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Updated: May 2, 2025
There is no ceremony of dressing, no privacy in which to conduct it if there were. Arul rises in the same scant garment in which she slept, snatches up the pot of unglazed clay that stands beside the door, poises it lightly on her hip, and runs singing to the village well, where each house has its representative waiting for the morning supply.
The great majority are Christians, for few Hindu parents are yet sufficiently "advanced" to desire a high school education for their daughters, and those who do usually send their girls to a Government school where caste regulations will be observed and where there will be no religious teaching. Some of the Christian girls come from origins as crude as that of Arul.
With twenty-five boys there are only three girls who frequent its halls of learning. Of the three Arul is one. Her father, lately baptized, knows but little of what Christ's religion means, but the few facts he has grasped are written deeply in his simple mind and show life-results. One of these ideas is that the way out and up is through the gate of Christian education.
Bible stories are happier. Arul can tell you how the Shepherds sang and all about the little boy who gave his own rice cakes and dried fish, to help Jesus feed hungry people. She has been hungry so often that that story seems real. The years pass over Arul's head, leaving her a little taller, a little fleeter of foot as she hurries back from the pasture, a little wiser in the ways of God and men.
Now the water is gone, the crops are ripening, and in the clay tank bottom the cattle spend their days searching for the last blades of grass. "Watch the cows well, Little Brother," calls Arul, as she hurries back on the narrow path that winds between boulders and thickets of prickly pear cactus.
Green parrots are screaming in the tamarind trees and overhead a white-throated Brahmany kite wheels motionless in the vivid blue. The sun is blazing now, but Arul runs unheeding. It is time for school she knows it by the sun-clock in the sky. "Female education," as the Indian loves to call it, is not yet fashionable in the Village of the Seven Palms.
Next comes the tooth-brushing act, when a smooth stick takes the place of a brush, and "Kolynos" or "Colgate" is replaced by a dab of powdered charcoal. Arul combs her hair only for life's great events, such as a wedding or a festival, and changes her clothes so seldom that it is better form not to mention it.
Under the thatch of each mud-walled hovel of the outcaste village there is the same stir of the returning day. Sheeted corpses stretched on the floor suddenly come to life and the babel of village gossip begins. In the house at the far end of the street, Arul is first on her feet, first to rub the sleep from her eyes.
And so it is that Arul comes to school. She is but eight, yet with a mouth to feed and a body to clothe, and the rice pot often empty, the halving of her daily wage means self-denial to all the family. So it is that Arul, instead of herding cattle all day, runs swiftly back to the one-roomed schoolhouse under the cocoanuts and arrives not more than half an hour late.
There is the plash of dripping water, the creak of wheel and straining rope, and the chatter of girl voices. The well is also the place for making one's morning toilet. Arul dashes the cold water over her face, hands, and feet. No soap is required, no towel the sun is shining and will soon dry everything in sight.
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