I am Swapna Abraham also known by my maiden name Swapna Susy Cherian and my Christian name is Anna. I was born in 1971 in a traditional Jacobite (Syrian Orthodox) family. My father K. A. Cherian is a retired banker and my mother Soosy Cherian has always been a homemaker, but at one time also worked as an accountant. My parents were always heard in Church. They sang. Dad was the choir master and mum’s voice always stood out. Both my parents hail from small villages in Kerala, India. Dad’s closest town was Cochin and mum’s was Kottayam. My parents spent the first few years of their life together in Chennai, which was then called Madras, from where they moved to Abu Dhabi, UAE. I was born close to Pathamuttom, the small village where my mum has her ancestral home. I saw my dad when I was nearly a year old. My sister Sebeena was born when I was two years of age.
When I turned four, I was sent to a boarding school in a hill station in India. A little town Coonoor, near Ooty… From kindergarten till I finished high school, it was in that Convent that I studied. Most of what I know and what I am, is from there and those hills. I saw my parents every twice a year, three months in all. I remember growing up with a strong resentment for having been forced to study in boarding school for nearly all of my school life. Over there, I got trained in sports and games. My favourite was volley ball and I was a champion at that. I was also good at public speaking, although very nervous initially. I was forced to learn Bharatnatyam – Indian classical dance. Although I did not like it one bit, I did well, so much so that I was awarded the prize for the best outgoing dancer when I left school. I did a bit of drama, besides what I ‘dramaed’ with life… studied reasonably well since Grade Six, so much so that I kept getting the Best All Rounder (the General Proficiency Prize) every year, except the last year when I got all rebellious and disobedient, but was never the less a winner at anything I put my heart to.
What I seriously enjoyed doing was writing poetry and singing. Poetry, because it was a vent for my feelings, especially those of self pity and bitterness, and singing, because I simply loved to sing… My paternal grandfather was an extremely devout Christian. He was blind, but very intelligent. His sixth sense was too cool. He prayed a lot. Several times a day, and through the night... He knew the Bible cover to cover, and also the liturgy of the Syrian Orthodox Church. A Syriac scholar himself, he taught the language to many who aspired towards priesthood. But he could sing like a nightingale. And I loved and admired him. I started with singing Church music. Kind of was a help to my dad during the holidays. It was only in Grade Seven that I started learning to play the piano. When I went to boarding school, my dad gifted me a little colour keyed, battery operated piano and I kept getting more and more of them all along… they just kept getting better and bigger every time. I was not fond of playing by sight, but would spend long hours just playing any song I loved. Playing with the lights off was the best thing really…. I did not persevere after Grade Five of Piano, Trinity College of Music, London. But kept playing… When I was nine, there was this Pakistani sister-brother duo, Nazia and Zoheb Hassan who were very popular on the then Indian pop scene. How I wished I could become like them! I knew that I could sing. I even dreamed I could make music, but I did not know the language Hindi. The only languages I knew were English and Malayalam which is my mother tongue. I couldn’t for the world imagine that I could write songs in English although I was writing English poetry! Anyways, a lot of things about me changed when I was in Grade Seven. Even my choice of music... I was listening more to popular English music, the likes of George Michael (is still my favourite), Madonna, Lionel Ritchie, Duran Duran, Stevie Wonder... A couple of yeas later, I remember the first time I tried singing one such song. It was ‘I Want To Break Free’ of Queen. And it sounded fine. Then I tried ‘Last Christmas’ of George Michael and ‘True Blue’ of Madonna and it all sounded fine. Sometimes I thought I was mimicking them! I didn’t know even then that I could write my own songs, although I was already making my own little melody lines.
It was after I left high school and was going to stay with my parents and study for a couple of years that I began to set into a kind of depression. My parents took my sister and me on a vacation to the UK and to Europe. I will never forget… as the bus was going through some part of Germany, I felt this song coming up from the pit of my heart. I came back to the UK and completed it on the piano. The name of the song was ‘I’m Crying’. A simple love song... I was fifteen then. A cousin of mine in the UK taught me a few chords on the guitar. And then the songs kept coming. ‘Live Love Laugh’, ‘Across The Ocean’, ‘Letter To Heaven’. I got back to India for my studies in University. And kept writing more songs ‘Along With The Desert Sand’, winning more singing competitions. Our college had a band that I was a part of. Just played the keys and sang. There were only two of us who came to those competitions then with our own songs. Some of those I wrote were already popular among my college mates. It was nice to be considered the weird songwriter-singer… Winning the first position in Western Music in my university (Mahatma Gandhi University) was a breakthrough. I did not win the first year. In year two my Sir, Joymon (Jacob Alexander Benjamin) who was very real in his relationship with Jesus, challenged me to sing for Jesus, since I claimed to love God deeply not having believed in human relationships since childhood. He gave me a whole lot of gospel music records and showed me one particular one of Amy Grant’s and said that I could sing like her. I liked the depth and passion in her voice, the intense emotion in her lyrics and the chord progression in her songs. I saw her concerts on video and thought her charisma was incredible! I wrote a song for Jesus, ‘It’s You’ and I sang and won. Year three I did the same thing with my songs “Victims of Sin” and “More Than I Know”, and I won. Considering the guys I was competing with have made it so big in the world of secular music today, I know that that was no cakewalk. By that time I would have written 25 songs in all and about 100 poems. The best thing that happened to me in University was when I graduated as the Best Outgoing Student of the same college my mother had studied in and won the same award she had won in her time.
After my Bachelor degree in Commerce and I did well enough to top my batch on a district level, I got in for my Masters in Business Administration. Just before that I was invited to sing on the first album of a young man, Abey. It was called ‘Believe In The Lord’. Abey who was into drugs for a long time and was saved by the grace of God, was into sharing the testimony of his life-changing God experience. He was also into writing songs for God. That, (the leaning towards God and writing songs for God) was all and what we had in common. Abey later proposed to me and we got married, very young. I was 21 and he was 23. By the time I finished my studies, we had our first baby Adrian and a year later our second, Amy. Adrian was named after the young choir conductor in the Church in Manipal where I did my MBA, a committed and firm leader. Amy was named after Amy Grant who was my greatest inspiration as far as music, composing and singing were concerned, now perhaps even more. Abey’s firm, Adonai Musics brought out all the albums that you so see in the List of Albums. I held no office in Adonai Musics, but I did ‘most of’ the composing (lyrics and music), orchestra and artiste coordination, direction, recording and mixing in the studios, singing all of the songs that I sang, most of the backing vocals, label designing, and arrangement of printing and replication… And more… concert arrangement, worship seminars, retreat scheduling (I was moving more into the realm of preaching and counseling and praying for people which I loved doing), liaising with the organizers of the programmes and following up, also travel planning including ticketing and visas arrangement, even coordinating with bands in different locations, rehearsals and making it happen. The production of all the albums was by our common resources, what we earned and were gifted in ministry. The Church loved us dearly… I make mention of it considering the manpower that would normally be required to achieve such results in this circuit… we could not have done it except by the grace and power of God!
Abey & Swapna were popularly known as the ‘Singing Couple’ from India. Thus we performed all over our country, in all the big metros- Mumbai, Pune, Delhi, Kolkata, Madurai, Trichy, Coimbatore, The Nilgiris, Mysore, Chennai, Goa, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Cochin, Nagpur, Assam, The North East… and in towns and villages. Our ministry mainly streamed from a Catholic Retreat Centre in Kerala, called the Divine Retreat Centre. But our outreaches were very interdenominational, as worship which is not a doctrinal thing was our forte more than anything else. It is something common to all Churches. Just the forms are different. And then we started doing the same in other countries… in the US (San Fransisco, Portland Oregon, Seattle, Salt Lake City, Denver Colorado, Oklahoma, Dallas, Houston, Boston, Chicago, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut), Canada (Toronto, Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver), the UK (London, Leeds, Hartlepool, New Castle), Germany (Stuttgart, a military camp close to the Austrian border), Kenya (Nairobi, Nzaickoni, Mombasa), Tanzania (Dar es Salaam, Arusha), the UAE (Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Sharjah, Ras Al Khaima), Bahrain, Sri Lanka (Colombo, Kandy, Galle), Malaysia (KL), Singapore, Hong Kong, the Philippines (Manila, Cebu, Abra, San Fernando, Pangasinan, Laog, Subic City, Mindanao), Australia (Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra. Perth), New Zealand (Auckland, Hamilton, Wellington, Whangarie), Israel and Egypt. These are some of the places I can remember now, it seems like it was a long time ago… In all of these places our albums were sold at points of performance. The companies that we have worked with for the distribution of our albums are Polygram India Limited for the album ‘Prayer To Prayer’ and Praise Incorporated, Philippines for ‘In Thy House’ and ‘Anoint Me’. The International Worship Leaders that we have performed with are Bob Fitts (Hawaii) in Manila and with Steve Kuban (Canada) on his Indian Tour. Our ministry was more popular among the youth, and our service was more among the married couples. Adrian and Amy used to travel with us for most of the time until it became necessary for them to be in regular school and not have to move around so much. That was when at age eight each of them joined a mission school called Hebron in Ooty, very close to where I studied.
What I continue to write is not with the intention to defame anyone, but just for information sake, which explains what happened to me at a turning point in my story. It was at the peak of our ministry that Abey decided to move out of the marriage and/or rather asked me to move out. He finally took this bold step after contemplating it for a very long time. And thus not only did our life as a family come to an end, our ministry also ended. I moved out after completing all the programmes I had committed to do. It was truly the amazing grace of God that helped me start my own firm ‘Admiral musics’ in January 2005. I can now vouch only for the albums produced by Admiral Musics. With Abey’s permission (as he was the owner), I compiled my most popular compositions and brought out my now first album ‘Flashback-The Best of Swapna’. Life got very difficult in terms of the most practical aspects, but what I suffered the most was rejection from the people of God, because I seemed not to qualify anymore to be God’s ambassador of good news, to preach, counsel, pray for people and sing for the Lord. I was afraid my children would lose their faith in God. I was afraid I would do the worst out of my helplessness. Being judged for all that I did and also for what I did not do, I became extremely skeptical about the gospel web of people. For my livelihood and to give my children a good life, I started working in a secular capacity alongside my small outreaches singing for Jesus, which was what I loved doing more than anything else. Starting with my own country and gradually moving on to the nations like it used to be, only now that it was much smaller, more unnatural in that I was alone, I was ever so blest by the people (my parents, sister, Sir and a few close friends) who still encouraged me and prayed that I would not give up. I was profoundly touched by all the people who were not in the gospel network at all, but were good human beings, and were just there at that point in my life. That was when I did a new recording of all the songs I wrote just after my wilderness experience started and called it ‘Lessons In The Wilderness’. I believe that what I cannot do for the Church as much as I used to, this album will start doing, in terms of bring healing and restoration to the sick and brokenhearted. As far as I owe a confession to God’s people who have loved Abey & Swapna, I have forgiven, released and blessed Abey for his decision and for having concretely moved on with his life (to put in very plainly). I believe that God will honour me and my decision not to go back to this marriage for obvious reasons that I do not want to disclose publicly and do what is necessary to get life back to discipline, sanity and clarity. I really trust God to deliver me from the wilderness. Although some people’s critical reaction to my decision often hurts me, I am determined to keep trusting God to see me through. Abey has a reason to still hope in God’s faithfulness. Our children have a hope and so do I… that God works everything to the good of those who love Him, in spite of our mistakes and wrong choices. |
