Muttur Devi, a decrease caste girl who works on a farm within the impoverished state of Bihar, followed Christianity two years in the past. Nonetheless, every morning, she affixes a bindi, a small round decal, to her brow, and paints a vermilion stripe on her scalp. Those are visual Hindu marks that she says assist hide her departure from Hinduism.
“If I take this off,” she mentioned, touching her bindi, “the entire village will harass me.”
One chilly night time this previous iciness, Pastor Patil drove to a secret prayer consultation in an unmarked farmhouse. He temporarily stepped within. On a dusty carpet that smelled like sheep, two dozen Pentecostal Christians waited for him. Maximum have been lower-caste farmers. When a canine barked outdoor, one girl whipped round and whispered, “What’s that?”
Pastor Patil reassured the girl that she was once doing not anything mistaken and that God was once looking at over. He cracked open his weathered, Hindi-language Bible and rested his finger on Luke 21, an apt passage for his beleaguered flock.
“They’re going to grasp you and persecute you,” he learn, voice trembling.
“You are going to be betrayed even via folks, brothers, sisters, kin and pals,” he went on, tracing the passages along with his finger. “They’re going to put a few of you to demise. Everybody will hate you as a result of me.”
The farmers sitting at the flooring, some maintaining slumbering young children, watched him intently.
In addition they checked the home windows to verify nobody was once coming.
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