Against All Odds

“The Time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things—
Of shoes and ships and sealing wax
And cabbages and kings,
And why the sea is boiling hot
And whether pigs have wings!”

You immediately recognize this doggerel as from Lewis Carroll’s (AKA Ludwig Dodson, that old English mathematician who gave us Alice in Wonderland) poem “The Walrus and the Carpenter.”

My sister Lois and I numbed ourselves during the evening chore that fell to us as kids (washing and drying dishes) by reciting this poem in an antiphonal manner, speaking a phrase, stopping in mid-sentence or even mid-word, and waiting for the other to complete it and go on from there. Some six decades later, even though we cannot remember where we left our car keys, we can execute this flawlessly. (One small benefit from our step-parently masters who refused to buy a dishwasher. O! They weren’t invented then. No matter—they treated us cruelly even for those barbaric times.)

So what?

Well it’s an example of those trivial specks of lint on the dark suit of life that can be more significant than the obvious biggies we tend to focus on. One might, uncharitably, call it a kind of spiritual dandruff that can fall upon us from those who are head and shoulders above us.

You see, for Lois and me this is an elemental bond that time cannot weaken. It may mean nothing to others. It is nothing one would bother to type into a blog. But it speaks of something precious and personal. Something our older brother knows not of, since he was always off on some Jamaica Plain High School project requiring him to hunt for bugs under the garbage pail—or some such. Just a word or two of this poem from either of us spreads an entire landscape of meaning and memory onto the canvass of our consciousness.

What I am about to relate is an example of this on a grander scale by far, since it is woven into the fabric of a relationship with the Eternal One whom we are invited to call “Daddy.” (That’s what “abba” means in the Aramaic Jesus used to address his Father in heaven.)

You may recall from an earlier blog that I recovered my luggage due the airlines’ desire to make restoration for its sins of omission. But due to my own negligence I had lost my back-pocket diary for 2007. Lost in the black hole of India, the Mother of All Trash Heaps.

Try though I might to let this loss go and get on with my life, the thing kept intruding from time to time. It’s hard to stop kicking yourself when a little of one’s usual care to check and re-check while traveling was so unhelpfully lacking. Although I suppose it’s only a matter of time when the odds of doing something like that catch up with you no matter how good your record.

Did I say “odds?” Holy Cow! (A little more India influence there—sorry.) I don’t believe in odds. I’m a Calvinist for crying out loud! We don’t cry about anything, because we know there’s no use crying over milk spilt before the foundation of the world!

Ahem! To get back to the saga.

I am at morning tea last Thursday, November 1.

This endearing custom, likely a hangover from the British Raj, comes after the first two periods of classes. My guess is that someone noticed that even after two hours of scintillating lectures the students were still in a morning stupor and drugs would have to resorted to.

Now, the locus of this tradition has shifted since I first came here five years ago. We used to come down from our classrooms to a table that the staff spread before us faculty (I will not say in the presence of our enemies) with chai, plain tea and a plate of either Ritz crackers or Dehra Doon biscuits. Perhaps I should divulge that the classroom building is quite impressive with a large central atrium onto which four floors of classrooms and offices open. The opening is hexagonal. The effect is striking as one stands at the rail on any floor and gazes down upon fellow workers in this giant educational anthill, watching them scurry about with books and the like. On the ground floor (one dassn’t say first floor because here the first floor is the floor up one flight of stairs) the atrium had a sunken central square with two broad descending steps, which were designed, I presume, for potted palms and plants. That sunken feature is no longer with us. I would guess it was raised to floor level after some adjunct elderly faculty backed up a step with his tin of hot tea, and stumbled into the empty aquarium (it would have looked great with lilies and goldfish), breaking a limb or two and scalding himself to boot.

But now morning tea-time has been elevated to the new dining hall higher up the hillside, where there is a fine view of the Himalayan foothills alluded to in a previous blog. As one enters this marble palace, there are wash troughs to the side where one can remove the dust of the day before entering the hall itself. There is a tasteful but direct sign on the doors: DO NOT ENTER UNTIL BELL. Yes the old school bell is in use here still. And in these all-stone mausoleum-like buildings one can have an ear split and bleeding when, by mischance, you happen to be walking past it when the ringer asserts his finger. I have had the uncharitable thought that this guy—who comes out of his neighboring office—waits to push the button until someone passes by who, when startled by its ungodly scream, is likely to jump enough to set a new record for long-jumps. That would be someone like me, who lives in a humane environment where OSHA retired the shrieking school bell decades ago. How a country this poor can afford to add such an abusive task to a staff member’s daily duties mystifies me—ringing this monster every hour all day long.

So we enter the shining new alabastar city that gleams atop the hill at NTC. The student men line up at one station to fill a cup from the samovar (I exaggerate a bit here to add color—it’s only a stainless pot with a spigot handle), while the girls have theirs at a safe distance on the other side of the hall. Faculty still have their own station in the center (to ensure there is no hank-panky between the east and the west). Faculty get their traditional biscuit or cracker—not students. We use stainless steel cups with no handles, pouring in the steaming brew. In the USA OSHA would shut this down in fly-blink as these suckers can wick the heat in a nanosecond up to your dainty fingers grasping the top. So you make haste for the marble-top tables to set your cup and let it cool. When you can pick it up comfortably that is the sign that you will not blister your lips. Pretty clever.

You are wondering how I will get to the point? Read on!

As I stand in the queue one of the staff secretaries waves me to the side to announce some news. “A gentleman called to say he has your lost date book!”

Suddenly this woman is an angel, hovering over the plains of India, shining in heaven’s garb with a heavenly hosting singing “Alleluia” while trumpets sound and the dead are being raised, incorruptible. And we shall all be changed!

At least that’s the effect this Great Glad Tidings had on me. I was raised from the death of doubt and sad resignation to the joy Martha and Mary must have known when their brother was restored to them against all reason.

This may seem overblown to you. But this was so unexpected that I could scarcely believe what she was telling me. I asked her to repeat it—once more, with feeling.

“Yes, it is true. See, he has given his number and wants you to call him!”

Dr. Samuel, the Principal, spread the news over the loudspeaker to the assembly, saying, “Let us rejoice with Dr. Gustafson. I could see that he was troubled by this loss. And now the Lord has done what we said could not be accomplished.”

I took the mic to thank the assembly for their prayers, saying I would add this story to my Bible in Luke 15—the chapter about things lost, then found.

After several tries the office got me through to one Arun Prakash. “I am James Gustafson and have been told you have my lost date book from the Delhi train. Is that really so, and how can these things be, since I know no man who could bring such a thing to pass?”

It seems that Mr. Prakash is a Christian (Methodist) who is the executive secretary of a large charity for all of India. He travels this train north from Delhi so frequently that all the crew know him. His assigned seat was in car C4, seat 47. That was next to seat 46 assigned to me.

Mr. Prakash alighted in Meerut while I continued on to the end of the line at Dehra Dun. I had not spoken to him, as I was in less than a chatty mood after enduring 36 hours of travel with five hours fitful sleep in the YWCA in Delhi. I was reading and nodding off most of the five hours to Dehra Dun.

So when the train came to the end of the tracks, I put my carryon on the seat next to me—seat 47. Unknown to me, my date book slipped off the edge of the carryon and lodged on the seat somewhere. I never saw it. As Adi came to fetch me off the train and to the college car (an old 1950’s London cab) I grabbed his hand of welcome, reached back for my bag and made haste to get off. (We always wait for a college escort so we are not mobbed by ever-present sherpas eager to swing one’s bag onto their heads and earn a rupee or two.

As reported in a previous blog, I did not notice my empty back pocket until over an hour later when I arrived at the guesthouse. By then the cleaning boys would have swept the cars and tossed all trash into the Black Hole of Kolcotta. (This used to be Calcutta—back when Mumbai was Bombay.) Ergo – the Great Depression for moi-meme, the one who had never lost such an absolutely essential piece of equipage in over 50 years!

How did this needle in the infinite haystacks of India come back to me?

It was on this wise.

The crew boys knew Mr. Prakash sat in car C4, seat 47. He is their friend. Being a Christian, I imagine he actually looks at them with a smile and speaks kindly to them. “Look—there is Mr. P’s datebook in his seat. We’ll keep it safe and give it to him tomorrow on his journey back to his home in Delhi.”

Next day Mr P.gets this treasure in its worn out paper cover. He rifles through. He sees a professor’s card—from the USA. But wait. In yesterday’s slot is a fresh card from a John Varghese working for that Christian College in Dehra Dun. There is a cross on the logo. And a mobile number. This must be a brother in Christ.

And the rest—as they say—is history! John gives him the address and phone of the college. And here I am talking to this messenger of the Lord, thanking him profusely.

“Don’t thank me. It was the Lord who put it into my hand for you. I am but a fellow servant. Please, when you come next time, stay at my home in Delhi and we can get to know one another.”

As I hang up the phone, I sit—stunned. How can this be? In the grand cosmic scale of the Kingdom this is less than a fleck of lint on the dark suit, less than a scale of dandruff on the shoulder of the Body of Christ.

But to me it was—and evermore shall be—a token that God is indeed Abba. My Abba. “He knows my every need; he sees each tear that falls; and he answers when I call.”

As a child calls in the wee hours of the night at some smidgen of worry or concern, so when I called to him he came to restore such a tiny thing that means so much to a childlike traveler on a Kingdom Errand to north India.

“The time has come,” the Walrus said, “to talk of many things.” And to praise the Infinite for the infinitesimal.

Against all odds…. That’s our God and Savior—every day.