountain with a lone tree in the middle of a clearing on the ridge. We could see it clearly every day from Ridgewood, the young boys’ dorm. I called it Lone Tree Mountain and dreamed of hiking there someday.
The President Cleveland sailed on to Honolulu, and then when we saw the gull we knew we were approaching the United States mainland. I was met at the port by Ted, a tall, businesslike young man, the treasurer of the student body of San Francisco Theological Seminary in San Anselmo, fifteen miles north of San Francisco. It is set on a hill in the shadow of Mount Tamalpais and its forested slopes. My room was on the second floor of the single men’s dormitory, Montgomery Hall, a medieval castle-looking building with ivy on the walls, hardwood floors, and big windows. This would be good for me. I would not be alone here.
Among my classmate friends was a darkish, smartly dressed young man who carried himself with reserve, dignity, and poise. He became class president, to no one’s surprise. Pat and I spoke of how the seminary was split between liberals and conservatives, liberals being those who embraced the modern methods of interpretation and conservatives being those who resisted them. I quickly found myself caught in the murky middle with burning questions having to do with the doctrines I had been given to believe since I was a boy, and which I now began to test against the brightest of my fellow students and even my teachers. One tall former baseball player, Don, a senior, blew me away with an answer to a question I had on atonement. I could not beat him in ping-pong either. Bill’s room was at the end of the hall. He was a stocky man, a weightlifter. He was a gentle soul too, and a scholar who could read German. He told me about Karl Barth, the theologian who was all the rage here in seminary and all over the country, some of whose volumes he had, though I would have to wait to read them in upper level classes, he said. I liked and trusted Bill and visited with him often. Soon I was in awe of Barth and promised myself that I would master his work some day. Bill said that it was Barth who was responsible for the theological boom that was taking place in Europe and America. Surely Barth was saying something of pivotal importance, the guts of which I should know.
Dr. Arnold Come was the authority on Barthian theology. He had just returned from Germany, where he had studied with Barth himself. A serious man, he lectured with notes that were painstakingly precise. He was teaching a system, consistency and coherence were all-important, and every word counted.
The other theologian was the young, playful new graduate from Princeton Theological Seminary, Dr. Benjamin Reist. Both his lectures and his preaching were articulate, funny, and theatrical, charged with an irrepressible theological swagger. We smiled when he spoke. Someone signed Barth’s name on the roll that was being passed around in class. Norm Roddick’s impersonation of him was perfect on a Friday entertainment night. His palm stuck to the table, resisting release. When Billy Graham came to speak at the seminary, those two professors sat in the balcony as a sign of rebuff. It was widely known that they disapproved of his visit.
Hard work prevailed in Montgomery Hall. The muffled sound of typewriters emanated from the rooms late into the night. I would listen to the radio at times to the sounds of San Francisco, the jazz, the hit songs like You Send Me. Songs have a way of stamping an era with their seal. They shape the soul too. The voices, the lyrics, the rhythm, the melody, and the musical accompaniment all can blend so well that they penetrate, they escalate you to new domains of being and nonbeing. In my room I swayed and drifted with them, hand in hand with the girl of my dreams, from Ferris wheel and boardwalk out to the beach.
The songs I was hearing now had a different gestalt than the mild Because of You and A Kiss to Build a Dream On, which I had heard on the All India Radio Hit Parade broadcast from what was then Ceylon. These songs now conveyed a dark waterfront ephemerality. Something of a painful transition, perhaps a tipping point long in the making, a smoke gets in your eyes goodbye, was transpiring in the underground of the human soul. On the other hand, Be Thou My Vision and Come Labor On, two forceful older hymns I learned in my hymnody class, refurbished my reasons for being here in seminary. Pilgrim reader, you should have heard the vigorous sound of our class as we sang them in the stone monastery-style classroom building. I had never heard such powerful singing or such unsentimental and muscular religious music.
If I could only compose this book in musical notes! My symphony is about the still of the night. It starts with the jazz in The Hungry Eye of my imagination. Overtones of the hit songs come and go throughout. The threatening
