Sugar and Water

“When my father and my mother forsake me, Then Jehovah will take me up.” — Psalm 27:10 (ASV)

Ramabai was about sixteen when a long famine began in southern India.

She did not blame the weather for all of it. Her father had grown old and blind and lost his wealth. The sacred books promised that if people worshipped in the right ways, gave alms and fasted, the gods would give them what they asked. So the family did exactly that. “For three years we did nothing but perform these religious acts. At last all the money which we had was spent, but the gods did not help us. We suffered from famine, which we had brought upon ourselves.” They sold everything, down to their cooking pots, and gave the money to the priests. Learning an ordinary trade had seemed beneath them, something she later called “the pride of caste and superior learning.”

At the hill shrine of Tirupati, with nothing left, they decided it was better to die in the forest than to bear the disgrace of poverty among their own people. For eleven days they lived on water, leaves and a few wild dates. Then her father, old, blind and starving, decided to drown himself in a sacred pool, which in Hindu belief was not suicide but a holy death. He said goodbye to each child. Ramabai came last. He held her tight and stroked her face. “Remember, my child,” he said, “you are my youngest, my most beloved child. I have given you into the hands of our God. You are His, and to Him alone you must belong and serve all your life.”

Then her brother Srinivas stepped in. He could not watch his father die, he said; they would give up their pride and he would find work. Their father agreed. Even so, Ramabai admitted, “we wished very much that a tiger, a great snake, or some other wild animal would put an end to our lives.”

They dragged themselves to a village. At the start of his last illness, her father “asked for a little sugar and water. We gave him water, but could not give sugar.” He died on the third morning. No one would help carry his body, so Srinivas tied it in his cloth and carried it alone for over two miles.

That evening their mother fell ill. In the town of Raichur, desperately hungry, she sent Ramabai to a neighbour to ask for a piece of coarse millet bread. Ramabai could not make herself beg. “I kept the tears back; but they poured out of my nose instead of my eyes, in spite of me, and the expression of my face told its own story.” The woman understood and gave her the bread. “I ran to my mother in great haste, and gave it to her. But she could not eat, she was too weak.” A few days later her mother died. Soon after, her sister died of starvation too. Only Ramabai and her brother were left.

If you have ever felt, like that family in the forest, that you would rather not go on living, you are not alone, and it is not weakness to say so. Tell a safe person: a parent, a pastor, a teacher, a doctor, or a crisis line where you live.

David wrote, “When my father and my mother forsake me, Then Jehovah will take me up.” Ramabai's parents had not forsaken her; they loved her to the end. But she came to believe God had taken her up in that forest. “My father's prayers for me were, no doubt, heard by the Almighty,” she wrote.

And the worst days of her life became the root of her life's work. Years later she told her daughter, “When you go to Raichur, think of my mother, and remember that it was there that I got my inspiration for famine work.”

One thing to do this week: this week, give some food, some money or an hour of time to people who feed the hungry where you live.