An evening in Pune

It was about 4.30 in the afternoon and teatime. I got up from hostel room at AFMC, Pune and ventured down to the mess below for a cup of hot and sugared tea that the mess served up at this time. It was a lazy afternoon ritual and most students would idle over their cup and chat and talk among themselves. Unlike dinnertime, when many students would have guests over, teatime was a tame affair. So I was surprised to hear the sounds of animated conversation coming from one of the tables. I picked up my cup of tea and sat down alone and tried to pick up strands of the conversation. There was a young man with a shoulder bag and some literature engaged in energetic conversation with one of the students and they were talking about Jesus Christ. I tried to listen a little more intensely.

A year or more ago, after reading a second hand Bible with its cover torn off, the Lord had spoken to me through His Word and I had accepted Jesus Christ as my Savior and Lord. But thereafter, unsure of how to proceed further, I had withdrawn in to a shell and kept my faith to myself. No one in the close-knit community of the campus knew about my faith and I was happy to keep it that way. So I was hesitant when as I listened to the conversation I discerned the Lord telling me to go and meet the young man with the shoulder bag. It was an awkward but before I knew what was happening, I was ambling and shuffling across to the table and joining the conversation going on. The discussion soon broke off and I found myself alone with the young man who introduced himself as some one from a group called Operation Mobilization. They were involved in a evangelistic campaign throughout the state of Maharashtra and some of them were reaching out to students through a group called the Evngelical Union. The names of these organizations meant nothing to me and our gawky, and haphazard talk ended quickly.

The man from OM was having difficulty placing me – was I a student to be evangelized or a brother to be encouraged? I had introduced myself as a Christian, but my name did figure in the list of Christian students in the hostel that the EU had supplied him with and I did not show any familiarity with Christian terminology or the names of evangelical icons like OM and EU. He was understandably confused.

Shortly after this, I was confronted in the hostel aisle by one of the “brothers”, who in the campus was known as a pious type of person. He was the kind of person I had been avoiding all year --- I wanted to savor my faith and internalize it slowly and not get swamped away by anyone or any thing. But I realized that the young man from OM after leaving had talked and in a closed campus like AFMC, once some news had leaked, there was not much to be done about it. So I blankly followed the “brother” to his room. Not that he had much to say. After a few awkward moments, he gulped and said that there was a students’ meeting in a certain church every Saturday and if I would like to come. Now, church and Christian meetings were events I had diligently avoided all this while, but running low on excuses, I vaguely agreed to come on one Saturday. Even so, I ensured that I did not have to accompany him or any of the others attending the meeting, and chose to land up alone.

The gathering was not large but it was the first time that I was attending a Christian meeting of any size (I was to learn later that this was an EU meeting) and I was sweaty and nervous. The meeting began with a couple of Christian songs, then some one preached a while with some discussion and then there were prayers. Amazingly enough, I perpetually shy and retiring, found myself participating – whether it was the supernatural working of God or the body language of the group that made me feel welcome or both, it is difficult to say today. After the meeting, nobody seemed to want to leave in a hurry, neither surprisingly did I – there was a certain kind of bonding in the group that was not easily explainable. Some faces were familiar- from my own college, others were not, but all shared an easy companionship. I, who had cautiously agreed to attend one meeting – and that too out of politeness would be back—on many Saturdays and many occasions.

The small EU group in Pune, perhaps not even necessarily representative of UESI culture nationwide, would nonetheless shape me in many, many ways. It was there that I first learnt to pray publicly, to intercede for others, to make my own needs and vulnerabilities known to others - never an easy task and it was here that I would learn to receive and give Christian love and concern and sharing. As I continued to come for meetings and was accepted into the group, I was given new responsibilities - and with each new task, I would learn some thing fresh. More importantly, I found the freedom to think through and apply my mind to the Word of God and arrive at my own conclusions on faith and spirituality. Today, I look back with wonder at how a meeting over a cup of tea with a man from OM I have never met again – Sunny Varghese was his name if I remember correctly, and an encounter in the hostel with a brother who would be part of my life decades later – (though we hardly knew it then) and a motley crowd of boys and girls who called themselves the Pune EU would forever shape my spirituality and help me look at life through heaven’s eyes.