The girl and the train that saved lives

After learning of newborn deaths in Palghar, she made thousands of quilts to wrap warmly around the babies as soon as they emerged. Pic/C Y Gopinath

If I had met Zelma Lazarus, 86, last week I would not have recognised her, nor she me. Time has a way of rewriting our faces, replacing the sturdy invincibility of youth with frailty and crinkled skin. Creeping dementia had also robbed her of memories one by one till only a few important faces remained. I was not one of them.

But this shrunken woman with fading recollections whom I have called friend for 40 years had created something stunningly unexpected that will long outlive her. Of all things, it was a locomotive train that saved lives. By the time Zelma passed away six days ago, her train, the Lifeline Express, had brought new health and a better future to two million poor Indians over 217 expeditions to India's hinterland. If you want to understand the connection between this chestnut-haired old woman and a railway train, you must first understand numbers.

Zelma's problem has always been with numbers. Multiplication tables, calculus, ordinal and cardinal numbers, sums after sums after sums. For example, how many lives could you save if you had 67,956 kms of railway lines covered by 13,169 passenger trains that stopped at 7,349 stations? Zelma and arithmetic were wary adversaries circling each other. There was only one rule: you couldn't run away.

I have seen a few sepia photographs of Zelma from her schoolgirl days, a freckled girl with clear skin and eyes and a sunny sky above her. If there were any dreams, they might have been typewriter fantasies ending with a carriage return. Girls like Zelma in those days could always count on at least a secretarial future.

But by 1983, 47-year-old Zelma was a senior officer in Voltas and woman Friday to its visionary chairman, the late A H Tobaccowala. She understood perfectly the power of the well-made wish. Anything can become true, if you only dream it well. On loan from her company to the United Nations, she was asked to head up IMPACT, a global initiative against preventable disability promoted by the UNDP, UNICEF and WHO.

Like the best of ideas, it could be summed up in a sentence - how amazing if India's vast railway network could be used to carry treatments for preventable blindness, deafness and impaired mobility and facial deformities to remote corners of the country that were inaccessible to modern medicine? Zelma was charged with making it happen.

A considered audacity was the chief trait of the Zelma I knew. I was not very surprised when she told me over lunch one day that she needed a good name for three railway bogies, equipped with surgical instruments, medicines, top-flight doctors and a recovery room, which would travel to remote villages hitched to existing trains. Once there, they would be sidelined and for a few weeks deliver free treatment to people laid low and helpless because of diseases like polio. No point asking her how one human being could hope to accomplish such a daunting enterprise. With Zelma, it was always first the yes, then the rest.

I noticed once that she stitched patchwork quilts every Sunday after church, about ten at a time. Why? She had discovered, while investigating why so many newborns in Palghar were lost within hours of birth, that they died of hypothermic shock in the few minutes they were laid on the cold floor while the mother's umbilical cord was severed. Zelma's solution - make quilts to wrap warmly around the babies as soon as they emerged. She had already stitched about a thousand life-saving quilts.

If you study Zelma's life carefully, you can learn things, not about trains or arithmetic but the art of living, and the special skills needed to make a difference in someone's life. At the height of her train project, there was a moment when she despaired of the Lifeline Express, as it was called, ever happening. I asked her why she didn't share her troubles with her team.

"Never ever let them know you're worried," Zelma replied. "They'll lose heart and it'll become nobody's baby. But," she added unexpectedly, "never let them see your jubilation either. Then they'll assume it's your baby, not theirs."

Zelma never understood how the Lifeline Express again and again brought together so many willing hands and hearts, corporations and NGOs, high-flying medical skills and with so much love in the service of those for whom every step is a lifetime. She might puff up with pride when talking about the train, but never once has she called it "my train". Like Alice in Wonderland, she feels linked with objects and events immensely larger and more inexplicable than she.

The questions of numbers came back again recently, when someone, perhaps a journalist, demanded to know how many people the train had served. Mathematics again, but this time Zelma challenged the inquisitor, asking why saving even a single life should not be considered a universe of difference.

For Zelma, arithmetic only ever made sense when you added 1 and 1 and got infinity.

Here, viewed from there. C Y Gopinath, in Bangkok, throws unique light and shadows on Mumbai, the city that raised him. You can reach him at cygopi@gmail.com
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