‘City of Joy’ inspiration still working for India’s poor

Decades after inspiring a best-selling novel that brought readers into slums near Kolkata, 86-year-old ascetic Gaston Dayanand is still working for India’s poorest.

His life helping people in the mega-slums of Pilkhana formed the plot of Dominique Lapierre’s 1985 book “The City of Joy”, which was later turned into a Patrick Swayze movie.

Born in 1937 to a Swiss working-class family in Geneva, Brother Gaston said he remembered deciding at six years of age to dedicate his life “to Christ and the poor”.

“I never wanted to be a priest,” the brother of the Prado congregation told AFP at the Inter-Religious Center of Development (ICOD), an NGO he co-founded in Gohalopata, a village 75 kilometres (45 miles) southwest of Kolkata.

“The church would never have let me live in a slum with the poor, but my life was about sharing with the poorest.”

A trained nurse, Brother Gaston arrived in India in 1972 to work with a French priest in a small self-help centre in Pilkhana.

“It was the biggest slum in India at the time, they said in the world!

“I went to places where there were no doctors, no non-governmental organisations, no Christians. That is to say, places that were completely abandoned.”

Chicago on the Ganges

One day in 1981, Brother Gaston said he received a visit from Dominique Lapierre, who was “sent by Mother Teresa”.

The well-known French author, who wanted to write a novel “about the poor”, convinced the ascetic of his sincerity. The two men became friends.

Lapierre, who died last December, described Brother Gaston as “one of the ‘Lights of the World’ whose epic of love and sharing I had the honour of recounting in my book ‘The City of Joy’.”

At the time of Lapierre’s visit, Mother Teresa was receiving medicine from all over the world.

She donated large quantities to the self-help centre, which Brother Gaston was able to use.

He trained nurses and established a dispensary.

“We quickly had more than 60,000 patients the first year, 100,000 the second. Three years later, we had a small hospital,” he said.

As soon as he arrived in India, he decided to adopt the nationality.

“It took 20 years, of course,” he said.

Brother Gaston was born with the surname Grandjean.

In India, he chose the surname “Dayanand”.

Now white-haired and confined to a wheelchair, Brother Gaston is still trying to help those in need in the northeastern province of West Bengal.

Of the 12 NGOs he founded since moving to India, six are still active, including the ICOD, which has taken in 81 people of all faiths, including orphans and the elderly, as well as those suffering from disabilities and mental health problems.