8. The Starry Cluster
8.
THE STARRY CLUSTER
Thomas Walker was not much older than thirty-five, with jet-black hair. He was so fiercely concentrated and humorless he seemed tedious to Amy. He was going to speak at the meeting, and she was glad she had brought her Tamil language books with her. His talk would probably be insufferably dull. But it wasn’t. She thanked him afterward.
“I see you’re studying Tamil,” he said, glaring at the books in her hands.
“Yes,” she cried enthusiastically, “and I long for the chance to live among the natives—in a mud hut preferably—and to learn the language directly from their lips.” She almost added “just as David Livingstone did in South Africa,” but surely Mr. Walker already understood all that.
“That method won’t work at all,” he said brusquely.
Well, of all the narrow-minded people! Was he a righteous man or a boor? Oh, self, die, she quickly corrected herself. It was the “me, me, me” in Amy that was stung by Thomas Walker. Nothing of any importance.
“I suppose you know a better way?” she asked, trying to smile.
“Yes, I do, young lady. You must come out to Tinnevelly, where Tamil is the first language of the natives, but not to live in a hut! I will personally instruct you.”
She didn’t answer. What was she to think? Confused, she went off by herself and sat under a great tree. She mustn’t waste time brooding. Faith, hope, and love. God is all. For a long time she had been practicing the simple mysticism of Brother Lawrence as revealed in his tiny classic, The Practice of the Presence of God. Dying to self was from Brother Lawrence. If one tried always to please God, one would know God’s will, she reminded herself.
“But I also know from Brother Lawrence that I must continue to work and not wait in idleness for answers.”
Amy opened her Tamil grammar book. Suddenly she felt a presence, a listener. It was He. Amy realized she was to listen with Him. “The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground” was what came into Amy’s mind as she listened. The book of Hebrews had expanded on that ancient cry from Genesis: “And to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling, that speaketh better things than that of Abel. See that ye refuse not him that speaketh.” Time seemed to stop for Amy. Yet when she finally arose, she realized she had been sitting under the tree for hours.
“Here in Ooty I’m not in the real India at all,” she murmured.
Every Indian in Ooty served a European. The truth was that Ooty itself was very British. One would never have known that in India the British were outnumbered one thousand to one by the native Indians or even that the sacred cows numbered tens of millions. With Simla, Darjeeling, Muree, and Naini Tal, Ooty was one of the acceptable “hot weather” retreats. Every place she had been, in fact, was insufferably British. Ooty was so British that “the right sort of people” assembled regularly to “ride to the hounds.” Yes, they even maintained a pack of the very finest foxhounds, imported from England. Their quarry was a jackal, which served well enough as a substitute for a fox. And Amy had stumbled onto one party after a “birding.” The two dozen hunters, including so-called ladies, were assembled for their photograph with hundreds and hundreds of dead sand grouse laid in rows. The organizers had even printed a program with the scores of the participants. One British gentleman had bagged 115!
“HERE IN OOTY I’M NOT IN THE REAL INDIA AT ALL,” SHE MURMURED.
“Pity we can’t stick pigs here,” lamented one sport, referring to the lancing of wild pigs from horseback.
Bangalore was little better than Ooty. So on November 30, 1896, Amy, now almost twenty-nine, left Bangalore for Tinnevelly. She left the highlands, too. She traveled by train first to Madras, then south to the port of Trichendur, then nearly forty miles up the muddy Tambaravarni River to Tinnevelly. This low country would be much hotter and much more humid than Bangalore—more like Madras. It seemed a plain of silver with all its rice paddies. Palms stuck up here and there and were an important source of matting and the food starch sago. Tinnevelly was not as remote as Amy had imagined. The rail service went even beyond the town, farther into the interior. Tinnevelly and Palamcottah, its neighbor across the river, probably totaled fifty thousand natives. Myriad tiny villages added many thousands more.
Hindus outnumbered Muslims ten to one in southern India, so generally the missionaries encountered Hindus. Tinnevelly was very old with a long history—one thousand years at least—of strife between Hindus and Christians. The town not only had a very Anglican church, but a Catholic church with a bishop. Thomas Walker had been there eleven years. As administrator of the Tinnevelly district, he was in the midst of a very agonizing job of purging the church rolls. This was not his idea but that of the missionary society. But as long as he was forced to do it, he insisted on doing it righteously. The missionary society was not happy that he had removed the names of converts who were still living as Hindus. Just as Amy got to Tinnevelly, Thomas Walker did what everyone back in Bangalore had been gossiping about.
“I’ve resigned from the Church Mission Society,” he told Amy as she arrived.
“But I’ve never belonged to it,” she said. “I’m a Keswick missionary.”
“Then we had best get on with your study of Tamil.”
Thomas started her on not only basic grammar and vocabulary but Tamil classics. “Isn’t this a waste of time,” she asked, “when I could be studying the Gospel and learning how to preach to them?”
“One must learn first to think like them.”
“I’ll do it then—against all logic!”
Once he softened and read to her from his own diary. Oh, how he had agonized over Tamil. Yes, with a great deal of effort one could read Tamil, even write it. Then eventually one’s ear became tuned and one could understand it when spoken. But to speak it so that the natives could understand it was so difficult. Tamil was a rich language, almost without equal. There was a special word for every shade of meaning. And besides the enormous vocabulary to master, there was an equally enormous reservoir of idioms to learn.
“You set yourself too high a standard,” said Amy.
“Oh, you know nothing whatever about it!” snapped Thomas testily.
But Amy forgave him. She had learned that he was under enormous pressure. His independence was much resented by other missionaries. In fact, she soon saw him come out of his study, white as a ghost, yet his eyes burning. He had just read a petition mounted against him—based on lies and jealousy—addressed to none other than the head of the Church of England, the Archbishop of Canterbury!
So was it any wonder Thomas was occasionally cranky? He was by no means humorless. Once he wrote Amy a poem of which one stanza said:
Who plays the part of kinsman stern,
And makes my soul with anger burn?
It is that cold and taciturn
Annachie.1
Annachie was Tamil for “big brother.” Yes, Walker was her bossy big brother. And Amy was the pesky little sister who would fight back!
Amy lived with the Walkers in a bungalow. Bungalows of a standard type had been built by the thousands all over India by the British, so the word bungalow had a very specific connotation. And, if one was European, one lived in a bungalow. First of all, the bungalow was within a nice-sized compound with walls and well set back from any dusty road. A veranda ran around the bungalow. The interior rooms were large, high ceilinged, and whitewashed. The plan was U-shaped, with bedrooms in the wings. The main part of the house had the living room facing the front, with the dining room behind. Behind the house were quarters for the servants. Also removed from the house was the kitchen, which generated odors and heat and attracted flies. About the only variation in the design of bungalows from one region of India to another was the type of roof: steep pitched in rainy country, flatter pitched in dry country. Furnishings were standard, too, with much rattan furniture on the verandas, especially the ubiquitous lounge chairs. Flower beds were rarely cultivated. All decorative plants were in huge pots.
WALKER WAS HER BOSSY BIG BROTHER. AND AMY WAS THE PESKY LITTLE SISTER WHO WOULD FIGHT BACK!
“Even you live in a bungalow and employ servants,” Amy once said bluntly to Mr. Walker.
“But I don’t sip whiskey soda while a boy pulls a punkah over my head!” snapped Walker, referring to the great fans hung vertically from ceilings. He regretted his outburst and added, “The Indians expect us to live in a bungalow and give them jobs. You mustn’t vary from the norm too much, Amy, or they will shun you completely.”
As Amy continued to venture out, she discovered that Thomas Walker was quite right in crushing her desire to live among the Indians. Many of their customs appalled her. For latrines, the Hindus used nearby fields, gutters, alleys, even the floors of their own huts. The waste festered until an Untouchable carried it off. The injustice to Untouchables was staggering. These pariahs—one of every four Hindus—survived by being the sole caretakers of all waste and all death. The sole exception was the waste of the sacred cows. This the devout eagerly gathered.
Walker’s resignation freed him and his wife to move. Pannaivilai was also on the Tambaravarni River, closer to the coast, but more in need of the Gospel than Tinnevelly. The town was already pastored by the Reverend Isaac Abraham, a Christian native, but he needed help. The Walkers would rent a bungalow there.
“You may as well come, too,” Thomas Walker teased Amy. “I can’t very well leave you here so ignorant and only half conversant in Tamil.”
In July 1897, the Walkers and Amy moved into a bungalow in Pannaivilai. Amy, who was always independent, began forming a “women’s evangelical band.” By 1898, at the age of thirty, she had gathered three very devout sisters. Leyal was the pastor’s daughter; Sellamuthel, or Pearl, was a young woman with one arm; Ponnammal was a young widowed mother, the daughter-in-law of a convert.
“And they did not ask to be paid,” Amy informed the Walkers and told them of the prejudiced perspective in Bangalore that said that a native would help in ministry only if paid to do so.
Amy had adopted the native dress of the Hindus. The Hindu women wore one very long rectangle of coarse cotton cloth, a sari. The sari was wrapped securely around the waist twice, then brought up across the chest and over the left shoulder. The remainder hung down the back or was brought up to cover the head. The cotton cloth for the sari usually had one decorated border. Amy’s sari was plain white at first. She did not oil her hair as the Indian women did. She tried it once, but the smell offended her. And she wore her bun higher on the back of her head than the Indian women did. In camp, she did not yet cover her head with the sari.
“A sun helmet with a sari?” queried Thomas Walker, referring to the British topee that Amy wore.
The few wealthy Indians wore silks and brocaded clothes, and the poor Indians dressed in simple cotton cloth; but the two main religious cultures could easily be distinguished. The Hindus’ garments were “draped”; the Muslims wore “tailored” clothing. In contrast to the sari of Hindu women, the Muslim women wore tailored cotton tops called choli and bottoms that were loosely fitted but gathered tight at the ankles. They often added a cloth to cover the head, as well as to give the clothing a more draped appearance. And, of course, the face was covered by a veil.
Muslim men also wore tailored clothing, while Hindu men had a draped appearance. The Hindu man wore a dhoti, a rectangle of cotton cloth wrapped around the waist and securely tucked. He was often uncovered above the waist. Both Hindu and Muslim men usually wore turbans. All Indians wore sandals. Most wore a great deal of jewelry on their fingers, toes, noses, necks, wrists, and ankles. Wealthy men and women of southern India dripped jewelry of gold and precious stones, including lockets hanging from a heavy chain around their necks and an even heavier girdle around the waist. The women added much more adornment, featuring a lavish ornament on the forehead and a lesser bauble in the side of the nose. If they were married, the jewelry was to show how well the husband provided for them. If not, the jewelry was to show what a splendid dowry their father would provide. Even poor women were expected to be adorned with a minimum of two good-sized earrings, ten finger rings, ten toe rings, two necklaces, a dozen wrist bangles, and a dozen anklets—if not gold, silver; if not silver, good brass; if not brass, copper or steel; if not copper or steel, glass.
“Nothing is so shameful as no jewelry at all,” confided one Hindu to Amy.
Amy tried to learn as many of the customs of the Hindus and Muslims as she could. Of the Hindu rites, it seemed that three were observed by all castes. Twelve days after birth, a Hindu baby was placed in a swinging cot above twelve candles, and the priest announced the baby’s name. A second rite was marriage. The first marriage for a man was almost always arranged. But if he later became wealthy, he could add wives of his own choice—as many as he could afford. Of course, no woman could have two husbands! The third rite was at death. The Hindus believed the soul, trapped in the skull, could be released only by sacred fire. So they burned their dead, making sure the skull was burned up or broken open. Three days later, they scattered the ashes into a river.
Amy was surprised at how many rites the Muslims had taken from the Jews. It seemed the only things the Muslims couldn’t eat were blood and pork. Muslim boys also were circumcised, although not before the age of seven. Seven days after birth, a baby was named in a ceremony called aqiqah. A Muslim man could have as many as four wives if he treated them as equals. For the dead, a service was given before burial. In the grave, the face of the corpse faced their holy city of Mecca. Two main sects of Muslims had evolved: Sunnites and Shiites. The Sunnites were more pious, more accommodating. The Shiites were mystics yet often quite violent.
“Praise God that India has Sunnites,” reflected Amy.
Of course, Amy tried to comprehend their religious beliefs. The Muslims’ faith she found rather Jewish but stripped of all the wonder, all the miraculous. It seemed a bare-boned desert religion. Hinduism she found too encompassing, too tolerant. The Hindus were all too ready to embrace Christ, but only to set Him beside their other one thousand gods. Their tolerances seemed as abominable as their intolerances. She knew some of their horrible practices, like burning widows and sacrificing baby girls, had been banned by the British. But she had heard rumors of some current temple practices that she prayed were not true.
THE MUSLIMS’ FAITH SHE FOUND RATHER JEWISH BUT STRIPPED OF ALL THE MIRACULOUS.
“Who can doubt the righteousness of converting such heathens?” she wondered.
Amy and her band were energetic. The locals already called Amy the Musal. Musal was Tamil for “rabbit.” Amy was always moving, always busy. The natives called the entire band the “Starry Cluster.” Amy and her band were admired. The natives honored people who adhered to religious vows. In the one hundred-degree days of hot weather, the Starry Cluster evangelized around Pannaivilai. When the weather was cooler—except for June and October, when the monsoons brought the rain in buckets—they hired a driver to haul them farther afield in a wagon pulled by oxen. It was commonly called a bullock cart and was covered by folded-over mats. The women would camp in clearings, usually by a river, and venture forth from there to the surrounding villages.
The swift prayer for an open door; the entrance, all of us watching eagerly for a sign of welcome anywhere—for this was pioneer work, not work in prepared ground, and in scores of the places to which we went no white woman had ever been before…[we would] walk until we saw a friendly face—and we almost always found one. We usually separated then, and went two and two, and won our way past the men who would be sauntering in the front courtyard, and so penetrated to the women’s rooms, or if that proved impossible, we held an open-air meeting somewhere; or sat down wherever we could, and waited till someone came to talk, for we found—at festivals, for example—that if we sat guru-fashion, on a deserted verandah, or under a tree, that one by one people discovered us, and came and squatted down beside us and asked questions.…2
It was not unpleasant to wait for the curious. Strains of Indian music teased Amy’s ears. Sometimes it was classical music, called in southern India karnatak, which was considered less contaminated by Muslim influences than northern music. Typically it was performed by a drummer delivering the rhythm, a guitarist droning with a four-stringed tanpura, and for the melody either the peculiar stringed instrument called the vina, or the Western violin, or the flute. Often a vocalist joined the three instrumentalists. Amy never felt more in India than when she bathed in their exotic music.
Camp life was congenial, too, if one watched out for scorpions and cobras and one kind of white ant that bit viciously. The women slept on cots with mosquito netting inside a large square tent, twelve feet to a side. The driver and cook slept in a smaller tent. If Thomas Walker was along, he slept in a tiny pup tent. The tent life for evangelism had been pioneered long before by Ragland. Camping itself had been refined and perfected by the British in their many foreign conquests. Very sophisticated and portable equipment was available. The larger equipment all folded up, even bathtubs. Airtight boxes protected valuables. Every utensil was protected by a special cover. Within a short time at a campsite, all gear was unfolded and set up. Experienced helpers could have dinner on the table—with tablecloth and all—in very short order. This art of civilized camping was so old with the British that Amy thought very little about it.
Amy tried to be fair by paying the Starry Cluster when they first ventured forth from Pannaivilai. The sisters refused the stipend. And once in Pannaivilai they astonished Amy.
“Your jewelry is gone!”
They had removed all their jewelry. Amy would never have asked them to surrender their jewelry. The sacrifice seemed beyond belief. What holy women He had selected for Amy’s work! And what was the reaction of the Hindus? The fathers who had bought the finery were furious, but many other Hindus respected the women even more because the Hindus honored holiness. The word soon spread to thieves that the Starry Cluster women possessed nothing. It really seemed like the hand of God to Amy.
WORD SPREAD TO THIEVES THAT THE STARRY CLUSTER WOMEN POSSESSED NOTHING. IT SEEMED LIKE THE HAND OF GOD.
“Refuge! Refuge!” cried a girl’s voice outside the bungalow in Pannaivilai one morning in early 1898.
A girl of sixteen, never seen before by the Walkers or Amy, was calling at the gate. She had gone to a mission school in nearby Perungulam and by reading the Bible had become a believer. In India, in contrast to Japan, one could not be a believer and remain at home. Nevertheless, her relatives besieged the bungalow, demanding that the girl be returned. The Walkers and Amy refused to give her up. They offered her sanctuary. Next, Thomas Walker went about securing legal sanctuary for the girl by seeing the proper authorities.
It was Amy’s first real exposure to politics in the state areas that were not ruled by maharajahs. These areas were divided into 250 districts. In each district, the chief administrator was called the collector, a holdover, she supposed, from collecting taxes. The collector was all-powerful. Second in command was the superintendent of police. If a British army regiment was stationed in the district, the regimental commander vied with the superintendent of police for power. But the highest authority within a district was always the collector.
Fortunately, the young refugee was of age, so her independence was entirely legal. Krishna Pillai, a Christian and a poet, dubbed the girl “Jewel of Victory.” There was nothing Jewel of Victory’s relatives could do legally to get her back. But there were illegal means. Kidnapping was common. But in this case, the relatives chose to punish the perpetrators.
“They’ve burned the mission school in Perungulam,” Mr. Walker told Amy one morning.
Another girl sought sanctuary that same year. Again the Walkers and Amy withstood the storm of protest from relatives. Fortunately she, too, was of age. Krishna Pillai dubbed this girl “Jewel of Life.”
Each summer, the Walkers went to Ooty in the highlands. There they stayed with Mrs. Hopwood at her great house called “Farley.” She ran it as a haven for missionaries. Amy did not want to go, but the Walkers explained that by escaping the blistering plains in the summer, a missionary could put off much longer a furlough to England. So in the summer of 1898, Amy went to Ooty with the Walkers but brought her two recent refugees with her. Mrs. Hopwood, who was wealthy but devoid of any notions of British superiority, accepted the young girls wholeheartedly. Mrs. Hopwood and her daughter were much like Amy: blurs of constant activity. But Ooty never seemed so refreshing as when Amy thundered across the greens on a pony. Her hair was flying. No head covering could survive such a charge.
“Irish,” explained Thomas Walker sheepishly to the other missionaries in retreat.
After a few weeks of recuperation on soft feather beds, and English breakfasts of bacon, eggs, toast, and marmalade, they returned to the sizzling plains. By early 1899, several converts, including men and boys, were baptized in Perungulam. Most of the girls were sent on to a Church of England Zenana school for converts in Palamcottah. The twenty-mile distance seemed a sufficient barrier to retaliation by relatives.
Amy, compelled to write, had recorded all these events in a manuscript. By late 1898, she had sent it off to a mission society that seemed interested. They quickly returned it. It was far too pessimistic, they said. Couldn’t she eliminate the failures and accentuate the successes? They obviously did not know Amy Carmichael. Bosh! She put the manuscript aside.
Then came a real test.
“You are how old?” Amy asked a young girl who had come for sanctuary. The girl was radiant in a crimson and orange sari. Bangles reflected light off her like facets of a diamond. Her eyes were large and warm.
“Eleven,” replied the child.
“We cannot keep you here, but you can come here for instruction, if you like.”
The girl, named Arulai, did come for instruction. Amy soon learned that her father had enormous pressure on him to stop her from coming. But he was a tolerant man. When the girl became ill and Amy visited the house to nurse her, the father became even more tolerant. His tolerance was impressive in view of the fact that Arulai’s cousin was tied up in an attic and tortured for trying to do the same thing Arulai had done.
Once, at the bungalow, Amy heard Arulai praying, “Don’t let me go back to the dark, please, Lord! Oh, let me live in the light!”
Amy prayed very hard, too.
But one day the father came to the bungalow. He seemed dejected. He said Arulai could no longer come to the bungalow. Was Arulai to be plunged back into darkness?
“IT IS AS IF MY ARM IS PARALYZED.”
No!
When her father reached to take her, his arm fell lifelessly at his side. This phenomenon happened several times.
“What is this?” he finally exclaimed. “It is as if my arm is paralyzed.”
“It is the one Lord God of heaven,” Amy told him. “He has marked this child as His.”
Miraculously, the father relented. Arulai begged to have her younger sister, Mimosa, brought to Christ, too, but the father would not even bring her to the bungalow. Still, Arulai was allowed to remain and live with Amy.