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

A Child at the Church Door

On an evening in early March 1901, a little girl was found alone outside the church at Pannaivilai. It was getting dark. She was about seven years old, with tumbled hair and frightened eyes, and she did not belong to the village. A Christian woman found her there and, rather than send her home in the dark, took her into her own house for the night. In the morning the child insisted that she wanted to see a particular foreign lady, and the woman, guessing who she meant, brought her to the mission bungalow.

The date usually given for her arrival at the bungalow is 7 March 1901. Amy Carmichael was sitting reading on the verandah when they came. The child ran straight to her, climbed onto her knee without the least fear, and began to tell her story. Her name, Amy wrote in her first account of it, was Pearl-eyes, and she wanted to stay there always. “I have come to stay,” she said.

In Amy’s later books and in all the biographies the child is called by her Tamil name, Preena. In Things as They Are, written within a year or two of the event, Amy used the English translation, Pearl-eyes, as she did for almost everyone she wrote about, to protect them. Her account in that book is the earliest we have, and the closest to the events, and this chapter follows it.

Her Story

The story the child told, as Amy recorded it, was this. Her mother had given her, as a baby, to women attached to a temple in a nearby town, whom Amy calls the Servants of the gods. She had grown up in their house. She was not happy there; nobody loved her. Some months before, the woman who kept her had burned her little fingers as a punishment for some childish fault, and she had run away. She knew that her mother lived in a town about twenty miles to the east, and she set out to walk there. Some kind people on the road let her travel with them, and after three days she reached the town, where she searched the streets, describing her mother to strangers, until she found her. “My mother cried,” she told Amy. But the temple woman had followed her, and her mother gave her up again.

Back in the temple house, the child overheard the women talking about her. She was soon to be “married to the god,” the phrase used for the ceremony by which a girl was formally dedicated to a temple, or, as they put it, “tied to a stone.” She did not understand all that it meant, but she understood enough to be terrified. Amy recorded what she did next. She ran into the temple, slipped past the priests, stood before the image of the god in the dim shrine, clasped her hands and prayed to it, “Let me die! Oh, let me die!” Amy added: “Barely seven years old, and she prayed, ‘Oh, let me die!’”

Then came the detail that brought her to Pannaivilai. While Amy and the Walkers had been away at Dohnavur, one of the Tamil women of the band had passed through the child’s town, and the temple women, wanting to frighten the child, had pointed her out and said that she was “the child-stealing Ammal.” It was meant as a warning. It had the opposite effect. The day after Amy returned, the child decided to go and look for the child-stealing Ammal, and she walked to Pannaivilai alone.

A Note on the Burned Hands

Popular retellings of this story usually say that Preena’s hands had been branded with hot irons as a punishment for her first escape. Amy’s own account in 1903 puts it a little differently: the burning came first, as a punishment “for some childish fault,” and the child ran away afterwards. The difference is small, but it is worth noting as an example of how the story has grown. The cruelty was real either way. A child of six or seven had been burned by the woman who was supposed to care for her, and had run twenty miles to find a mother who sent her back.

The Temple Women

Within hours the women from the temple house arrived. Walker, whom Amy calls the Iyer, asked who they were. One of them answered, “We are Servants of the gods,” and another was overheard reproaching her for admitting it. They called the child and told her to come home. She would not go, and the missionaries would not force her.

A larger crowd came later, and one woman, whose presence clearly terrified the child, demanded that she say aloud, before them all, that she would not go back. The child was struck dumb with fear. Amy dared not go near her, lest she be accused of bewitching her, and she signed to one of the convert girls, Star, who had been through such a scene herself, to take the child out of the room for a moment. Out of sight of the woman, the child sobbed that if she refused they would catch her and punish her dreadfully, and she showed the cuts on her skin where she had been punished before. Then she came back, stood before them all, and cried, “I won’t! I won’t!” The crowd went away.

The danger was not over. The temple women said they would write to the child’s mother, who had legal authority over her. One of them accused the child of being a thief, a common charge in such disputes, which could be used to bring the police; the sum in question turned out to be fourpence halfpenny, which the missionaries paid. There was talk of a plot to snatch her back. For weeks the household never let her out of sight.

The Law and the Child

It is important to understand what Amy and the Walkers were risking. Under the law, the child belonged to her mother, and through her mother to the women to whom she had been given. To keep her against their will was, on the face of it, to take a minor from her lawful guardians, which was a criminal offence. Amy noted in her account that if the facts could be proved, “the Government would be on our side in such a matter,” because the dedication of minors to temples for an immoral life was already, in principle, against the law. “Only the great difficulty might be to prove it.”

That would be the pattern of the next half-century. The law of British India did forbid the sale or disposal of minors for prostitution, and courts had sometimes held that dedicating a girl to a temple for such a life fell under that law. But proof was almost impossible to obtain. The ceremonies were religious; the arrangements were made within families; the girls were usually too young to testify; and the communities concerned closed ranks against outsiders. Missionaries who took in such children could find themselves accused of kidnapping, and some were. Amy and the Walkers decided to keep Pearl-eyes and take the consequences. The early sources do not say whether the temple women ever went to law over her, but she was not taken back.

Fourpence Halfpenny

The child stayed, and she quickly became part of the household. Amy described her playing with dolls, setting out leaves and flowers in rows, cooking imaginary meals of sand with three pebbles for a hearth and a shell for a pot, and inviting the missionaries and her doll to dine. When she first arrived at the Christian woman’s house she had refused the curry and rice she was offered, drawing herself up and asking whether she, a child of good caste, could be asked to break her caste. A few weeks later she was playing at church with her doll and insisting that it should have its collection too.

Amy recorded one exchange that she treasured. Some weeks after the excitement of the first day, she was teaching the child the text about being redeemed “not with corruptible things, as silver and gold,” and explaining how much Jesus had paid for us. The child interrupted. “Oh yes, I understand!” she said. “I know how much you paid for me—fourpence halfpenny!”

Attracted by the Influence

Amy called the chapter in which she told this story “Attracted by the Influence.” The phrase came from a letter by Thomas Ragland, a Cambridge scholar who had worked as a missionary in Tinnevelly half a century earlier, and whose life Amy would later write. Ragland had tried to express the worth of a single soul in the language of astronomy, and had written of the soul of the poorest outcast as a body with mass and weight enough to draw down the Creator of the heavens to save it. Amy took up the image. Nowhere, she wrote, did she see the glory of God more than in “chapters of life which show Him bending down from the circle of the earth, yea rather, coming down all the way to help it, ‘attracted by the influence’ of the need of a little child.”

She also saw the hand of God in the timing. If the child had come to Pannaivilai a few weeks earlier, when the missionaries were away, there would have been nobody to protect her. If the Christian woman had taken her home that first night, she would have been lost. Amy listed these “touches that tell how God cares,” and they are the heart of her account. The psalm at the head of this chapter says that God sees mischief and spite, that the helpless commit themselves to him, and that he has been “the helper of the fatherless.” Amy believed she had seen that verse acted out on her verandah.

The Beginning

Amy Carmichael always regarded the coming of Preena as the beginning of the work for which she is remembered. Until then her attention had been on the women of the villages and the converts of the band. She had heard of the temple children, and had seen them playing in courtyards near the temples, “gracious little maidens,” she wrote, “winsome in their ways.” But she had felt powerless. “One longs to help the little things,” she wrote, “but 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. Amy began to ask questions: how many such children there were, how they came to the temples, what happened to them, and whether anything could be done. The answers would occupy her for the rest of her life. Preena herself grew up in Amy’s household and stayed with the family that grew around her. She had come, as she said, to stay.