Four Thousand Miles

“They wandered in the wilderness in a desert way; They found no city of habitation. Hungry and thirsty, Their soul fainted in them. Then they cried unto Jehovah in their trouble, And he delivered them out of their distresses,”

— Psalm 107:4-6, ASV

Two Left

After their sister’s death, Ramabai and Srinivas were alone in the world. She was about sixteen. He was a few years older, the young man who had carried his father’s body two miles in a cloth. They had no home, no money, no relatives who would take them in, and no training for any work but the reading of Sanskrit scriptures in public places. For the next three years and more they walked.

“My brother and myself continued our sad pilgrimage,” she wrote in 1897, “to the northern boundary of India and back to the east as far as Calcutta.” In A Testimony she gave the distance:

We wandered from place to place, visiting many temples, bathing in many rivers, fasting and performing penances, worshipping gods, trees, animals, Brahmins, etc., for more than three years after the death of our parents and elder sister. We had walked more than four thousand miles on foot without any sort of comfort, sometimes eating what kind people gave us and sometimes going without food, with poor coarse clothing, and finding but little shelter except in dharma shalas (i.e., free lodging places for the poor), which are common to all pilgrims and travellers of all sorts except the low caste people. We wandered from the south to the north, as far as Cashmere, and then to the east, and went to Calcutta in 1878.

The figure of four thousand miles is her own, and there is no reason to doubt it. It is roughly the distance from the southern tip of India to Kashmir and across to Calcutta, with the detours that pilgrims make. Later retellings sometimes attach it to her whole childhood of pilgrimage, or inflate it. It belongs to these years, and to these two.

Four Rupees a Month

Srinivas found work where he could. “Brother got work here and there,” she wrote, “but most of the time we lived a wanderer’s life. Very often we had to go without food for days. Even when my brother had work to do, he got so little wages, only four rupees a month, and sometimes much less than that, that we were obliged to live on a handful of grain soaked in water and a little salt.”

They had no blankets or warm clothes. They walked barefoot, without umbrellas against the sun or the rain, and slept “either under the trees on the roadside or under the arches of bridges, or lie down on the ground in the open air.” Sometimes they were so hungry that they ate handfuls of wild berries, “swallowing the hard stones together with their coarse skins.”

One night in the far north, they stopped on the banks of the Jhelum river, in the Punjab.

Once on the banks of the Jhelum, a river in the Punjab, we were obliged to rest at night in the open air, and tried to keep off the intense cold by digging two gravelike pits, and putting ourselves into them and covering our bodies — except the heads — with dry sand of the river bank.

It is one of the most unforgettable pictures in her writings: a brother and sister, the children of a learned pandit, lying in two graves of their own digging on the river bank, with only their heads above the sand.

She did not dramatise it. “Four long years we suffered from scarcity. We did not mind it much, as we were young and strong. We could stand it much better than our poor old parents and weak sister.”

Losing Faith

They kept up their religious observances all the way. They bathed in the holy rivers, visited the temples, fasted, performed penances, and worshipped whatever the scriptures told them to worship. But their faith was draining away. “We had fulfilled all the conditions laid down in the sacred books and kept all the rules as far as our knowledge went, but the gods were not pleased with us and did not appear to us. After years of fruitless service we began to lose our faith in them and in the books which prescribed this course and held out the hope of a great reward to the worshippers of the gods.”

They did not abandon their religion. “We still continued to keep caste rules, and worshipped gods and studied sacred literature as usual.” But it no longer held them as it had. And as it loosened its grip, they became less strict about the rule that had cost their parents their lives: the rule against secular learning and ordinary work. “As our faith in our religion had grown cold we were not quite so strict with regard to obtaining secular education and finding some means of earning an honest livelihood.”

Some of her admirers later told stories of these years that she did not tell herself. One says that she worked as a cook in a high-caste household while her brother taught. Another describes Srinivas swimming out at dawn across a Himalayan lake to discover that the “floating mountains” the pilgrims came to see were rafts pushed by priests. Neither appears in any of her own accounts, and this book does not rely on them. Her own story is remarkable enough.

A Heart of Stone

What did these years do to her? It would be natural to say that her own hunger taught her compassion for the hungry, and that she learned on the roads of India to feel for the poor. Twenty years later, as she set out to rescue famine children, she herself warned against saying anything so simple.

Yet I must say that suffering alone is not able to produce sympathy for other sufferers. My own experience of the unconverted state of mind, and the present knowledge of my fellow country women and girls, whom I have ample opportunity to study, shows that suffering in itself has rather a hardening effect on the human heart. It takes away almost all delicate feelings from the soul, making it as hard as a stone.

It is a striking thing for her to have written, and a brave one. She did not claim that she had come out of the famine a better person. She said that, left to itself, suffering hardens the heart. She understood now, she went on, what God meant when he spoke through Ezekiel: “I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you a heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 36:26, ASV). What changed her heart, she believed, was not suffering but grace.

This is worth remembering as the story goes on. The woman who later walked into the famine camps of Central India was not simply acting out of memory. She had known hunger, and she had also known what hunger does to the soul. She knew that pity could die. She believed it had been brought back to life in her.

The Wilderness Way

The psalm at the head of this chapter describes wanderers in the desert, hungry and thirsty, who “found no city of habitation.” Ramabai and Srinivas had spent their childhood walking from one sacred city to another, and now they walked through city after city and found no home in any of them. The psalm goes on: “Then they cried unto Jehovah in their trouble, And he delivered them out of their distresses.”

They did not yet know to whom to cry. But as they turned east, towards Calcutta, the greatest city of British India, they were walking, without knowing it, towards the next turning of their lives. There, for the first time, people would listen to her. And there, for the first time, she would meet Christians.