FOR GOD SO LOVED.
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By Marian Bishop Bower
N IGHT was coming to the village. Already from some of the open doorways smoke poured into the streets—the smoke that said, “ Supper is being cooked.” Shanta and Shewanti, who had been roaming the streets all day, decided that it was time to go home. They took a roundabout way. Shewanti was tired and her big sister Shanta had to drag her along, but the big sister liked to linger in doorways and watch the supper preparations. All in the village knew her, and sometimes scraps of food were tossed to her and Shewanti. Tonight the darkness came before they had turned into their own street, for they had stayed too long watching a procession near the temple. Small sister cried, “ You’re a bad girl, Shanta. You ought to take me home and get me something to eat.” She wailed loudly. One of the neighbor women looked out of her doorway. “ What’s the mat ter?” she asked. “ Nothing,” said Shanta, and she tried to pull Shewanti along more quickly so that they might soon be safely in the shelter of their own doorway. “ There is too, something the matter,” said Shewanti, and she wriggled away from Shanta to run over to the woman. “ Shanta’s a bad, wicked girl,” she said. “And I want my mother.” The neighbor woman looked down at the little girl sadly, but there was nothing she could do. “ Shanta does the best she can,” she said. “ She’s your mother now.” “ But I want my real mother,” She wanti wailed again, and she sat down in the dust and hid her face in her lap. Shanta came over to try to pull her up. “ She’s tired and she’s hungry,” she explained to the woman. “ It got late too fast. We saw the procession at the temple. They had candles and music and lots and lots of people. Everybody crowded around. They chased us for getting in the way. It was fun.” Shewanti peeped out from under her arms. “And nearby there was a lady telling about a God that loves people, and she gave out little papers. I grabbed one.” She handed the little folded paper to the woman. “What does the writing say?” The woman looked at it. She shook her head. “ I don’t know what it says,” she said. “ It’s too dark to see, and be sides I can’t read.” She handed the little tract to Shewanti. “ You better go home,” she told the children. “ Your father came home early. He looked tired or sick.” She went into her house then.
Shanta and Shewanti ran home quick ly. Sure enough their father was sitting inside the door. “ I didn’t know you had come,” Shanta explained, “because you don’t have the lamp lighted.” “ I was too tired,” he told her, as he got up and lighted the lamp. “You shouldn’t stay out so long. It’s bad.” “We saw a procession,” Shewanti told him, “ and a lady gave us a paper. What does it say?” “ Shanta began to get the supper, and Shewanti sat down beside her father who had taken the paper in his thin fingers and was reading it slowly to himself. “What does it say?” Shewanti asked him again. “ It says,” said the father reading from the paper. ‘“ For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.’ ” “ The words sound nice,” said She wanti wisely, “ but I don’t know what they mean.” Then she nodded energeti cally. “ But someday I shall. You wait and see.” The father went on reading the little paper. Several times as he ate the sup per that ten-year-old Shanta had pre pared for them, he picked the tract up to reread it and think about it. He did not talk much. “Are you sick?” Shanta asked him. “ The neighbor said you are.” The father shook his head quickly, “ I’m not sick,” he said. “ I’m just tired. It’s hard being in the sun all day and never a minute to stop.” He sighed and repeated, “ I’m not sick.” Long after the little girls had tumbled into comers and fallen asleep, he sat in the open doorway and thought of the words on the paper he had read, and of his tiredness, and of his mother less little girls. Then when there were no more lights in the village, he lay down on the floor, too, and slept. . But when another night came, the two little girls were quite alone in the little hut. The father had been taken away to the hospital. Then the next day men came to the house—men who had been sent there by the doctors in the hospital. The neighbor woman came in
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Shewanti and Shanta were from the land of India with the men. “ Get up,” she said to Shanta and Shewanti who .were huddled together on the floor, crying. “Where is my father?” Shanta cried. “ Do you know? Last night I fixed the supper early, but he never came.” “ Your father is very sick,” one of the men told her. “ He has leprosy.” Leprosy ! Shanta knew what that meant. She had seen old men and old women—and young men and young women, too—whose fingers and toes had been eaten away by the terrible dis ease. She had known one little girl, a little girl that she had played with, who had been taken away from her home, never to come back again, be cause she had the spots of leprosy on her. “Will he never come back? Will he die?” she asked, and the tears were running down her cheeks. “No, he cannot come back,” the man told her, and his voice sounded as if he were sorry for the two little girls. “He will have to stay where other people with leprosy live. He will be taken care of with good medicine and good food.” He turned to the neighbor woman. “ We have to take the children to be ex amined to see if they are all right. Are you any relation?” “No” said the woman. “ They have nobody.” She ran quickly to her home, for she was afraid of the leprosy. The doctors in the hospital examined the children and said that they were quite, quite well. There was no trace of leprosy in their blood. Then the ques tion came, “ What shall we do with the little girls?” “ We can take care of ourselves,” Shanta assured them. “ I’ve been taking care of Shewanti and the house and cooking supper ever since my mother was sick—long before she died. My father gave me the money to buy the food.”- (Continued on Page 26)
JUN IOR KING'S BUSINESS
Martha S. Hooker
M A R C H , 1 9 5 0
Page Seventeen
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