He served as a researcher at Yale's Institute for Human Relations (1934–40), and as a senior bureaucrat with the Indian Civil Service in New Delhi and Simla (1941–46) and the UN Secretariat in New York (1947-1952).
He spent a year studying philosophy at the University of Toronto, and then moved to the Yale Divinity School from which he graduated magna cum laude in 1929.
[1][6][7][8] After returning to India in 1940, he married Dr. Mary Thangam Cherian (1910-1998),[9] a paediatrician, also from the Syrian Christian community who had trained in London and was working in the Madras Province's Medical Service.
Dr. K. T. Behanan joined the Indian Civil Service and worked in New Delhi and Simla in a series of increasingly senior positions within the National War Front's central office until victory over Japan in August 1945.
[10][11][12] In April 1952 the couple's 10-year-old son Roy tragically died on the operating table while undergoing minor surgery at Kew Gardens Hospital shortly before the family intended to return to India.
The family and others attributed the death to criminal medical negligence, prompting an investigation by the Queen's District Attorney's Office, which a year later resulted in 2nd degree manslaughter charges against the surgeon and anaesthetist in late April 1953.