Sadhu Sundar Singh Preaches Across the Himalayas

The trail north of Shimla still held the night’s cold when I first saw him. I had come down from the higher villages with a load of wool, expecting only the usual dust and the ache in my shoulders. Instead a man in a saffron robe stepped out from the trees ahead of me, feet bare on the frost. He carried nothing but a book wrapped in cloth. When he turned, his eyes caught mine as if he had been waiting.

He asked if I knew the way to the next hamlet. I nodded and fell in beside him without thinking why. By midday we reached the cluster of stone houses where the women were spreading grain on the flat roofs. He stopped at the edge of the common ground and waited until a few men drifted over. Then he spoke, not loudly, but the words carried.

He told them the story of the carpenter from Galilee who had walked the same kind of paths. No one laughed at first. The older men watched his bare feet on the stones. One boy asked what the foreign god wanted from them. Sundar Singh answered that the one he followed asked only that they listen to the voice already inside their own silence.

That evening the headman let him sleep in the cattle shed. I stayed too, though my own house lay only an hour farther on. In the dark I heard him pray in a language I did not know, then in our own. He spoke to someone as if the person stood right there in the straw.

We left before dawn. The path climbed steeply toward the pass. Snow still lay in the hollows. I wore thick sandals; he walked on without them. When I asked if the cold troubled him he only smiled and said the road itself was enough. By noon my feet hurt inside the leather. His left heel showed a fresh cut, yet he never slowed.

At the next cluster of houses he preached again, this time inside the low temple that served for meetings. A few women came with children on their hips. One man shouted that the old gods had kept the snow away this year and needed no new stories. Sundar Singh waited until the shouting stopped, then asked the man what peace he had found in the old stories. The man had no answer ready.

We traveled together for four days after that. I carried extra food because he refused to ask for it. He would sit on a rock at midday, open the wrapped book, and read aloud to whoever passed. Sometimes no one stopped. He read anyway, voice steady against the wind.

On the fifth morning we reached a wider valley where traders from both sides of the range met. A crowd had already gathered for market day. Sundar Singh climbed onto an empty grain sack and began to speak. He told them of the light that had come to him in a room years before, of the marks he had seen on the hands and feet. A trader from the south tried to argue that such visions belonged only to the old saints. Sundar Singh answered that the light had not asked for his learning, only his hunger.

By afternoon the crowd had thinned. Two men stayed to ask more. One of them later walked with us part of the way out of the valley. He said he had never heard the name Yesu spoken without anger until that day.