11. Nightmares
11.
NIGHTMARES
Nightmares.
Amy began having dreams that frightened her very much. On January 16, 1917, she wrote in her diary, “O forgive me, but I must ask it: take me quickly when my work is finished. Do not, I beseech Thee, let me be disabled by pain or inability and live on as a burden to others. Have been more than usually in pain these last few days.”1
“Oh, God,” she prayed, “don’t let this dream be a premonition that I might someday be disabled, even an invalid. Is the devil trying to trick me?”
But Amy’s anxieties were usually on behalf of others. Perhaps it was not apparent to those who saw her quick decisions, but, oh, how she lamented the girls who lost their way. “Is the work for these girls going to end in dust and ashes?”2 she wrote unhappily in her diary. Then she remembered a gift to Dohnavur perhaps not handled properly. “Burn, burn out of me any insincerity that lurks within.”3 The memory of Ponnammal’s agony haunted her, too. And Dohnavur now wrestled with emergencies in twelve nurseries!
Discipline on the children was strict. They were not allowed to be slackers. A few were rebellious, reminding Amy of herself as a child. Dohnavur harbored many endearing stories of the antics of children now. Every parent has a hundred stories. Amy had a thousand. She gave every child a good-night kiss and she would continue to do so until there were not enough minutes in the evening to do it. Love was their blanket.
One game the children played was acting out a poem as Amy recited it:
Our mother was a butterfly,
We are her little eggs,
Inside us caterpillars lie,
Young things with many legs.
I am a little caterpillar,
Very soft and fat,
I’ll change into a chrysalis,
What do you think of that?
I am a little chrysalis,
And very still I lie;
For folded up inside me
Is a little butterfly.
I am the little butterfly,
I want to fly about;
I’m so tired of being here,
Oh, now I’m out! I’m out!
O kind wind, come and fan my wings,
O sunshine, make them dry,
O flower, I come to you! Away,
Away, away I fly.4
Many of the children adopted their own special monkey among the band that cavorted around Dohnavur. Also allowed as pets were squirrels, dogs, and exotic animals like the loris that Amy’s people back in England could only wonder about. Amy loved animals and birds. In fact, her weakness for birds was becoming legend. Occasionally in the open market she would be overcome after seeing “little living jewels” in tiny rickety cages. On those occasions she would come back to the compound with as many cages as she could carry! There the birds settled into larger cages or aviaries. Of course, she made the pets into metaphors.
“Are you Raggles or are you Taggles?” she would sing to the children of two pet robins. “Raggles was called Raggles because he was always untidy. His feathers hung about him like rags. He did not take the trouble to tidy himself, and so Taggles had to try to tidy him, which he did by pulling those loose feathers out. But the great difference between the two is this: Raggles expects to have his food put into his mouth, and Taggles, though he likes to be fed, takes the trouble to feed himself. Raggles, you see, likes everything to be done for him, while Taggles does things for himself and even tries to help his lazy brother. Also Raggles doesn’t come when he is called, and Taggles gladly does. I like Taggles’s disposition very much. Don’t you? Are you Raggles or Taggles?”5
In 1917, Muttammal—now twenty years old—finally consented to marry Arul Dasan. Dr. Clift was due to go to France as a medical officer. Mrs. Clift was going to America to wait out the war. But first they would all convene in Colombo, Ceylon, for a wedding. It was just as Amy had dreamed it, down to the last detail! In May, Arul Dasan and Muttammal returned to Dohnavur. It was a great blessing to Amy. Not only was she joyous over seeing Muttammal, now called Kunmunnie to hide her identity, but she needed Arul’s help.
Summer retreats were no longer spent in Ooty. It was not because Mrs. Hopwood had passed on, for her daughter was congenial. No, it was because Thomas Walker had always been part of Ooty, too. And Amy’s family was so large now, they overwhelmed the accommodations at Farley. In 1915, after Amy had inquired about nearby highland forests, the forest department let her use an empty bungalow located at Sengelteri, a mere eight miles northwest of Dohnavur. Cool air and a waterfall were most refreshing. What a peaceful kaleidoscope—the children dressed in blues and yellows flickering through green and brown forest glades!
THE FOREST WAS MORE REAL THAN ANY FOREST IN RUDYARD KIPLING’S JUNGLE BOOK STORIES.
The forest was more real than any forest in Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book stories. Real panthers lurked instead of Bagheera, and genuine tigers, not Shere Khan, were to be feared. The bears were real as well, unlike Baloo. Once, Amy, who by now was almost fifty, exercised her wild Irish humor. When she and three girls spotted Pearl and the rest of the group coming back from the river, they hid behind a tree and growled like bears. Their victims flew into a panic. Led by rail-thin Pearl, they danced about and waved flimsy sticks in defense against the forest phantoms.
“Whatever is the matter?” yelled Amy, stepping out from the tree.
“Bears! Bears!” screamed Pearl and the others.
There was no need to explain the hoax after the small girl with Amy fell to the ground in a fit of giggles. How could the family ever stop going to the forest? It was there her little songbirds sang:
The elephant comes with a tramp, tramp, tramp,
The elephant comes with a tramp, tramp, tramp,
Through the forest and over marshy ground
His great big flat feet pound and pound
With a rumpety-dumpety-crumpety sound.
See, here’s a tangle of maidenhair,
Among the pandanus spikes down there;
And right through the very middle of it
He’s trampled exactly as he saw fit
With his blundery-wondery-dundery wit.
A fool, do you think? No, he’s no fool,
Look at the track, it leads to a pool,
And on and on to a shady place
Where he can fan his beautiful face
With a jungelly-tumbelly-scrumbelly grace.6
But soon the facility at Sengelteri grew too small. What were they going to do? The forest was such a delight. In the summer of 1917, Amy and others from Dohnavur began looking around for a forested property they might buy for themselves. Amy prayed their wish was not frivolous. Surely the family needed such a retreat. Eventually an old Hindu Brahmin led them to an area called the “Gray Jungle,” which lay on the flank of a mountain, below the great forests of teak and sal. Within a thick growth of evergreen oak and chestnut was a river and a waterfall, and the forest opened into a beautiful glade, as if inviting Amy to build a cottage there. The Gray Jungle could be entered only by climbing up a scary cliff. It was perfect.
“The Brahmin tells me you are interested in buying land,” said a Muslim who appeared out of nowhere.
“Yes, I might be interested,” said Amy, disguising her amazement.
“I am the owner,” he said matter-of-factly. “For one hundred English pounds you can own thirty-seven acres of this paradise.”
So much! And yet so little.
“Sisters,” said Amy, “let us pray: Lord, if it be Your will, may You send us a sign.”
It was as if she had thrown out a fleece. That same night, they returned to Dohnavur. In the mail from a lawyer in Ireland was an inheritance bequeathed to Amy by an old friend. The sum was one hundred pounds!
“The Gray Jungle!” screamed someone.
“And a forest house!” piped another, who then added apologetically, “when we get the funds.”
On September 17, 1917, the Gray Jungle became the family’s legal property. Building in the highlands was difficult, though. It was hard to get laborers up the cliff. And the caste system drove Amy wild. The men who cut down a tree were allowed to do nothing else, and the men whose caste allowed them to saw the tree into planks were not there that day. Then, when the boards were ready, the carpenters were not there. If it rained, none of the men showed up, and the family had to hurriedly cover all the mud walls with mats to keep them from disintegrating. Much of the work had to be done by the family. They made amateur mistakes, with walls collapsing and roofs leaking. But what a wonderful sanctuary the forest house was when the summer sun blistered the plains below.
Near the forest house, the pool swirled out of the ancient core rock of the mountain. The pool was a special place where every child was taught to swim, just as Amy had been taught as a child in the mill pond. Once, they were blessed when two carpenters—captivated by Christ in their meetings—asked to be baptized in the pool. An ordained friend of Amy’s was happy to come to the Gray Jungle and oblige:
The Pool looked its very loveliest. A rock runs into the heart of it, and on it we can stand. This rock was colored a sort of dull gold that day because of the way the light caught it. On either side the water was jade green, till it reached the rocks which are gray, splashed and veined with crimson, brown and yellow, and their colors were brokenly reflected in the water. A little waterfall tinkled at the other end. This is a pool of many joyful swimming hours.…But never was it so happy a pool as that day when those two men confessed Christ crucified. The toil of the house was nothing then.…7
Construction of a forest house in no way slowed the expansion of Dohnavur. In fact it seemed to explode. Amy’s conscience had been troubling her for some time—at least eight years—about taking only girls. One day in the forest house, God reminded her to take boys. She was stunned. How was this to come about?
AMY’S CONSCIENCE HAD BEEN TROUBLING HER ABOUT TAKING ONLY GIRLS.
Then in January 1918 another baby—this one more than one-year-old but bundled—was delivered into her arms at the gate of the compound. The baby smiled wearily and held out wanting hands. Amy remembered thinking, What a brainy little head! If only this baby were a boy. She handed the precocious infant to Mabel.
“It’s a boy!” screamed Mabel from the nursery five minutes later.
And thus began their haven for boys. In 1919, Irene Streeter visited to break the ground on yet another nursery, the third of a new series. And she stayed long enough to break the ground on a fourth. Nurseries now numbered more than twenty! But 1919 marked the beginning of great upheaval in India. After the Great War ended in 1918, the little lawyer from Bombay, Mohandas K. Gandhi, who had supported Britain during the war, wanted justice for the Indians. British authorities brushed him aside like a pesky fly. But Gandhi persisted. To his credit, he advocated peaceful π presistance. This pleased the British very much. But something happened that no one in India—not even Gandhi—expected. If Gandhi showed up somewhere to file a protest, as he did for sharecroppers in Champaran, within hours there was a sea of peasants by his side. Thousands upon thousands. Only Gandhi could control their anger. Occasionally even he could not restrain his single-minded followers. Riots ended in bloodshed. But the most savage atrocities were committed by the British against the Indians. None signaled British oppression of the Indians more than what happened at Amritsar on April 13, 1919.
Gandhi was not at the rally of peaceful demonstrators. British troops opened fire on them, killing 379 and wounding another thousand. So the terrible thing growing in India was not the move toward nationalism but the immoral force employed by Britain to stop it.
“I don’t want to believe such terrible stories,” admitted Amy.
To make things worse, 1919 marked the year Amy had become acceptable to that very British establishment. It would be hard to imagine a greater shock than receiving the news from Lord Pentland, Governor of Madras, that she was now included on the Royal Birthday Honors List. It didn’t seem that long ago that the district collector and the superintendent of police would have gladly paid her passage back to England or anywhere else!
Then Amy was informed she was the recipient of the Kaiser-i-Hinds Medal for her services to India. She fired a letter to Lord Pentland:
Would it be unpardonably rude to ask to be allowed not to have it?…I have done nothing to make it fitting, and cannot understand it at all. It troubles me to have an experience so different from His Who was despised and rejected.…8
But friends convinced her it was unpardonably rude to refuse it. It might even hinder her efforts in Dohnavur. So she relented. But she refused to go to Madras to accept the medal. She wanted no glory.
One day, Arulai’s long-lost sister, Mimosa, turned up at the gate of the compound. With her were three of her four sons, one a baby. Mimosa’s husband had not allowed the teenage son, Rajappan, to come. Mimosa wanted to leave her four-year-old and her seven-year-old. Amy welcomed them, stunned by Mimosa’s haggard appearance. She was two years younger than Arulai but looked much older. Her story was the most heartbreaking story Amy had ever heard. Poor Mimosa had wanted to come to Dohnavur back in 1899, but her father refused. But in the briefest of interludes when Arulai had counseled her, Mimosa had been smitten by the love of Christ. After Arulai had left, Mimosa existed among the Hindus like an illiterate Abraham, knowing only that she must love the one true God.
She refused to indulge Hindu customs. And she had been a pariah all these years. Her own brothers treated her with the disrespect normally reserved only for Untouchables. Naturally such a woman, who was not practicing Hinduism and getting poorer every year, could find only a lazy scoundrel for a husband. Her life had been ten thousand times harder than Arulai’s. Yet she had her one God—whom she worshipped in a primitive but pure way—and she had her four sons.
Years before, Arulai had heard of her plight and written to her. It was the only letter Mimosa had received in her entire life. A cousin condescended to read it to her. She kept it like it was treasure. At long last she had come to Dohnavur to give her sons a chance. If only she, too, could learn to read, she said, so she could savor God’s Word. But she had to go back to her husband to try to save the oldest son, Rajappan. Amy’s heart ached that Mimosa had to return to that very hard life. Had there ever been such a poor, ordinary, illiterate girl who was so tenacious for Christ? Amy resolved to someday write the story of Mimosa.
Amy continued to write. Writing was like breathing to her. As if she did not have enough to do, she began to write letters to individuals within the compound, too. Of course, she had always written down day-to-day requirements and fired them off to workers; but now she wanted to do something more spiritual, more loving. A good example was the tender note she sent to a troubled child:
I wonder what your biggest temptation is. Is it to be suddenly angry? That was mine when I was a little girl. I used to feel something like fire suddenly burning up in my heart. If you feel like that, ask the Lord Jesus to pour His cool, kind, gentle love into your heart instead. Never go on being angry with anyone; be Jesus’ little peacemaker.…9
She also continued to write for the public. It was very important for many reasons that the story of their ministry be told outside India. By 1918 she had added two more books, including one loving tribute to Ponnammal. Now she was writing about their experiences in the Gray Jungle. Poetry still expressed her thoughts best:
Dim green forest
Of a thousand secrets,
When you were planted
Did the angels sing?
Many things I wonder,
Are they all your secrets,
Won’t you ever tell me anything?
Great white waterfall
Breaking through the forest,
Where do you come from,
Where do you go?
Had you a beginning,
Will you go on forever?
For ever and for ever will you flow?
Great black, glistening wall
Veiled in shining glory,
Piled among the waters
Rock upon rock,
O to have stood and seen
Hands at work upon you,
Shivering you and shattering shock upon shock.
Deep, dark, silent pool
Hollowed in the water’s foot,
What do you think of
All the long day?
Do you hear the thunder
Of tremendous waters?
Do you hear the laughter of the spray?10
Tranquil thoughts.
But when she first encountered Jambulingam, her life was scarcely tranquil. Jambulingam was a notorious robber. He called himself the Red Wolf. The English newspapers labeled him Robin Hood. Amy rather liked that name herself. Just like Robin Hood, he gave rise to stories that were far-fetched. He robbed from the rich to give to the poor. He leaped across wide streams in a single bound. He was a crack shot. No handcuffs could shackle him. No jail could hold him. Like everyone else, Amy was enchanted with the stories. Amy was not shy about asking God for favors, either. So she prayed that she could meet this “Robin Hood.” On October 12, 1921, when Amy was returning from the Gray Jungle, a man stepped out in front of her.
AMY PRAYED THAT SHE COULD MEET THIS “ROBIN HOOD.”
“I am Jambulingam,” he said.
“Whatever do you want with me?”
“I felt a compulsion to meet you.”
Thus Amy learned firsthand about this Robin Hood. He claimed he had been falsely accused of a crime many years before. He panicked and ran. By not clearing his name right away, he gave his accusers the opportunity to soil his reputation even more. He then made another poor choice and turned to crime. Yes, he gave money to the poor, but only to ease his conscience. He was nothing like a “merry” Robin Hood. He was intensely unhappy. While he was running from the law, his wife had died and left his three children to the cruelties of India. It was when Amy learned of the children that she knew the reason God had forced them together.
“I will take your children in at Dohnavur,” she offered. “But I urge you to surrender to the police and get this meaningless life behind you.”
He refused to surrender, but he did deliver his children to Dohnavur. Five days later, he was captured and savagely beaten. Could Amy doubt that God had brought them together in the most unlikely of meetings to save his three children? She was allowed to visit him in the prison hospital. He was a broken man. She counseled him in the Lord. She gave him a Bible to study and visited him often. She prayed for his soul. Then she dreamed she went to Jambulingam in prison to ask him if he wished to be baptized. He said yes. So she visited Jambulingam in prison and asked him if he wished to be baptized. And he became a Christian just as she had dreamed it.
One day a sister rushed to her. “Jambulingam has escaped!”
No! Why had she considered him safe? Why had she not prayed for him fervently? Why did she not know he could not resist the temptation to escape? Amy was very worried. Yes, he was popular with the people, even with a lot of the British. But among the British lurked the mentality that slaughtered the innocents at Amritsar. One must never forget that. So she prayed that he would give himself up. Yet, new robberies were attributed to him. Amy was certain the crimes were done by others and conveniently blamed on Jambulingam. Efforts of hers to arrange a secret meeting with the fugitive were unsuccessful for many months. She even saw an official who reported to the collector. The official said if Jambulingam would vow that he had committed no more crimes, the officials would believe him. Jambulingam would not be prosecuted for them. Finally she did secretly meet with Jambulingam. He had given up hope. He had made the British officials look foolish. He didn’t believe what the official had told Amy. He would be killed in prison for sure. No, it was too late.
“Just promise me you won’t die with blood on your hands,” said Amy sadly.
He promised.
Amy tried to put aside her worry. Worrying wasn’t Christian. Christ’s words were plain enough: “Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” And a wonderful thing happened. Arulai’s sister Mimosa was rescued at long last. She had come to live at Dohnavur. And the oldest son, Rajappan, was with her. Mimosa had rescued a niece, too, a neglected toddler. What a life Mimosa had led for Christ!
Yes, today had its own troubles. But Amy’s problems were now the problems of prosperity and expansion. For her recent acceptance by the Crown caused donations to flood into Dohnavur. Nurseries were under construction constantly. By 1923, they were building the thirtieth! Whereas once they had virtually no boy babies, there were now dozens. Amy had twenty-seven helpers, of whom thirteen were from Britain and Ireland. Chief among the helpers were Pearl, Arulai, and Mabel Wade. And new living quarters had been built for her helpers. The new quarters offered the one luxury enjoyed by these older individuals: privacy. Each had ample water to bathe, as well as a chamber pot.
Dohnavur now even boasted an automobile, which greatly speeded up trips to Palamcottah and Neyyoor. All this she reported in her newsletter, renamed the Dohnavur Letter because Scraps suggested to some readers the trivial. Readers also became acquainted with a certain nomenclature in Tamil that had arisen for the Dohnavur family. Older girls were “Sitties.” Those older sisters in authority were “Accals.” The equivalent “big brothers” were “Annachies.”
That year of 1923 also marked the end of the Jambulingam story.