31. Where Are the Men?
Chapter 31
Where Are the Men?
One of the features of village life in South India was the Car festival. The Car, or juggernaut, was a towering wooden structure on wheels which bore the Hindu idol. Its dark, carved surfaces, representing various aspects of worship, were covered with streamers, tinsel, and garlands of flowers. One day in 1909 Amy was standing in the blinding heat and smothering dust when, “with shoutings and flingings of arms in the air, the brown flood swept past.” Thousands of men, stripped to the waist in honor of the god, strained and sweated at the ropes. “The flood grew denser, the shouts were frenzied, the Car moved round the corner, rocked for a dizzy moment, and stopped.” There were policemen about, lest any devotee attempt to fling himself under the huge wheels. But it was not the Car or the crowd or the heat or any other aspect of the festival that riveted the attention of the missionary—it was little boys, acolytes, attending the god, one of them on the upper tier of the Car, wreathed in pink flowers.
Amy could not bear it. She believed that the gods of India, as depicted by their aggressive or seductive images, were satanic, and they who made them were “like unto them.” The things she had learned about the character of Hindu worship, through years of study of the language and the mind of the Hindu, were for her quite literally both unutterable and nearly unthinkable. It was “slime, filth, sin,” she wrote, but “books that whitewash Hinduism are turned out by the dozen now, and it’s terribly unfashionable to feel as we do.”
These things shaped and colored all Indian thinking. There were exceptions. “India has men to whom these evil things carry no appeal. The ‘light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world’ has lighted the mind and soul of some who have never heard of the Light of the World. They have not blown out that Light, and surely the Powers of Calvary have reached even unto them,” she wrote. “But never has one ray of light come from the idols of the people, only a darkness which has defiled the mind of millions of India.”
She could not bear the sight of those lovely little boys captured by that system. Neither could she forget it.
John Donne wrote, “Ignorance is not only the drousinesse, the sillinesse, but the wickednesse of the soule.” She would vastly have preferred to remain in ignorance of this sort of thing. The vexation to her Victorian soul was nothing compared to the outrage to her Christian conscience. It blackened the sun. She refused to sit blindfolded. She began to investigate.
As before, she met with bland indifference and denial. But there were Indians who knew and deplored as she did this traffic in little boys, similar to that in little girls. Many were sold or given to temple houses where they became musicians and teachers of dancing and poetry to the girls. Others were adopted by Hindus or Muslims, sometimes for purposes she could only describe as “infamous,” meaning homosexual. Others became the property of dramatic societies connected with the temples, and learned to act in plays which were “wholly unclean, soul-destroying.”
She received a telegram from Simla urging her to provide the government with facts. She did so, asking that the information and its source be kept confidential lest her own work be hindered by publicity. The result was “much earnest movement” among both Indians and English to end this “black iniquity towards innocence.” At last laws were passed, “thank God, which at least mean to help, but India knows how to evade laws. . . . So we go on.”
Once an Indian friend, acquainted with the ways of the underworld, took her to a house with barred windows and verandahs and a heavy, bolted door. It was not different from the other houses in the street, but he knew what went on inside. In answer to their knock an old hag opened the door a crack. After the usual polite preliminaries the Indian asked if the children were well.
“What children? There are no children here.”
“The boys, O elder sister, the boys who learn here.”
“No boys learn here,” and the door all but shut.
“Oh, say not so, sister. Do they not learn songs?”
“No boys learn songs here.” And the door shut.1
Later Amy succeeded in walking straight into a house where the boys were taught. A white woman in topee and European dress would never have managed it. The boys swarmed around the lady in the sari, taking her hands, begging her to sit down, “friendly and lovable and keen to make the most of this welcome interruption to an apparently strictly enforced routine.” After an illuminating twenty minutes the interruption was discovered. An angry man rushed in like a whirlwind, sent the boys off to their lessons, and, “too confounded for speech,” returned Amy’s calm salaam as she departed.
She bought a ticket for the drama, and found that the boy who had invited her into the house was the star of the show—a little queen, “robed in a shimmer of pink and gold jewels, playing a musical instrument, which showed to perfection the delicate sensitive hands. As he played, he turned his little head slowly from side to side and bowed in the approved fashion of beautiful queens.” The crowd, boisterous before, was suddenly hushed, transfixed by the beauty of the child.
When she spoke to her comrades of the plight of the boys, they pointed out the impossibility of her doing anything about it—her hands were already more than full. Boys were more difficult to rear than girls. Boys’ and girls’ work should be kept separate in India. Where were the men they must have to help them? What about a doctor? No, it was unthinkable. Surely God would raise up someone else for the job. She listened politely. She did not settle for that verdict. Unthinkable? Not to God. She prayed and kept on praying, the face of the little queen indelible in memory, for years.
One day she knelt by a rock in the forest. There was a quiet pool beside the rock, on the floor of which lay sodden leaves. It was one of those “figures of the true,” a visible sign of an invisible reality—life out of death. “Broken, battered, sodden leaves—these that were ready to sink out of sight and be dealt with in any way, all choices gone, they were near to becoming life to the forest. ‘Learn to obey, thou dust, learn to meek thyself, thou earth and clay.’” She asked that God would either take away the burden for the little boys, or show her what to do about them.
Forbodings such as we had never known when we began to save the girls oppressed us. We knew more now than we did then of the inwardness of this to which we must set our hand. The fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is. Were we ready for that? Was our reputation ashes to us? This was a curious question that came again and again. What if our hopes fell in ruins about us like a child’s castle of cards?2
The matter of where the needed men would come from was settled finally, in the forest again, this time not by the quiet pool but by a waterfall. Watching the ceaseless cataract pouring down from above she “heard a voice from heaven, the voice of many waters, Can I who do this, not do that? Spiritually, in that hour, the work for boys began.”
Prayer and travail had to go on for a long time to come. She, “dust and ashes,” was learning to “meek” herself. A doctor finally arrived, to Amy’s joy and relief. She lasted only a short time. Health was the reason given for her return home. Dass, a friend from another town, made journeys in search of boys he had heard of. He was foiled again and again. One woman gave Dass her child, only to follow them to the bazaar and reclaim him. Later when he went to see her she said, “Take him, he’s yours,” and pointed to a bundle in the corner. He found the four-year-old, covered with smallpox, and blind. Back he went a few weeks later. There was no trace of him.
Late evening, January 14, 1918. A bandy jingles up to the bungalow in Dohnavur. A tired woman hands out a weary child who smiles and cuddles down on Amy’s shoulder. Someone takes it to the nursery, and in five minutes Mabel Wade rushes back breathless: “It’s a boy!”
They named him Arul. He was “the first fruits of seven years’ travail.’’
Amy swung into action—surveyed a field next to the girls’ compound, “received the pattern” for the buildings, asked for a sign: one hundred pounds as a seal on the new endeavor, told the Family. On the next mail day it came—a legacy of exactly one hundred pounds.
Another boy arrived in June of that year, and by 1926 there were between seventy and eighty. Although Amy was not by nature suspicious, she had had to learn some lessons the hard way. Nevertheless she was duped by some who brought the boys to her. A trusted friend brought several, one of them a handsome Brahman whom he claimed to have “found.” No doubt her eagerness to see the vision in the forest fulfilled caused her to lower her guard.
One prospective donor made it clear that his money would go for evangelistic work, not for buildings. The line between the secular and the sacred, long since obliterated in Amy’s mind, in his was bold and black. “Well,” sighed Amy, “one can’t save and then pitchfork souls into heaven. There are times when I heartily wish we could. And as for buildings, souls (in India, at least) are more or less securely fastened into bodies. Bodies can’t be left to lie about in the open, and as you can’t get the souls out and deal with them separately, you have to take them both together. What then is to be done?”
It was a new mold of man required to train these boys, “so that the type of character evolved may be different from that which for so long has been the grief of every man and woman missionary who thinks deep thoughts.” Where were these men? Amy knew they existed—somewhere. She had seen them. Her father, for instance: hard worker, a man of incorruptible integrity, generosity, zeal for the glory of God. Barclay Buxton. Thomas Walker.
But in India? There was Arul Dasan, faithful and true, though not endowed with the gift of strong leadership. Were there any others? Men with any notion of self-giving were not to be found when cholera swept again through the village. As before Amy went alone to the “black horror at our doors.” She would not permit the sitties or accals to go. Their work could not be dropped. Amy sallied forth, armed with a dinner bell and a pail full of medicines, bottles, tins, rags, and disinfectants. She tried to get the local Christian leader, the catechist, to carry the heavy pail for her. He preferred to carry his Bible, he told her. He preferred prayer meetings to sanitary work. Once the headman asked her to help him clean out some of the deadliest houses. “I was thankful. When it came to doing it he had urgent work on his fields.” Other men took an interest in the proceedings—to the extent of watching her at work.
When after two weeks the government hospital sent the subassistant surgeon, Amy was hopeful. He was “a dapper little youth with a long Brahman name.”
“May I enquire of madam where you have obtained medical training?” he asked. Nowhere, alas, she said, but in the cholera villages themselves.
“But with ‘excuses for importunance’ he seemed very doubtful as to the propriety of this occupation ‘for lay person.’” When he had delivered himself of a long dissertation on her unqualified practice, she heard herself saying “My dear boy, I was at cholera work when you were in your cradle.”
“May India be pitied on the day when she is handed over to the tender mercies of such,” Amy wrote. “‘We must put on turban or people will not respect,’ remarked the Brahman as he replaced his very nice turban, the nicest thing about him, in fact; but I could not help thinking how truly (and quite unconsciously) he spoke. The people ‘respect’ the outward show of superiority and authority, but not in the very least the inward man of the topmost caste. The poorest peasant, however, respects to the innermost fibre the English Collector or Policeman or Doctor, and would if he were in rags. Take the salt of the land out of it, and what have you left? I don’t often inflict politics on you, but for this once I do it.”
The “salt of the land”—was it Englishmen only who were salty? Was there no such thing as a salty Indian? And of the foreign collectors, policemen, or doctors, were none saltless? Amy would have disclaimed such an implication, but within her own milieu, the evidence seemed to point that way.
The war ended in 1918. The day the Family heard of the Armistice “we had a most thrilling little service, with the Te Deum of course, and every praising thing that we could find.” The school hall was made glorious with palms and yellow flowers, the children decked out in their “Sunday colors,” white and yellow. For them it was all excitement. For Amy there was the dark backdrop.
“We could never for a moment forget the sorrowing hearts upon whom the clash of bells must beat with an almost agony, and the maimed men in hospital, blinded and broken for life, and we longed with a longing that hurt to reach them with our reverent affection. Sometimes it seemed almost unbearable that we should receive so much and give nothing. What we have to give is given in certain songs in Made in the Pans”
This was a collection of her poetry and songs published in 1917, which included a section of war poems such as, “Battle-Burial,” “Died of Wounds,” “Missing,” and “This Great Obedience,” this last to a soldier dying near Ypres who instructed his soldier-servant to go on with his duty.
. . . O English nurseries that trained such sons,
O schools and playing fields that sent them forth,
Where is your like? Decadent have we grown?
Steeped in the spirit of the earth, consumed
By lesser fires than the pure altar fire
Of love of Duty? . . .
“Is There No Balm in Gilead?” touches the deep well of the meaning of suffering:
. . . Today, upon the clan
We call mankind
Falls such a woe that hadst Thou, passionless,
Spent easy days, O Christ, known only joy’s dear kiss,
Walked on safe sandalled feet
In meadowlands—Ah, who that ever ran
Naked across the plain,
Scourged by the vehement, bitter rain
And fearful wind,
But turning to Thee desperate, would miss
Something in Thee, yea, vital things? Tears were Thy meat,
A spear-stab, Thy caress,
Thou suffering Son of Man.
1. Gold Cord, p. 211.
2. Ibid, p. 220.