Scala stories Part 2

Sohoitis

At the Shaw Library of the LSE, I stumbled upon ‘Memoirs of the Forties’ by Julian Maclaren-Ross, an author and ‘dandy’ who was conscripted during the war and subsequently died before completing his book. Maclaren-Ross paints a heady picture of the nightclubs, coffee houses and pubs in Fitzrovia. He refers to a conversation with J. Meary Tambimuttu, the founder and editor of Poetry London, on Fitzrovia.

“Only beware of Fitzrovia,” Tambi said, quelling the mob with a flicker of his amazing fingers. “It’s a dangerous place; you must be careful.”

“Fights with knives?”

“No, a worse danger. You might get Sohoitis you know… If you get Sohoitis, you will stay there always day and night and get no work done there ever. You have been warned.”

Tambi then takes Maclaren-Ross on a tour that night of all the pubs the other side of Oxford Street. MR writes, “It was the first night of my many in Fitzrovia,” adding that because he had been warned, he had not succumbed to Sohoitis.

I wonder if the folks at LSE know of this disease, and if indeed they do, whether there is a deeper reason for housing Gurukul scholars in Fitzrovia. “I can resist anything but temptation,” Oscar Wilde famously said. Some of us can only nod in agreement.

Fitzrovian Nights

I’d strongly recommend the chapter Fitzrovian Nights from Memoirs of the Forties as compulsory reading for Gurukul scholars, but since it’s unlikely that you’ll ever get hold of it, here are some of the best stories linked with places in Fitzrovia.

The Black Horse pub, Maclaren-Ross writes, was very sombre and very Victorian, with a Ladies’ Bar where old dears toasted departed husbands. The atmosphere was so bleak that the owner committed suicide by shutting himself up in the bar and drinking solidly over three days. His body was found on the bar floor surrounded by empty liquor bottles.

Gurukul scholars will also know the name Goodge Street (which has a nearby Goodge Street tube station; this tube station, incidentally, is one of the eight London Underground stations with a WW II deep-level air-raid shelter underneath it.)

Goodge Street has a more seedy history in MR’s account. Near it was a public house called the Burglars, where “gigantic guardsmen went in search of homosexuals to beat up and rob and, finding none, fought instead each other: one summer evening, in broad daylight, a man was savagely killed by several others in a brawl outside while a crowd gathered on the pavement to watch and was dispersed only by the arrival of a squad from the Goodge Street police station nearby, by which time the killers had made their getaway in someone else’s car.”

Sister Ann, on Tottenham Court Road

The 20-minute walk from Tottenham Street to LSE takes you first through Tottenham Court Road (a road that is mentioned in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Grizabella the Glamour Cat and in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows). To give you an idea of the kind of exciting place Tottenham Court Road once was, here’s MR again.

“One of the regulars on the road was Sister Ann, the tart who was more respectable than many other female customers: she mostly moved in a no-man’s land between public and saloon bars and patronised both as it suited her.”

Sister Ann was short and wholesome-looking, wore sturdy clothing and little makeup and had as her clientele very respectable middle-aged businessmen who were glad to chat with her afterwards. MR writes, “Ann’s beat was under the Guinness clock in Tottenham Court Road: ‘You catch them going into the tube or coming out for a day up in London dear, and maybe they’re lost and don’t know where to go or they don’t want to catch a train home just yet awhile; either way they’re glad to spend an hour or two with a girl they can talk to quiet like, poor blokes.”

I looked around for Sister Ann on TCR but all I could find were anorexic Twiggies in satiny leggings seeing whom, I’m sure, Sister Ann would have shuddered.

Story of Scala House

Now for the road where Scala House sits: Tottenham Street. It’s a singularly ugly street with large buildings that serve either as offices or as serviced apartments. British History Online records: “There is nothing of architectural importance left in this street.” It then adds, “On the north side, between Whitfield Street and Charlotte Street the only original house is No. 28, of four storeys with a 19th-century shop below. Nos. 20–26 have some original brickwork in the upper storeys.” I should mention here that No. 21, where Scala House sits, is on the opposite side of the road, where the odd numbered houses are. I read that in a house on Tottenham Street lived theatre actor and writer Charles Laughton with his wife Elsa Lancaster, but I’ve never been able to find it.

Scala House started life in 1772 under various names in succession: the King’s Concert Rooms, the New Theatre, the Regency Theatre, the West London Theatre, the Queen’s Theatre, the Fitzroy Theatre, the Prince of Wales and the Royal Theatre, the Little Theatre and the Cognoscenti Theatre. There are records that show performances of music and theatre by a group called the Pic-Nics as far back as in 1802. “In 1802, a private theatre club, managed by Captain Caulfield, the Pic-Nics occupied the building and named it the Cognoscenti Theatre (1802-1808). It became the New Theatre (1808-1815, under Saunders and Mr J. Paul) and was extended and fitted out …In 1802, a private theatre club, managed by Captain Caulfield, the Pic-Nics occupied the building and named it the Cognoscenti Theatre (1802-1808). It became the New Theatre (1808-1815, under Saunders and Mr J. Paul) and was extended and fitted out as a public theatre with a portico entrance, on Tottenham Street.”

In 1903, the Cognoscenti Theatre was demolished and the Scala Theatre built in its place. It housed music, ballet and pantomime and for some time, the cinema. In 1964, it was used for the filming of the Beatles film A Hard Day’s Night, with the Beatles playing a concert here on 31 March the same year, before it was finally demolished in 1969 after a fire to make way for an office block and today’s Scala House hotel. A note: the main entrance to Scala Theatre (in all its avatars) was on Charlotte Street, and the entrance that we use today, on Tottenham Street, was the stage entrance.

Scala stories Part 1

The first day I walked into Scala House, the effervescent never present Sasha – one of the richest property managers in London – told me that one of the flats had a view of the London Eye and would I like that? Yes I would, thank you very much. She took less than 20 seconds to hand over the keys. And I spent the rest of the afternoon peeking through every conceivable window in Flat 24 looking for the London Eye. Not finding it, of course. I realised weeks later that she’d given me a flat that faced the opposite direction. Typical. That should have set the note for my expectations. Fortunately, it did not.

Fitzrovia

Scala House is located in the heart of Fitzrovia, a central and famous (or infamous depending on your particular orientation) area straddling the borough of Camden and the city of Westminster, and including within its boundaries the very happening Oxford Street and Soho. The word most often used to describe the area and the people that frequented it was ‘bohemian.’

Fitzrovia gets its name from the Fitzroy Tavern, located on Charlotte Street, which, by the way, is a great place for foodies. The Fitzroy Tavern (not to be confused with the newer, wannabe Fitzrovia pub) attracted some of the leading lights of literature. George Orwell, Dylan Thomas and Aleister Crowley frequented it, not together of course. (An interesting aside about Dylan Thomas: A mutual friend introduced DT to his future wife, Caitlin, at another pub in the area, The Wheatsheaf. What he perhaps didn’t know was that Caitlin was having an affair with this friend, an affair that continued after Dylan and she were married.)

To get an idea about the kind of people who frequented the pubs in Fitzrovia, here’s Dylan Thomas: “Oh how I hated those recumbent Bohemians! Slowly, I went upstairs to bath. There was a man asleep in the bath. Two creatures stretched dead in my bed… P.S. I am sorry to add to this that by the end of the day I was happy as a pig in shit myself, and conducted the singing of hymns with my broken arm, and chased people and was caught, and wound up snug as a bugger in Rugby.”

The Fitzroy Tavern gets its name from Charles Fitzroy, who owned most of this area. Coming out of Scala House and walking in the direction of Great Portland Street tube station, you come upon this lovely rush of greenery in Fitzroy Square, surrounded by very posh homes. Blue plaques mark significant residences. One such is the place where George Bernard Shaw and Virginia Woolf lived. Again, not together.

Walking across Charlotte Street, just past Saatchi & Saatchi, to the right is Howland Street, where on No. 44 lived one of my favourite poets, Arthur Rimbaud along with his then lover, Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine. The house was demolished to make way for the Post Office Tower in the Sixties, which all current Londoners will recognise as the British Telecom tower, and which I can see from my living room. That’s another reason to hate the ugly tower that mars my view of London.

(The more famous residence of Rimbaud and Verlaine was on Royal College Street, when they returned a year later to London, and where they wrote rapidly and fought bitterly.)

Bookslam at The Tabernacle

Bookslams are fun.

For the uninitiated, a book slam is like a poetry slam, except that you have prose as well as poetry readings. The Tabernacle, a nightclub situated in the heart of Notting Hill, was just the perfect venue. Lots of good wine. Very good poetry. Decent prose. And many, many good-looking men with more than a passing interest in poetry. Not bad at all! There were a couple of British actors who made me go, ‘Wait a sec, I know this guy.’ But obscure British actors are not my specialty. And sadly, there was no sign of Hugh Grant or Daniel Craig.

Performing poet Roger McGough echoed my dilemma when he read out a poem about mistaken identities. I hadn’t read McGough before, but he appealed immensely to my James Tate loving self. Funny, ribald, poignant, and wonderfully entertaining. McGough started gently with a poem about all the addresses at which he had lived (that struck a chord in me – eight homes in 10 years.) Of course, he now lives at the very fashionable Portobello Street. He warmed up with some poems on teenage, no doubt from his collection, That Awkward Age.

The second round was even better. A response to Britain’s recently appointed first woman poet laureate, Carol Anne Duffy, who wrote a series of poems on women married to famous men, McGough recited a bunch of poems on men married to famous women: Mr Nightingale, Mr Mae West, Mr O’ Arc and the one I liked the best, Mr Blyton. Will try to google for them and put them up.

<< I did find some of the lines:

Mr Nightingale

Coughing and sneezing, I wish I were dead
No angel of mercy at the foot of my bed
Suffering here in the cold and the damp
While you’re in the Crimea, swanning round with a lamp.>>

The Blyton poem shows a harried husband being driven around the bend by Julian, Dick, George, Anne and even Timmy the dog. Mr Blyton hopes something dire would happen to the Famous Five, but that’s not to be. A couple of lines had me in splits:

“Each night in bed I felt for your body
Only to feel the felt of Noddy.”

American author David Vann was the other act, but McGough overshadowed him. For one, David Vann’s voice, I thought, was not suited to performance. Two, he read out an incredibly long piece about catching a halibut with his father, which my vegetarian soul couldn’t take.

I had started the evening on a low because I’d missed hearing Noam Chomsky speak. This wasn’t quite Chomsky, but was it fun!

All things change. The centre cannot hold…

Geneva is a city of old people. Geneva is a city for the young. But then, that can be said for many other European cities that are home to an increasingly aging population. The sad part is not that old people in Europe are poor, though a quarter of Britain’s pensioners live in poverty. It’s not even that they live in empty nests. It’s that they grow relentlessly old in a brutally young world that’s indifferent to them.

A good part of my Sunday in Geneva was spent talking to old people who were a little bemused by the speed at which life had overtaken them. All things, as they knew it, had changed.

Walking along Lake Geneva, an old couple on a bench held hands and kissed. ‘Bon jour!’ the man smiled at me. The lake was a brilliant blue and the masts sliced up the sky into bits of blue. Impeccably dressed young people talked, shared a joke and laughed as they walked by. In love. Out of love. A swan buried its beak in its feathers and sunned itself to sleep. On a bench a girl sat sobbing, while her lover drew her close and whispered into her ear. And so life passed the couple by.

Walking back to Cornavin station, I passed two old women on a park bench surrounded by a flock of pigeons. I wished them a good morning and sat down nearby. “That one doesn’t look so well,” said the older of the two women, who looked about 80. The other one fished out a plastic bag and said to the pigeons, “Hungry, are you? Here’s something for you!” As the grain hit the gravel, the pigeons scrambled for a bite. The game went on for more than 20 minutes. The women talked to the pigeons till the grain ran out. The pigeons seemed to sense that the treat was over. A few of them expectantly hovered around me, and when nothing was forthcoming, they moved away. Every one.

The younger woman (who must have been around 70) held out her hand; the other woman caught it, reached out for the motorised walker that stood nearby, and they trundled down the road to Cornavin station and Maria.

Maria sleeps on the stone bench outside the Cornavin station, her face and hair covered by a woollen scarf held in place by a large safety pin. On hearing I was from India, she says, “I was there, almost 40 years ago. I saw Mumbai, Delhi, Agra, and yes, the Taj Mahal. It’s really magnificent, isn’t it?” I don’t have the heart to tell her that I am yet to see the Taj.

Maria speaks English fluently but her first language is French. “I am Italian by birth and my home is in Belgium. But I’ve lived here for a very long time now. Do you like the atmosphere here?” she asks. When I murmur a yes, she says, “It’s all changed. Geneva used to be very beautiful and quiet; I came here with my husband and we fell in love. Parts of old Geneva are still lovely. But the city has been taken over by Roms (gypsies.) They are everywhere. Their skin is a bit dark, and they are very good at dancing and singing. But they are thieves at heart. Why, the other day they stole uniforms from policemen and used it to seize passports and money from a bunch of Japanese tourists! Beware of them.” And then she throws me completely offguard. “The Roms originally come from Rajasthan, I believe.”

Where is her family? “They are all in Belgium,” she says and after a pause adds, “My husband died a year ago.” I want to ask Maria why she sleeps on a stone bench outside the train station. But her fragile dignity holds me back. I ask instead, “Are you waiting for a train?”

“No. I’m just here.”

I ask to take a picture with her. She protests, “I am not very interesting!” Then says, “Remember me as the strange woman who told you all the bad things about Geneva.”

Maria. The two women who feed pigeons at the park. The couple by Lake Geneva. The men in their fifties belting out music that blew my mind, at a pub in Scotland. The sweet couple that slow-danced cheek-to-cheek through the music.

All trying to make sense of a world where the centre cannot hold. And all, so terribly irrelevant to the arrogance of youth, who shrug them off with one word, ‘Old.’

The water that falls with the sound of the tabla

“When water falls with great force on the rocks, it makes the sound of the drums – like the tabla. Trummel is the corrupted form of that sound in German. Bach, of course, is river.”

In beautiful wild Lauterbrunnen (brunnen meaning springs, a reference no doubt to the many lakes and falls in the area), hearing the word ‘tabla’ from the German staffer at Trummelbachfalle was a special gift this Diwali. It was the rhythm of home, and perhaps, the rhythm of the heart that beats in all of us.

An elderly German couple from a village near Frankfurt that I met outside Trummelbachfalle were delighted to meet someone from India: “We have heard about India since when we were this young, and have wanted to go there. And now…” the elderly woman shrugged, no doubt wondering if she would ever be able to go. “I’m sure you will. I had never dreamt I would be here!” I wanted to say this, but her broken English, my ‘Guten-morgen-danke’ German and our limited sign language failed at this point. We smiled and shook hands and I’d like to believe that the message got through.

Trummelbachfalle is a waterfall that empties the defiles of three glaciers – Eiger, Monch and Jungfrau. The water falls through a gorge that has now been made accessible at 10 levels, six that you can climb on a lift, and the remainder, through a set of gradual steps and ramps. These lines from Byron are framed at the entrance to the fall, “The sunbow’s rays still arch the torrent with the many hues of heaven, and roll the sheeted silvers’ waving column o’er the crag’s headlong perpendicular…” Another verse from Baudelaire (also displayed here) compares the falls to crystal curtains suspended against metallic walls. The reference to metal initially jars, but it grows on you.

All around, the walls of the mountain arch up against the sky, and the roar of the water gets louder till you can hear nothing else at one point, and you can feel your heart pounding to the same rhythm (only partly due to the effort of having climbed all those steps.) Midway to the top, a gentle sleet that felt soft on the tongue began to fall, and we pulled the edges of our coats closer together.

The train from Interlaken to Jungfrau in the Berner Oberlander or the Bernese Highlands in the German part of Switzerland takes two routes – one through Lauterbrunnen and the other through Grindelwald (nothing to do with Harry Potter.) The vivid descriptions of Rivendell in Tolkien were apparently inspired by the Lauterbrunnen valley.

The long half-hour walk back to Lauterbrunnen took us through large fields where picture-perfect cows grazed contentedly, lulled by the tinkling of the bells around their necks. We passed small farms growing leafy vegetables and also, sheds owned by companies that were carving up the mountainside, a sign that this beauty might not always remain. I lit a candle at a small church by the roadside, sending up a prayer that it should.

War – and wartime Dover

‘Nothing is crueller than war.’

These lines echoed in my head during our tour of the Secret Wartime Tunnels at Dover.

The tunnels were first dug out of the chalk cliffs in the 18^th century to provide extra accommodation to British troops during the Napoleonic wars. They were modernised in 1938 and converted into the headquarters of Vice Admiral Bertram Ramsay, who planned and executed what came to be known as Operation Dynamo.

But first, the facts. Thousands of British and French soldiers were stranded in 1940 at Dunkirk in France at a low moment for the Allies during WWII. An evacuation – code named Operation Dynamo – was planned out of Dover. More than 338,000 soldiers were rescued in a ‘miracle’ operation. (The situation at Dunkirk prompted Churchill to make his famous, ‘We shall fight on the beaches’ speech.)

We followed the progress of an imaginary mosquito pilot through the base, starting with the hospital, complete with the sounds of a ringing phone, the clatter of scalpels and pans, urgent commands, lights dimming to the sound of bombing and the groans of injured men. The hospital opened in late 1941 close to the battle zone and mostly dealt with routine inoculations and injuries, but there were times when surgery was called for. At times, the surgeons ran out of sutures and used red hair instead!

We visited the significant casemates, which were underground voltage chambers, housing a telephone exchange that was run by women operating 120 external phone lines and 600 internal connections. Our guide narrated how the women formed lasting friendships in the bleak surroundings of the exchange, which were damp and cold in winter and where condensation ran down the walls in summer. The few women who are alive, still meet at annual reunions, dwindling every year in numbers, but with friendships just as strong.

We saw also the coastguard room where enemy ship movement was monitored and plotted; the amplifier room that allowed telephone and telex messages to be heard loudly a long distance away; the clock that gave the crucial time to all clocks on the base; and Vice Admiral Ramsay’s now demolished room with a view that formed the nub of the operation.

The narrative, interspersed with films, bemoaned the loss of thousands of British lives and more than 200 ships, but concluded – in the manner that such narratives do – that ‘British troops lived to fight another day.’

What is it about conflict that brings out the language of ‘us’ and ‘them?’ Sometimes, this was said in jest, referring to German guns as Big Bertha and English ones as Winnie the Pooh. But nothing was really a joke.

The good part of the Dunkirk evacuation story is that it was a story in which so many lives were saved.

The ugly part of the story is that so many were not. The military base at Dover lived up to its nickname, Hellfire Corner.

Earlier, waiting in the lounge for the show to begin, I read these lines from a poem by Sonny, or Wilfred Rigden, a 24-year-old soldier who was one of the last to be evacuated, and who had just lost a close friend. Sonny writes with moving idealism:

And in those fateful hours
As we waited on the beach
We wished that we could turn back,
And stop this great retreat.

And as the bombs and shells
Went on whistling by
Deep in our hearts we had the thoughts
That England, would never die.

Men were dying on the shore
As planes o’er us did scream and roar
But history that day was seen to be made
The memory of which will never fade.

At last we got upon a boat
And on the ocean once more afloat
But even then our troubles did not end
As shell and bomb did jerry send

After an hour or two of hell
We saw the land we loved so well
The cliffs of Dover were shimmering white
Which made us more determined to win this fight.

We were not the heroes of that memorable day
It is unto the navy our respects we pay
If it wasn’t for these heroes who gave us their best
We’d be lying on Dunkirk beach dead with all the rest.

In the end, that’s what it was about. Sonny survived the war and lived in Dover till his death in 1967. His friend, perhaps still in his early twenties, did not. And British troops fought many, many more battles.

Chalk and cheese: Dover part 1

My sole impression of Dover had thus far been of a beach, made larger than life by the Matthew Arnold poem, which we studied and criticised in equal measure in college, and which my Bengali professor pronounced ‘Dover Bitch.’

The two-hour train ride from London Charing Cross to Dover Priory in Kent raised mixed questions. Was it really worth travelling 200 miles – and more importantly, spending £30 out of our precious student allowance – to see some chalk cliffs? I searched my memory for a comparable experience against which I could benchmark this. The Marble Rocks in Jabalpur?

My pedometer shows that we walked 15 km today, and my calf muscles are asserting themselves with unusual urgency. But at the end of the day, the simple answer is: Yes, it was worth it. It was also immensely disturbing, for reasons I shall reveal in my next post.

Dover is the point on the English coastline that is closest to France and therefore, has always been of strategic importance in wartime, especially during World War II. We walked the endless road to the White Cliffs through some remarkably plain countryside and then, suddenly, there was the sea.

The sea seemed bluer in England than I had seen elsewhere. The blue-grey of the sea, the blue of the sky… and suddenly the chalky White Cliffs rose out of the earth, contrasting with the blue all around. I began to breathe.

We could have walked for 40 minutes or so along the cliff, but we were running out of time. So we headed back to the Dover Castle, which promised us mysterious medieval tunnels, Henry the Second’s Great Tower, and nine ghosts to boot. The castle was – in a word – artificial, with plaster of Paris imitations of bread and meat and recorded sounds from the recreated kitchens and halls. No ghosts, just a couple of dressed-up grown men enacting silly scenes and ad-libbing in the hope that no one would notice. Plus a museum of the Princess of Wales regiment, at which two facts caught my attention.

One, that the British seemed to be remarkably generous with Indian possessions. In 1661, the port of Bombay was part of the dowry that Catherine of Braganza received when she married Charles II.

Two, a piece of journalism trivia. The Crimean War was the first to be reported live by a regular correspondent, William Howard Russell of The Times.

I was just beginning to question my wisdom in having left the White Cliffs behind for two pieces of trivia, when we joined the guided tour of the Secret Wartime Tunnels, underneath the Dover Castle.

But more on that later. I will end with some lines from Arnold’s poem, Dover Beach.

The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Arnold ends on a truly pessimistic note characteristic of Victorians:

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Incidentally, I googled for these lines and found that there is indeed a poem called The Dover Bitch, written by Anthony Hecht, a funny but rather unkind criticism of Arnold’s poem.

Julius Caesar at Stratford-upon-Avon

What makes a good man and great leader give in to hubris and turn tragic hero? Who is the tragic hero of Julius Caesar? Is it the very obvious Julius Caesar, a great warrior who is all too human, too susceptible to pride and vanity? Or is it Brutus, torn by his love for Caesar and his greater love for Rome, who is misled by other envious men?

At Lucy Bailey’s Julius Caesar, the first I’ve seen directed by a woman, at the Courtyard Theatre of Stratford upon Avon, the answers are not very clear, as indeed they’re not meant to be.

The creaking Courtyard Theatre formed the venue for the performance, since the Royal Shakespeare Theatre is being re-designed. In the Courtyard Theatre, the performance space or stage connects to the audience seating through converging passageways that actors use to come in. This contributes to the illusion that the actors and the audience are in ‘one room,’ as they would have been in Shakespeare’s time. But in reality, the stage is far removed from the audience. Lucy Bailey’s use of filmed sequences to cast the big picture further contributes to this distance. And that was my biggest disappointment of the evening.

I’ve always regarded Brutus as the tragic hero of Julius Caesar – the good man, loved by his wife and friends, kind to his staff, and of course, loved by Caesar, who is misled into committing murder for the good of a country he loves more than any human being. It would be too easy to read this play as a murder plot by an ambitious man. But in Rome of the time, the republic was poised to turn into a dictatorship, a thought that would have disturbed any thinking person. So what if that monarch was Caesar, who surely deserved to rule? This would be as disturbing as if, on India’s independence, Nehru had wanted to be dictator-king, rather than prime minister.

Brutus’ concern is valid, and this is the goodness that Cassius exploits, for a much baser motive – jealousy. In yesterday’s performance of Julius Caesar, Brutus is played to subdued perfection by a rather colourless actor, without the flamboyance or strength that Mark Antony, Cassius or even Caesar have, but as all too human. Did the fact that it was directed by a woman make a difference? Not too sure.

But in the end, it was the disbelief of actually being in Stratford-upon-Avon that thrilled. Walking the roads to the bard’s birthplace on Henley Street, now spilling over with shops and restaurants touting Shakespeariana; the beautiful walk by the riverside to the Holy Trinity Church where he lies buried (curiously, inside the church, rather than outside with the other commoner graves); the house by John Nash that Shakespeare bought and died in – all of this viewed from the outside, because someone forgot to plan that we needed to get there before 4 pm!

To an eye used to the vastness of Indian rivers, the Avon seemed but a trickle, and I kept looking for the ‘real river’ before it struck me: This was it.

What is the real Stratford-on-Avon? It would be difficult to say, because the dressed up version for tourists has become its de-facto face now. The brick row houses have all been transformed into pubs, restaurants and bread-and-breakfast places. Every stone you stumble on claims a connection with Shakespeare. Every other house is painted over with white and black vertical stripes – perhaps indicative of the period. Overall, Stratford-upon-Avon is an artifice, built on a grand scale, and replete with memorabilia on sale for a few pounds.

It was great to be here and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. But let me run back to my Complete Works of Shakespeare and seek the real man in the poetry and the drama.

Grace and courage

Grace Nirmala is a quiet woman who’s astonished by her own success. But let me start at the beginning.

For many years now, Grace has been working with the Jogini community in the Telengana region of Andhra Pradesh. Joginis (also known as devadasis or matammas) are young Dalit girls who are “dedicated” to the village deity or Yellamma. From the moment of their dedication, they become the property of the village, and are “revered” as goddesses on select festival days and during funerals. But the system, thought to be in existence for more than 2000 years, is another excuse for men from dominant castes to exploit young, attractive women. On attainment of puberty, a Jogini is raped by a village elder, who has the right to rape her as often as he likes, till his interest wanes. The girl then passes on to the whole village as common property, to be sexually abused by all the men in the village. “It’s strange,” says Grace, “that a society so conscious of caste that even if a Dalit’s shadow falls in an upper caste area, he or she is beaten up, there’s no caste at night time, when men want sex.” What’s even worse, the girls are so young (many of them are barely eight or nine), that they don’t see that they are being exploited – many of them come to believe that they are “serving their society” by offering sexual favours.

As long as they are young and attractive, the girls are routinely used; they are equally ruthlessly cast aside when beauty deserts them. The men take no responsibility for the upbringing of the children they father. Often, young daughters see no other way than join their mothers. Some joginis earn less than a rupee from every client; those who don’t earn enough, take to begging. Needless to say, in an area where migration for employment is on the rise, these young women are also at risk of contracting serious diseases, including HIV and AIDS.

Grace has run several campaigns to stop the jogini system – she has canvassed house to house, asking tough questions about caste, exploitation and faith. We visited a hostel she runs for children of joginis. When we reached at 7.45 am, we saw 26 girls with bright eyes and clean school uniforms. The hostel is run by a small team of women who cook and clean – the older girls chip in, serving food to all the children and making sure the young ones are ready for school on time. The girls formed a circle, while the older girls sat at the head next to a pile of shining stainless steel plates, each bearing a number and a name. The oldest girl called out, “No. 11, Bindu!” and the other two heaped some upma, an egg and chutney on the plate. One by one, the children came and collected their breakfast. We asked what they wanted to be in life – “Teacher”, “Doctor”, “Teacher”, “Doctor” came the response. Only one stocky girl with cropped hair piped up, “Police!” When we asked her why, she said the policeman in their village would take a big stick and beat them up – she wanted to return the favour!

Another girl with a minor handicap in her left hand was a new entrant – Grace had heard that owing to her disability, her family wanted to give her up as a jogini. She rushed to the village, and fought with the family and village elders to bring the 11-year-old girl back with her.

Some of the children sang songs and performed a dance – they sang of their childhood, their dreams, and why they were sad, and how they had found a way to be happy. The dance was a typical Bollywood number, and I marvelled at the 13-year-old who mimicked with aplomb and yet in all innocence, the gestures and steps of a mature woman.

Breakfast over, the girls cleaned their plates and lined up with their glasses, again numbered and marked, for a nutritious drink of ragi malt. They would soon leave for school. Grace said she had discussed the girls’ background with the school teachers and had requested them not to ask for details such as their father’s names. The school had, surprisingly, agreed.

Grace is now looking at building a centre to train young joginis in vocations so that they can earn a decent living. She has had some good press; anyone who visits her work comes away quietly impressed; she has firm friends in India and outside who support her in small ways. With her endearing humility, she mentions that someone had offered to make a film for her, that IBN (CNN-IBN) had been in touch, and that X donor and Y friend had shown interest in funding aspects of her work. Bless her – she needs all this support and more!

The number of Joginis in Andhra Pradesh is estimated at 25,000. If anyone does read this and would like to help, please contact Grace at graceneela@yahoo.com

As natural as life itself

I must have been around 15 when I performed my first dissection in the biology lab at school.

Squeamish by nature, when the teacher plonked the limp toad on my tray, I reached for my scalpel with reluctance. The razor edge sliced through the soft skin with surprising ease, and I tried not to retch as I prised apart the two folds.

But all I remember of the class after then is a sense of wonder at the order and beauty of what I saw inside. Suddenly, I was no longer squeamish. The toad on my tray seemed the most beautiful thing I had seen. The symmetry of the organs, that still throbbing heart, the blood pumping out of a vein that I had cut by mistake – each thing seemed to be in its place, playing out its role. And I felt within me the same throbbing of the heart, perceived the symmetry of my limbs and felt the blood coursing through my veins.

The same sense of wonder is perhaps what links the Adivasis in India to their forests. Coexistence with nature forms the basis of their lives, whether it’s the Irulas, the Kurumbas or the Lambadis in south India, or their counterparts in the north. They gather herbs, live off the forest’s yield, treat illnesses with brews they alone know how to concoct, propitiate the nature gods and pray to the mother goddess to protect them.

The ancient Indians too lived this way, if we go by the scriptures. They prayed to Varuna, the god of the sea, Indra, the god of the heavens, Agni, the god of fire, and above all, Bhoomi Devi, the earth goddess. Did they pray to these gods because they thought them more powerful or because they didn’t understand why thunder cleft the skies and rain beat upon their bare shoulders? It doesn’t matter why they did. What matters is that they understood a simple truth – protect the trees and the trees will bear fruit and feed you. Protect the river and the river shall yield her bounty of fish to you. Bow down before the river before you attempt to cross her and you shall reach the other shore safe. Show respect, and be respected. Much before the Gaia theory was propounded, the ancient Indians had it all figured out. They saw the universe as a whole, and all humanity as an inextricable part of the whole.

An ancient Hindu verse goes “That is whole, this is whole; from the whole the whole originates. When the whole is taken away from the whole the whole remains.” This hymn unifies the entire universe into a single whole. The Japanese school of Nichiren Buddhism has another phrase for it – esho funi, meaning, literally, that “the environment and the self are two, but not two”. What this means is that life and its environment are distinct in the way they manifest themselves, but inseparable in their essence. And because of this interconnectedness, the way I perceive and live my life defines my environment.

So if you ask me, “Do we need nature?”, I instinctively respond, “Sure we do. In fact, we ARE nature.”

But believing it, living it, demands much more of me. While I understand this symbiotic relationship on the level of my immediate environment, I struggle to understand it on a global level. Sure, if I become an inspired worker, my colleagues might absorb some of my enthusiasm. If I harvest rainwater, not only do I save water, but I also encourage others to do so. But how do I affect the ozone layer? How do I stop the whales from becoming extinct? How do I stem the tide of global warming?

Perceiving all life as an interconnected whole requires a breadth of vision that I often lose in my neatly segmented life. I flip through the pages of my daily organiser to find my day divided neatly into Work, Personal, and Leisure. Each of these is further subdivided into Must Dos, Try to Dos and Want to Dos. At work, I shut out the concerns of my home; at home, I attempt to focus on stirring the soup even as the memory of a deadline threatens to disrupt the rhythm of my stirring.

In the midst of all this, sure, I care about the environment. I carry my own cloth bag to the store; fight furiously with the neighbour who lets his water tap run; and protest against the cutting of trees on my road. But I also scoff at people who tell me not to play golf, because golf courses are a drain on my city’s limited water resources. I tell them they are taking their concern too far. I sympathise with the people who live on the banks of the Narmada and whose homes will be washed way because of the dam to be built. But I also feel that that is the price of development – to light up the homes of thousands, perhaps letting hundreds lose their homes is a small sacrifice to ask for. Who decides who shall pay the price? I don’t really have the time to think about that.

Sure, I think we need nature, but if you’re asking me to live every moment conscious of the interconnectedness of all life, wait a while. Here I am, trying very hard to connect to human nature around me; all other nature can, perhaps, wait.

And yet, at another level, I have never been so connected with the rest of the world as I am now. Sitting at my computer, I know every detail of what’s happening in Iraq, what Sean Penn did, what Arnold Schwarzenegger’s latest rankings are, and what China’s population is. Ask me about the top 10 films this week in Britain – and I can tell you. Not all of this knowledge or ability is trivial, in case you’re wondering. From my vantage point at the mouse, I can shoot off letters to shut down polluting factories for Greenpeace, effect the release of political prisoners for Amnesty International and sign petitions to the government on the right to information. This is what it’s like to be connected to people around the world and their lives – minus the smell of the sweat. And the more I labour under the illusion of being well connected to the world, the more humanity slips out of my grasp.

In the course of my work, I go to meet the Irula tribals in Tamil Nadu in south India. As the van approaches Thandarai, my mind conjures up a picture of tribal women and men in grass skirts and beads. The frail woman in a cotton saree talking to me about land reforms bears no resemblance to the tribals in my imagination, reinforced by popular Indian cinema. As I set out to interview members of the Aravani (transsexual) community in south India, I spend half an hour wondering how to address them, what questions to ask, and hoping I don’t rake up uncomfortable issues. Another journey, another time, I am tongue tied when faced with the “manual scavengers” (cleaners) who lift human excrement, euphemistically referred to as “night soil”. I am shocked at my own inability to deal with people so different from me.

I am human – and yet, here I struggle to fathom human nature. How could I even be expected to understand – leave alone feel at one with – the natural world?

It’s not just me. Things have changed for the Adivasis too. With the depletion in forests, many of the Adivasis are now poor peasants and landless labourers at the mercy of local landowners. They, who once walked the forests they owned, now mortgage their children’s lives for land to work on. There are well-meaning organisations working to “restore the rights” of the Adivasis to their traditional way of life. But since no organisation has yet managed to persuade the government to leave the forests alone, it’s perhaps too much to hope that the Adivasis will go back to their old life, in close communion with nature. And if it’s so tough for them, surely it is likely to be tougher for me?

But I’d like to try. I’d like to be able to look at my organiser and see the targets for Work, Personal and Leisure make sense when read as a complete whole. I’d like to look deep within myself and understand where I stand with respect to other human beings and to nature. I’d like to discover what connects me to the Irulas, the Kurumbas and the forests they love. And when I find it, I’d like to talk to my family, my colleagues, my friends, my acquaintances, and all I meet. And together, we’d like to arrive at a vision of a world where we wouldn’t have to make choices such as us or them, human beings or nature.

But where do I start? Perhaps it’s time to go back to my biology lab – and just maybe, I will experience again the sense of wonder that I felt in dissecting that toad.

Funeral, funeral

On the patch of mud that I can see from the balcony are 10 to 12 graves, mounds of earth, built over with makeshift tombstones and on special days, decorated with hastily gathered wildflowers. On other days, stray dogs make their home on the stones, safe from the rain, out of reach of the overflowing drain. The peace of the sleepers is shattered by a new death. The villagers gather to the sound of drumbeats, dancing and singing, stumbling, a little in grief, but mostly due to the drink. They open up a grave, put in another body, on top of last month’s, and pile earth on both. Strangers in life, intimate in death. Marigold garlands, incense and a decorated stone higher than it was the last time… and a life is laid to rest. The drunken dance, the song blaring from loudspeakers, is a celebration of a soul’s release from the fetters of the body.

Another day. Another time. I see a motley crowd of children from the village taking out a procession. Two older children lead the procession, thumping the air in confident, earthy dappankuttu moves. The kids who follow mimic the steps, singing the by-now familiar song. By the side of the road is a makeshift bed, sheltered from the sun by a shamiana. A pooja, I think to myself. But the shamiana is all in white, the colour of death. And on the bed lies a rag doll, also draped in white cloth, just the face revealed to the world. Marigold strands, incense, and the game of ‘funeral, funeral’ comes to an end…

Sabarmati

I walk out of the MICA campus and phone Damanbhai, the auto driver who took me around Ahmedabad the previous evening. Fifteen minutes later, he is there at the gate. As I make a move to get in, he introduces me to another man, “This is Jawedbhai. He will take you around today, if you don’t mind. I have some other work.”Being used to Bangalore’s auto drivers, I stare at him, not quite understanding that he has come all the way to introduce me to the other driver, and that he’d probably have to walk home or hitch a ride back.

The Sabarmati ashram is locally known as Gandhi ashram – few Amdavadis recognise the name that has made the river and the place well known throughout the world. The Sabarmati ashram is where Gandhiji lived between 1917 and 1930, and from where he launched the defiant opposition to the British kingdom with a fistful of salt.

The ashram sits on a busy road on the outskirts of the city and is easily missed. I decide to leave my suitcase in the auto, silently praying that Jawedbhai will still be there when I return.

I walk past the newer museum complex to Hridaykunj, Gandhiji’s home during these years. The cottage is built around a central courtyard, with a traditional verandah bordering it. On the left is the simple room that Kasturba used, and the kitchen to the right. I sit in the courtyard for a while, while around me people walk in and out of the rooms with a casual tread. Was this where Gandhiji spoke to Kasturba, ordering her to pay the ashram authorities in full for the expenses of their grandchildren when they came visiting?

The small bare kitchen had created a revolution in its own right by being the first kitchen inhabited by upper caste Hindu men that welcomed Dalit people. This had forced on Ba the choice of either letting go of her conditioned response to untouchability or leaving the ashram. Most of the shelves in the rooms are empty, some contain replicas of Gandhiji’s possessions, including the famous round-framed glasses.

On the left side of the outer verandah is a locked room. Through the door, I see two large floor and back cushions, a charkha and a low writing desk. The room looks strangely familiar. It’s only after reading the inscription at the door that I realise this is the room where Gandhiji met world leaders at Sabarmati ashram, a room that has been shown multiple times in documentaries and films.

The steps down to the Sabarmati have been long blocked; the upasana mandir is too crowded for a visit just then. I enter the kutir with two names, Vinoba Kutir where Vinoba Bhave lived for more than 10 years inspired by Bapu’s ideals. It’s also known as Mira Kutir after Madeleine Slade, who made Gandhi her guru and Sabarmati her home. A bare room of less than 100 sq ft, with a kitchen built into the corner, with natural depressions indicating the place where the stoves must have been.

In contrast, the newly built museum that documents the years Gandhiji spent at Sabarmati is a soulless addition that detracts from the experience of the ashram. As I walk out I think of the other ashram that I’ve been wanting for long to visit – Sevagram or Bapu Kuti. Perhaps it’s time I went there. As I leave the ashram, I find Jawedbhai fast asleep in the auto, my suitcase still resting on the back seat. My belief in the goodness of human nature is a little more restored, thanks to Jawedbhai and to Sabarmati ashram.

Talking of tea

White. Orchid. Pu-erh. Oolong. Green. Jasmine. Orange pekoe. Makaibari. Lopchu. My adventure into the world of tea began more or less around the time that I met Vijay, another tea lover. When we got married, I made a deal. I would take care of the cooking, if he would make me my first cup of tea in the morning. These 12 years, with the exception of two years when he was in Mumbai, Vijay’s made my morning cup of tea. And if you include the many afternoon and evening cups, I would guess he’s made close to 5,000 cups of tea for me. Golden brown, just stopping short of orange and brewed just right – not a minute over, so that the leaf turns bitter, and not a minute less so that the colour pales. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

In Kolkata, you can’t get away from good tea. Visiting the homes of college friends, I would watch in fascination the stately tea trolleys, tea cosies and white china cups with delicate handles. Tea formed an integral part of the future dream home that I sketched in my mind. I understood why the Japanese go to all the trouble of a tea ceremony. If I had the time, I would do a tea ceremony every day.

I stubbornly believe – with no shred of evidence – that tea absorbs the fragrance and taste of the vessel in which it’s made and served. No stainless steel, no plastic, no paper – tea must be drunk out of decent china. And tea must be made with love – love for the leaf and for the people for whom you’re making it. I also believe that tea absorbs the maker’s emotions, which is why I’ve always believed in settling fights before going to bed!

Over the years, we’ve collected tea memorabilia from our travels around the world. From Sri Lanka came a ‘tea mummy’ to hold tea bags (though tea from a bag is a sacrilege allowed only in the office where it’s impossible to brew a good cup or when I’m feeling incredibly lazy!) Vijay bought a flat and squat black teapot from Singapore that I now use every day. A friend gifted us a teapot-cum-cup from Pondicherry that makes a single cup of tea. I have strainers of various shapes and sizes, even travel size (these are a bad idea because they don’t allow the leaves to fully open.) And though I’ve been teased mercilessly about it, yes, I finally bought a tea cosy that now hangs prettily in my kitchen (but if truth be told, I haven’t used it much.)

All this makes me sound like quite the tea expert. I am not. I do know what good leaf tea is, and I cannot stomach the tea in most parts of India. In north India, I graciously decline all offers of tea after a furtive look around, and very truthfully, cite heartburn as the reason. Tea in north India is boiled until it gives up its soul and is doused with so much over-boiled milk that you have to wade past a layer of malai (cream) to get to the tea. Even if you do get through, the malai monster coats your tongue and oesophagus till you want a good brush with Scotch Brite.

In Punjab, the tea has so much sugar that it’s got a name of its own – khhadi chai, or tea in which the spoon stands! I must admit it has character, though a bit like Gabbar Singh. Sure, he’s interesting, but you wouldn’t want him in your home, would you?

The tea in south India is, in contrast, and as the Bengali would put it, ‘characterless.’ What I mean is that it’s prepared as just another convenient beverage, with no passion or interest. In essence, it’s tea made by non-tea drinkers. Of course, this is a generalisation – apologies to my several friends and a couple of colleagues who also drink good tea – but it’s largely so.

And then you have the masala chai drinkers who like anything from cinnamon to cardamom to mint leaves in their tea. It seems a bit strange to me that they should like that, but since they’re not judgmental about my choices in life, I return the favour.

There are also flavoured and herbal teas, from raspberry and chamomile to a bouquet of flowers and exotic herbs that I cannot pronounce. I have often drunk these varieties of tea, and still do. But I have never bought them. I will never buy them. And even when they find their way onto my shelf, I never suggest drinking them. But once in a while, I quietly allow someone else to pick out the raspberry tea bag and make me a cup. I nurse the cup till it has cooled and down it in a shot. I’m all for exotica, but give me my leaf any day!

A few years ago, I was on my way to Madhupur from Kolkata in a local train, when I heard the familiar call of a chaiwalla. I was alone, and my destination was hours away, so against my better judgment, I beckoned to him, hoping that he would not dish out Tetley-teabag-and-milk-powder tea in a paper or worse, plastic cup.

What I got was strong golden brown desi tea, with just a little milk and a bit more sugar than I have now got used to. But it came in a kulhad (earthen cup) like the tea of my childhood on countless journeys from Kolkata to Andal and back. Tea sweetened with gur (jaggery) since sugar was not available. Tea that tasted of the Chotanagpur red earth. And most of all, tea that smelled of the summer heat rising up to greet the first rain.

The first sSTEP

Sunday, 9 pm

In a makeshift room of hardly more than 4 feet by 6 ft are packed 10 to 12 men, all daily wage labourers in their late thirties. As they make room for more men to come in and rib each other, a slight girl in her 20s starts to speak. And the men listen.

Anupama, the girl, works with sSTEP or the Society for Social Transformation & Environment Protection. sSTEP brings together poor urban communities such as labourers and domestic help to negotiate better terms of work, assert rights and reduce vulnerability in Guwahati. Today’s meeting is to talk about insurance for the daily wage labourers, rickshaw-pullers and construction workers who live in Ward no. 37 of east Guwahati.

Anupama starts on a general note by asking them the times of the year when there’s a stream of work, and income is more or less assured. ‘January to April.’ ‘September to April.’ Finally there’s consensus, on the months when there’s no work: June and July, because of the rains. “Then what do you do if you need money for an emergency?” asks Anupama.

‘We take loans from moneylenders.’ ‘Credit from shops for ration.’ ‘Loans from rich people at 10 per cent interest.’ ‘From friends.’ ‘From relations.’

A man who has been quiet till then speaks up, “There’s no guarantee that we will get the money when we want or when we ask.”

“During the five months or so when you do get a good income, why don’t you save? Haven’t you heard about keeping aside a fistful of rice on a daily basis for bad times’ sake?” asks Anupama.

“When we get regular work, the money is just enough for food, rent and expenses. How do we save?”

Anupama asks the men to recollect any instance in their lives when they needed a lot of money. The voices are louder. ‘Children’s marriage,’ ‘school admissions, uniforms and books,’ ‘accidents.’

She hands out chits of paper and sketch pens and asks the men to write down their biggest and most important needs. More needs tumble out. ‘Death,’ ‘ceremonies,’ ‘home repairs…’  Anupama puts all the chits in order of priority and then pulls out a bunch of carom tokens from a bag. She asks them to allocate weights to each need, on the basis of what they consider the biggest burden (bojha.) The voices erupt into debate and no agreement seems likely. One man says, “All are equal, so give each need one token.”

Finally, another man snatches up the tokens and puts a few on each, in order of priority. A couple of suggestions from the others, and he’s done. The two that come out on top surprise me.

1. The death of a father or mother: This is because not only do they have to spend on the ceremonies, but they also cannot go out for 40 days to work.
2. Children’s education: As one of them puts it, “Whatever has happened in our lives is past, but they should be secure.”

Anupama broaches the subject of insurance, but meets with resistance.

“They attract you in various ways, but it all comes to nothing.”

“I paid Rs 200 to a Kolkata-based insurance company, and didn’t hear from them after that.”

“Accident insurance is the worst; it’s all a waste unless you have an accident.”

A solution needs to be found for some form of saving or insurance that can give these men a cushion during the bad months. But that’s a subject for another day.

Mushroom Man

Sunday, 4 pm

I’m just back from meeting the Mushroom Man, Pranjal Baruah, the only person in Asia – and perhaps the world – to bring mushroom farmers together into a federation.

Pranjal dreams by daylight. He dreams of scaling up to produce tonnes of mushrooms that will feed the world, and that will transform forever the lives of the hundreds of farmers across the north-east with whom he has formed a close relationship.

Farmers comprise 70 per cent of the population of Assam, and the Mushroom Development Foundation that Pranjal has started, reaches out to 30 per cent of these farmers.

Pranjal explains that mushrooms are relatively new in India, with cultivation having started only in the late eighties. In developed countries, however, seven people out of 10 eat mushrooms, and the average demand is 14 kg every week for every 10 people!

In the early nineties, Pranjal attended an international trade fair where he saw foreign countries (eg Holland) queuing up to transfer technology for mushroom culture to countries where labour was cheap. He saw, to his surprise, that mushroom culture formed the backbone of agriculture in Korea. Why can we not do the same in India, he wondered.

Pranjal started a mushroom business in two rooms of his home with a loan of Rs 2.5 lakh. He underwent training from Solan, which he calls the national capital for mushroom culture, and set up a lab in Jorhat. By ’95 he was training others, and the following year, he set up a lab in Guwahati.

Pranjal takes me around the lab that produces and supplies mushroom spawn to farmers across the region. The space for the lab is on lease from the government. He has procured autoclave machines and BOD machines (to control temperature and supply oxygen) at one-sixth the price from closed government labs. He explains how mushroom spawn is grown in a tedious and highly controlled process that takes 70 days.

Looking at the thorough research and technological expertise that Pranjal has acquired, one might be tempted to think that he’s always known what to do. He’s quick to disillusion you.

“Having grown up in the city, I had never planted even a chilli plant or flower pot. So when I first started this venture, it was a thrill to just see these milky white mushrooms emerge from the straw.”

Once he started to grow them, he needed to find a market. “People here did not know that mushrooms could be grown, let alone eaten.”

Around the time, Pranjal saw the condition of farmers in the state, who were earning a pittance from agriculture. He saw that mushroom culture could lift thousands of farmers out of poverty by providing an additional source of income. What’s more, the only raw material required – straw – was available in abundance as waste from their paddy farming!

Thus the Mushroom Development Foundation was set up, and started training farmers on mushroom culture.

Soon, in Borbetta, 700 km from Guwahati, some farmers started growing mushrooms. Borbetta has one of the largest jute markets in the country, and that seemed like a good place to sell mushrooms. But who would buy them?

“We started selling mushroom pakoras outside this jute market. And that was the tipping point,” he says.

The pakoras sold out within minutes, and from then on, MDF made mushroom pakoras the point of entry into any market. Often, they did not have the money to rent a stall at the fair, but they would put up a table outside the fair and a banner, and soon enough, the pakoras would be sold out.

By ’99, MDF’s brand – mushfill – was well established. They were producing sandwiches, burgers, cutlets, samosas, momos, pakoras, pickles – 15 products in all.

With incredible timing, the office boy brings in a plate of steaming omelettes stuffed with milky mushrooms. I have eaten stuffed omelettes before, but the texture and taste of these mushrooms is something else.

Pranjal is both delighted that I like the omelette, and I suspect, a little amused. He recounts that at a trade fair in 1999, he had models, celebrities and corporate executives queuing up at the stall for a lunch of sandwiches or burgers. In the seven days that the fair lasted, MDF had done business of Rs 1.5 lakh.

By 2000, the organisation had 20 staff, and the farms were producing 100 kg of mushroom a day. He had signed up with 200 outlets for marketing, and paid back his loan of Rs 2.5 lakh. By 2004, business had touched Rs 25 lakh.

Then disaster struck.

The flash floods that hit Assam in October 2004 washed away all the farms. Small farmers had taken loans of Rs 1.5 lakh to invest in the business. He himself had invested Rs 3.5 lakh.

MDF changed direction at this point. Pranjal decided that he needed to put negotiating power in the hands of the farmers, and to create a common platform where they could come together to find solutions to their problems. He needed to put small farmers in control of collection and directly link them with vendors.

But first, the farmers needed to come together, instead of operating in a scattered manner. He formed groups of 10 farmers each who share the infrastructure between them; several groups formed a village committee and many such committees led to a central committee.

The largest such cluster is in Sonapur, which has 1,000 farmers as members. MDF started by putting up posters, distributing leaflets, every Saturday. They trained the farmers to speak up, articulate why mushrooms were good for health and as a business, and held several competitions among farmers, which were intensely contested. The farmers saw a dramatic increase in their monthly income, from Rs 400 prior to mushroom cultivation to extra income of Rs 4,000.

At this point, rather late, I ask, are there any women among the farmers? I am taken aback by the answer. “70 per cent of the farmers are women.” I have just watched a video on the process of mushroom culture, which involves lifting large sacks filled with straw and dunking them in water to boil. “Isn’t this rather heavy work for women to do?” I ask.

Pranjal laughs, “The women are very smart. In every group of 10, they make sure they take 1-2 men, who do all the heavy work.”

With support from the Foundation for Social Transformation (the only grant-making agency focused on the north-east), MDF is developing three village level clusters, one in the Garo Hills near Tura, another in Makum in Tinsukia, and the third in Nirjuli, Arunachal. All these clusters are located strategically close to the market so that the produce can reach the stalls in half an hour.

I ask some more questions, but Pranjal looks like he’s miles away. He’s dreaming again, I think. His next words confirm my suspicion. “I want to produce a ton and then three tonnes a year.”

Pranjal has won an Ashoka fellowship for social entrepreneurship. He’s a simple guy with a B.Com but with some help, he’s developed a fairly detailed business plan. But he needs help figuring out if the numbers make sense. All I need is a person who understands numbers and who can spend 15 days with me to crack this model, he says. Any takers?