“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.
Chapter 49
The River Breaks Out
It may be that decisions which seem to change the character of the work
