The Fort

IT was early afternoon on the edge of a South Indian town, at the place where it touches the desert. It was hot, but those happy little sun -birds, the children, darted about in the sunshine, or played in the doubtful shadow of the palms which border the Brahman street. There were vivid splashes of colour where the little children played, otherwise the street was colourless and empty, for the people who lend it life were out of sight in the close dark of windowless rooms, trying to feel cool. To the left of where we stood, above housetops and palms, rose the central Temple tower, carved in stone for a hundred feet. A wall faced us, crossing the end of the street.

The wall was of clay, clumsily but massively built, rough with uneven additions and patches, the work of careless generations. It was bare and ugly, and covered, as all the world was then, with the dust of rainless months. The little flowers and grasses that had struggled for life on its ridges, in the last wet season, had been burnt up long ago. Only their famished shreds were left to tell how the poor wild things had tried to decorate man’s prosaic. But green trees showed above it. We wondered what was inside.

A door was set deep in the wall, facing the Brahman street. We knocked, but no answer came. Then friendly voices called us from across the street, and we saw that friendly faces were watching us from verandahshaded doorways. We crossed again, sat down gratefully in the shadowy recess of a verandah, and questioned our new friends about the place behind the wall. But India, though frank, is reticent. The door at which we had knocked was always locked. The Fort lay behind the wall. This was all they cared to say. So we talked of other things for awhile, until we had passed the first boundary-line fencing us off from their confidence, and they told us part of what they knew, the pith of which lay in the fact that there were people in the Fort whose ways were not as theirs, and therefore most uninteresting, unworthy our inquiry. The women, they told us, never came outside. Never till death was a woman seen out. And even then she was not seen. She was sewn in a sack and carried out by a gate in the wall on the other side. Two such gates lay on that side. By one dead women were carried out, and by the other, men. No townsman ever went into the Fort. All men of all castes were strictly forbidden, except the servants of the Fort who tilled the Fort lands outside. There was no stringent law about women; but no woman they knew had ever gone in. “May we go in?” we asked.

The question came as a surprise. Every face was a blank. They had never thought of going in. And yet they had lived all their lives within sound of a laugh or a cry from the walls. The East and the West meet often, but sometimes they walk apart. Perhaps the

Eastern way is the more dignified. Why should we pry into what, for probably excellent reasons, our neighbour has concealed?

Something a little less fine, may be, is mixed up with this sentiment; for the women’s remarks hardly suggested the sublime. “Why go in? There is nothing to see. The people are not like us. They are mere animals; poor jungle creatures.” Then after a pause came the hesitating after-thought: “Once, it is said, a white woman went in, and nothing evil befell her” — as if a thought of evil had ever crossed one’s mind! “But this is foolish talking; you would be as a parrot watching the silk cotton pod [the pod ripens, the wind blows the light-winged seed away, the parrot gets nothing]; for even if they let you pass the wall, you might wait for a lifetime and never see a woman. Each lives in her house with the door fast shut.”

There is a curious instinct in our race, which always wants to explore the unknown, and finds in discouragement impetus. This moved within us as the women talked. “It is hot, so hot,” they repeated dissuadingly. “Why go out in such a heat?” But we went.

It was certainly hot. There was no shade. The wall seemed to concentrate heat, and throb it out to us. Below, the dust struck hot through one’s shoes. Above, the sky overflowed with light, a clear white blaze of heat. There is a beautiful story in the “Kamayana” (one of India’s epics) which tells how Kama, Prince of Oudh, and Lakshman, his noble young brother, while journeying with their spiritual guide through forest and plain, came to an arid desert, “so hot that the tongue would scorch if it tried to describe it.” But the guide taught the lads a certain charm, and as they chanted it the fiery ground changed for them into cool water springs. We thought of this old tale then. We have a Charm by which life’s glowing sand becomes a pool, and even the common fiery ground to be trodden under common feet is cooled by the Charm for us. So, hardly minding about the heat, we traced the wall further, and came to a door fitted with huge locks and bars, and a hinge that looked centuries old. The door was open. We went in. A white-washed wall built half-way across intercepted the view. We stood there for a moment, and then went on, passed another wall, mud-built and broken, and saw fine tamarind trees shading the approach, and altars guarding it; beyond stood picturesque groups of red-roofed houses, and great stacks of straw. We had no time to see more; for before we reached the houses an old man met us, and leading us back to the door, asked us our business.

He was a very old man. From his ears hung long gold rings. His dress was the loin-cloth and scarf of the South. His manners were those of a chief. “These tidings,” he said, after listening a little, “are excellent for those outside, the ignorant people of the town. But we of the Fort are different. We require nothing external. Nor do we desire it,” he added, “so kindly swiftly retire.”

A year passed before we had an opportunity of attempting the Fort again. But such a year need not be wasted, and we went with hope renewed. We tried to find the head of the Clan, to win his consent to our visiting it, but no one outside could direct us to him; so believing we were meant to go in, and that the way would be otherwise opened, and asking that the very light might be spread as a covering for us to veil us from any who would disapprove, we walked quietly in.

This time we were not turned back. Unhindered we wandered through silent streets, so strangely silent that they seemed like streets in a city of the dead. The houses were solidly built, and often enclosed in courtyard walls. Their windows were few, and heavily barred. We stopped before one notable house, three-storied, built of stone and brick, coloured buff, terra-cotta, and blue. There was some fine wood-carving in the lower verandah, and the upper balcony was decorated with a pineapple device. There were small outhouses near, and a deep empty well, cut in a regular spiral. But not a woman or a child was visible anywhere. In the distance we saw men, but they did not see us. The blaze of noontide covered us as with a shining screen. We walked on unaccosted, down a short street, with four small quaint houses on either side, all shut up. They reminded one of a book often examined in childish days, which had a lock and key. What wonderful things must be inside, too wonderful for everyday reading, and so it is locked up we thought, never imagining then, as we handled it almost reverently, that the wonderful things concerned mere money matters. But here there was a difference. Wonderful things were most surely inside. Only the old house-book was locked, and the key hung out of reach. We sat down on one of the little stone verandahs, facing an iron-clamped door. No one saw us, for no windows looked out on the street. The stillness was oppressive. Was the place asleep or dead?

At last the door opposite opened. A woman looked out. She was just going to slam it, dismayed, when a smile reassured her, and before she could make up her mind what to do, we were on the other side of the narrow street, persuading her to let us sit on her verandah, and to keep her door open six inches, and let us talk to her.

She was a pleasant-faced motherly woman, this product of a system considered exclusive even in exclusive India. She had the peculiar sweetness and grace of the typical Indian woman of gentle birth. There was the flash of quiet humour too. She was very human. Had she lost anything after all by her long exclusiveness? Perhaps her life had included life’s essentials; she had her home. We talked with her, and after her first surprise had passed, she talked with us. Then we knew what she had lost.

For we had not come to play in the shallows, to study character or creed, or a new and suggestive problem. We had come to speak to the soul in the name of God about that which concerned it infinitely. The first thing, then, was to find the soul, and only those who have talked to one whose mind is as a fast closed outer room, know how much may hinder the finding of a way into the far more fast closed inner room we call the soul.

The woman listened as one asleep. The message we had brought was something so remote from anything she had heard before, that it fell on her ear as a strange song sung to a bewildering tune. How could it be otherwise? The “murmur of the world” outside had never reached her. Her range of vision, mental as well as physical, was bounded almost absolutely by the wall that surrounded her house. It is true that the call that wakens often comes from within, but oftener surely it comes from without. This woman’s world knew no without, and much of the meaning of the within was hidden from her. We do not realise until we think about it, how much we owe to the largeness of our environment. Think of the littleness of her’s.

But even the narrowest Indian horizon is usually widened by something of the culture of the past. The nation has its mythical history handed down in poetry, sung rather, through the ages, the young voice catching up the song where the old fails. I listened to our sweeper woman the other day, as she crooned a lullaby. It was the story of Rama and his queen that she sang to the baby — a beautiful old-world tale. But that mud wall seemed to have shut out even the song. A reference to one of its illustrations, which, had this woman known it, would have lighted one of the words we were using, did not surprise her into the accustomed sign of recognition. There was the less to go upon, the fewer stepping-stones by which we might hope to pass from the known to the unknown in her experience. We found she kcaw almost nothing of her own religion. A South Indian wife and mother rarely feels her need of God. It is the childless wife, and the widow, who turn to something outside themselves, and seek by fastings and penance to propitiate that Something, or elude it, or persuade it, so to speak, to look elsewhere. This woman was happy. Husband, children, plenty of jewels, she had all these; what more did she want?

Naturally, as always in such cases, we kept to the elementary. We told her that God loved her, and would save her from her sin. But God meant Siva to her, so that word needed much explanation. Love was a word she more perfectly understood. How glad we are to have that one word which belongs to the universal language. Sin meant ceremonial defilement, such as would be incurred by touching us, or eating food other than that prescribed by her caste. This word kept us a long time. Salvation meant temporal help. The thought had to be opened out before even a glimmer of its true meaning could dawn upon her. This development of idea took time. “Go and tell them God loves them” sounds beautiful and easy. It is beautiful, indeed; but so to do it that it shall be effective is not easy. The words may seem to be understood, and smiles and appreciative gestures often delude us into imagining the truth behind the words is being apprehended; whereas very probably each of the pivot words upon which our message turns conveys a wholly defective or, at least, inadequate idea, and the truth that would mean eternal life is not even within grasp. Praise God for the illuminating power of His Spirit, without whom our words were as idle tales. But if we would be accurate in thought we must abandon the idea, so hard to abandon, that instantaneous spiritual receptivity is something often seen. It is seen sometimes, and the day that shows it is marked by a crown in memory, and an Overweight of Joy. Such days are rare. Most days are commonplace, uncrowned by any such discovery. But every sunrise shines with hope. We may find that soul to-day.

For nearly an hour we sat by that woman, gradually drawing nearer fco her in the contact that comes with sympathy. And her dark eyes looked deep into ours, and stirred our hearts with strong desire that she should understand. Before we could be sure she did, the kindly covering was removed. Some men saw us, and hurried us out of the Fort.

And after we had gone away that woman’s face came back to us with its dark, deep-gazing eyes. I felt as if I had seen it before, though I knew it could not have been so, for no Fort woman walks outside. But often, during the years that passed before we could enter the Fort again, I seemed to see that same face pass, and to hear a tone in another voice so like hers that it startled me, and haunted me like a haunting tune. But life is full of the definite. And the strange intangible influences that, shadow- like, cross and recross it at times fall for the most part unheeded.