The Clue

OF all the people we had met in six or seven years’ continuous itinerating work, none had drawn us more to pray, or followed us more persistently through those fugitive half-resemblances which so often suggested remembrance, than the secluded women of the Fort. But the conversion of a Fort woman still seems distant.

The genesis of anything is interesting. According to the folklore of the place, the Fort’s story is briefly this:

Over eight hundred years ago it is said that two sisters and their retainers in journeying south quarrelled while fording the river which flows by the town near which the Fort is built. One sister held that convenience should rule in crossing rivers; and she marched straight through the stream holding her garments so that they should not get wet. The other insisted that custom should ever be observed; and she let her garments trail in the water.

The straw became a pillar, as the Tamils say; the two sisters and their adherents parted never to meet again. The independent-minded sister travelled further and founded a township. The other stopped near the river, built a wall a mile in circumference, fifteen feet high and six feet thick, pierced with four doors iron bossed and fitted with huge locks. Within this wall it was then ordained the women folk of that Clan must dwell in absolute seclusion. No woman born within should ever go out alive. No man born without should ever come in. Till they were eight or nine years old, the Fort’s little girls might play freely in the open enclosure within the wall. After that age was passed they must live indoors. Once, a child, attracted by the sound of a procession passing through the street beyond the wall, ran out of her house, up to the wall, where the door stood open invitingly. And she looked out. Some one had seen her and followed. She was pulled in, and the people say she was instantly sawn asunder, and buried beside the door. Since then that door has been locked.

Once that great man, the Governor of the Province, rode up in state to the locked door and asked to be admitted. He was refused, and rode off with his suite. “If any of them,” writes an I.C.S. friend, “gets into trouble, all you can do is to knock at the door and say he is wanted; and his friends hand him out to you. We have never known a case which would justify us in violating their scruples to the extent of forcing an entrance.” The people to this day tell with relish the story of the Governor who turned back from the locked door. You can see their appreciation of the courtesy which respected their tradition, but overtopping that is pride in their glorious grooviness. “We are the People of the Fort.”

But the Fort’s existence has been jeopardised by certain of its laws. “Their treatment of the ladies is not, as may be imagined, conducive to the longevity of that sex,” is the laconic observation of the Civil Servant before quoted. One law enacted that no family might possess more than one daughter. This law has been repealed, but its long observance has denuded the Clan.

So these people have lived their lives for many generations, unaffected by the changes in the world outside their wall. India may pass from hand to hand. What does that matter to the people of the Fort? Storms and calms are nothing to the fossil in the rock. It may appear incredible to the strong commonsense of the West that the will should close on its purpose to bury its owner alive. In the East such things are not strange. The corpse is content in its coffin. That is the pity of it. But the coffin lid has smothered any sigh that may ever have risen, the world so close outside has never seen through that coffin lid, where the thing that was not a corpse may have moved. That is the tragedy of it.

After their altercation, the two branches of the Clan naturally fell apart, and considered themselves foes. No intermarriage was permitted. They were as two separate castes. The sister’s descendants who settled outside increased and spread to a neighbouring town. “And it is affirmed that the characteristic shown by the sister at the ford, who dared to act as she chose apart from the rules of etiquette, still lingers in the family, for the women are brave and independent of spirit, and their men are very bold “: so reads the Tamil manuscript from which the story comes, and ends.

For a moment I saw nothing, and put the paper down; then suddenly I understood, caught at the fleeting floating clue that had eluded me so long, knew why that first Fort woman’s face had followed me through all the years; knew too how prayer had wrought when it seemed as though it had fallen as the very foam of the spray beaten back by the great sea-wall.

The family famed for audacity and defiance of public opinion live eight thousand strong in the town where we held that ever-remembered open-air meeting by the well. Star and her cousin, the boy who bore glorious witness in his death, belonged to that special Clan. The town in which such battles were fought and in which the Spirit has wrought in power, proving Christ and not Siva reigns, is peopled by the same family, twin Clan to the Clan of the Fort. 9

“True prayer,” says Westcott in his note on Hebrews v. 7, “the prayer which must be answered, is the personal recognition and acceptance of the Divine will. It follows that the hearing of prayer ... is not so much the granting of a specific petition which is assumed by the petitioner to be the way to the end desired, but the assurance that what is granted does most effectively lead to the end.”

Often the answer to our prayer comes as it were obliquely. We pray for one, and the prayed-for one goes on apparently unimpressed. But the prayer, if one may put it so, glances off the soul that has hardened itself, and falls like a shower on another, and that soul responds like a watered garden, and blossoms out in flower. Or where, as in the case of the Fort, and perhaps more often than we know, ignorance rather than wilful refusal shuts off the fall of the showers for a while, the answer may be delayed, and we may count the time a void; not seeing that what is granted does most effectively lead to the end which is our heart’s desire. But if, not seeing any light, we listen in stillness, we hear God say: “Fear not, look up, for My love works now, even before it is given full scope. See, I am filling the interval with shining answers to those prayers. Look and see them, star-like, strewn across the places you thought were void. There are no empty places here. Look up, and praise.”