By Chatura Rao
Lights will guide you home
And ignite your bones
And I will try to fix you
– Coldplay, from the album X&Y
Manchar is six hours from Mumbai, a train and a dusty bus ride away. There, among lanes that seem to be just the side effect of a mushrooming small town, is a rambling, open-porch house. Here lives a woman called Kusum Karnik. Kusum, whose name means flower, is 78 years old, 4 feet 10 inches tall, with fierce eyes and white hair that frames a face that is serious when she is debating life issues.
These days, death preoccupies her greatly. She has recently lost her younger sister, who was disabled, and who she raised. Perhaps her own recent illness – a stroke that has affected her memory – makes her ponder loss in all its facets.
She greets my friend and me on her open porch with an unsure hug. In the first minutes, she remembers us only as far away visitors. Every year we help her organisation, Shashwat Trust, with bits of writing and design. We write their entire year’s work down in 1,300 words and wind these around 6 photographs in a 4-page newsletter.
The stroke has affected Kusum’s confidence. Earlier she’d been talkative, recounting her experience of non-violent people’s movements and developmental work. She has been a forest and people’s rights activist for 37 years. She faced the police and paid-goons’ lathis until three years ago. She has also been equally open about her life story.
She was raised in Dadar, Mumbai. She stayed married for a decade, in a conventional joint family setup, not rebelling against middle-class norms. Except in the matter of her husband’s brother, who was schizophrenic – who she felt was treated with less than kindness by the family. She did a course in nursing in order to better understand his condition, and to care for him.
Eventually, ethical differences with her husband made her opt out. Kusum, at the age of 40, joined a voluntary group working with Adivasis in Thane district. She lived with the community and worked with them in the field and forest. Here, among the people and in nature, she found her true self and a true path.
Manchar town is close to her beloved Bhimashankar hills and forest, with whose tribes she has worked for the last three and half decades. She led them in a resistance to save their sacred groves, and Shashwat Trust runs schools to educate their children. Her second husband, Anand Kapoor, an engineer from IIT Kharagpur, has worked on building roads to connect the villages to towns. Their developmental work – fisheries, schools and agricultural support – has ensured food security for 23 villages in the area.
Shashwat Trust won the Equator Prize, a prestigious UN Development Award, last year. Anand went to Rio de Janeiro to receive it.
Kusum’s advancing age and stroke force her to recuperate at the Trust’s old house at Manchar. She’s often to be found on the porch, among the women and men who work with Anand and her on various projects.
What my friend and I have known for some time now is that Kusum and Anand have a kind of magic about them. In my first book for children, Amie and the Chawl of Colour, I wrote about the magic-of-growing-things.
“Given real love and sometimes a good reason to grow fast (like if a tree needs sunlight badly, and is too short to get enough), a living thing can grow at a great pace. Lata knew how to wield this magic through her touch and words.”
You might call it the ability to nurture and sustain something very tiny and weak like a sapling, to give it what it needs to grow into a tree.
As we chat with Anand on the old porch (they have so much news from their projects!), a few women feature strongly in the narratives. These women, from the Koli Mahadeo and Katkari tribes, come and sit on the sofas to browse through a range of newspapers that the Trust subscribes to. They wander into the house whose one room is an office. They discuss their work with Anand and Kusum, and go out into the community kitchen to eat lunch before they set out on the day’s work. Each of them smiles at us as they’re introduced, looking us directly in the eye.
Radhika (name changed) has been hovering in the background monitoring the household work. She is about 25 years old and her life changed on this porch, about three years ago.
Radhika is physiologically transgender. She was raised a girl and married off by a drunkard father to a small vegetable vendor in Manchar. She became silent and depressed. Worried that she may commit suicide, Radhika’s husband went to the local police station to inform the police about the situation. There he met Kusum.
She asked him to bring Radhika’s medical reports to her at the house. A few months later, he brought the reports and the girl. Kusum asked a woman gynaecologist friend to examine Radhika.
Radhika’s husband and sister, meanwhile, had approached a village committee, requesting them to annul the marriage. Kusum intervened to request that they conduct a private, rather than public hearing, so that Radhika’s privacy may be protected. They agreed to hold it at the house. Subsequently the village committee annulled the marriage.
Kusum and Anand gave Radhika room at Shashwat.
For the first three months, Radhika stayed in bed, refusing to speak to anybody. By and by she began to get involved in the day-to-day activities of the Trust. In the last one year, she has begun to run the kitchens. Her manner is quiet and she keeps to the fringe of the porch. Anand asks her to come and sit with us.
This Diwali, he explains, she asked Pratibha (who runs the tribal children’s school programme) if she could make laddoos. Pratibha looked up the recipe on the Internet. Radhika, with help from another girl, bought the ingredients and assembled five laddoos, which she offered to Kusum and the rest, who were so proud of her for having made them.
There are many people out there working with women’s empowerment. There are many ways to view empowerment, and documented strategies to employ. Kusum and Anand simply include everyone, gradually and consistently, in their projects.
It takes years to get each project going properly. Innumerable village meetings; heels worn out visiting departments of government; hands chafed from teaching displaced farmers how to build boats to fish the river that flooded their farms; voices scraped from explaining to community members how to access government schemes that they don’t know exist. Kusum and Anand’s porch is where random strangers come with medical difficulties they don’t know how to handle. No one is turned away.
Over the last 37 years, Kusum and Anand have brought light to dark places: light to see by. Others light their torches off this flame and when they can, spread it. It takes time.
When our time with Kusum is nearly over, my friend reminds her of the magic that lives in her. Her confidence sparks. She smilingly bids us goodbye at her porch. Walking the dusty lane back to the bus stand, we are aware of her great kindness. And that those whose lives Anand and she have helped restore, hold the fragile memories that now elude her.
To support Kusum and Anand’s work, email shashwatmkr@bsnl.in.
Chatura Rao writes fiction for children and adults. ‘Amie and the Chawl of Colour’, ‘Meanwhile Upriver’, ‘Growing Up in Pandupur’, ‘Nabiya’, and short stories too, are published by Puffin, Scholastic, Penguin, Young Zubaan and Tulika Books. Her world, like Mumbai city, is always ‘under construction’…being adjusted and altered a little each day.