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When Shabana was 11 she was diagnosed with a brain tumor.

She didnt see me approach, and when she finally turned to storm off at the clearly unsatisfactory end of her furious tirade, she suddenly noticed me and stopped dead in her tracks. I actually thought she was going to faint dead away. Apparently she had never seen a white person before. When I began speaking to her gently in Bengali, she panicked, and fled at top speed, with Juman and Sahara literally corpsing with helpless laughter beside me.

My friend Juman is on the local village council or Panchayat. He is here with his wife Sahara, being verbally assailed on a Sunday afternoon by a woman with a grievance about land ownership. All too common there I'm afraid, and likely she had a case, but not one the Panchayat could easily fix. Certainly not Juman on a Sunday afternoon. But she refused to calm down.

Mitthu with her baby boy

These men were among the first children Nirmal ever taught. That was back in 1968. When Nirmal became too frail to take care of himself they set him up in a room at Paddyfield School and paid for three carers. He stayed there until he died.