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“lady evangelists” of the Bible Churchmen’s Missionary Society, or BCMS, were urged not to leave. In spite of the “churchmen” in its name, BCMS boasted that “the toughest fields were served by women” in its missionary work.
    Something like a million people died during the partition of India in 1947, killed in religious violence or by malnutrition or contagious disease as Muslims traveled west to Pakistan, and Hindus and Sikhs east to India. More than ten million refugees poured across the border in what is still the greatest mass migration in history, and during that time, many foreign missionaries risked their lives to run clinics at the dangerous border crossings between the newly divided countries. Idon’t know whether Edith was there, because she didn’t like to discuss difficult matters with the family, which, according to the dictates of her proper British upbringing, included political turmoil and religions other than her own.
    It seems improbable that the lady evangelists would have had any success in evangelizing the religion of the kicked-out colonizers, but Edith and the others “carried on” in India, as one former lady evangelist told me. They “wrestled with the strange Hindi characters, learnt to eat fiery Indian curries, and, ignoring aching joints, to sit upon the ground,” according to a BCMS pamphlet. In the photographs of Edith’s missionary days, the Indian women look shrunken beside her. She was over six feet tall, a disadvantage in her line of work: She refused to wear saris on her evangelizing missions for fear that villagers would think she was a man dressed as a woman, though I’m not sure why she thought wearing a shapeless ankle-length cotton frock protected her from making this impression.
    In spite of Edith’s fastidious English dresses, expressions of femininity were never appropriate among missionary ladies, who lived a life of self-denial and rigor completely unlike that of officers of the British Raj and their wives. Edith’s hair was parted down the middle in a cruelly straight line and scraped back into a practical bun. Years later, my mother’s sister, Susie, told me that their aunt’s hair was actually her secret vanity. She would save the strands from her comb and wrap them into the bun at the nape of her neck, like some surreptitious storehouse of her femininity. Edith had few other indulgences: She spent her adult life in a rural mission with neither electricity nor running water. She would travel to villages on the dusty northern plains to distribute medicine, teach girls to read, and, of course, do God’s work of preaching the Bible to the pagans.
    They say every family has one black sheep, but almost all my mother’s relatives were strong willed, rebellious, and independent. My mother and Susie did not share Edith’s faith or her paternalistic missionary attitude, but her dedication and endurance had a huge influence on them both. Edith was in her late sixties by the time she retired. Until then, she continued making her annual summer expeditionsnorth to Kashmir with missionary friends to rest, away from the heat of the plains. One year, they sent the porter ahead with their bedrolls and tins of homemade English biscuits and rushed through the train station to make their connection. After they’d leaped aboard, Edith’s face went gray. She refused to interrupt the vacation by going to the hospital. When she returned to the mission, six weeks later, she discovered she’d had a heart attack.
    As a sheltered child in rural England, my mother pored over the letters Edith sent each month on stationery printed with Indian birds. She dreamed of seeing the bulbul and the hoopoe, with its fan-shaped crest, and of experiencing the simple Indian village life Edith described. The opportunity came soon after she married my father, an American graduate student she’d met at Oxford University. He was working at a small college in a Michigan town they both hated. In