Kumar died four-and-a-half years ago.
On December 27, 2008, the 28-year-old was riding home from a colleague´s place when a motorist traveling in the opposite direction swerved into his lane and knocked him off his motorcycle. Kumar died on spot.[break]
Bijay Gajmer
Just over two weeks after the accident, his father sold his share in the travel agency he had spent two decades on building. For Gautam, to continue as he had done without his son was not an option. It now seemed improper to him to make money out of business.
"If I worked, I knew that I had to work for a noble cause," Gautam says.
However, his notion of a noble cause was a vague one. Dulled by grief, he didn’t know where and how to start and he had no experience in the NGO sector. So he looked to Kumar´s life for inspiration. A fluent Chinese speaker, Kumar had earned his living through a travel company pitched at the South-East Asian market that he had built up from scratch. Much of its profits went to charities, including an AIDS rehabilitation centre and an NGO that provided computers for students in remote areas.
After registering his NGO, Laxmi Pratisthan – named in honor of his wife Laxmi Gautam – he devoted his attention to a lower secondary school in Kavre, providing land for an extension, two new classrooms and 20 scholarships.
Just over nine months after Kumar´s death, Gautam received a phone call from the US. On the line was a friend of his second eldest son, Balram, who had just graduated magna cum laude in mathematics and computer science from Northwestern Oklahoma State University, and begun a job in the IT department of a local hospital. It was the evening of Dashain but Balram, still grieving for his brother Kumar, had not joined his Nepali friends in the celebration. Instead, he had headed out to visit a friend and had hit an embankment and his car had crashed and rolled over. Balram, according to the friend, did not survive the accident.
In his office at Dhulikhel, a photo of Kumar and Balram hangs from the wall. The boys pose in front of a snow-cloaked Annapurna; Kumar stands in a swagger, with his hands on his hips, offering a close-lipped half smile to the camera. His brother kneels behind him on a pile of rocks, smiling outright with his hands on Kumar´s shoulders for support. It´s the last known photo of the boys together, and its caption reads "Laxmi Pratisthan is your reincarnation."
Gautam says that after learning about Balram´s death, he considered committing suicide with the remaining members of his family, but dismissed the idea just as soon as it came to mind. He had never formally worshipped any deity, but he had a notion of God as a ubiquitous presence. After Balram´s death, he felt a flash of rage towards this god for taking his two sons. If there was and solace to be had, it was in the Bhagavad Gita and the teachings of Osho. Existence, he told himself, is a transient state.
"As soon as you are born, you prepare for death," he says. Flowing on from such a truth, it seemed clear to Gautam, even in his deepest grief, that death should be a trigger for transformation.
Gautam´s oval spectacles and neatly trimmed moustache give him a scholarly appearance. He sits by the window of Laxmi Pratistan´s Dhulikhel branch office with a ramrod posture, composed throughout. Resounding in the room is the clatter of pedal-powered sewing machines. Down the hall, women sew western men´s shirts out of a plaid fabric under the supervision of an instructor. All said, there are 20 students in the class, mostly widows or women whose husbands have failed to provide. Over the course of six months, they will learn how to tailor everything from Punjabi suits to men´s western trousers.
Of all of Laxmi Pratisthan´s courses for female empowerment, the program is the most conventional. The NGO has instructed women to drive cars and broken new ground by training them to work as electricians, house painters, tile fitters and shoemakers.
Gautam says he didn´t set out to challenge gender roles. As he saw it, the departure of many Nepali men to work in India and the Gulf had left a trade vacuum in many villages. So why not teach women to perform services in high demand? His women graduates include 23 fully qualified electricians.
As an NGO, Laxmi Pratisthan takes something of a random approach, with projects ranging from driver safety to animal husbandry. Gautam attaches himself to causes that speak to him. After reading about the death of eight Chepangs, all members of the same family, after consuming poisonous mushrooms, Gautam traveled to Chitwan to investigate.
What he found was a community of 450 which relied on foraging for survival. Families, he recalled, lived in grass huts that leaked during the rainy months, and sent their children out naked, for want of clothes. After the visit, Gautam devised a long-term strategy to rehabilitate the Chepangs. First, he would supply each family with a goat and then materials to build houses. In the long term, he hopes to involve the Chepangs in an agro-tourism scheme, drawing travelers to the region to stay with their community.
Assisting him in the project is Krishna, his 21-year-old, son. Krishna had dreams of following in his brother Balram´s footsteps and studying IT at Northwestern Oklahoma State University but shelved them to join his father at Laxmi Pratisthan. He says that a trip to Chitwan confirmed the career change that had already begun to consider.
There, he says, he saw a four-year-old boy, naked and with a distended belly, chewing on what he thought were stones. Concerned that the child would choke, he swabbed his mouth with a finger and retrieved a clump of masticated grass. It was explained to him that it was common practice for the children to chew on foliage as a source of nutrition.
"Nobody was looking after the Chepangs and that nobody included me. I wanted to change nobody so somebody." Krishna says of his decision to join Laxmi Pratistham.
Krishna loves his cricket and used to play football for a local club. His thick neck and broad shoulders are the products of a five-day-a-week workout schedule. Krishna says he hasn´t completely given up on his dream of studying in America, but acknowledges that the prospect of it ever eventuating is slim. This, he says, is the source of only mild disappointment. Enrolling in a three-year social work degree felt like the right course of action. His father began Laxmi Pratisthan with no experience in the NGO sector, and needed practical guidance. In addition to his core subjects, Krishna will take course in fundraising and proposal writing.
As for Gautam, his professional life has gone full circle. After setting up a cold drink stand outside his house near Pashupatinath, he branched out into the gem market and then into agro-tourism after purchasing 40 ropanis of land in Kavre which he planned to develop into a hobby farm with tourist accommodations.
But his main enterprise was packaged tours of Nepal to Chinese speakers. The Southeast Asia focus had been Kumar´s idea. When China opened its borders to Nepal in the late 1990s, he had enrolled in Chinese language classes, foreseeing a business opportunity. Now all that remain of Gautam´s previous ventures is the stand outside his house that now sells souvenirs to tourists – silver jewelry, wooden sculptures of Brahma and the Buddha. Aside from being an income generator, it provides his wife – who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to cope with the trauma – with employment and focus.
Looking back, Gautam says he sometimes finds it hard to believe where he has ended up. As a travel agent, he had a vague notion that he wanted to give back.
"I wanted to transform society, but I was busy and didn´t know how," he says. But after Kumar’s death, a plan took shape. He estimates that Laxmi Pratisthan has helped 1,000 people till now.
"Through my social work, I’ve gained so many children," he says.
alana rosenbaum@me.com
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