4. The Search for the Jewels: (1901-1904, India)
“The dark places of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty.”
Psalm 74:20
“Unto the damsel thou shalt do nothing. … there was none to save her.”
Deuteronomy 22:26-27
4
The Search for the Jewels
1901-1904, India
“I am Pearleyes. I have run away and come to you, and I will stay with you forever. The servants of the gods don’t love me. My own mother doesn’t love me. Nobody loves me!” With this disarming announcement the child climbed into Amy’s lap, twined her arms around Amy’s neck, and laid her curly head on her shoulder.
Amy hugged her, astonishment written all over her face. “Who is she?” she asked the woman who lingered in the background. Late the night before, Amy had arrived home after visiting a village some distance away. That very moment she was having breakfast on the veranda of the house where she lived with the Walkers.
The woman told the story. “I thought you were away traveling. If I did not see you this morning I would have taken her back to the temple.”
“I was looking for the child-catching Ammal,” Pearleyes confided.
The woman was greatly embarrassed. “The people call you that because children just naturally love you and follow you.”
Amy laughed. She understood. She leaned over and reached to the floor for an old rag doll for the little girl.
The old woman turned and shuffled away. “It is good you came back,” she called over her shoulder. “An evil place is the temple.”
Pearleyes talked freely as she played with the doll. She told Amy things they did to her in the temple that blotted out the sun and made the bright day turn black. She demonstrated, using the doll.
The date was March 7, 1901. Amy never forgot that date, nor the child’s story. It was terrible beyond imagination. Amy took Pearleyes to Walker Iyer, who questioned her, then consulted the local Christian pastor. He sent a message to Perungulam to see if the story was true. The messenger returned and reported the village was alive with temple women searching for the child. They followed. Even as he spoke to Walker Iyer, six women ran toward the house, hardened hags with haughty faces, expensive saris, many jewels.
“Who are you?” Walker Iyer stepped forward.
“Servants of the gods,” said the leader.
“Shush!” The second woman nudged her. “You shouldn’t have told him!”
They demanded to see Pearleyes. Amy brought her out of the house but held her hand tightly. A large crowd gathered, and there were cries of “Kidnapper! Stealer of little ones!”
A woman with bold, cruel eyes spoke up. “If you want to stay here,” she pointed to Pearleyes, “you must say so yourself, so all will hear you. Or else, come back with us.”
“I won’t! I won’t!” cried Pearleyes, almost convulsed with fear and clinging to Amy.
“She stole money from us, the little thief!”
“How much money?”
“Four annas.”
Amy paid the sum to the woman.
“Your mother gave you to the gods,” insisted one. “We shall write to her.”
Pearleyes hid her face in Amy’s gown and shook her head. After much grumbling and threatening the crowd finally lost interest and drifted off, and the temple women left. To Amy’s surprise, no one ever again even inquired after Pearleyes. She was nicknamed “Elf,” and she called Amy Amma, the Tamil word for “mother.”
After traveling each day as usual with the Starry Cluster, Amy returned home to a loving, lively welcome from little Pearleyes. There had been an empty space that her work had never filled. But if the things Pearleyes said were true, something must be done about it.
How to find out the facts? To ask questions was to close the door. India was a land of secrets. It was to be a three-year search before Amy would find out from what source the temple procured infants and children.
Still, she tried. She began by writing to other missionaries. No one knew anything. Some hinted she was imagining things. Members of the Indian Civil Service knew something but could not prove it. One of the cardinal principles of British rule in India was “religious neutrality.”
Pearleyes continued to describe temple life in the uninhibited way of a child until Amy thought she could bear no more. She wept in secret and openly kept a smiling, happy appearance for the child’s sake. “It was a bitter time. Few were in sympathy. It was a closely guarded secret as to how children came to the temple houses.”
Once, she and Ponnammal stayed at an inn for traveling priests and pilgrims. They sat on the floor watching a garland maker string oleander flowers. The evening lamp flickered over them and shadowed Amy’s face. While Ponnammal asked careful questions, Amy listened. If a man’s wife died, he would dedicate an unwanted girl baby to the temple, saving wedding expenses and the bother of hiring a nursemaid. It was their first clue—an important one.
Another time she and Ponnammal slept in a cow shed. (“The cow was away,” Amy hastened to explain.) Ponnammal, her mind still clutched by caste, remembered that the Lord of glory once laid in a cow’s feeding box, and she humbled herself and lay down on the manure-covered dirt floor. Through the wall they heard a quarrel going on in the house.
“Three daughters—too many! Get rid of one!”
A woman’s muffled sobbing.
“Give one to the temple. Is it not a worthy deed?”
Or, if a father died, they learned, a mother might sell a daughter to the temple. “She will eat good and wear pretty clothes—and never be a widow!”
A family desperately needing rice would sell a baby to the temple. If a child fell ill, the parents would vow to give it to the gods if they would send healing.
A couple with no male heirs would give a daughter to the temple. She became a “ritual son,” able to inherit property and perform the funeral ceremonies. If a couple’s firstborn was a girl, they would give her with the prayer that the next born would be a son.
“Alice in Underland,” Amy called herself, for she saw much of India’s lowest, hidden life as she searched for clues.
One evening, in the shadowy part of a mud veranda in a caravansery, Amy sat on the floor in Indian dress, eating with her right hand from a bowl of rice and curry. Men travelers came up the steps. Each one politely gave her the sign of greeting they gave all high caste Brahmin women. Beside her, Ponnammal laughed to herself, and Amy felt a thrill of victory. She was inside India—the real India!
A government official she spoke to told her to start collecting facts. If she could find temple children, they were the best evidence.
“This land is ruled by a Christian power,” retorted Amy. “Such things ought not to be.”
“It is useless to move without a body of evidence at your back,” he replied.
Friends mailed Amy newspaper clippings. One, from the Madras Mail, stated: “The Conference of Hindu Social Reformers supports the movement to better the condition of unprotected children in general … and to protect girls and young women from being dedicated to Temples.”
Another government worker made plain that reverent Hindus were violently opposed to the corrupt and degrading practices that had crept into their religion.
Such efforts to stamp out the secret traffic came to nothing. They did not even begin. Public opinion needed to rise behind existing laws in order to enforce them.
One Hindu reformer suggested that temple women be retired on allowances and at their death should not be replaced. However, that too came to naught because of the demands of the worshipers.
An Indian Christian friend who visited the second most sacred temple in India told Amy of the evil that filled the place. “I never felt the closeness and power of the devil as I felt it in that Temple.”
Amy kept a running diary and in it told of visiting one village where she heard of a nine-year-old to be sold to the large temple at Tuticorin. Amy pleaded for the child. “Come back in a week,” said the mother, almost convinced. Amy prayed all through that long week, then hurried back to the village. Too late! The little girl lay on the floor, drugged, and a temple woman was on her way to collect her prey.
A later entry in her diary about the same child tells us that the child was married to the god, lived for a year, then died in such distress that the one responsible ran from the house covering his ears to shut out the sound of her screams.
Scorching, scorching times in which to live! How could she stand it?
While praying one day Amy pictured the Lord Jesus Himself kneeling in prayer, loving such children far more than she did, and she was comforted, knowing she knelt beside Him.
Still, three long years were to pass before they could save a second child. And, terrible words that she wrote near the end of her life’s work further delineate the power of Satan: They never once saved a child after those other hands had had her in their grasp. She never heard of a child pulled out once she was involved.
A medical missionary told Amy she had lived for some time, unknowingly, next door to a temple house in an Indian city. Night after night she was awakened by the cries of children; frightened cries, indignant cries, sharp cries of pain. She inquired in the morning and was always told the children had been punished for some naughtiness. “They are only being beaten.” Later, by means of her medical work, she came upon the truth.
Amy visited a Hindu town and bumped into a child, Sellamal, who had dropped out of the mission school. “Why haven’t you come to school?”
The child, drooping her head, whispered. “I am learning to dance and sing and get ready for the gods.”
A group of men stood near, and Amy turned to them. “Is it right to give this little child to a life like that?”
They smiled tolerantly. “Certainly no one would call it right—but it is our custom.”
A little later Sellamal was the center of the gaze of thousands of Brahmins and high-caste Hindus. Every eye in the circle was fixed upon her. The men scarcely dared to breathe lest they should miss a point of her beauty as she danced.
“But afterward,” Amy confronted the mother. “What comes afterward?”
The mother shrugged, palms held up. “What know I? What care I? That is a matter for the gods.”
One missionary described the dancing as an overt invitation to the men present. The seemingly innocuous motions and movements were obscene.
The whole body and facial expressions are involved in the dance, but the delicately weaving hands communicate ideas in the lengthy, complicated dance-story of the gods and their loves. Indian hands, small and supple, designed for beauty and grace. Many changing rhythmic patterns, sculptured poses, and fluid flowing footwork, subtle erotic glances, seductive movements, expressive mime.
Dance practice began at 2:30 A.M. when the little girls practiced eye movements for an hour. They sat crosslegged on the floor. Ghee (clarified butter) was rubbed into the eyes to lubricate them. Their fingers stretched the eyelids up to the eyebrows and all during the hour the eyes never blinked. Exercise and massage followed, then a bath and very small breakfast.
From 9:00 A.M. to noon the dance dramas were practiced. Punishment was harsh. One girl was made to stand one hour in a dance position without so much as an eyewink, so the dancing master could admire her. “I used to punish her like this often to enjoy the beautiful sight.”
After a lunch the children worked again from 2:30 P.M. to 6:00 P.M. Then, a bath and mudra (gesture) lessons. Nine o’clock was bedtime. Even after ten years of this, the little dancer had barely scratched the surface of dance lore.
Men suffering from leprosy and other disease believed they would be healthy if they married young girls, and they were willing to pay high prices.
One widow, wishing to become ascetic and holy, entered a temple but soon fled from it. “I expected whiteness; I found blackness.” She told how children who are to dance before the gods begin at an early age so their natural grace is developed, their arms and legs massaged with oil to keep them flexible. The child’s mind is slowly familiarized with sin. Confused and deceived her conscience is smothered, and she is no longer capable of choice.
A “joy gift” is given to the parents by the temple, thus sealing the transaction, making sure both parties know the child is not loaned but has been sold.
All temple children were marked by wearing a small gold ornament tied around the neck but hidden under the dress.
Amy was never so thankful for her childhood “no” answer to prayer than the night she stained her hands and face with coffee, dressed in sari and set out to try and get into a temple.
“Irish—but no blue eyes?” a friend commented. “Yes, you look Indian all right. How fortunate you have brown eyes.”
Amy knew a blue-eyed foreigner would have been torn to pieces should she enter a temple, but disguised she might be able to find out more about temple children. She marched right past the priests and into the outer court where it was dark with only yellow torches stuck along the walls. In a dark inner shrine was a monstrously ugly idol, the only god the people knew, surrounded by saucers of oil with burning wicks. Even though people starved everywhere in India, tons of mashed bananas were sometimes poured over an idol.
She caught sight of six chubby little Indian boys in a dark back room and started toward them, but a priest darted forward and shoved her away.
Drawing her sari more closely about her face and praying for safety, she entered another larger room where ten beautiful little girls, aged four and six, stood in a line, waiting. They were dressed in silk saris and sparkled with jewels, perfumed, and wearing flowers in their hair. Their eyes were wide with fear, and they stood as carved statues. A door opened behind them, a burst of weird music, and a priest led them in.
So it was true. There was no doubt at all in her mind. But how to convince others? She returned home, sick at heart.
She kept a traveling bag packed so that she or Ponnammal at a moment’s notice, whenever they heard of a baby or child about to be given to a temple, could go immediately and try to change the mind of the parent.
She describes travel in those days: first, being thrown about in a bandy for two hours, worse than seasickness, then a four-hour wait in the brutal sun along the road hoping for a bus that would stop. Heat hitting the side of her head like a bullet. A wave of nausea and dizziness, brain and stomach colliding, as the devouring heat circled her. Surely her clothes were on fire!
Bus after bus passed, crammed with rollicking people. Finally, a ramshackle bus lurched up, and she climbed aboard and wedged herself into a space between people and crates of noisy chickens. The bus stopped once at a shrine so the priest could sprinkle Siva’s ashes on a wheel that seemed to be held together by twine. Then, getting out into a deserted street in a strange town, she hunted for another bus going farther. No bus. A rough and tumble ride in another bandy, which charged triple fare since the driver saw her desperation.
Arrival at the address given, only to find the baby had already been sold to a temple woman.
“But to give them to temples is honor and glory and merit to us forever. To give them to you is dishonor and shame and demerit, so why should we give them to you?”
Among the Starry Cluster was an older woman Devai, who devoted herself to such journeys. Often she traveled two days and nights without sleep, following up any clue, returning without the baby, resting an hour, starting out again.
The three long years passed. Everywhere, Amy discovered, temple men and women appeared right on the spot to purchase a child, almost with uncanny knowledge of the opportunity.
Finally—March 1, 1904—another shining date to remember. The very first temple baby was rescued. That is, the baby was prevented from being sold to a temple. Amy held her in her arms. The tiny thirteen-day-old mite was sent by a Christian pastor who had succeeded in taking the child from a temple woman. Pearleyes picked out a name from Revelation 21:20—Amethyst. Amy had read and explained the verse, and Pearleyes liked the sound of “Amethyst.”
It was almost too good to be true—except that God is good—that by June Amy had seventeen convert children besides six babies prevented from entering the temple.
The only blot on such happiness was that Ponnammal did not understand. In rescuing a child it was necessary to repay expenses incurred by the brave rescuers. And just at this time Amy heard of a father who offered to sell his eight-year-old daughter to Amy for one hundred rupees.
Buying and selling children? Are we not as bad as they? Ponnammal thought, though she said little. But the cloud was over her. Once word spread that Amy would bid against the temple for a child—prices would go sky-high! And was it right to pay money?
Amy prayed much about it but dared not hesitate, for the sake of the child. She paid the money, then prayed for one hundred rupees to drop, as it were, from heaven. Ten days later a check arrived for the exact amount, from a person who knew nothing of the matter.
Then Ponnammal was convinced the hand of God was in the rescue of the children. The day came when she could say, “I see into the future. I see God with us. This work is of Him, whatever man may say.”