48. Maintain a Constant Victory
Chapter 48
Maintain a Constant Victory
On the stroke of midnight, August 14, 1947, Lord Louis Mountbatten took his pen and performed his last official action as the king’s representative.
“Outside, at almost the same instant, his personal standard as the Viceroy of India, a Union Jack emblazoned with the Star of India, came down the flagstaff of Viceroy’s House for the last time.”1 Britain in that moment relinquished the world’s greatest empire.
“Never before had anything even remotely like it been attempted. Nowhere were there any guidelines, any precedents, any revealing insights from the past to order what was going to be the biggest, the most complex divorce action in history, the breakup of a family of four hundred million human beings along with the assets and household property they had acquired in centuries of living together on the same piece of earth.”2
The effects of this stunning piece of history, so cataclysmic for the country, made little difference inside the red clay walls of the Dohnavur compound. Godfrey Webb-Peploe wrote,
“The great day passed off quietly. The village had a few fireworks and chorused shouting of ‘Victory to India.’ We had a very simple talk by Thyaharaj on the change of government, and then we put up the new flag of India and stood around it and prayed for the country. There was no visible difference on August 16th.”3
One of the sitties felt liberated in a personal way. “We were sisters now,” she said, “Indian and European. It was wonderful. I no longer resented everyone’s knowing everything about me anymore. Before, I had held onto my British culture—I liked to be alone.”
Amy did not think it was wonderful. A woman of her generation, she could not think that independence was a good thing, although she may not have shared Rudyard Kipling’s view of Britain’s divine appointment: “The responsibility for governing India has been placed by the inscrutable design of providence upon the shoulders of the British race.” It is doubtful she felt pained for the same reason Churchill did: “The loss of India would be final and fatal to us. It could not fail to be part of a process that would reduce us to the scale of a minor power.” Amy’s thought was not for Britain’s loss so much as for India’s. She believed India was not ready for self-government and would suffer far more than she could benefit. Amy was tremendously loyal to her own people. She knew the worth of Britain’s control, as did many Indians who looked with misgiving on the end of the raj and had fought hammer and tongs to prevent it. There were men in the civil service for whom she had great respect, men of honor who saw themselves not as conquerors but, like Amma, servants to the Indian people. The price of freedom was a terrible one—partition, war, murder, and pillage.
In the quiet gardens and lanes, in the lively cottages of the compound, things went on more or less as usual. Rice, by the ton, was pounded by hand, parboiled in the great pots, cooked daily, and eaten. Babies were fed and bathed and changed and rocked and sung to and carried out to play. Bottles were prepared, diapers washed, nurseries scrubbed, walks swept, tiles and brass vessels polished, gardens weeded. The children bathed under the pumps, ate their curries, learned their lessons. The bells of the Prayer Tower called the Family to prayer and rang out the evening hymn.
In the Room of Peace lay the mother, nearly eighty years old now, interviewing people for five hours a day, writing her love letters, working on a book—a simplified biography of Thomas Walker, This One Thing—writing always in longhand on the writing stand, giving the pages one by one to Neela her helper, who typed them and passed them on to a sittie for final draft.
It seemed to Amy that the Family had let up a bit on their prayers for healing.
“For years patiently the prayer meeting went on praying for me,” she wrote in her private notebook. “It does not seem to do so now. I was feeling the need of prayer very much, but to ask for it would be selfish. So I had settled that I would not do so, when this word came: ‘I have prayed for thee.’ My dear, dear Lord.”
Daily Amma called in one of her doctors, Nancy Robbins, to give her background in Hinduism, customs, histories of DF people. Nancy was writing a book, Greater Is He, for which Amma made suggestions and, to Nancy’s surprise, humbly asked for suggestions on her own book. Dr. Robbins believed that the strongest psychological element of Amma’s illness was her fear of the domination of pain over mind and spirit. This she managed to conceal from nearly everyone, but it was revealed again and again in Rose From Brier and her poetry, such as:
Before the winds that blow do cease,
Teach me to dwell within Thy calm:
Before the pain has passed in peace,
Give me, my God, to sing a psalm.
Let me not lose the chance to prove
The fulness of enabling love.
O Love of God, do this for me:
Maintain a constant victory.
“She never complained,” Nancy said, “and was reluctant to discuss her symptoms with anyone, even her doctor.”
At least one or two of the Indian women who cared for her saw a different side. Neela once said to Amma, “Your last word will be pain, pain, pain.” Tired of hearing about Sennacherib and Goliath and Apollyon and the rest of her aches, she told Amma she ought to be thanking God instead that most of the ordinary functions were still functioning.
Nancy wondered at the large number of people who always seemed to be about, waiting on Amy. It made a strange impression at first, “but I realize that this attention was largely imposed on her by her anxious family, and that most of these ‘attendants’ were selected by Amma because no one else could cope with them and she felt they needed her help. So it was a complex situation.”
The family thought of everything. Philip England, who built everything, designed a brick platform reaching from her verandah out to a place under the trees where she could sit without having to negotiate steps. Jeevanie brought powder for cooling and comforting, but when she put it on Amma’s face, Amma said, “You must not think you can put powder on when you go to the House of Prayer.” Powder for an invalid was one thing. Powder for vanity quite another.
Jeevanie was annoyed when Amma would have her open the bird cage so that the birds could fly through the room.
“She would be beckoning them—’Come, come, little birds!’—and I would be standing behind her shooing them away—’Go, go!’ They landed in her hair, on her sheets—such a mess. I was very cross with her. But she loved them.
“Sometimes Amma imagined that I had bumped her bed. She chided me. I was angry with her. I threw the hot-water bottle at her and ran away.”
Bee brought a bottle of cologne.
“Last night I used you to help toward sleep,” Amma wrote in her thank-you note. “You are in a bottle with a red top, you know, close at hand. Nothing helps me more sometimes, and to have this extra means that I can use it without counting the drops.”
Then someone thought of face cream. It was well timed—a gift from heaven.
“A few days ago I saw an advertisement for cream in the paper and thought, ‘If I went in for buying such things I would try that stuff—it sounds cooling’—and here it comes! Did our angels (yours and mine) laugh?”
Besides the pain, heat and sleeplessness were constant torments. Before an electric fan was installed the seven-and eight-year-old girls would come in twos to “do punkah,” pulling the rope that swung the fan for half an hour at a time. “If I got slow Amma would say, ‘Oh darling child, are you asleep?’ Then she would give me a sweet and give the other one a turn.”
At night she asked her nurse to read to her. Jeevanie read John 14, 15, 16, Revelation 7:9-17, and chapters 21 and 22 so many times that she had them memorized, as well as the whole of Rutherford’s hymn, “The Sands of Time Are Sinking.” Then she would massage Amma’s legs until she nearly fell asleep herself.
“Oh darling, what would I do without you?” Amma said. “You always make me sleep.”
“She would make me take dictation in the middle of the night, and throw it all away next morning. ‘What a waste!’ I said. ‘Never mind, darling, the Lord has given me something else,’ she said.”
Jeevanie was one of those who as a child had not believed Amma loved her as much as the others. She was very dark, not the coffee-with-cream color of Tara and Leela that Amma loved.
“But when she was sick I cared for her. I had to love her then, and I learned. I told her she had caned me often. ‘Did I, darling?’ she said. ‘Yes, Amma.’ ‘Oh darling, I loved you dearly,’ she said. All bitterness went. She was not at all a difficult patient. If Amma had not rescued me, where would I have been? She took me to a temple once so that I would know, but I saw the beautiful girls and their jewels and thought to myself, ‘I would like that.’ Now I understand. She saved me.”
One of the tasks Amma had set herself very early in her illness was to write a letter to each member of the Family to be put into a box and kept until after her death. She did not keep a careful record of what was in the box, so some received several letters and probably there were some who got none. To Neela, who was both nurse and secretary, she wrote of the way the Lord had brought her to Dohnavur, through impossible barriers. “It was then our Father, yours and mine, said to me, ‘No purpose of Mine can be hindered.’
“I don’t want you to become so wrapped up in the work of this room,” she went on, “that when it is empty you will feel your life is empty. So don’t think of me, ever, in a way which would make it too hard if you had not me to help. Think of yourself as belonging first to your Lord and then to all, Servant of all. . . . Never, never let any human love come first.”
To one of the sitties she wrote:
Margaret, for whom I thank my God, if ever you read this I shall be among the cloud of witnesses, looking with a deepened love and understanding upon you as you run your race.
I hardly know what to say to you. I think you know all I would wish to say, but you may not know how I count on you for the future—if there be a future—and how I thank God for the preparation of the years.
I remember your first letter coming and I remember your cable . . . and now you are deep in what seems to us a peculiarly selfless service. The spiritual training of children must be that. You work for the years you will not see. You work for the Invisible all the time, but you work for the Eternal. So it is all worth while.
Then follow words of encouragement for discouraging days, strong words for loneliness, and “Goodbye, my steadfast Margaret.”
The letters I have been allowed to see follow a similar pattern—thanks to God, reminiscence of how they came, heartening words to help them toward faith, hope, and, beyond all, love.
This was her prayer for her children:
Father, hear us, we are praying,
Hear the words our hearts are saying,
We are praying for our children.
Keep them from the powers of evil,
From the secret, hidden peril,
From the whirlpool that would suck them,
From the treacherous quicksand pluck them.
From the worldling’s hollow gladness,
From the sting of faithless sadness,
Holy Father, save our children.
Through life’s troubled waters steer them,
Through life’s bitter battle cheer them,
Father, Father, be Thou near them.
Read the language of our longing,
Read the wordless pleadings thronging,
Holy Father, for our children
And wherever they may hide,
Lead them Home at eventide.4
1. Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, Freedom at Midnight (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975), p. 288.
2. Ibid, p. 198.
3. Katherine Makower, Follow My Leader, p. 162.
4. Toward Jerusalem, p. 106.