A Precious Package

The telegram arrived after dark bearing the cryptic message: a package is ready for delivery. Six short words, yet much hung on their import. These words were followed by an address.

Christina Akka*, smoothed her graying hair and twisted it into a knot. She snatched her ready-made duffle, wrapped her plain, cotton sari neatly, and slipped wordlessly through the high gate. Her flashlight bobbed bravely as she headed down the sandy road to the bus stop. The road ran through Dohnavur village, a cluster of earthen dwellings with thatched roofs and open sewers. The atmosphere hung thick and humid. A white bullock, long horns and head held low, meandered under a tall palm, silent against the dark sky. Christina Akka’s heart pounded as she hastened, her flip flops making a slip-slipping sound with each step. She shuddered as she skirted around the dark temple, then stood still along the roadside, waiting for the last bus before nightfall.

Now she stood still, her duffle clutched at her side. Her mind spun through the items within: blanket, formula, thermometer, stethoscope, medicine. She whispered a prayer, for protection, for courage.

During the day, Dohnavur village stirred with noise and activity. The populace crowded the village pump to fill colorful plastic jugs, wash laundry, and bathe. Livestock roamed freely, chickens cackled underfoot, and bullock carts teetered between potholes. Hindu music whined from the temple loudspeaker. Towers of material, vegetables, firewood, clay urns, and containers swayed gracefully from the tops of turbaned heads. The market, a brilliant medley of color and humanity, sprawled over an expansive courtyard in the village center. Home industries, crafts developed over generations, flaunted their wares on fabulous mats: pottery, jewelry, weaving, and agriculture. Ground spices in browns, reds, and yellows were wrapped carefully in banana-leaf packets and sold to haggling customers. Soups and vegetable curries steamed, their pungent aromas wafting low and heavy. Merchants sold their peppered curries on banana leaf plates atop mounds of sticky rice, and always with a cup of sweet, creamy chai. Heat radiated from the sand in silvery waves while the floral scent of jasmine permeated the humidity with its musky perfume.

But as dusk settled below the jagged Western Ghats, an eerie silence blanketed the village. At night demons unleashed superstition and fear upon the poor and ignorant. Tragedies of sickness, death, and natural catastrophe were explained as punishments bestowed on evil doers. The only way mankind could escape the wrath of the gods was through sacrifice. The caste system had become deeply rooted in religion, creating fear and division. The Untouchables, with the task of dealing with the village sewer, cemented the bottom rung of the social ladder.

Temple priests played on this primitive fear from within the dirty confines of their stone temples, temples that housed the statues of the gods. Food and milk was proffered to the gods, poured over black, stone idols by their worshippers making the temple a place of rot and decay. Oppressed and poor, they were willing to continue their sacrifices to gods that didn’t love them in return.

Sometimes that sacrifice was costly: a daughter, gifted to the temple women. These evil women would raise the child for prostitution, a temple dancer for the temple priests. Sometimes the child was offered or even “married” to a specific god, branded with its symbol on her forehead. Other times a poverty-stricken family felt cursed by the gods for giving them a girl child. The family of a man demanded expensive dowries, often leaving the bride’s family in debt for generations. Arranged marriages could become mere business contracts between families, devoid of affection.

Christina Akka, knew she must catch the night bus as it swooped to a stop, brakes screeching, headlights blaring. No villager owned a car, not even a motorbike. The bus was the only mode of transport other than the bullock carts, peddle bikes, and man-propelled rickshaws.

During daylight hours, the village bus burst with humanity: women and children in the front, men in the back, separate doors for each. Women must cast their eyes to the ground when passing a man because genders must never mix. Incense wafted down the aisle from where it smoked near an enshrined idol at the front of the bus. The bus windows had no glass, only wooden boards available to cover the openings during monsoon weather.

The bus stopped, but only briefly enough for Christina Akka to grab hold of the stair railing with one hand. By the time she had swung a foot on the bottom stair, the wheeled monster was already in motion, a cloud of dust billowing behind in the gray. The night air pressed close around Christina, close with sweat, incense, and heat. The engine roared at the silent night, and air rushed past her face. She was alone on a seat.

Now the Western Ghats loomed purple against the star spangled sky. Between the mountains and the road, stretched a network of rice patties, each rimmed with clay dikes. Palm trees reached their long, graceful trunks skyward, dark and still. The bus rumbled, creaked, and rattled through dark villages, devoid of electricity, devoid of hope. Here and there, goats roved in thorn bush corals, fidgeting uneasily in the night. More often, they were brought into the mud houses alongside a family for the night.

Christina Akka sat alert in the darkness. Would she reach her destination in time? She was well-practiced in her work.

“A package is ready for delivery.” She prayed she would not be too late.

The package was a baby. A baby in dire need of rescue. Female infanticide, although illegal, was still practiced in these rural parts of South India.

Christina Akka had been rescued herself, just this way, many years ago by an English missionary, Amy Carmichael. Amy, with the help of others, had built a safe refuge for rescued babies, not an orphanage, but a community where children would be grouped in families, raised, educated, and set forth as strong contributors to society. A school, playground, swimming holes, sports, festivals, and contests were all part of the children’s vibrant lives. Life for these unwanted children could blossom inside a safe compound wall, the girls’ identities kept secret until they were adults and out of danger.

Christina Akka grasped the paper note, the address scrawled hastily across it—a hospital, a two-hour drive from the girls’ orphanage home. The sun was just coming over the jungle horizon, a great red ball of fire. Christina Akka dismounted from the bus and headed through the sand toward the wrought iron gate. She knew this hospital. One of her “sisters,” another rescued girl, worked here as a midwife. They had worked as a team and had rescued several girls over the years.

One was a child of a single girl whose father was so angry, he ordered the baby disposed of after birth. Another, was a mother’s fifth girl, and wasn’t wanted. Another was born with a birth defect. Another was a perfect, beautiful child, olive skin and a mop of black silky hair. This one was to be delivered to the temple women.

Christina reached the courtyard in front of the hospital. Although it was the wee hours of morning, the courtyard was crowded with women squatting or lying on the courtyard tiles, children and baskets around them. A doctor’s appointment, for many, was their only excuse their husbands would accept for a day out, and they wanted to make the most of it. Many of these women’s only occupation was rolling cigarettes in the dark confines of their mud homes. They came dressed for a picnic vacation, chains of jasmine adorning their majestic black hair, their saris, brilliant on their caramel chocolate skin. They chatted and laughed merrily in the safety zone of the hospital.

Christina Akka tiptoed through the populace and made her way in the lightening dawn to the back of the hospital. The hospital had no running water. All water was pumped by hand and hauled in buckets. Sheets and bedding were boiled in towering cauldrons stoked by fire. Even the cooking for all 80 beds and staff was cooked in the kitchen on fire lit stoves.

The different areas of the hospital were roofed in red clay tiles, and connected by covered walkways, also clay tiled, an attempt at keeping the dust and dirt out of the simple wards. The windows were low and guarded by great wooden shutters.

Beads of sweat trickled down Christina’s temples as she hurried to the prearranged meeting place, a grove of palms behind the hospital. She waited standing against a rough trunk. Silent. Expectant. Praying.

A door creaked open, and a figure hurried out carrying a bundle in both arms, glancing to right and left. Christina stepped out revealing herself, and the two women met in an embrace. The bundle quickly exchanged arms, and Christina darted out the back gate.

She would take another bus home. The child would receive a new name and a new life. She would grow up with sisters and playmates, with fields and grasses, animals and birds. One day she may ask, “Who am I?” and Christina would open the locked safe and read to her where she was born, and if she wanted, what caste or family. Or maybe she wouldn’t want to know—she would simply be a child of God.

A baby lay asleep in her white cotton hammock, tied by a sturdy rope to the nursery rafter. Her black hair curled just a little over her satin ears; her long beautiful eyelashes rested; she slept softly. Palm trees swayed outside the low, open window. She had been named Suria, the Tamil word for sunshine, and welcomed with open arms and hearts full of love.

When I was seventeen, I had the privilege of traveling to India and working for seven months in the hospital started by Amy Carmichael in the Dohnavur village. My assigned work place was the baby nursery where the rescued girls were first brought. While I was there fifteen babies were rescued and I fell in love with each one. I helped bathe them, feed them, and love them. (All with no running water!) I also go to know the Indian woman in charge of the rescues and she told me many of her rescue stories.

*Akka means older sister and is a title of respect