A Chance to Die by Elisabeth Elliot (best book recommendations .TXT) 📕

Amy gathered those brown faces around her whenever she could. A group of “heathen boys” who attended the mission school listened to the story of Solomon, illustrated by a picture roll. Amy was alone, without Saral to interpret, and felt “like a bird in a cage too small for it. But oh, it was worth it all to be able to do, or to try to do, even so little as this. It’s simply blissful to see that they understand.” She told them how King Solomon had prayed not only in public (this did not seem strange to them—school always opened with prayer) but also alone. Did any of them do that? No. They could not possibly do it at home, one of them said. “So I told them they could in the jungle. They could easily go away there and be quite alone with God.” One boy said promptly, “I will!”

One day three boys came asking for Bibles. Amy was astonished, for they were from “Christian” homes. Hadn’t they got Bibles? No, they hadn’t. Hadn’t their parents? No. There wasn’t one in the house. Had there ever been? They weren’t sure. Amy, thinking she must have misunderstood their Tamil, went to Mrs. Walker who confirmed it all. Off they went to visit the Bible-less house. One scrap of an ancient bit of the Psalms was found. After prayer and talk the father agreed to buy a Bible.

“Do you see what this sort of thing means?” wrote Amy. “How can the Heathen know that He is the Lord when God is not sanctified in these people called by His name? For sanctified they cannot be when the Word is held in such small account Will you pray for these Christians of India? All round them there is the awful darkness of heathendom, and the darkness conquers the light unless that light is truly Divine.” She learned of one congregation in which hardly a soul was converted, and whole villages of professing Christians with hardly one who understood what the name meant. There was a great palaver over what “giving up sin” might mean—surely not the breaking of caste or the burning of idols? Killing an insect or stealing a little rice while husking—such things might be sinful, of course. Toward these “heathen Christians and those who made no pretense of being Christians Amy felt pitiful, purposeful love.”

No wonder that when the hottest weather came in April, requiring the customary trip to Ooty (“so one s brains won’t liquefy ), Amy wished she could be allowed not to go. The Walkers believed it was best, so up to the hills they went. There were the usual pleasant sociabilities, some “of a most Christian character, such as “picnics finishing up with prayer,” but it seemed “cruelty and wickedness to waste a moment when natives are waiting in the dark.”

Amy gave readers of her Scrap letter a “deep look down” into that darkness in the form of the story of a girl named Pappamal. She was of high caste and wanted to become a Christian. “This is very rare, and means no end of difficulty to the Mission, as it is invariably followed by the closing of houses, emptying of schools, and endless law troubles, for the Hindus leave no stone unturned to wreck the work and injure the workers, and, if they can get at her, secretly poison the convert.” Seen against the background of Tinnevelly’s conflicts in the past, such violent reaction is not surprising. So long as Christians were limited to certain castes and posed no threat to the ancient and powerful cultural structure that is Hinduism, they could be tolerated. But for a girl to declare independence from caste and family in this fashion was an outrage. Pappamal was over sixteen, hence legally free to choose her own religion. She begged a missionary for help in escaping by night from her parents’ house. Help was given. The parents found her, pleaded with her to return, but she stood fast. The Mission felt bound to protect her from “certain death” and decided to send her to Ooty. It was just at the time Amy was leaving for the hills, so she saw Pappamal safely into the hands of a Bible woman there.

Trouble erupted at once in Palamcottah. People who had been friendly glared at the missionaries. Doors of houses once open were slammed shut. In Ooty a man was seen prowling the mission compound, and soon the truth came out. The whole thing was a plot. He and Pappamal wanted to marry. As Hindus they were forbidden to because they were of different castes. She was to profess faith, escape from home, find asylum; he was to follow, profess faith also, then they would marry as Christians. That was not the end of the story. It came out bit by bit that the girl’s parents were a part of the web, having connived to bring shame on the Mission, charging it with the crime of seducing a minor (she was not yet sixteen, they said). The Bible woman immediately wired Pappamal’s father to come and take her. He refused, so the Bible woman personally escorted her to Palamcottah and publicly returned her to her family. She was shut up in solitary confinement. Word went round (and was confirmed by lawyers) that she would be killed, but in such a way as to evade proof. “Oh the dark dark deeds of this dark land!” wrote Amy. “It seemed like throwing the lamb to the wolves, only alas, the lamb herself was a wolf in disguise.” Pappamal claimed that the missionaries had bribed her to leave home.

Only a few days later word came that the parents had, in fact, nothing to do with the plot; Pappamal had poisoned her mother so that she was unconscious when Pappamal escaped, and the father had been degraded by his caste, who refused