I spent one of the most uncomfortable evenings of my life sitting in Gladys Staines’ living room in Baripada, Orissa. The discomfort was not because of Gladys, who was a wonderful host, taking me around the leprosy clinic that her husband had set up in the morning and inviting me over for tea in the evening. The discomfort was all mine. I couldn’t just get it out of my mind that here I was sitting in a house that had once seen three kids running around, two of them boys who must have played football, chased the dogs and done all those things that boys generally do. All that was left of that for this woman were memories, haunted by the worst possible end any mother could imagine.

Sitting there, I didn’t have the heart to interview Gladys or remember the list of questions I’d prepared. It seemed enough that she had shared the work she and her late husband had done at the leper clinic with me in the morning; that I had seen her interact with the people she was caring for and the people who worked with her. It felt normal to sit there and simply talk to this amazingly strong woman who shared memories of her husband as and when they came to her, smiled if an object in the room associated with the memory caught her eye, spoke about her daughter who was then studying in Australia, spoke of her ailing father back home and the support she got from people around her in India and why she forgave the fiends who committed that heinous crime. She never mentioned her two sons. I never asked. There are some things you just can’t intrude upon. It feels like slapping the person awake from a stupor that's probably keeping them sane.

I wasn’t a mother then. Very far from the thought actually. I’m one now and cannot even think of what Gladys as a mother must have gone through after that horrific night. How would you feel if your husband and kids who weren't even 10 were burnt alive as 50 men with sticks ensured they couldn't escape the inferno? Would you feel they were converting people into their religion forcefully and therefore deserved it in some way, something the court judgement reeks of when it calls this crime not the rarest of rare and comes down heavily on conversion, completely ignoring the work done by the same man in other areas altogether?

So when I heard of the Supreme Court verdict that has removed the noose off Dara Singh’s neck, I thought of Gladys Staines. And prayed that Dara Singh’s conscience, which apparently tells him he’s innocent, gives him an equally horrid death within the walls of the jail where he will hopefully spend his life term now, mentally, physically or otherwise.

The Great Man's Wife

An old post I wrote after meeting someone. It was lying in draft. Had forgotten to post it, God knows why!

The Great Man's Wife spoke with the faintest hint of an accent. All those years of first doing her masters in the US and then spending a considerable amount of time living and working there had left their mark on her speech. Her home was open, big and for the want of a better term, earthy. Red brick walls on the exterior, limewashed walls with the right niche hollows in the interior, plants spilling tastefully into the living area and the lawn giving a view of the greens outside. The outdoor furniture was simple but possibly expensive and you couldn't miss the discreetly kept but too prettily painted to be missed terracotta kitchen waste composter. The drink was organic as were the biscuits.

I nibbled on all that health as she told me the story of how her business came along. Though it wasn't as much business as 'economic empowerment.' as she repeated. The Great Man's Wife enlisted women from villages in the outskirts of Bangalore to transfer her much researched creativity onto silk stoles, blouses and on special customised requests, usually from her expat friends who 'understood and appreciated these things' sometimes even on a jacket, a wall hanging on a sari.

Thanks to the soothing combo of the garden breeze, juice and often heard words, I may have been part asleep as she spoke but did catch words of vital importance like 'at the grassroots level,' 'self-sustaining' "at the ground level,' 'preserving heritage,' and so on.

It's good work no doubt but I do wish it was done without the congratulatory self-pat on the back, that is meant to be invisible but yet, is visible enough. And then I thought perhaps I am getting too cynical, that even with the kids abroad, the huge house in the middle of the city and the works of art dotting the walls, she does mean it when she says that at heart she still is very middle class. That she belives in giving as much as she has got. That even now, everything she does is centred around the Great Man and his approval.

And somewhere through the chink, I couldn't shake off the feeling that I spotted a rather lonely woman.