Flex Mentallo

Over the next few years I visited the village at least once, sometimes twice a year.

Her father, Ashraf, had been a good friend. I now found that he was paralyzed from a stroke, though he broke into a delighted grin when he saw me. He died while I was there.

Mridula now had two girls of her own.

They were all indeed married, but still in the village.

I went in search of the handful of children I had been closest to. When Mitthu was a tiny girl, she was my protector. She used to bring me cups of tea, and act as my bodyguard. Whenever I crossed a road she would gravely take my large white hand in her tiny brown one to make sure I crossed safely. When I returned after many years absence it was to find her married, and heavily pregnant with her first child. She had no idea I was coming, and I no way of knowing she would still be there, girls often marrying outside and moving away.

Nirmal grew older, and gradually ceased to respond to my letters. My last visit to the village was in 1991, and Nirmal wasn't even there. By the mid-nineties, I had developed other interests, had helped found and build a charitable organisation in the United Kingdom which I still serve. Then, in 2005, completely out of the blue, I received a letter from Nirmal. He was now 97 years of age, blind and infirm. In his letter he said that he was alone and there was no-one to help him. He begged me to come and see him. I had no idea what to do. I feared that the village would have changed so much that I would find myself among strangers. I feared that Nirmal would need an intervention I could not provide. In the end, after much soul searching, I realized that I had no choice but to go. I found Nirmal in a poor condition though not by any means bereft of support. I was able to improve his situation a little, and he was happy to see me.

I taught English, and there was one young girl I particularly remembered. Her name was Mridula, and she was the main carer for her mother, who was dying of cancer.

Years passed. I went to the village most years to work with Nirmal and the children.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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).

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

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.")

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.