Nineteen Months

“For thy Maker is thy husband; Jehovah of hosts is his name: and the Holy One of Israel is thy Redeemer; the God of the whole earth shall he be called.” — Isaiah 54:5 (ASV)

In 1880 Srinivas fell ill and died. His only worry was what would happen to his sister, alone in the world.

When he spoke of his anxiety, I answered: “There is no one but God to care for you and me.” “Ah,” he answered, “then if God cares for us, I am afraid of nothing.”

She was twenty-two. Her father, mother, sister and brother were gone.

Six months later she married Bipin Behari Medhavi, a Bengali lawyer and a friend of her brother's. He was not a Brahman, and to orthodox Brahmans such a marriage was a scandal. She said plainly why she did it: “Having lost all faith in the religion of my ancestors I married a Bengali gentleman of the Shudra caste.” They had a civil ceremony, because “We neither of us believed either in Hinduism or Christianity.” They made a home in Silchar, in Assam, and in 1881 their longed-for daughter was born. They named her Manorama, “heart's joy.”

At Silchar, Ramabai found a little pamphlet in her library. She never knew how it got there. It was Luke's Gospel in Bengali. A Baptist missionary, Mr. Allen, explained the first chapter of Genesis to her. “It struck me as being a true story,” she said, “but I could not give any reason for thinking so or believing in it.” When she told her husband she would become a Christian if she became sure it was true, he was angry. He had defied his caste to marry her, but joining “the despised Christian community” was too far. “I do not know just what would have happened had he lived,” she wrote.

He did not live. Early in 1882 he died of cholera. She remembered “nineteen months of happy married life,” though scholars' dates suggest it was a little shorter. “I was left alone to face the world with one baby in my arms.”

Here is what being a widow meant in high-caste Hindu society then. A widow was blamed for her husband's death, through sins in this life or a former one. She could not remarry. Her head was shaved, her jewellery taken, and she ate one meal a day. She was kept away from weddings as unlucky. Child-widows, girls married as small children whose husbands died, lived this way from childhood to old age. Ramabai, who had married outside Hindu custom, was spared most of it. But she knew it from the inside. She was twenty-three, with no family and no home.

What she said next is remarkable for someone who was not yet a Christian. “This great grief drew me nearer to God. I felt that He was teaching me, and that if I was to come to Him, He must Himself draw me.”

She did not know who God was yet. But she had grasped something many people take years to learn: you cannot find your own way to God; he comes looking for you. Jesus said the same: “No man can come to me, except the Father that sent me draw him.”

In the world she grew up in, a woman's husband was her god, and when he died her hope died with him. Isaiah says something completely different to a people pictured as a widow: “For thy Maker is thy husband.” A widow is not cursed, and she is not alone. Ramabai would spend her life telling that to the widows of India. First she had to learn it herself.

Loss can make people run from God or toward him. If you are grieving right now, you don't have to have it figured out. You can tell God what she came to see: if I am to come to you, you will have to draw me.

One thing to do this week: pray that prayer in your own words once a day this week, and pay attention to anything that seems like an answer.