Gladys has just stepped out

Gladys stayed on in Baripada—the headquarters of Mayurbhanj district—taking on full responsibility of the Mayurbhanj Leprosy Home that was essentially run by Graham. She may have now gone to Australia to look after her 91-year-old father and to enrol her daughter Esther in a medical school but residents of the Home insist she will be back.

Past the narrow, crowded lanes of Baripada where people, vehicles and cows co-exist in a happy chaos, the road falls off to open out into an orderly green patch and the constant honking of horns is replaced with a quiet stillness. It is a green little world, a world the Staines nurtured. It’s business as usual as its residents busy themselves weaving mats, cooking, making shoes. But behind the humdrum of routine, there is a listlessness.

‘‘She will return,’’ says Solomon Soren, honorary superintendent of the Leprosy Home who also looks after the Staines house. The residents of the Home are equally hopeful. ‘‘Didi will return,’’ says Thumpu Marandi who came here as a 12-year-old fifty years back. ‘‘What she did for us no one can. She spoke Oriya and Santhali, we never felt she was an Australian. She was just like us.’’ Graham Staines joined the Mayurbhanj Leprosy Home in 1965 and stayed on for 34 years until his death. Gladys, a trained nurse, met Graham while she was in India as part of an international ministry. They got married in 1983 and a year later moved to Baripada.

It was a world away from Queensland. A small Oriya town that was noisy at day and very dimly lit at night. It was to the Leprosy Home in this town that Gladys brought a certain medical expertise. In fact, when a fire broke out in Baripada in 1997, she put in endless hours treating the injured at the hospital.

For the 65-odd members of the Home she was ‘Didi.’ Cast away by their own families, they had built an alternative one with ‘Dada’ and ‘Didi’ at its centre. First with Graham’s death and now with Gladys’s departure, there’s a troubling void where once there was comfortable security. ‘‘For two-three days after she left, we didn’t eat,’’ says one resident.

Already there are little worries. She used to give us saris, who will now? She was just a phone call away but what will happen in the future? Gladys’s absence is being felt for reasons emotional and practical. ‘‘Her word carried weight. The kind of prestige she had, no one has,’’ says Surendra Nath Majhi, a health worker at the Home. Her large network of contacts was a big help in getting things done.

All over Baripada are lives that the Staines touched. Peter Murmu joined the Staines as a cook and after two years graduated to becoming their driver. ‘‘Gladys taught me how to make biscuits and ice cream. Graham Staines taught me how to drive, on his jeep,’’ says Murmu. That jeep was later burnt by the mob and Murmu was an eyewitness to the killing.

Dr B K Das and his wife Shobha, two of the Staines’s longest associates in town, are still emotional over Gladys’s leaving. ‘‘We have lost a good friend,’’ says Das. His wife remembers Gladys as a strong woman who stayed on and fought back. ‘‘She was simple and loved Oriya food. And she wore her saris so beautifully.’’

And it’s not just old associations that are feeling the loss. Dr Danigasalam K heads an eight-member team at the Graham Staines Memorial Hospital that was inaugurated on July 8, 2004. ‘‘It’s a lacuna. Our team is incomplete,’’ he says.

The project, a joint venture of the Mayurbhanj Leprosy Home Society and the Christian Fellowship Society at Oddachhatram, Tamil Nadu, was initiated with the aim of providing reconstructive surgery to leprosy patients. Danigasalam says: ‘‘This is where Gladys’s experience would have been of great help. But perhaps, someday her daughter Esther will come to this hospital as a doctor.’’