OONA
Jasjit Mansingh

“I am a little past page 195 of Oona Mountain Wind , a book I picked up on the advice of a friend… There are points in your book which are familiar. The name ‘Theo', IRMA, Anand, the NDDB…perhaps more as I read on.” The letter was dated 2 October 2001 and it was forwarded to me by the publisher, Srishti.

I was touched that a stranger should feel compelled to make contact with me even though he was not even halfway through the book. He introduced himself as Managing Director of one of the Tata Enterprises. Further down, he wrote:

I wonder if IRMA would plant a tree in their compound called ‘Oona' and another one beside it called ‘Ilya.' Left to me I would choose….

He had understood, even by page 195, that trees, the lungs of the earth, had been Oona's life, so to speak. He continued:

How do we bring out the ‘Oonas' in us? Could this be another purpose of your book? India needs Oonas. Not one, but thousands. May your book provide the inspiration.

Some explanation is in order. Oona, my daughter, and Ilya, her daughter, both died in August 1996. It was deduced to be a case of mushroom poisoning, mushrooms picked from the forest around their home in Satoli, in the Kumaon, where Oona and her husband had set up their NGO, Aarohi, for integrated rural development work. Oona was from the Sixth Course at the Institute of Rural Management. Her concerns were natural resource management with the focus on the degraded forestlands and community development, while her husband, a doctor, took charge of the health needs of the community.

When Oona died, she was thirty-three and her daughter three-and-a-half, I was devastated. We all were. Including friends, their colleagues, and whoever had known of her. It seemed so meaningless, so illogical, and such a waste of a productive life.

I questioned and explored the meaning of death itself and started writing to re-create Oona, even if it was in another medium – the printed word. Perhaps it was also my way of coming to terms with the event. The final outcome was her story, intertwined with mine, and at the end of it she was no longer ‘dead'. Oona Mountain Wind was published by Srishti in the year 2001, 475 pages, with a few illustrations, priced at Rs 395 in the paperback edition. It received a fair amount of publicity and reviews. There has been a reprint, which carries extracts of comments, and it is also listed on Amazon.com.

I mention the letter and the circumstances in some detail because it indirectly led to the idea of another book about Oona and her work which would be more readily available to the kind of readership, young people with ideals but no direction, I felt would most benefit from knowing about Oona's life and work.

My discussions with the Chief Editor at the National Book Trust bore fruit and it was suggested that I write for the Young India Library Series. The new book, titled Oona , was started, as it happens, in the International Year of the Mountains. It gave me the opportunity of using some of Oona's own writing about her travels and experiences so that, largely, she speaks for herself. The chapter, “A summer in Bastar” is reproduced from an article she wrote, in 1984 while she was still at St Stephens' College. It was published in a magazine, Facets , edited by Chanchal Sarkar. “The travel bug” is an unpublished article on a trip to Chandra Tal in Lahoul in 1986. The illustrations in both are Oona's own sketches and drawings.

Let me quote from the Foreword by Mr V B Eswaran, retired civil servant and an eminent environmentalist who has been active in the field of development, who knew Oona well and was a member of the first Managing Committee of Aarohi, besides having supported the forestry work of CHIRAG while she was there, when he was Executive Director of the Society for the Promotion of Wastelands Development (SPWD):

This book is not a biography of Oona. Rather it is about some facets of her personality and her chosen field of work, of her concerns, and caring, for the environment, for people, and doing something about those concerns… Do we not all have lessons to draw from her story?

This book about Oona is particularly welcome as it gives a very good idea of the flowering of not only her personality but also her passion for her chosen work. One does see writings of other young professionals' work of similar nature, but they are usually case studies or articles which seek to share specific experiences and perceptions and to invite comment and debate. Such writing is not on the same plane as this story about Oona – her fulfilling personal life and her work – and can rarely create the same kind of vibes in readers' minds. The story comes alive in the narration, characterized by rare empathy and the same transparency that was Oona's.

Oona focuses on her adult life – from the age of 19 to 33. After graduating from IRMA, she worked in a tribal district in Gujarat but her heart lay northwards. It was the desire to be in the mountains and do something about a fragile ecosystem that finally drew her to Kumaon.

Oona set up the Forestry work of CHIRAG, Sitla, Mukteswar when she joined them in 1987 as one of the initial core group of development professionals. It was there she met her future husband, a doctor with the team. In 1990-91 she went to Sussex, England, to do her Masters in Rural Development. She returned to get married and they, then, set up Aarohi, in the same region but a little lower in altitude. The middle section of Oona , Reflections, contains her work experiences, her thoughts on ‘development', her fulfillment in marriage and in motherhood, told once again largely through her own words. She was articulate and maintained a prolific correspondence with not only her friends but with her family too, in particular her brother who had moved away to the United States. She ‘connected' with people, was warm and honest in her relationships at all levels, whether personal or professional. And she was full of enthusiasm, unafraid to step out and experiment. More than the endearing qualities of character, she also had a basic sense of self-discipline and commitment to whatever she undertook.

In June, I received a request for an article for the August issue of Ritinjali. The computer was down and my acceptance was delayed. In early July, the book finally came out. And we received a ‘Dear friend' letter, dated 5 June which, incidentally, was World Environment Day, from Oona's husband. It gives an update of the progress in Aarohi, particularly the health centre which, he notes, “was inaugurated on 20 December 1999, in memory of Ilya and Oona, and is fully operational, ” and he seeks support for the next phase of the building, the operation theatre.

That was Ilya's birthday. She would have been seven.

As it is, this year, makes it seven years since they left this world. Yet it seems like yesterday. … So when I finally sat down to write the promised article, it seemed appropriate to talk about Oona. As I wrote in the introduction:

In a world completely under the sway of the Western rationalist interpretation of the Universe, Jung had suggested that the world was more than matter, things that can be known through the five senses. In other words, phenomena, or things of the external world, the world of Nature, which can be verified through the scientific methods of experiment by the mind and intellect and by logic. He said there was another way of knowing – through the faculty of intuition governed by the right half of the brain. Intuition is a faculty that has fallen into disuse through neglect. Jung said that there was another world, an unseen world, which was known to enlightened sages and seers, and to the prophets of the various religions of the world….

For these seven years I have been exploring the unseen world through the writings of our sages. It brings me great solace to know Jung, too, reached a similar conclusion:

Jung also said that physical death was not the end of life; something survived death. This something was ‘thoughts' which came together as a force and influenced human behaviour. He termed it the collective subconscious.

As I look back over these seven years, I see more and more clearly that there are unseen forces at play. I know , in the inner depths of my being, that “I” have not written these books. I have been helped by some of these forces, and they have been written. I have merely been a vehicle, a channel.

The purpose of their lives used to haunt me. The question I asked, over and over again, seven years ago, was: Is there purpose in any of our lives? What was it in their case, and what is it in mine now?

The answer came, from many directions, over these years. It was always the same: Each of our lives is just a thread in the cosmic tapestry. We ourselves may not, or perhaps cannot, see its “purpose” but the right half of my brain tells me never to doubt it. As for the purpose of the book, now that it is published, it will go where it will. It will touch you, if you have the need for it whether you seek it or not. And if you are reading this, the chances are that the book is for you.

So let me give you flavour of Oona herself, and some Oona-thoughts.

“Get yourself Microsoft Word 5,” she told me in 1991 when she was in England. She was due to return by the end of that year: “I'd do a six-month stint in a big organization just to get that provided I'm based in Satoli. Have to settle down there now… Nice feeling to know one has got one's own home at this young and tender age! That was a brilliant stroke of luck…” She was 28 then and not yet married. But the home in the mountains was important.

She didn't know exactly what she would do when she returned. “The work options for me seem so boundless that I feel as if I need about seven lives to go through them all!” One option, which didn't work out for a dozen reasons, was to return to CHIRAG. Working in a city wasn't an option at all, effectively ruling out big (not so big in those days) money.

She married Sushil within a month, and they set off to make their village home habitable and work towards establishing their own NGO. Within seven months she wrote:

Aarohi is registered, without much difficulty. Now comes the task of writing down, in proposal form, our aims and plans. We have started having some village meetings in villages where we haven't worked before. It's very interesting and so dynamic.

It's a great challenge to help communities constructively at the grassroots level. In my understanding, to structure people's needs into options that are appropriate requires a very high calibre of input…

By September 1992 she wrote about herself:

I feel physically better, with a more voracious appetite but a faint sense of worry at the size of my tummy. It's never been this big! Anyway, the sensation is rather nice and we are getting more and more pleased at the thought of our own ‘pup'.

I think of Ilya always as an Ayodhya baby. We drove Oona down to Delhi on 6 December 1992 when curfew had already been imposed in U.P. “It has been awfully distressing about the Babri Masjid trouble,” she commented to her father-in-law saying nothing about how we bumped along those terrible roads, driving at 100 kmph in a small car to keep up with the ad hoc convoy. Nobody knew what trouble would erupt where.

To see how much the world has changed in just seven or eight years I quote from Oona's letter of 1995:

We have four new additions to the family. Two chickens and another gorgeous cat, called Papuchino. He is a real friendly beast and has almost pure white, long hair – a Persian with pale blue eyes. And the latest addition is a Computer!… You can't imagine how convenient we find writing work now. First we thought we would install it at home so that we could work at night, but our voltage is so appalling that the transformer wouldn't pick up the voltage. All we need is a cellular phone and then maybe we could even have conversations!

Until then all work was done in longhand, and office work on a little portable typewriter. Mail took about ten days by post. There was no telephone. The practice was to send letters by hand of whoever was coming or going, and there was a constant stream of people, whether friends or visitors. They called it the monkey-mail. They had no neighbours then so writing letters served many purposes for Oona.

“We are up to our ears in work,” she wrote in 1993 when Ilya was a year old. “There is so much to be done and such sub-optimal human resources with which to accomplish it. To top it all, the accountant is sick, so Sushil and I have been reduced to clerks making up the horrible backlog of accounts work.” It was a letter to her father-in-law: “We had a successful general meeting… the Commissioner of Kumaon and our Chairman had come. The local attendance was sensational – over a hundred people from 11 to 12 villages. What was nicest was that so many local members were enrolled after the meeting.” She announced their intention of starting work on education and plans to open a school the following year – Aarohi Bal Sansar besides her plan to go to America for her brother's wedding. “Have a great New Year and take care also of Sushil and Ilya!”

The last letter she wrote to her brother is dated April 1996:

Life in Satoli is soaring and the year-end is always an interesting time when we look back and see where we are getting – the achievements, and the impact of Aarohi's work is beginning to show. It is, indeed, satisfying to see the slow revolution in awareness and basic needs, such as the safe water plus sanitation slowly being fulfilled for the ordinary Pahari.

Organisation-wise we raked in Rs 3.2 million this year and we are inching towards more stability. And it is not all dreary grassroots work. The sprinkling of action research, networking, and travel keeps us well stimulated and ever growing. Let us see what the year ahead brings.

A final comment about Ilya: “She has done an about turn and converses with us only in English. I hope that helps her in her otherwise Hindi environment. She loves her Aarohi Bal Sansar and we are trying hard to keep our much-needed efforts in education afloat.”

The year ahead, too, did a kind of about turn. Ilya died on 22 August, and she on the 28 th .

Her last conversation, with a visitor, took place on 20 August. They talked of Aarohi's work, NGOs, panchayati raj and the then recent government declaration to form a separate hill State. She felt the new developments would be a way “to ensure that things functioned in a more democratic manner; of using funds in the right ways; and of giving people more control over their resources…. This is an important time for us…. I have a lot of thinking and writing to do on all this.”

After a slump, work did continue. And, today, seven years on, there is a monument which might well be a fitting memorial. The new Health Centre is on the gound floor, and the office – a large room beautifully built with wood and a large window to the north giving a magnificent view of the mountain – is on the first floor. It has all her hand-written files, exactly as they were in the old rented building.

She had remarked once: “Most institutional buildings in the hills are such awful concrete monstrosities when such a lot of local, appropriate skill exists.” Sushil's letter of 5 June 2003 includes a picture of the building (and there is another view of it on p. 162 of Oona ) says: “Many of the staff of Aarohi contributed a month's salary each towards this effort and the team of masons gave one hour of free labour each day to make this dream come true.” The woodwork uses the traditional carving, likhai , which she was so keen to revive as a dying craft.

She would have been happy to see it. How do we know she can't ‘see' it, or isn't happy?

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For more information about:

Oona Mountain Wind , 488 pp. Rs 395

Write to srishtipublishers@forindia.com or ask your local bookshop.

Oona , Jasjit Mansingh. Illustrated 175 pp. Rs 85. NBT/Young India Library Series.

Write to nbtindia@ndb.vsnl.net.in or try at

NBT, A-5 Green Park, New Delhi 110 016

Aarohi: Secretary (Dr Sushil Sharma) : Aarohi2000@vsnl.net

Or Youthreach (Delhi) : 26533520 and 26533530, a partner NGO.

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