children | Gladsome Lights

My first few days in India, I told Kate and Tom that one of the top things on my list of things to do was to buy picture postcards to mail back home to my old-fashioned friends. Wait — it’s not just the old-fashioned who like that, but even people who themselves never resort to paper correspondence or postage stamps are normally more than glad to discover a postcard from a faraway place in their mailboxes.

Neither of them had noticed postcards for sale anywhere during the many months they’ve been in India, but we read online that the huge General Post Office has them; you might have read in a previous post about my failure to find any there. But Tom did buy stamps that day.

Last week a visitor to our new baby suggested The Bombay Store closer to home, so a few days ago Kate and I took the baby in the car and spent a long while shopping there, but they didn’t sell postcards, either. They told us to go to the local post office, which we actually tried to do immediately after, but couldn’t locate it where the driver remembered it had been….

So Friday Kate suggested we go and check out the post office on foot; Tom had the car and driver on business. She had found a different such office on her phone and it looked like a short walk. Since it would be such a brief outing we left fed-and-sleeping Raj with Kareena. It was the hottest time of day, and temperate winter weather for these parts, i.e. about 90 degrees. We felt it.

We maneuvered in traffic and squeezed between parked motorcycles. We picked our way over broken sidewalks and walked alongside the moving rickshaws and buses in places where the sidewalk was missing. Early afternoon, the sidewalks were crowded with people, including schoolchildren like these in pink uniforms who were about to enter the gate of the convent school down the block.

The post office was pretty easy to find. We walked up to the window that said Stamps and Stationary [sic]. The woman behind the grille said, No, they did not have postcards. She asked another patron nearby whose English was better to help us, and he gave us vague directions, waving with his arm, to a bookstore down the street “on this side,” where he assured us we would find what we were searching for.

I decided to buy stamps while we were there, on faith that I would eventually have something to stick them on. I laid rupees enough for ten stamps on the green marble counter, and was handed three bills in change. Then we waited. The postal lady was eating her lunch.

When she had eaten the last bite, she cleaned up her desk and had one more swig from her pink water bottle. After another few minutes she passed my stamps through, with instructions to put “one of these, and four of these, on each postcard.”

On we went to look for the bookshop. Kate was also on the lookout for a chemist to see if they had diapers. We did find a chemist on the way, where the packages contained too few diapers, but I bought four shrink-wrapped pills for 12 rupees. A rupee is worth about one and a half American cents.

Oh, and the ATM: we stopped by the little room off the main bank building, staffed by two attendants/guards, and used our U.S. debit cards to pull out rupees, a limit of 5,000 rupees per transaction. Along every sidewalk I saw sights that made me glad I had my camera ready.

Now, where was that bookshop? Crossing back and forth through busy intersections — there were some helpful traffic lights on this street! — and with Kate following her Google map, we finally found it, and entered. Why of course, the bookseller had postcards; a new supply had just arrived in the shop the morning before. His business is to make his customers happy, he emphasized, as he took a few packets from a small stack behind the counter.

Kate deliberated with me over which collections to choose, based on the subjects listed on the back of the package, and not able to see any of the actual cards. I wanted pictures of everyday scenes such as I have actually experienced, and not the big tourist spots, most of which I won’t see.

It seemed clear from the brief text and the covers that these were the sort of postcards I was looking for, and I bought two packs of 20 each, Wallahs (merchants) and Mumbai Buzz, just to be sure that I would find a few that I actually wanted to send, once I saw them. I noticed then that the name of the shop printed on the bag was The Happy Book Stall.

When at home we all examined all the cards, we were amazed at the “vintage” quality. The photos appear to have been taken about 25 years ago, and the print quality is worse than that. The word art would not be associated with most of the pictures in any way, except of the sort of interesting framing that can randomly happen when you give a camera to a five-year-old.

But I’m very pleased! I’d still like to see if any others exist in town, so I will keep my eyes open, but now I’m ready to start my picture postcard correspondence. And I saw so many sights on this short outing; if I had my printer and my card stock paper, etc. I would make my own postcards. But then I would be missing something I can’t put my finger or my words on — because there’s no doubt this collection I have acquired is accidentally telling a story about India.

In a Valentine’s Day e-mail letter, Touchstone Magazine editor James Kushiner comments on the news from Belgium. After the general greeting for the day, here is the rest of the letter:

…we live in time when the love of many has grown cold. How else to explain what has happened in the West? Most have heard that Belgium has passed a law [updated link 2023] allowing the ‘euthanization’ of children. With their kind permission, of course. We wish we did not have live in such times. But we do.

Many have seen such things coming, for decades. But warnings, debates, arguments have been to no avail. Books will continue to be written on why it has come to this and how to argue against the slide down the slippery slope (is there any doubt that this slide has been going on?).

Maybe it’s time to recognize that one cannot argue rationally with a demonic spirit. In the United States, some 55,000,000 children in utero have been murdered under the inspiration of this spirit–over the past 41 years, a biblical generation of death in the wilderness. There is no Promised Land waiting for this unrepentant generation. We’ve been killing children without their permission already. Now, Belgium wants to kill adolescents if they are persuaded it would be better for them to go to sleep and never wake up.

I write to name this as the spirit of iniquity that it is. I am reminded of a scene in one of the greatest American films, “The Night of the Hunter.” Two young children, John and Pearl, are running for their lives from a deranged and murderous false preacher, Harry Powell (played by Robert Mitchum). Escaping down the Ohio River, the exhausted children spend part of a night in a barn, but they are awakened by the approaching sounds of Powell on horseback. John says to his sister, “Don’t he ever sleep?”

Exactly. The devil stalking in our midst is a ravenous adversary, always looking for someone to devour. He does not sleep. And his staunch ally, Molech, has devoured little children since biblical times.

The Lord Jesus Christ, to whom all authority in heaven and on earth belongs, has said, “Woe to them who cause these little ones to stumble. It would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened to his neck and be cast into the depths of the sea.” Woe to the nation that does these things. One does not have to be a prophet to see this. God will not be mocked.

In the film, a courageous witness to the Lord delivers the children from death. She is a magnificent heroine, played by Lillian Gish. She loves truly, without fear, with courageous compassion. We must continue to shine the light, like the magnificent witness Valentine.