In Kali's Country: Tales from Sunny India

by Emily Churchill Thompson Sheets

Deal baptized him at once and then asked what he could do to help him.

Shama Bhana replied, "Nothing, thank you kindly, Sahib. I will find work at once. I will not starve. Yes, Sahib, there is something you can do for me. Pray! Pray that some day I may get my wife and child back again."

Then Shama Bhana went away. He was a rich man, the son of great possessions, as I have told you. The news of his baptism spread fast and the fury of his father was unrestrained. Shama Bhana was declared to be dead and his effigy was burned with his mother's body on the funeral pyre. His wife was proclaimed a widow and treated as such; her head was shaved and her jewels and beautiful garments were taken from her.

But Shama Bhana's Brahmin training stood him in good stead, for he went on his way apparently unmoved by all the indignities that were being heaped upon him and his. He is a remarkably bright man and so without much difficulty, for he procured it the very day of his baptism, he got a fair position as clerk in a big English office in the city. His family later did everything they could to get him ousted, by fair means and foul, but he had proved his worth before they began their work against him and so he was kept.

That was the situation I found when I returned from America. At my request Shama Bhana came to live with me, but we saw little of each other, for every moment when he was not in the office he was out preaching or teaching and with power. But in the brief intervals that I did see him I knew that his heart was sore. I had left my own family in America, you know, and he would look at their picture upon my dresser. "Your wife is a Christian," he would say. "And you will probably see them again in a couple of years. But my wife is a Hindu widow!" Then he would turn at once into his own room and I knew he had gone to his knees in prayer. I would pray, too, both for him and his and for my own. Though his case was, of course, immeasurably harder than mine, still I thought I was pretty badly off with thousands of miles of ocean rolling between my family and me and with no definite knowledge as to when we would see each other again, for the kiddies must be educated, you know.

Well, what if I am blowing my nose violently! Man, they aren't here yet and what's more, they aren't coming for another year.

Well,—then came the pestilence; not the plague or the cholera or any of those Asiatic diseases which you folk over there hear so much about and really know so little of; but the plain smallpox with which you are at least so familiar that you run away as soon as you hear the word pronounced. The smallpox is usually with us here, more or less, all the time; but somehow this season it was here in tenfold fury. It swept over the city, but was worst in the section where Shama Bhana's family lived. Several of our native church workers had tried in vain to get entrance into his house since the trouble had happened, but now they walked right in and took possession unhindered, for the father himself and every member of the family were down with the disease and the servants had all fled. Shama Bhana's wife, whom they found in a dark chamber in the servants' quarters, had the worst form of the disease because of the hunger and ill treatment she had suffered since she had become a mock-widow. Shama Bhana who had given up his place at the office as soon as he heard of the situation came at once to his wife's side, for there was no one to object. And as day after day our faithful Hindustani preacher and his wife worked over that household, they preached Christ as they worked whenever a mind was free enough from pain to receive the message.

Three of the sons died, but the rest of the family soon began to show signs of recovery. The old father, since his case had been the lightest, as he had been vaccinated once years before in an English hospital, recovered first. As he, in his weakness, lay and watched the loving ministrations of the two Christians and listened to their words, his heart seemed to be touched.

"Why do you do all this for me?" he asked one day. "Are you immune?"