2. Long Shadows
When it was first published, you could walk into any bookstore in Kerala and purchase a massive red volume titled The Malayalam-English Dictionary. Malayalam, which is one of the world’s most difficult languages, is the language of Kerala, the most southern state of India. Kerala is also the region that has birthed some of the nation’s greatest philosophers.
On the spine of that Malayalam-English dictionary, the first of its kind, you would have read two authors’ names: Zacharias and Zacharias — my grandfather and great-grandfather. Both were very prominent linguists, and for Malayalam and English this dictionary is the equivalent of Webster’s Dictionary. A compilation of such magnitude could be designated the work of two lifetimes, pioneering in its effort for its time and a landmark in its effect to date. I am told it was an enormous help to missionaries and to businessmen and women trading in that part of the world. When the Bible was translated into Malayalam, the translators borrowed from the genius of this work. I was so thrilled when I held the massive volume in my hand for the first time — to see the incredible accomplishment of my grandfather and great-grandfather. Linguistically, they paved the way for the British to reach India’s intellectual elite.
Of all the many language groups in India, Malayalis take particular pride in their language. When it is spoken, it sounds like a person with a mouth full of marbles, head thrown back and gargling in abandon with mellifluous tones. The polysyllables just roll off the tongue, and you may find yourself wondering whether this is for real or just a game to see who can outsound the other! The person who engages in palindromes will appreciate that the name of the language itself, Malayalam, is the same spelled backward or forward. I have often wondered if that’s why its very sounds are mesmerizing.
The defenders of this language will tell you passionately that it is the most beautiful and descriptive tongue in the world. I shall let them argue it out with others who lay the same claim for their own language. To speak it well is considered to be quite an accomplishment, much the same way that Arabs view the beauty of Arabic or the academics of old viewed Latin. They bemoan the fact that the world doesn’t know their tongue.
Although my dad wasn’t a linguist like his forebears, he was naturally very fluent in Malayalam. I learned other languages as a boy — English and Hindi — and I understand and can speak some Tamil. But Malayalam was not commonly used where I grew up in Delhi, and I regret that I never learned it. I often quip now that the only words I learned in Malayalam were the words my father used to chastise me, and those are not fit to be heard in public!
I never knew my grandfather, Oliver Zacharias. With the exception of my mother’s mother, Agnes Manickam, all of my grandparents died before I was born. Yet, Grandfather Zacharias provided me with an important legacy that still touches me very tangibly today.
He was the first Indian to be appointed by the British as professor of English at a university in India, Madras Christian College in Madras (which, I remind you, is now Chennai). The college was founded by the British and remains one of the country’s best-known schools. His appointment was a historic honor.
That my grandfather was near the top in his field has been confirmed many times by several of his former students I’ve met in their later years. To a person, they have said he was very gifted in both his native tongue and English, and a delight to be with. But mostly what they’ve wanted to tell me about was his way with words and his ready wit.
About ten years ago, I had just spoken to a large audience in Chennai when an elderly man approached me. He asked, “Does the name Oliver Zacharias mean anything to you?”
“Yes, sir, it does,” I answered smiling. “He was my grandfather.”
With a twinkle in his eye, the man said, “I thought so. I was one of your grandfather’s students.”
I was momentarily caught off guard. “You studied under my grandfather?” I asked.
“Yes, son,” he said, “and as soon as I heard you speak, I leaned over to my wife and said, ‘He must be Oliver Zacharias’s grandson. He has to be.’ ”
Then this man told me something that amazed and delighted me. “Listening to you,” he said, “I see you have the same sense of humor your grandfather had.”
In the brief moments we had, he noted something else: “Obviously, you are of a different stripe spiritually from your grandfather.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, he was very much the maverick,” he began. Then a grin formed. “He was also very attached to snuff.”
“Snuff? You mean tobacco that is inhaled?”
“Yes. And the reason I mention this to you,” he said, “is that on the day he retired, he was presented with a silver walking stick and a silver snuff box. That was over half a century ago now, yet I’ll never forget it.
“When the presentation was made, with a long speech commemorating his accomplishments, your grandfather simply approached the lectern to receive the gifts. Then, with a sarcastic grin on his face, he said, ‘Those who smoke tobacco look like pigs. Those who chew tobacco act like pigs. And those who snort tobacco are pigs. Thank you very much.’ And he sat down to roaring laughter and applause!
“That was it. No protracted speech, just that single line of humor. Your grandfather was brief, witty, and very self-effacing. All of those traits were captured in that one moment. I will never forget him for his way with words and his love for his students.”
My eyes moistened with a longing to have met my grandfather as I heard this all too brief description. We were surrounded at that moment by hundreds of people, yet what I would have given to be able to talk with this man for the rest of the night! It was a wondrous moment, all too fleeting. I marveled at how this stranger could recognize a trait I shared with a man I’d never met. It was a moment when God seemed to peek out from behind the shadows, revealing in the very makeup of my family a glimpse of His tapestry.
But this man’s description of my grandfather struck home for another reason. The moment he told me the story, I thought, “Boy, that was exactly the way my dad was with his wit!”
My father was always fussy about “dotting his i’s and crossing his t’s.” Language was important to him. His entire family had a touch of irony and sarcasm in their humor. Like my grandfather, my dad was a very brilliant man in his own right. And I believe his type of humor bordered on genius — that rare ability to caricature reality in the moment and to play on words, adding a creative twist to a situation that reveals a different dimension to its reality.
All of this only makes me wish I had known more of my ancestry. That evening in Chennai, I had to acknowledge that whatever the elderly gentleman recognized in me from my grandfather was evidently a transgenerational trait.
Kerala, where my father grew up, is a beautiful place. It is known as the “fruit basket of India” because it’s full of banana plantations, coconut groves, and acres of well-irrigated orchards. The miles and miles of green everywhere contrast beautifully against the rich turquoise waters of the Indian Ocean. Some years ago, I enjoyed basking in the sun one summer afternoon with the famed astronaut James Irwin. He and I were sharing some meetings together in Kerala. He said to me, “When I was in space, I well remember the unique blue of these waters and always wanted to come here. From space and from here, this is a luxurious reflection of God’s beauty.” This part of the country is very different from the north, which is known for being the center of government, Delhi, and also India’s cosmopolitan hub.
It is said that India’s brains come from the South, and, as I mentioned, many well-known philosophers have emerged from here. This was home to Sankara, the Socrates of Indian philosophy. He was a pantheist who believed there was one ultimate impersonal reality called “Brahma,” of which we are all part and parcel. To him, any effort to define God in personal terms was a beggar’s refuge. In the beginning was Reality, impersonal and absolute without attribute, and you and I are part of that reality. Sankara’s name is writ large in philosophy today, and he is revered as the best exponent of this strain of Hinduism.
Ramanuja, also from the South, was by contrast a Hindu “theist.” To him, God could be defined in personal terms and was manifested in a multiplicity of incarnations. Worship, hymns, and all the expression that assumed a significant other were God-ward devotion. To him, God was describable.
In terms of modern Indian thinkers, Sarvapelli Radhakrishnan is probably the most quoted and prolific. He, too, hailed from the South and at one time held the prestigious chair of Eastern philosophy at Oxford University in England. He later became India’s second president following its independence in 1947. As a little boy, I had the privilege of meeting him when my father was invited to his home. Little did I know then that I was shaking the hand of one of India’s seminal thinkers and writers and would later study Hindu philosophy under one of his students. He was also a very humble man and much beloved by Indian people.
I cannot resist adding to this list of distinguished southern figures a contributor whose intellectual origins were foreign — the apostle Thomas. He came to India and paid with his life to bring a new message to the upper crust of India’s cradle of philosophy. One of the largest church groups in India today, nine million members and a thousand parishes strong — called the Mar Thoma Church (“Lord Thomas,” a title of honor, not comparing Thomas to the Lord Jesus) — originated in Kerala and is named after the apostle. Thomas’s contribution, both to the philosophical landscape and to my own path, has been incalculable.
My father’s side of the family certainly had its share of brainpower. They came from what can only be described as the upper echelon of Indian society. My father’s brother-in-law, my uncle, was a prominent pharmacologist who wrote a well-known textbook used for decades in India’s medical schools. This distinguished gene pool often showed in his attitude and self-confidence and, sadly, many times in his disposition to those not from such privileged roots.
My dad applied his intellect to studies in industrial labor relations at Nottingham University in England. Sometime after he returned to India, the government transferred him from Madras in the South to Delhi in the North, so my family bid good-bye to southern life and became, in effect, northerners in our tongue and culture. I was quite young at the time, probably around four or five years old, and we lived in Delhi until I was twenty. During that period, my father ascended government ranks to hold a very powerful portfolio as deputy secretary in the State Department, which in India is called the Home Ministry.
Being born in the South and raised in the North has presented unique challenges. My name and coloring are southern, but my language and accent are northern. Often when I speak in India, I am asked, “Are you a Dilliwallah?” which means, “Are you a Delhi-ite?” This is like asking in England, “Are you from London?” Or, if I may mix geographies a little, it is a bit like being Atlanta born and New York raised. I always answer, “Yes, I am a Dilliwallah,” but then explain that my roots are southern. In that way I am a product culturally and psychologically of both the North and the South. My language is northern, but my philosophical bent is southern.
It’s somewhat funny that when I am given any introduction in India, what is said of me depends on where I am being introduced. If in Delhi, I am introduced as “a native son.” In Chennai, I am said to be “a child of Chennai’s soil.” In Kerala, I am described as the “product of Keralite blood.” All these things are very important there. And I am happy to cater to each setting, appreciative of all the many teary-eyed elderly persons who want to come and stroke my face when I’m finished, each endearingly laying claim to my roots.
Most people I have met who have grown up in a Western culture don’t seem to be nearly as aware of their ancestry as those from the East. I have lived in North America for almost forty years now, and I’ve experienced the differences between cultures. In Western culture, we are so pragmatically and entrepreneurially driven that we tend to overlook the lines throughout history that have fallen into place for us to arrive at where we are today. We think it has just “happened.”
It hasn’t. And those from Eastern cultures never forget that. They always know their ancestry. I remember such a moment when I was still in my twenties and, for the first time, had returned to India to preach. My wife and I were the honored guests at a very prestigious cricket club where I was to speak, and the introduction caught Margie completely off guard. To begin with, it was about ten minutes long. Beyond that, it was all about my father, and, in typical Eastern fashion, no part of his credits and accomplishments was left unembellished. Finally, after a pause, the hostess said, “And we will now hear from his son.”
I understood what was happening. And I smiled, also understanding what was behind the stunned look on my wife’s face. I knew she was thinking, “What? Couldn’t you say anything about Ravi? His father isn’t even here!” But in their minds, they had. What greater compliment could they give me than that I was the son of my father?
This was driven home to me again just a few months ago. I had finished writing a book about a conversation between two Muslim young men, one a rigid Muslim and the other a convert to Christ. It was an imaginary debate between Jesus and Mohammed being argued by these two young men. Before I sent it to the publisher, I asked a Muslim scholar to review the manuscript. After reading it, his first comment was, “You can’t do this. I know nothing about these two men, except what they’re conversing about here. How can you tell me so little about their roots? There is no way I can enter into this conversation without knowing something about their ancestry.”
So he set to work. He labored for hours and created by sheer imagination an extensive family tree: what the father did; what the grandfather did; who killed whom, when, and why; which school each boy attended; the name of the street they lived on as children; how many children in each family had been lost due to violence. In fact, he traced their ancestries all the way back to the Ottoman Empire. On and on it went.
After two full days, he returned the manuscript to me, along with a complex diagram of two family trees. I was overwhelmed and absorbed by the detail, and yet I knew he was right. Suddenly the characters were brought to life in a context. “Now your conversation makes sense,” he said. “Keep this, because you may someday do a sequel, and you don’t want to forget who came from where and from whom.” I felt justifiably rebuked.
It is an amazing piece of work. What that Muslim scholar did for me in critiquing my manuscript in this way was incredibly generous. Yet he didn’t do it just for me; it was as much for his own benefit. You see, to an Easterner, one cannot pass judgments or make evaluations on the present without equally taking the past into consideration, in a very linear fashion. This, of course, is a tendency that has its good and bad side, for in the East history and ancestry never die. The very life you live is a debt from the past.
I was once speaking in Cambridge, England, when a young Pakistani student came up to me quite deeply troubled. “I came to hear you because I learned you were from India and had become a Christian. The same is true for me, except that I am from Pakistan and was a Muslim before I became a Christian. I am troubled, very troubled. My father paid for my education. But while I’ve been studying here, I have found Jesus Christ and committed my life to Him. I don’t know how to deal with this.
“My father died last year. I was his pride and joy. Now I have decided that after I receive my degree, I will take it and bury it in his grave as my honor to him and as the only way to express that in my conversion I intended no disrespect to him. Let it mingle with the soil that carries his bones. Do you think I will have done enough?”
He was too choked up to finish his thoughts. That speaks of the deep etchings of culture upon the Eastern soul. In a proverbial sense, soil and soul define the “I” and the “U,” and if we do not understand this, we will never understand the East. Religion, language, and ancestral indebtedness are carved into the consciousness of every child of the East. And this is precisely what makes conversion to any other faith an upheaval of titanic proportions.
I thank God for the Eastern part of me. My upbringing in India gave me a true understanding of how the Easterner thinks. I don’t have to struggle to figure it out. Likewise, having lived in the West since I was twenty, I believe I’ve come to understand how a Westerner thinks. I’ve been given a unique opportunity to learn to think in different languages, to be shaped by different cultures, to have a completely different way of measuring values in order to decipher the between-the-lines hints of the world and, if I may dare say it, the breaking points within each.
God makes an incredible investment in you when He combines two worlds into your mind. Christians see the great value of such convergence in the life of the apostle Paul, who was Hebrew by birth but deeply conversant in both the Greek and Roman cultures. Being able to speak in two languages from opposite ends of the world helps you to be sympathetic and, I believe, effective in not just hearing but listening; in responding not just to the question but to the questioner. For this, language and shared tragedy are indispensable. You really only learn to think like the other when you speak their language and share a cultural DNA. With the world increasingly becoming a crossroads between East and West, being bicultural helps to answer the crucial question, “How can I connect with the soul of this man or this woman?”
I understand very well what is being said by a fellow Indian, even when the words he’s using may be very different from what he actually means to convey. In Eastern culture, appearance and essence are implicitly accepted as two different parts of reality and can oppose one another. Indeed, it is very common in many Eastern cultures to live a bifurcated life. For instance, your religious life and your moral life are not necessarily connected. It is perfectly acceptable for a man to light holy candles, walk out of the temple, and then lie through his teeth about what he’s selling you. The incredible thing is that it may not even qualify as hypocrisy, because he genuinely believes that the rules of engagement in commercial enterprises are different from his life of ceremony and superstition. The theorist from the East may challenge what I am saying, but he or she can never deny its accepted reality. Life is a bargain, and you negotiate the best deal for yourself. That’s just the way it is. In fact, there is a Middle Eastern proverb that says, “The lie is the salt of man.” You season everything you do with a lie. Everyone ends up finding how to skirt around the truth and appear honorable.
This disconnection stared me in the face very early in life. I saw vividly that things were not right in many of the families we knew, a fact that struck very close to home. On hot summer nights in Delhi, our entire family used to sleep on the lawn in front of our flat. A thick hedge of jasmine plants ringed the frontage of the home, giving us a degree of privacy, and after dark the servants would carry the beds outside and ready them for the night. That way we could enjoy the cooler fresh air outdoors rather than the stifling heat indoors. It was a lot of fun for us, and it usually involved plenty of laughter and pillow fights with my brothers and sisters, as we had more room to horse around than we had inside.
But while lying on our outdoor beds on some of those nights, we often heard the abuse that took place in the flat above us. Every now and then, the silence of the night would be broken by the horrific sounds of the husband beating his wife, even chasing her from room to room as she would try to flee his wrath. Yes, I could hear the thud of his hand landing on her as she would run and sometimes stumble. This is a horrible memory for me. I would take my pillow and cover my head, unable to block out her pleadings for him to stop.
And nobody did a thing about it — not us, not the other neighbors, no one. It was just not done within the cultural ethos. I would lie there silent, like my brothers and sisters, and terrified. I realized, “This isn’t right. Where does one go to complain? What does one do to make it stop?”
The next morning, at the crack of dawn, we would be awakened by the same couple singing together in worship, as if nothing had happened. Like a nightmare, it had come and gone, and the new morning was another day in which to just carry on living as if all was well. I fought it on the inside, but such dissonance is kept private in an otherwise very public culture. I would avoid even looking the man in the eye if I ever crossed his path.
Sadly, it was a disconnection I learned all too well, even in my own household.
One of the most emphasized lessons I learned from listening all around and observing was that you had to succeed professionally. Keep your private heartache private; keep your collapsing world propped up. Professional appearances are all that you could take with you. And one dare not wash the family “dirty linen” in public. I could understand that to a degree, but it left a residual heartache in private. That’s what life is all about: Become a doctor or lawyer or military officer. Become part of society’s influential lot. This was passed along to each of us, both explicitly and implicitly.
In this sense, Ajit, the oldest of us, was the mirror image of my dad. He was confident, poised — and I wanted so much to be like him. Ajit was very sharp and professionally driven, like our father. I think that’s why the two of them got along very well. My dad apparently saw Ajit as the one who was going to carry the family’s accolades. To this day we each see my dad differently.
My two sisters, Prem and Sham, were gifted in music and in many other qualities that I didn’t have. And my little brother, of course, was the darling of the family, being the youngest. Somewhere in the middle was me.
My dad was very affirming toward my siblings — not to the degree that a typical father would have been, but he did affirm them. He always affirmed Ajit. In fact, my father and brother were so much alike that on the rare occasions they butted heads, my heart would beat faster as I watched Ajit stand his ground, which is something I never could have done. My dad knew that Ajit was a “toe to toe” kind of person, like himself, and that he couldn’t be pushed too far.
On one occasion when we were all at the dining room table for dinner, my dad did something that upset Ajit. My brother said something in response, and there followed a very long, tense moment. I shivered in my shoes. I did not know what would happen. After a tense moment between them that seemed like an eternity, each staring the other down, my dad backed down, and the tension slowly deflated in silence. My dad knew he was up against his own kind.
Our father had very endearing terms for my sisters and my younger brother, and he had a very affectionate way with them and with other young children. But for whatever reason, he had no such term of endearment for me. He always called me by my name.
That was a small thing compared to knowing that I was also the one consistently on the receiving end of his rather violent temper. I never could figure out why his wrath was reserved for me in ways that carried over even into my middle teens. None of the rest of our family ever have, either. Maybe I cowered in his presence, and it was just his nature to go for the weak one. I was certainly the weakest of the bunch. Whatever it was, something developed in which I became the brunt of all his anger. My brothers and sisters knew it. My mother certainly knew it. Even Margie came to know it, in our married years, from the stories that were told and by the way I held myself in my father’s presence, even as an adult.
I’ve often wondered if this was because my dad didn’t even see me until more than a year after I was born. He was in England, studying at Nottingham, when my mother gave birth to me, and he didn’t return until well after I was a year old. That may or may not have had some bearing on the tension I always felt from him.
As soon as he came home from work each night, my whole demeanor would change. If he were going out for the evening, for me it was good news. If he and I were alone in a room, I would find an excuse to leave to get something. I am sure it was not all his fault. I feared him and therefore could not make conversation.
As time went on, his fears of my failure and my fear of him met in some very painful memories. I simply never performed at the level my siblings did. My life seemed purposeless, without direction; I could never live up to his expectations, nor could I bridge the distance that existed between us. It was an impasse neither of us was able to solve on our own.
Like his father and grandfather before him, my father certainly made his own contribution to Indian culture. He did this especially in his support of Indian sports, spending a lot of his energies procuring funds for the training of Indian athletes and sportsmen and women. Interestingly enough, when he left India for Canada, a newspaper article was headlined, “Good Samaritan of Indian Sports Moves to Canada.” I have no doubt that his work as a government leader was somewhere lining the fabric of the recognition people gave me the first few times I returned to India. So there was that side to him that was giving and caring.
And it was my mother’s heart that shaped my soul. She always cared for the poor. When we were young and our family had very little money, she would come home from a tea party or a dinner bringing little pastries or cookies wrapped in a napkin for us, her purse full of crumbs from the goodies. After we moved to Canada, and I began traveling to India, she always sent with me clothes and jewelry or little household items to give to the servants who had worked in our home when we lived there. These people held her in the highest esteem.
I see her also in the etchings of my own conscience. I have brought into being a division of our ministry — RZIM Wellspring International — that reaches out to Asian women, the destitute and the poor, and particularly to women who have been sexually abused or forced into prostitution. It is a privilege for me to see my middle daughter, Naomi, directing its reach and its touch.
My southern Indian heritage, grounded in the philosophical and intellectual, has surely informed the scholarly programs our ministry sponsors. And my love of words and the use of language to generate wonder may have been the bequest of my grandfather. My opportunity to move to Canada was a gift from my father’s belief that if his children had the opportunity in the West, then I might succeed. And my mother’s gift was a tender heart.
It strikes me that as I pen these acknowledgments, I am minutes away from landing in Chennai on a visit. It also happens to be my birthday today — quite fitting, I think. As I set foot on my native soil again, I am reminded in its sights and sounds and smells and everything else this land represents to me, whether of pain or in the brain, that the marvel of the work of God in all this is that He planted in me the roots of order for my calling. But my hungers went unfulfilled until I found Him.
Sometimes in the shadows of one’s self lie the problems, and in the shadows of one’s shaping lie the answers.