8. The Longest Shadow
Who am I, and what am I doing?
I had been asking myself these questions relentlessly, day after day.
If you have the idea that life is something random; that there is no point to it, no purpose; that you just happen to be here — in existential terms, that you are a useless being floating on a sea of nothingness for whom in the end it all comes to nothing — then the idea of becoming nothing can seem better than that random something. It was the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre who said, “I’ve asked myself many questions and answered all of them. What I cannot answer is why I don’t commit suicide.”
I had heard some of my classmates speak of the unspeakable on several occasions. The word “suicide” was whispered, sometimes in jest, at other times mockingly, but we knew there was really no humor or sarcasm intended, especially as failure always seemed imminent.
Yet, they had no more reason to consider it than I. “Why put my family through any more of this?” I thought. “My father, my mother, my brothers, my sisters?”
I don’t know when exactly I came to the decision. But when I did, I made it firmly and calmly: A quiet exit will save my family any further shame. And it will spare me any further failure.
Was I depressed when I made my decision? No. Was it impulsive? No, I had seen it coming for some time, perhaps always lurking in my mind as the final escape. Some cultures lend themselves more to the thought than others. My culture was definitely one of them.
When I arrived at the university that morning, I walked into the chemistry lab. No one was there. I did not hesitate in my mission. Somehow I got into the locked cupboard where the chemicals were stored. I pored over shelf after shelf until I came to some packets marked “poison.” I grabbed several of them and stuffed them into my pockets.
I went directly home from the college and hid the bag in which I had put the packets. I had no idea what the chemicals were. They might have been some kind of acid, for all I knew, which could have burned through my insides. As far as I recall, that evening I played my usual game of cricket. What loomed in my mind, however, was foolish, very foolish — a coward’s exit, really — but I had made my decision.
The next morning, one by one, each family member left for school or work. My mother, curious, asked me why I was still home, and I brushed her question aside, telling her that classes were beginning later that day. With the house emptied of my family, I went to the kitchen for a glass of water; it would help me to drink down the poison. Our house servant was there, tending to the boiling pots and simmering pans as he cleaned up from morning breakfast. So I changed my mind about carrying out my plan in the kitchen. I filled a glass from the tap and took it into the bathroom. I shut and bolted the door behind me and let the faucet run for a few minutes, while I wondered if I was really going to go through with this.
I hurriedly emptied my pockets of all the toxic packets. I opened them and emptied some of the contents from each, pouring them into the glass of water. The poisonous concoction began to effervesce, bubbling up.
I lifted the glass.
One last breath. I couldn’t think of any reason to stop. The thought of my mother flashed through my mind, and it smothered my determination not to think anymore. “How is she going to react?” I wondered. “What will she do when she finds out?”
But I had to go through with it. I pushed all thoughts of my mother aside, and I swallowed the entire contents as quickly as I could.
My first reaction was nausea, because it was salty, very salty. Almost immediately, my body seemed to react to it, wanting to expel it.
Once it went down, I filled the glass again and clumsily poured in more of the chemicals. Fighting back nausea, I took another gulp. But I could no longer suppress the saltiness of the poison welling up in me. I began to throw up. I did not realize that, once the gag reflex had set in, I wasn’t throwing up just the poison but also every bit of the moisture from my body. I was dehydrating fast.
Soon I collapsed to my knees. I tried clutching on to the sink, but I could barely hold on. I could feel my strength leaving me.
Impulsively, I called out for our house servant.
I had no idea whether he heard me. With all the noise coming from the kitchen, I gave up that he would hear me.
Suddenly, the door banged hard behind me. It was the servant, pushing against it. Another bang, and another. Finally he burst through, snapping the door off the hinges. He looked at me on the floor, then at the opened packets on the sink. He was completely unnerved.
“Take me to the hospital,” I whispered.
I was rushed to the emergency room at Wellington Hospital. Much of what followed is a haze to me. But I do remember lying in a bed with needles in me while the doctors tried desperately to get fluids back into my body.
I tried to raise my hands but couldn’t. My windpipe was so dry I couldn’t swallow. I realized I could do nothing to help myself, or even to help the physicians and nurses. My muscle strength was completely gone. I could not even lift my arm.
As I lay there, with all the activity to revive me going on, I began to drift off. “If I am to survive,” I wondered, “have I made myself an invalid? Will I need sustenance forced down my throat?” I didn’t know what was going to happen to me, and suddenly I was fearful. I hadn’t known how to live, and now I’d proven that I didn’t know how to die. I had failed at both, and I feared where that might leave me.
When I awoke, my mother was beside me.
I realized I was in the intensive care unit. Fluids were still dripping into me, and I sensed that a lot of time had passed, perhaps an entire day. A doctor stood by my bed, holding up my arm to insert a needle. As he let go, my arm flopped back down onto the bed.
I have to confess that all that followed is still very unclear to me. I never asked for any details then or after my discharge. For one thing, I wondered what had happened to the plastic packets of poison I had emptied. Did the servant try to protect me from my father and throw them out so that it wouldn’t look like a suicide attempt but just a sudden gastrointestinal attack of some sort? He definitely did something with them to cover my tracks. None of us have ever talked about the incident. In fact, a few years afterward, when I did mention it in an interview with a magazine, the details seemed to shock my father. He wanted me to talk to him about the whole episode, but I wanted this to just be a thing of the past.
Another question haunts: how much did my mom know but not tell anyone? I know that in the times in which we now live, nothing is private anymore. And even this telling in print I do with great unease. The first time I have revisited the hospital where all this happened is at this point of writing, and the floodgates of memory have seemed at once unstoppable and blurred. My attempt to end my life was a sad, dark event. Moreover, it defined who I was — someone with no hope, no meaning — and I was embarrassed even to have my mother there with me in intensive care.
Two or three days passed before I began to feel any strength at all coming back. My friends were not allowed to visit because I was so ill. But they wouldn’t have known what had happened. No one had told them why I was in the hospital. I was sure that only my mother — and perhaps my father — knew what had happened. All my mom told my buddies was that I was receiving the best of care.
A day or so later, a man named Fred David came by to visit. He was one of the directors of Youth for Christ, whose rally I had attended with my sister Sham and whose meetings I had just started attending. As Fred stood over my bed, he could see I was in no shape to talk. So he turned to my mother and handed her a Bible.
“I’ve brought this for you,” he said, opening the book. He flipped through the pages until he came to a certain spot. “Here,” he said, pointing to a spot on the page and showing it to my mother. “This is for Ravi.”
They talked for a while as I drifted in and out. I was uncomfortable with any visitors, but I was glad Fred was there; his presence seemed to bring my mother some reassurance. Once he left, my mom decided to read the passage to me.
“He brought this for you,” she said, showing me the Bible. She opened it to the fourteenth chapter of John’s gospel: It told of Jesus in conversation with the apostle Thomas. She looked down at the page and began with this sentence:
“Because I live, you also will live.”
The words hit me like a ton of bricks.
Live?
“Mom,” I interjected, “please read it again?”
This “life” sounded very different from ordinary life. I had no real idea about what it all meant, and no idea of the context of the words. All I knew was that it spoke of something beyond what I had experienced.
She read the verse again.
“Who is that speaking?” I asked.
Later I found out the words were those of Jesus as he spoke to the disciples. He was responding to Thomas’s question about where Jesus was going.
I didn’t know the full ramifications of the verse. But to me, Christ’s words in John, chapter 14, verse 19, were the defining paradigm: “Because I live, you also will live.”
“This may be my only hope,” I thought. “A new way of living. Life as defined by the author of life.”
“Jesus,” I prayed inwardly, “if You are the one who gives life as it is meant to be, I want it. Please get me out of this hospital bed well, and I promise I will leave no stone unturned in my pursuit of truth.”
It was a simple, pragmatic prayer. Yet it would have immense ramifications.
I had been in the hospital for five days when the attending doctor came to sign my discharge papers. I had finally regained enough strength to go home. As he looked over the documents and scribbled a few notes on them, he asked an odd question of me: “Do you really want to live?”
Live? I looked at him in surprise. He only continued to scribble.
Very sheepishly, I pretended I did not hear what he asked.
He stopped writing and turned to me with a sober expression. “Do you really want to live?” His expression hadn’t changed.
The words my mother had read to me resounded loudly within me: Because I live . . .
“We can make you live again by getting this poison out,” the doctor said, “but we cannot make you want to live.”
. . . you also will live, said Jesus.
I let the doctor’s question settle in — but I already knew the answer.
Upon my return home, I was glad I hadn’t left a note. I didn’t know if my brothers and sisters even knew what had happened. I don’t believe they knew; but if they did, we never talked about it. As for my father, perhaps he was actually in denial, as he mustn’t have asked any questions to have not known exactly what had happened that day. This was the quintessential expression of a cultural tendency to cover shame, and I was as much a part of it as he was.
Today, we live in a very different culture from the one in which my parents raised me. We never talked about my attempt at suicide, even years later, after our family had left India. Even my mom and I never talked about it. I wish we had.
The truth is, I have seldom relived it myself because of the intense sadness and embarrassment of my foolish act.
It took years before I could mention it to anyone, even those closest to me. The only one with whom I was comfortable talking about it was Margie, my wife. The best way I can explain this is that it has been like trauma from a war experience. To dredge up the memory is difficult, but to forget it would be unwise. I remember well from what I was rescued. If I’m one-on-one with someone now and they want to know about my experience, I don’t really mind talking about it. But at the time, I kept it to myself.
Sometimes now, when I talk about it in India, I can see from the expression on my listeners’ faces that they are uncomfortable. I realize I have to weave my telling of it in a way that helps people recognize that I’m aware this is a very uncomfortable subject. Yet I often wonder: have we done justice to our children when we have not allowed them to open up and share the deepest troubles of their hearts? On those rare occasions when I have mentioned my suicide attempt to an audience, invariably mothers have come up to me with tears in their eyes. They hardly speak a word. About all they say is, “I know what you’re talking about. And I’m so glad you’re out there talking about it.”
Life presents very despairing moments for many. I am convinced that it is only the fear of the unknown that restrains the impulses of some. There is principally, therefore, only one reason I ever mention my experience in any sermon or talk. More often than not, there is someone in the audience who confesses to having wrestled with the thought of suicide, and I want more than anything else to give that person the hope that I was given — hope that only Jesus can give.
I was very clear in my mind as I left the hospital with my mother that I had made a commitment to Christ. It was the most striking and most noble-minded decision I had ever made. My life now belonged to Jesus Christ. He had answered my prayer. Inside me there was something new — a new vibrancy, a new meaning, a new hope, a new Ravi Zacharias. Of that I was absolutely certain. And I was going to plumb the depths of what this new life meant. There would be no turning back for me.
As surely as I had tried to take my life, I now knew something dramatic had happened. There was a supernatural element to my decision — all the details of which I could not discern then. I know for certain that I could not have conjured up such a change. My will simply did not have the capacity to make such a change; that had been proven again and again. But I knew that in those verses from the book of John, Jesus seemed to be talking about a new being and a different kind of believing, thinking, acting, and doing than what I’d had in my life up to that point. Purpose and transformation were now writ large in my heart.
I also marvel at how God was in the shadows then, for I could have done permanent damage to my body — but God protected me from it. What if there had been some neurological debilitation? That did not happen. In the shadows was the One who made me select the “right” poison, just enough to awaken me from my stupidity and steady my feet in the right direction. The wrong poison would have been catastrophic in every sense of the term. And now I want to tell you this: our servant’s name meant “one who follows God.” Certainly for that hour and for that moment he lived out his name and became God’s instrument to save me.
Nothing — that had been my life before. Now I saw that the nothing was not — and that something was.
Nothing can never desire to be something, but something can desire to be something else.
I had found that something in Jesus Christ. Decades have gone by, and I have only become more certain in my heart and mind that Jesus Christ is who He claims to be — the very Son of God who draws us into a relationship with our heavenly Father, the author and giver of true life. The utter delight in my heart and the bounce in my step that followed my experience in the hospital day after day, year in and year out, could not be stifled by the tragedy and despair that had preceded. I was a new creation, and everyone who knew me now knew this. It is actually quite difficult for me now to even picture myself in those terms of the past.
The book of Proverbs says, “The path of the righteous is like the first gleam of dawn, shining ever brighter till the full light of day” (Proverbs 4:18). The dawn came in my life after my darkest hour, but how brilliant is that light that shines at that hour and only gets brighter with the years. That is the light of Christ. The songs I once heard my father sing — “Lead me, Lord, lead me in thy righteousness”; “Behold, I tell you a mystery”; “Abide with me” from my grandmother’s funeral — all now became reflections of the wellspring of an inner life that sang for the first time with hope. Jesus Christ rescued a despairing young man in Wellington Hospital in Delhi on that unforgettable day.
Who am I? I could now answer it. “I am yours, O Lord.”
A hymn by Charles Wesley perhaps most accurately describes my encounter with Jesus:
   Long my imprisoned spirit lay
   Fast bound in sin and nature’s night.
   Thine eye diffused a quickening ray;
   I woke — the dungeon flamed with light!
   My chains fell off, my heart was free,
   I rose, went forth, and followed thee.