The following weekend he was asked to return to unveil a bust of Westcott and again spent time talking to the boys. This time he told them about his own experience of change – the resentment which had driven him to Europe, the discovery in the small chapel in Keswick: ‘I had never experienced the Cross. It just didn't mean anything to me. I had seven people I didn't like. But in this chapel I actually saw Christ on the Cross. It was a vision. I left that place a different man.' He then asked one of the boys to read the inscription on the memorial tablet to Westcott. On it are the words, 'A great saint, yet the friend of sinners and loved by so many of them.' 'That's the important thing to me,' said Buchman. 'And if you want to put something on my tombstone I hope it will be something like this: "Here's one who understood." '16

Back in Calcutta Foss Westcott's successor, Metropolitan Mukerjee, summed up the visit there: 'If even a hundred British in India had lived out their Christianity as these people do, India would have been a very different country.'17

A journey to Kashmir to rest the team in the cool after six months' intensely hard work was greatly appreciated. However, after ten days the local demand for the plays became irresistible, and Buchman decided to give way. Kashmir was one of the main bones of contention between India and Pakistan, an important and an intensely sensitive area. The Prime Minister, Sheikh Abdullah - a Muslim who had sided with Gandhi on national issues and who was partly responsible for Kashmir adhering to India instead of Pakistan at Independence - came to the plays and meetings, one after the other, at first on the insistence of his two sons. One of them made a deep impression upon him by admitting that it had been he who had led a student strike when his father was Minister of Education. Sheikh Abdullah told Buchman, 'You have here the answer for India and Pakistan. It takes patience. I saw the answer in the plays, and it is God.' His wife added, 'When I saw the plays, I knew the Spirit of God was there. It is something you don't run into much in the world today, and we are grateful.'

The time came to move on to Pakistan, a journey only possible then by going back via Amritsar and that with difficulty, as no large group of foreigners had made it since Partition. Most of the party of 150 took off by a round-about surface route for Karachi, while Buchman flew with an advance party of five, stopping in Delhi en route. 'It was heartening,' records a contemporary diary, 'to be met by many new faces, mostly students who had changed in recent weeks, and including a member of the staff of Nehru who, ever curious, had questioned him about his change for so long that he was half-an-hour late for Parliament.'18

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