In 1890 Ida received another message from her father, though this time it was not a letter but a telegram. One Saturday afternoon Ida was called from her room to receive the telegram. It was the first telegram she had ever received, and her hands shook as she split open the envelope and took out the telegram, which read, “COME IMMEDIATELY. YOUR MOTHER ILL AND NEEDS YOU.”
Ida stared at the message. Her mother was ill? How ill? Would she ever see her again? Suddenly all of Ida’s resolve never to set foot in India again melted away, and she calculated how long it would take to make the voyage to Madras. She knew that her brother Henry was due to set sail for India, where he was going to take over the boys’ school their father had founded. Ida decided the two of them could travel together.
When Ida told her friends about her plan to go to India, Florence teased her mercilessly. “You will go to India and end up as a missionary just like all the other Scudders, and we will never see you again.”
Ida felt the anger rising in her. She stamped her foot. “I will not!” she retorted. “I am going to spend one year in India, just one year. Then I am going to come back to America and live. So don’t any of you say I will be a missionary, because I won’t—never, ever, ever.”
On July 30, 1890, Ida stood beside Henry on the deck of the City of Berlin. She held a bouquet of roses that her classmates from Northfield had sent as a farewell gift to the New York pier the ship departed from. As she smelled the roses, Ida tried not to think of the dirt and awful smells she recalled from her childhood in India. Could it really be over twelve years since she had left there? It felt so strange to be going back with her brother at her side.
The voyage was fast and uneventful, and on September 20 the City of Berlin docked in Madras. Ida knew her father would be waiting for them at the foot of the gangplank, but when she got off the ship, she walked right past him! In the eight years since she had seen him, he had grown into an old man, and she did not recognize him. It was only when Henry yelled out, “Father,” that Ida turned to see Dr. Scudder beaming with joy.
Soon their luggage was assembled, and Ida watched as it was loaded onto the train bound for Tindivanam. It felt strange to be back in India. Once again Ida saw turbaned men and sari-clad women in the streets. Pungent odors filled the air. And there was the heat. After four years in Massachusetts, Ida felt like she was suffocating. She dabbed perspiration from her forehead with a handkerchief that was soon saturated. And then there was the crowd. People teemed around them as they made their way onto the train.
Once the Scudders were seated on the train, Ida had the opportunity to study her father closely. His beard had turned from black to white, and he was thinner than she remembered him. Still, as she looked into his dark brown eyes, she could see the father she had known.
He must have guessed what Ida was thinking, because he wistfully said, “It’s been a long time, hasn’t it, Ida? Your mother and I have missed so much of your growing-up years. Just imagine, you will be twenty in two months.”
Ida felt herself turning red with anger. She wanted to blurt out, Whose fault was it that you missed so much of my growing-up years? After all, it was her father who had chosen mission work over keeping the family together, and as far as Ida was concerned, she had paid the greatest price for that decision.
Green rice fields flashed by as Ida stared out the train window. She could see huge rock formations rising from the otherwise flat countryside. She counted the oxen she saw—…five…six…seven. She did whatever it took to keep her mind off the loneliness she had felt away from her parents over the years. Somehow, she vowed, I will get through this year, and then I will make my own way in the world.
Chapter 4
Together Again
The train pulled into the station at Tindivanam. Ida looked down with dismay at her blue muslin dress. It had been the latest fashion when she bought it in New York, but now it looked like something fished out of a ragbag. It was dusty and soaked with perspiration; even the muttonchop sleeves looked like deflated balloons. Ida hated the thought of meeting her mother looking like this, but as it turned out, her mother was not at the station to meet them.
After they had clambered off the train, Dr. Scudder hired a bandy, the familiar oxcart, to take them to the mission hospital where her parents now lived.
Ida’s heart beat fast as she wondered how her mother would look. Would she be strong enough to come out and greet them or be languishing in bed? Since Ida was too afraid to ask her father, she had to wait and see for herself.
The bandy ride seemed to last forever as the cart lumbered through the dusty countryside. All around them Indian people stopped to stare at the white doctor with his two grown children.
“We’re nearly home!” Dr. Scudder finally announced. “See that tamarind tree? It’s just in front of the house.”
Ida peered down the street at the huge tree. In one unladylike movement, she jumped from the slow-moving bandy. As she raced down the road, a whitewashed building with a thatched roof and long veranda came into view. Standing on the veranda was a white woman.
Ida yelled, “Marmee! Marmee!” and held out her arms as she ran. Then, all of a sudden, she felt strangely self-conscious. She stopped running and swept her hands through her hair. This time it was her mother who rushed forward, and soon the two were embracing—mother and daughter together again after five long years.
Soon Ida and Henry and their parents were all sitting on the veranda drinking tea and eating the vaguely familiar sweet cakes that Mrs. Scudder reminded Ida had been her favorite food as a little girl. When afternoon tea was over, Ida’s mother had to return to bed. She had used up all of her strength welcoming her children.
The following evening, after Ida had unpacked everything and settled into her room, she flopped down on the bed and opened her diary. The entries she had made at Northfield felt a million miles away now. She picked up her pencil and wrote, “I have been in India for two whole days. Our house—” she looked at the word our and then crossed it out; there was no point in getting used to it. She wrote on, “My parents’ house is on a big mission compound near a school. It is made of sun-baked bricks plastered with mud, then whitewashed. It has three rooms in a row.”
Ida paused for a moment and went on, determined to describe the place so that she could picture it when she returned to America. “The thatched roof is full of white ants, and every now and then drops down dust on your head. But we—” she stopped and drew a determined black line through the word we. “My parents are going to move into a new bungalow.”
For Ida life soon fell into a routine, and she found she enjoyed the daily challenges it presented. Besides being the only doctor in the area, her father was the principal of a boarding school for nearly one hundred boys, which her brother Henry had come to take over. Half of the boys in the school were the sons of Christian converts from the neighboring villages, and the other half were Hindus whose parents were eager for them to have the best education possible. Ida’s mother had overseen the daily running of the school, buying the food, setting the menu, seeing that the laundry was done properly, and ordering clothes and supplies for the boys. But now that she was sick, this responsibility had fallen to Ida. It took her several weeks to recall enough Tamil to communicate effectively with the cook and the maids, but she found a lot could be achieved with hand signals. Sometimes she brought the cook into her mother’s room, where the three of them would work out the menu and the supplies that would be needed.
Sometimes when Ida was alone with her mother, Sophia Scudder would pat her daughter’s hand and say, “It is so good to have you here, dear. You cannot imagine what it is like to have no one to speak English with from one month to the next. Your father is here, of course, but he is gone for two or three weeks at a time on the circuit touring Christian churches. How wonderful it is to have my daughter back to stay. I am getting quite used to it.”
Ida hated to hear those words. It made her dread the day when she would have to tell her parents that she did not intend to stay in India and that as soon as her mother was stronger, she would be heading back to the United States to make a life for herself. She waited for just the right time to say this, but it never seemed to come.
Thankfully, Mrs. Scudder began to recover from her illness, and four months after Ida’s arrival, she was well enough to resume many of her former responsibilities, leaving Ida free to accompany her father on a special evangelistic mission. Ida’s Uncle Jared and his daughter Dixie were also going along.
Ida was glad to accompany her father. Dixie, who was six years older, was one of Ida’s favorite cousins. Since Uncle Jared and his family lived at Vellore, fifty miles north of Tindivanam, they all agreed to meet each other for the mission halfway between the two towns. Once they met up, they began to hold a series of open-air meetings in a number of villages.
There was plenty to be done, and Ida and Dixie soon teamed up. Together they went to visit the local women. As in most areas around Vellore, about 10 percent of the families were Muslim and 90 percent were Hindu. Ida and Dixie set off first to visit the Muslim women. Both the Muslim women and the Hindu women rarely left the courtyards of their homes. In fact, some had not even seen the street outside their homes for many years. Instead they stayed indoors cooking and tending to the needs of their families. This meant that many of the women were eager to have visitors, especially foreign visitors like Ida and Dixie, who could tell them stories about what was going on in the world far beyond the courtyards of their homes.
During these visits Dixie did most of the talking, telling the women Bible stories and urging them to consider sending their children to the Christian schools in the area.
Sometimes the two cousins also spent time in small village churches preparing children to be baptized, assisting Ida’s father as he examined patients, and teaching the catechism to others.
One thing seemed to flow into the next. After an open-air meeting, where Ida’s father and uncle would take turns preaching from the back of a bandy, Dr. Scudder would lay a white sheet on the ground and proceed with minor operations, assisted by Uncle Jared. Broken arms and legs were set, growths removed, abscesses lanced, and teeth pulled. Ida was always fascinated as her father and uncle tied up their beards and invited the patients to lie down on the sheet. Invariably a crowd would gather around, making comments on every procedure. Of course, only men could be operated on in this way, because Hindu husbands would not allow another man, not even a doctor, to see their wives without their clothes on, including their veils. The whole idea seemed ludicrous to Ida as she watched her father try to diagnose a woman’s problem by feeling the pulse at her wrist through a nearly closed door.
After watching Dixie for several days, Ida marveled at how she kept working so cheerfully, even for Uncle Jared, who barked out orders and never smiled. Dixie was a very beautiful woman. She was rumored to have had more marriage proposals than any other white woman in India. Ida wondered why she had not accepted one of these proposals and gotten out from under her father’s incessant commands.
One day, when they had some spare time, Ida and Dixie managed to slip out of the camp and go for a walk alongside a stream, where they found a huge oleander bush in full bloom. Delighted by the sight of the oleander, Dixie and Ida picked the blossoms and festooned their hats with them. They then gathered branches from the bush and headed back to camp laughing and giggling at the sight of each other’s hat.
