Ratan Singh Masram does not remember seeing his father, who abandoned his mother a few months after he was born. His mother left him in the care of her parents.
Both mother and father remarried and “practically forgot about me,” he says.
Masram, a Gond tribal Catholic from central India, works hard as a day laborer to be a good father to his two children.
“Although I grew up almost like an orphan, my Catholic faith has helped me lead a decent life and bring up a Catholic family,” the 48-year-old says.
No one in Masram’s family was literate. The Gonds, a group of indigenous people in central and south-central India, did not send their children to school until recently.
“They also did not allow me to go to school,” he recalls.
As a child, he remembers working hard under the scorching sun in the fields, helping his grandparents cultivate rice, millet and oil seeds, besides grazing cattle and performing other daily chores like fetching water and firewood.
“God protected me. My life shows his plan,” says Masram who lives in a village in Dindori district of Madhya Pradesh state.
As a teenager, he was forced to move out of his grandparents’ home in search of work.
In nearby villages where he found work, Masram often spotted “some educated and well-behaved” people who wore “clean dresses.”
They regularly visited local people and took an interest in solving their problems.
He soon gathered they were Catholic priests and nuns from Jabalpur diocese.
“I wanted to be like them. But being illiterate, I knew very well that I could not become like them,” he recalled.
Despite the fact that nobody in his family even knew about Christianity, he made up his mind to become a Christian.
He was told by an acquaintance to meet the priest in nearby Junwani parish.
“The priest told me to learn more about Christianity before becoming one,” Masram said.
Though unable to read, he was determined enough to learn by heart the basic catechism.
A few years later, he was baptized.
At the age of 18, Masram married a Catholic woman named Chaity who was three years younger than him. This was in keeping with their tribe’s customs and practices at the time. However, he has ensured his children do not marry young.