Pearl-Eyes

“Thou hast seen it; for thou beholdest mischief and spite, to requite it with thy hand: The helpless committeth himself unto thee; Thou hast been the helper of the fatherless.” — Psalm 10:14 (ASV)

On an evening in early March 1901, a little girl was found alone outside the church at Pannaivilai, where Amy was living with the Walkers. She was about seven, with tumbled hair and frightened eyes, and she didn’t belong to the village. A Christian woman took her home for the night. In the morning the child insisted on seeing a particular foreign lady, and the woman brought her to the mission bungalow. The usual date given is 7 March 1901.

Amy was reading on the verandah. The child ran straight to her, climbed onto her knee without the least fear, and began to talk. “I have come to stay,” she said.

Later books call her Preena. In Things as They Are, the earliest account, written within a year or two, Amy called her Pearl-eyes, to protect her.

As a baby, the child had been given by her mother to women attached to a temple in a nearby town, whom Amy called the Servants of the gods. Nobody loved her there. Some months before, the woman who kept her had burned her little fingers as a punishment “for some childish fault.” She ran away to her mother, three days’ journey and about twenty miles off, and searched the streets until she found her. “My mother cried,” she told Amy. But the temple woman followed, and her mother gave her up again.

Back in the temple house, she overheard that she would soon be “married to the god,” the ceremony by which a girl was dedicated to a temple for life. She didn’t understand all it meant, but she understood enough to be terrified. She ran into the temple, stood before the image and prayed, “Let me die! Oh, let me die!” “Barely seven years old,” Amy wrote.

To frighten her, the temple women had pointed out one of the women of Amy’s band, passing through their town, as “the child-stealing Ammal.” It was meant as a warning. It worked the other way. The child went looking for her.

Within hours the temple women arrived. “We are Servants of the gods,” one said. She refused to go, and the missionaries would not force her. A larger crowd came later, and one woman, who clearly terrified her, demanded that she say before them all that she wouldn’t go back. The child froze. Amy dared not go near her, in case she was accused of bewitching her. Taken out of the room for a moment by Star, one of the convert girls, the child sobbed and showed the marks of earlier punishments. Then she walked back in and cried, “I won’t! I won’t!”

It wasn’t over. Under the law, the child belonged to her mother, so keeping her could count as taking a minor from her guardians, a crime. Dedicating a girl to a temple for that kind of life was already against the law in principle, but proof was almost impossible. “Only the great difficulty might be to prove it,” Amy wrote. One woman accused the child of theft; the sum turned out to be fourpence halfpenny, and the missionaries paid it. Amy and the Walkers decided to keep her and take the consequences.

Weeks later, Amy was teaching her that we are redeemed “not with corruptible things, as silver and gold.” The child broke in: “Oh yes, I understand! I know how much you paid for me—fourpence halfpenny!”

Amy saw God’s hand in the timing: a few weeks earlier the missionaries had been away, and nobody could have protected her. She called these “touches that tell how God cares.” Before this she had seen temple children and felt powerless: “no hand of ours can stretch over the wall and lift even one child out.” Now a child had climbed over the wall by herself. Everything Amy is remembered for began here, with one.

One thing to do this week: find out about one organisation that protects children at risk, near you or abroad. Pray for it by name, and ask what one small thing you could do to help, even if it’s only learning more.