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In the shade of the Banyan
AWAITING RELEASE, as these lines are written, is Out of Sight, Out of Mind, a collection of sad stories with happy endings. This is the story of The Banyan, started nine years ago "on a wing and a prayer", of 16 of 24 mentally ill women whom it rescued from the streets, rehabilitated and returned to their homes, and to an extent, of the author, Kendra.
Kendra, a young American, is the name Biteena Frazier adopted after the traumatic experience of losing a three-year-old son in Madras, where she lives with her husband, the German Consul, Karsten Warnecke. It is a name, she says whose linguistic derivations gave her "the strength (Japanese) to stay focussed/centred (Sanskrit)". One minute Sascha, the youngest of her four children, was vibrantly alive and busily playing, the next moment he had inexplicably choked to death. It was a tragedy that drove her almost out of her mind. And speaking at a meeting at The Banyan in 2000, her husband had related her experience to point out how thin the line was between sanity and insanity.
That speech by her husband was the first of many curious circumstances that were to give her a new focus in life. The day after the speech, she found herself being drawn to The Banyan and dropping in to visit and volunteer to help. When she suggested that she would like to tell the story of The Banyan and those under its spread, the idea was welcomed, but where was the money for the project? No sooner had she returned home than she got a call from Vandana Gopikumar that just after she had left a well-wisher had rung and had offered to fund a project to create awareness about The Banyan and its work!. Then there was that unknown force that kept telling Kendra there was someone out there she should extend her love and care to. And at the Missionaries of Charity's Shishu Bhavan where she used to visit before Sascha's death, she found Raja. When she decided to adopt the three-year-old, the papers took their time - and Christmas was on a family who would sorely miss Sascha. But on Christmas Eve, the Mission rang up to tell her the papers had come through and she could take Raja home!
Someone who had listened to all this added, "But there's one other thing she did not mention. Vandana and Vaishnavi Jayakumar, who founded The Banyan, are from Women's Christian College. In its early days, the College had a close relationship with Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. Kendra graduated from Mount Holyoke!" Life is, indeed, full of coincidences.
S.MUTTHIAH
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