Tales from the Island of Serendip 4 4

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My thanks to all my fellow boardies who contributed support, advice, comic books and purchases to the recent sales thread for Roshni, which raised over $3800 in vital funding for the coming year.

 

When I started Tales from the Island of Serendip on Christmas Day in 2012, I wanted to tell a few true stories to show how powerfully, life, love, death and hope intertwine to define our humanity, the need to find meaning and purpose, to light a candle in the darkness.

 

If you will, a living comic book.

 

I had no way of knowing how matters would then unfold, the past flowing into the present, the present cascading into the future. How much of the tale remains to be lived before it can be told!

 

And I have no idea about the ending.

 

Four years worth of posts, over 400 pages. It occurred to me that many readers might have come on board quite recently. For their benefit, what follows is a reprise of just one strand among many, but it is the one with a heartbeat.

 

Those of you who've shared the journey these past four years can thankfully skip the rest of this sequence, and move on to my further posts about recent events, beginning on Christmas Day....

 

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Gayatri Mantra

Om Bhoor Bhuvassuvah

Tat Saviturvarenyam

Bargo Devasya Dheemahi

Dhiyo Yo Nah Prachodayaat

 

"May there be peace on mortal and divine planes.

I meditate upon the most brilliant splendor.

May the Sun God inspire our minds

to take the right action at the right time."

 

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The story so far

 

 

 

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When I was young I saw a movie called Pather Panchali. It told the story of a boy called Apu, growing up in a small Bengali village. It made such an impact on me that I decided that one day I would live in India.

 

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More than a decade past.

 

Then I became a student in the Faculty of Fine Art at Baroda University in Gujarat - the Indian state that was the birthplace of Gandhi.

 

I became involved in the local art world, and in the summer of 1981 I was invited to attend an art camp in Kasauli, a hill station in the Himalayas 6000 feet above the plains, overlooking the city of Chandigarh, which twinkled below at night like a galaxy fallen to Earth.

 

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At this camp, without recognizing the moment, my life irrevocably changed.

 

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I met an old man in the company of the internationally renowned Kolkata artist Meera Mukherjee, The old man's name was Nirmal Sengupta. He didnt say much about himself, though I did glean from others that he had led a remarkable life. As a young man he had been imprisoned by the Raj for publishing seditious literature (twenty years before independence finally came). Later, he helped to found All India Radio. He published a novel, exhibited his paintings. Learned Arabic, and Chinese.

 

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During World War Two he was a captain in the Indian army. At one point he was tasked by Prime Minister Jaharawal Nehru with negotiating the surrender of a pocket of the Japanese armed forces that were still holding out - I forget where - it may have been somewhere in Indonesia.

 

Later, he became a civil servant, and nearing retirement, realized he was on the wrong side of a negotiation involving land developers and local farmers. Feeling responsible, he resolved to move into the district and spend his post-retirement days helping the poor in that area, just to the south of Kolkata.That was in 1968. Little by little, children came to him, and an informal village education movement was founded.

 

 

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Later to be called Paddyfield School, after the first teaching location (literally a roofless shack by the side of a paddy field), the movement grew. The first generation matured, then began teaching the next. Around 1981, the Jesuits of St Xavier’s College in Calcutta took an interest, offered to build a school and charitable dispensary.

 

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It is by no means insignificant that he was born into a high caste Brahmo family (the same religious community as polymath and Nobel prize winner Rabindranath Tagore), and the village children were low caste Muslims who had originally come to the area when fleeing the riots that arose in Kolkata following Independence in 1947 - almost two centuries after British rule began under the East India Company, in 1757.

 

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Nirmal himself was a Socialist, and an atheist, though given his life's course, I think it entirely likely that he had been indelibly influenced by his Brahmo upbringing. (For the Brahmo Samaj does not discriminate between caste, creed or religion and is an assembly of all sorts and descriptions of people without distinction, meeting publicly for the sober, orderly, religious and devout adoration of "the (nameless) unsearchable Eternal, Immutable Being who is the Author and Preserver of the Universe.")

 

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When I visited him in the village of Bonhooghly in February 1982, I found something magical.

 

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Single-handed, Nirmal had inspired an entire generation of local youths to found a centre to educate children from the very poorest families (who would otherwise never have received any education whatsoever).

 

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The center, by now complete, also doubled as a charitable dispensary.

 

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Within moments of getting down from the bus, I found myself surrounded by hundreds of children with more and more flooding in now that Nirmal had come.

 

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I only stayed a few days, but on my return to the United Kingdom six months later, I knew that my path would lead me back irrevocably to the village, and Nirmal, and his hundreds of children.

 

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In the course of a later visit, I discovered to my amazement that the village where Pather Panchali had been filmed by Satyajit Ray in 1955 was only two miles away from Paddyfield School. I even stood in the courtyard of the house where Apu's family had lived.

 

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I also learned the tragic tale of Mohan Ghosh, a social activist who had worked closely with Nirmal until his brutal murder by local thugs in the monsoon of 1978. This was also like being in a movie, more intense than Pather Panchali. For Nirmal told me Mohan's story while we walked a lonely road between two villages, and as the tale unfolded, we reached the murder spot both in the tale and in reality, while another year's monsoon rain fell around us. Where he died, where he was found the following morning by a child he loved, where people from seven villages assembled in mourning.

 

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I learned that Mohan had been very ingenious - for instance, engaging in deals to buy wholesale quantities of school text books, which he sold to local schools for a slight mark up, which meant that Paddyfield School got the surplus books for free at a time when they had no funding.

 

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I could not replace him, but I could find inspiration in his example. Years later, Luke Holland, another young man who strove with all his might to make a difference, would die in similarly tragic circumstances, shot by a stranger in a Berlin street in 2016.

 

Of Roshni, his mother said, 'that's the sort of thing Luke would have done'. Now they are involved with Roshni as well.