Brother in Bharat

This year, I was presented with an amazing opportunity to study in India. I spent almost two months traveling and learning with a group of students and professors from the University of North Carolina. On one day I would be tucked inside a classroom at Jamia Millia Islamia studying the Hindi language and the religious and cultural identity of Indians. The next day, I would be walking the grounds of the Taj Mahal or roaming around the ancient Mughal city, Fatehpur Sikri. I have little doubt that the education I have received over my summer holiday has equaled years of study in a traditional classroom and has impacted the way I understand my faith and the imperatives of a Christian in an increasingly interconnected global society.

Sunday was always my favorite day in India. It was the only day, besides long travel days, when we did not have class. This meant that my peers and I could enjoy some much-needed rest, freedom, and reflection. This provided me time to slow down and actually think about all the many pieces of India affecting me. On our first Sunday in New Delhi, two of my friends decided to go to a Christian worship service they had heard about through one of the workers at the University guest house where we were staying. Together we hailed a rickshaw and travelled a short distance down the street to meet this group of Christians. We arrived a little late (some things never change) and entered the basement of a relatively modern building. We certainly attracted a few stares, something which is likely for a group of Americans in India. As I finally settled down and began to participate in the service, I soon realized just how similar this group was to any fledgling evangelical ministry in America. It would be dishonest to suggest that I understood even one-fourth of the service, conducted entirely in Hindi, but the motions of worship, the ebbs and flows, the call and response was unmistakable and distinctly Christian. As the service came to a close, we began to sing. While I couldn't make out the words, midway through I came to realize that I was humming along to a hymn I had been singing since childhood. I stood and sang loudly with my Indian brothers and sisters, "now praise we all our God…"

There were of course many aspects of my time in India which were extraordinarily difficult. It is troubling to know that children live in the streets and must beg from others in order to live. It is heartbreaking to walk through a market and ignore the pleas of those children because the alternative is to sustain the crime organizations which exploit those children in the first place. One of the most challenging periods of my journey through India was my brief stay in Aligarh, where I lived with a family which included a mother (mater ji) and a brother named Sumar. During my week in Aligarh I was away from my support group of peers for the first time and was immersed in a family where Hindi was spoken all the time. Electricity was a rare luxury, and privacy was non-existent — a particularly challenging circumstance for someone from rural North Carolina.

My home-stay family and I live lives that are worlds apart. They are Muslim, while I am Christian. The cultural norms and social imperatives which characterize life in India vary drastically from those which exist in my homeland. There were many things, however, which made me feel a lot closer to home. The gift Sumar probably enjoyed the most was the Car and Driver magazines my dad slipped into my back pack before I left home. Fast, beautiful cars excite teenage boys everywhere.

On the last night with my home family, I stayed up late studying while my family slept. Around one in the morning, Sumar woke up and came into the room where I was working. We thumbed through the magazines and Sumar started to ask me about my own family in America. After a while, he started to talk for the first time about his father who had passed away less than a year earler. Sumar admired his father greatly and missed him dearly. At the end of our conversation, I asked Sumar what happened to people when they died. He told me that he thought good people went to heaven, and that this was where his father was.

It is clear that despite the many things which differentiate the masses of humankind, there are so many things which we share. The various mechanisms, academic, political or religious, which function to create distinctions among people, are imagined. When I think of my Indian brother, I will always remember that there are millions of others with whom I could easily find just as genuine of connections. We are all of one God and knowing the challenges that exist in places far from my home obliges me to take action as an imperative of faith.