Still working with India's poorest 50 years on

Decades after inspiring a best-selling novel that took readers into the slums near Kolkata, 86-year-old ascetic Gaston Dayanand is still working for India's poorest.

His service to the people in the mega-slums of Pilkhana formed the plot of Dominique Lapierre's 1985 book The City Of Joy, which was later turned into a Patrick Swayze movie.

Born in 1937 to a Swiss working-class family in Geneva, Brother Gaston said he remembered deciding to dedicate his life "to Christ and the poor" at age six.

"I never wanted to be a priest," the brother of the Prado congregation told AFP at the Inter-Religious Centre of Development (ICOD), an NGO he co-founded in Gohalopata, a village 75km south-west of Kolkata.

"The church would not let me live in a slum with the poor, but my life was about sharing with the poorest."

The trained nurse arrived in India in 1972 to work with a French priest at a self-help centre in Pilkhana, "the biggest slum in India at the time, they said in the world," said Brother Gaston.

He arrived in a tuk-tuk but entered the slum on foot. "I went to places where there were no doctors, no NGOs, no Christians. That is to say, places that were completely neglected," he said.

In 1981, Brother Gaston got a visit from Lapierre, who was "sent by Mother Teresa". The well-known French author, who wanted to write a novel "about the poor", convinced the ascetic of his sincerity.

Lapierre, who died last December, had described Brother Gaston as "one of the 'lights of the world' whose epic love and sharing I had the honour of recounting in my book The City Of Joy." The novel, published in 1985, sold several million copies.

"He funded my organisations US$3 million ($4 million) a year - almost all his royalties - for almost 30 years," said Brother Gaston, who hates the movie adaptation of the book.

"I hate the film. The City Of Joy becomes Chicago on the Ganges."

When Mother Teresa was receiving medicine from all over the world, she donated large quantities to the self-help centre.

Brother Gaston trained nurses and established a dispensary. "I had the medicine, I didn't need anything else. We had more than 60,000 patients the first year, 100,000 the second. Three years later, we had a small hospital."

He replaced his surname, Grandjean, with Dayanand (a portmanteau of blessed and mercy).

He worked with Mother Teresa's brothers in caring for the lepers in Pilkhana. "I stayed for 18 years, surrounded by 500 lepers, in a very small room," he said.

Mr Abdul Wohab, a 74-year-old social worker, said: "Gaston is a saint."

Now dependent on a wheelchair, Brother Gaston is still helping those in need in the north-eastern district of West Bengal.

Of the 12 NGOs he founded since moving to India, six are still active, including the ICOD, which has taken in 81 people of all faiths, including orphans and the elderly, as well as those with disabilities and mental health problems.

Brother Gaston spends "three-quarters of my days meditating" on his bed, facing Christ. "I had never had anything else but a board to sleep on. Now I live like a bourgeois in a big bed," he said with a laugh.

"But it's not me who wanted it. The worst part is that I accepted it."

ICOD co-founder and director Mamata Gosh watches over the man who taught her to be a nurse 25 years ago.

"Before him, I didn't know anything," the 43-year-old told AFP. "He is my spiritual father."

Brother Gaston's day begins at 5am, with a prayer in front of a reproduction of the Shroud of Turin overhanging an Aum, the symbol of Hinduism, in the tiny oratory adjoining his room.

Dressed in white and barefoot, he sits in his wheelchair and visits the residents of the thatched hamlet and returns to his room before noon.

On his bedside table sits a Bible, a crucifix, his glasses and an old laptop that he uses to keep in touch with his NGO's donors.

"I will earn my bread until the last day of my life," he said.

AFP

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