The comeback kid exists.

He’s the sort who’d be asked back to his alma mater to address the graduating cohort on ‘O’ level results day as one who made good.

They’d be on tenterhooks; he’d reassure them that beyond the result slips they were about to receive, there is a trajectory God has planned for them, one far higher and longer than anything they could ask or imagine.

“I was not a model student,” Suraj Mahbubani confesses. “The teachers invited me back, to let me tell you that it’s not about how you start, it’s really about how you finish.”

Those were the days

More than 20 years before, he’d been a primary school boy scarred by the acrimonious breakup of his parents’ marriage. 

And if a list of the attendant consequences of such a situation were to be made, his profile would include every single item.

By the time he finished his ‘O’ levels, he was hardened to the core – railing against every rule and authority, and most vehemently against God.

His prelim score was halved in the actual exam and he made it into a local polytechnic, but the efforts of his teachers and principal in that academic turnaround were summarily dismissed.

Once released from their watch, he went slip sliding away into a life of moral decadence and decay.

It was the high life – or so he thought.

“I made a lot of money,” he states plainly. “I thought that money meant power.”

And yet rock bottom, when he hit it, was where the recurrent “but God” line in Scripture (Ephesians 2:4-5, among others) resonated in his life.

Indeed, last year, after the Covid-related restrictions were lifted, Suraj returned from abroad to visit his former school principal, Mr Peter Tan, a different man from the embittered boy that had left Anglo-Chinese School (Barker Road) more than a decade before.

He had a bold testimony of the goodness of God in his life and heartfelt gratitude for how Mr Tan had been used as a means of grace – thanks to the regularity with which he was sent to his office for disciplinary issues.

Mum knows best

His mother was not blind to his faults. She knew her son well. He had grown up spoilt, lacking nothing as a child.

Nonetheless, she prayed for him incessantly.

It was no use to nag, after all. He shares: “She took a softer approach because she knew I was so far away from God. She just kept praying for me to return to God.”

They were “reasonably close” as he was growing up. But the years when he was between 17 and 21 years of age represented “absolute distance”.

“I wanted the convenience of having her as a mother, living in her house, but I didn’t want her as my parent.”

The first sign of a change of heart on his part came when he enlisted for National Service and was doing his Basic Military Training (BMT) on Pulau Tekong. On a weekend she was scheduled to be overseas on business, he was on guard duty.

That Saturday night, “I saw a plane in the air roughly around the time she was flying off. I actually prayed, ‘God keep her safe.’

“And that was when I started to pray for her.

“That’s when our relationship started to get closer. We started to connect a bit more, and I think the level of faith that I had started to grow.

“Today she’s my best friend. I won’t do anything without her blessing.

“She’s been my guardian angel. She’s been looking after me, praying for me.”

Saving grace

Asked to reflect further on his season at ACS (BR), Suraj, now 27, talks about the listening ear Peter Tan had lent him especially during his Secondary 4 year, just before the ‘O’ level exams.

“Clearly he had work to do but for some reason he put aside the time to listen to me.

“I was seeking attention but just from the wrong people. I think he knew that I just wanted to feel heard.

“In all of our private conversations he spoke with God’s wisdom but he never preached to me, ‘Oh you need to believe in Jesus.’

“The only time he ever preached to me was during school chapel. I think that was one of the reasons why I came back to God voluntarily. He definitely instilled Christian principles, but he didn’t enforce the beliefs on people. He made sure that we wanted to believe it.”

The day in 2019 when Suraj addressed the ACS(BR) graduating cohort is recalled as one of his most redeeming points.

In closing, he had said: “I’m just thinking what would my life be without God, without mum, without many praying parents, without Mr Tan and my teachers who never gave up on me … 

“They had no reason to believe in me. But … here I am today. I am incredibly grateful.”

But God.

But God shows His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (Romans 5:8)

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