Lillian Carter, a trained nurse and a Peace Corps worker, spent two years of her life, when she was in her late 60s, serving the poor in India, in the 1960s.
She was posted as a volunteer to Vikhroli, then a village 30 km outside of Mumbai and a Godrej township, and was there from 1966 to 1968.
America's 39th president Jimmy Carter's funeral will be held today, January 9, in Washington, DC.
Not many may know that Carter, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, who died at the age of 100 at his hometown of Plains, Georgia, had a rather interesting and warm India connection through his mother Lillian Carter.
Lillian, a trained nurse and a Peace Corps worker, spent two years of her life, when she was in her late 60s, serving the poor in India, in the 1960s. She was posted as a volunteer to Vikhroli, then a village 30 km outside of Mumbai and a Godrej township, and was there from 1966 to 1968.
The letters Lillian wrote to the Carter family from Mumbai were published as a book titled Away From Home: Letters To My Family in 1977. That book is now out of print, but her president son Jimmy wrote a book about his mother, where he referred to the detailed diary she kept while in India. The book was A Remarkable Mother.
When Lillian -- who, in a conservative, segregated Deep South, maintained identical relationships with her black and white neighbours -- began her Peace Corps training, she requested she be posted to a warm country and among 'dark-skinned' people. She eventually reached India on an Atlanta flight that travelled via London, Rome, Beirut.
Her days in India were full of excitement and curiosity, but often tinged too with a little sadness when cultural differences and lack of funds/facilities prevented her from helping those in need the way she would have liked to.
Her stint in Bombay began attached to Indira Gandhi's family planning mission project. Lillian's job was to persuade unwilling people -- some 20,000 lived and worked at the seven Godrej factories there -- of the need for permanent birth control measures or forgo government benefits. She helped out in a lot of the vasectomy procedures, guiltily, miserably.
Her initial days were not so happy because she was not entirely convinced of the purpose of this mission that Mrs Gandhi wanted implemeted. She had learned a bit of Marathi in Chicago while she was training to be a Peace Corps volunteer and had acquired some toota-phoota Hindi along the way.
But often communicating the importance of a vasectomy or the insertion of an IUD to a group of poor people -- who believed that the more children they had the more economic sustenance they would have in their old age -- was beyond her verbal skills and hampered by her reluctance to communicate the message.
Finally, she achieved a solution via a puppet show of a wife puppet talking to a husband puppet. She tape-recorded a soundtrack for the puppets in her halting Hindi, word by word, phrase by phrase that she painstakingly memorised.
The show was a hit and a novelty because people came from miles around to hear such a frank discussion on sex and reproduction, something they had never heard before in their lives and bit by bit the number of vasectomies increased.
Happiness gradually entered Lillian's days in India when she requested the Godrejs (at the time Pirojsha Burjorji Godrej was running the group) to allow her to assist the local physician, a Dr Ghanshyam Bhatia who was treating the colony workers. That way she had to contribute less time to persuading folks to go in for their wretched vasectomies.
Dr Bhatia was incredibly busy, with as many as 350 or more patients landing up at his clinic daily and Lillian described that he saw more types of diseases in a month than many American doctors saw in their lifetime. Lillian steadily became involved full-time at this clinic, inoculating children and handling smaller medical issues.
In her free time, of which there was not a lot, Lillian got to know the folks of Vikhroli and occasionally attended Godrej social gatherings.
She remembered her first Indian wedding with vivid detail: 'Most glamorous sight I have ever seen. At least a thousand blue, green and yellow lights could be seen from miles away and the guests entered on a beautiful red carpet at least a hundred yards long... a great orchestra was playing Indian music (probably songs from Teesri Manzil, Love in Tokyo which were the hits of 1966), but at a sign from the bride's sister they broke into a wild American piece... people said it (the wedding) cost over 50,000 rupees'.
She became great friends with the local mali (gardener) and taught his young daughter how to read and write.
Lillian missed home plenty. And many material items like novels, magazines, cigarettes, ice cream, Kleenex, her dresses (initially her suitcase got lost) and more. She wrote: 'When I get home I want a T-bone steak, tossed salad, a biscuit, a good drink, a haircut, a manicure, some clothes that fit, some grits, peach ice cream, a drink, some butter beans, some flowers, and a drink, the children to spend the night, the attic fan turned on, to go fishing, some collards and corn bread, my own bed, a car to ride in, my rings, a bathing suit, a good hot soaking bath to get this grime off, a drink and some NEW American magazines'.
As time went on, she changed. Her family was constantly mailing her various home comforts -- peanut butter, cheese, thimbles, mustard, anything that would survive the mail journey. But as fast as she got them, she gave them away. 'Material things have lost all meaning for me'.
She was plenty moved by the plight of the people around and was always working to, in some way, alleviate their situation. She convinced Dr Bhatia, after making a request to the Godrejs, to treat non-colony families too from nearby villages.
She was also successful in persuading leading American drug companies operating in that area to make drug donations by ingeniously pretending she knew the American owners. She had her family send over free drug samples as well.
Lillian was, of course, quite the novelty for the people there. She cut her own hair, probably crookedly, and often roamed barefoot, following the locals' example, when her footwear caused too many blisters and she was unable to wear chappals. She was sometimes caught off guard by many Indians' famous lack of tact, 'They ask, "How old are you? Why do you have so many scratches (wrinkles) on your face?"'
Slowly the Godrejs realised her worth and Dr Bhatia's and her advice was sought when they were planning a new hospital in Vikhroli.
In her time spent at Vikhroli, Lillian was fairly isolated from luxuries of a more civilised, everyday life. Then US vice president Hubert Humphrey got to hear about this from Jimmy Carter. He organised for the director of the Peace Corps in India to go and visit her. He took her to Bombay, one of her few trips to the city, where she shopped. He took her out for dinner and when he dropped her home, he kindly gifted her a bottle of bourbon.
After 21 months spent in India it was time for Lillian to return home. Before leaving, she gave away all that she had come with, including all her money. She was left with a bunch of going-away presents, that she packed in a large suitcase to take to London where she was changing planes for Atlanta.
Her send-off was touching. Some of the village folks she had gotten to know trudged on foot, 12 miles all the way to the airport to see her off, crying beside her plane.
She left India with her case of gifts and 10 cents in her pocket. When she reached London, she realised she did not have money to move her suitcase to the next terminal. Luckily a kindly porter helped her out.
'I left part of my heart there' she said of India. 'I didn't dream that in this remote corner of the world, so far away from people and material things that I had always considered so necessary, I would discover what Life is really all about, sharing yourself with others -- and accepting their love for you is the most precious gift of all'.
Lillian adds, 'In India what I did was to help people who didn't have anything. I am not quoting the Bible because I don't know it that well, but it says that when you do something for somebody in need you get back hundredfold. I got it back a thousandfold', said the amazing mother of a great man, who will be given a national funeral today and be buried later this week in Plains. Rest in Peace, Mr Carter.
Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff.com
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