A Reckoning

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This website has been online since 2018. The last entry ended with the words "The End." It was not the end. 

The accounting is still due — a reckoning. This is the truth about what happened, what did not, and by whom.

I had no intention of going to India. I am a designer. I love five stars and beautiful things. I had been traveling the world alone for two months when a young Englishman I met on an elevator in Cambodia recommended it. I cannot explain why I listened to him. I did. I landed in Trivandrum at 8:00 AM on a dusty March morning in 2014 and stood at the curb in the heat waiting for my taxi. I knew, standing there, that it was right. I have been back fifteen times. Somewhere in my second or third week, walking down a steep hill to yoga at 7:00 AM, I saw him for the first time. A man dragging himself down the pavement toward me, propelling himself on a piece of cardboard with flip-flops on his hands. What I felt was not pity. It was repulsion. I was embarrassed by my own reaction and I looked away. That moment — the looking away — is where this story begins. Because what came next was a decision. I made myself look. And once I did, I could not stop.

Over the next four years and nine trips I kept seeing him…all the time. Always asking me for money, he’s now tracking me. Small things a first, for food mostly, school supplies, his wife to buy a fish monger license. Then he showed up one day with a color copy picture of his family with a story about needing a home typed neatly below. His body was so mangled, hunched over back, twisted shoulders and no legs, his feet drag him down the pavement. It was hard to believe he could have a family. The picture shows three kids. I admit I was shocked. 

It progressed from asking for money to asking me for a house. At first, I did not know what to do so I did nothing. I returned the next year, and again he’s asking. A quandary? “Seek and you shall find. Knock and the door will be opened”. I sensed a directive. Hard to ignore. 

Two more years have passed, then I met his wife, and his two youngest, a wild-wild little thing, literally springing into the air nonstop. Not all there. I clearly recall the day I watched a group of teenage tourists just part around him, down there on a sidewalk - the way they would part around a stray dog…that did something. I committed. 

In early 2019, after previewing seventeen properties with the help of a taxi driver and a shop tailor — on my own — I found a small cinderblock home with a tiny cow pen in the back and no running water and no kitchen but a toilet. They said an elderly woman lived there alone but so feeble she was moving in with her daughter. (Later I discovered she was younger than me.) It was an awful little house, but it was safe, near a bus stop, two schools and bank. And I saw exactly what it could become. I got a builder. We went to work. 

My seamstress friend Shajeela, who turned out to be a lawyer whose husband was a judge, drafted every document and executed the purchase and made the legal protection of that family ironclad. The deed was intended to carry all five family members’ names. At closing, only one child had the required ID documents — but that was enough. A provision locked the home against sale until the youngest child turned 21.

By this point I had heard the stories, talk to the priest, I did not trust Sebastian. I was right.

On March 22, 2019, the children walked into their first family home. Jumping wildly on their new beds, with the beautiful, flowered sheets, their own fresh and clean, each with a small mirror hanging on their wall. They had all three lived in different orphanages. The oldest girl picked up the broom and began sweeping the floors, beaming. They had everything they needed to live like a family, stocked kitchen, cook top, stocked pantry, refrigerator. Filled water tank, proper toilet. More than most nearby homes had. Fresh blue paint over the raw blackened moldy stained cinder block, bright and colorful. It was pretty. It was clean. 

And there was a big cake, with the Rotary logo across the top (even if they had done nothing to help). I wanted them to feel important. We had guests stop by to help us celebrate. Nursing students from the neighborhood. The builder Biju, who had worked through the night to finish in time, came for a piece. It was a very good day.

I flew back to the US two days later. I did not know that Sebastian sent all three children back to orphanages then rented the house. I found out that he tried to sell it. He could not. Those documents by my seamstress lawyer friend will hold long after I am gone. Whatever Sebastian does with his choices, those three children are legal co-owners of that home. Done.

Perhaps after a lifetime crawling the streets to beg, being treated like an animal, Sebastian just learned to live like one. That is not cruelty — it is the truth of what prolonged degradation does to a person. I see it clearly now. I did not see it then.

Sebastian was the first. I had planned to help four more people, beggars, with polio that I had met along the way. Each living a nightmare in their own mangled bodies. I’ll tell you who they are. 

BK was another. I met BK through a pretty young Spanish photojournalist living in Delhi. She had found him in the Paharganj bazaar — a vast sprawling market across from Delhi’s main train station. Typical dirty streets, dodging tuk tuks and motorbikes around the potholes sloshing with dark greasy water. Elena del Estal had done a piece on him in 2015 for CNN world called Crawling in a polio-free country. Poignant. I met her there in the market so we three could lunch together at one of those restaurants that often fed BK. He ordered biryani with eggs. I had actually never seen that dish with egg. BK has no use of legs nor arms or hands, so he eats with his toes. But Elena fed him at the table that day. As I watched them, it was plain to see that he loved her. BK has an angelic quality about him — young, early twenties, bright eyes, and a serene smile. So gentle. 

Elena told me his story while we lunched together, no rush, all the time in the world. It felt important. She told me about his home village - there was a girl, they fell in love and wanted to marry. Her family would not allow it. I did not ask but it felt like it had been a few years when BK left the village - alone - and came to Delhi. That’s how he ended up on those streets across from the train station. He did have a place to live at one point, but it was not safe, so he chose the shop doorways instead. People gave him food.

The photojournalist was leaving Delhi that week to return to Spain. She had been there five years. It was time. She needed more.

On my next trip, I returned, walking those same streets showing his photograph to shopkeepers, I found BK myself. By then he had a friend who cut hair. BK now slept in the barber's shop at night — an 8x8 room, two men, it was hot in there with the door opened. I wondered how bad it got at night. 

I had a plan for BK. He had gone to get his Aadhaar card, but he could not use his hands to make the mark nor the fingerprint. I’m still not sure I got that story straight as how could anyone not help him with that. The Aadhaar card was necessary for everything. I wanted to get him a bank account since he could not protect money. And an ID, and a phone. Finding an apartment in a city like that, daunting. But now he had a friend. And now I knew how to find him. I told him I was coming back.

I have been back - twice - looking for him. The second time in 2023 I recruited a tuk tuk driver, Raju, and we searched those streets together showing his picture, asking about the barber. When you walk the third world streets alone, you trust your instincts about people. Raju was a nice man. We have stayed in touch now for over two years. But still nothing. 

BK is almost certainly gone.

I think Vinju was the first polio survivor I ever saw in India — I wonder sometimes if it was actually Vinju that first time I saw a man dragging himself down a steep hill at daybreak with flip-flops on his hands instead of Sebastian. He was 52 that year we met. Vinju walks on all fours with his hands, always with flipflops. I recall the day I videoed him like that. I was behind him. I don’t know how he knew, but he stopped and turned around. I am not proud of that moment. My reasons didn’t matter. I went back this March 2026. Vinju was also gone. I have no way to know. 

Mahendra lay in the hot sun in a Jodhpur marketplace without use of arms or legs, small, completely vulnerable, having to be carried. He was begging in the market, trying to earn enough to help his sister marry. Of all the twisted frail polio survivors begging in India, Mahendra was the most fragile. There is something about his eyes. It is clear in his photo, but nothing like the haunting of his face that day. Again, I do not know what became of him. I was with a guide that day when we met him. During lunch just after, my guide started filling me in on the fine details of the Caste system. One of the many reasons they don’t see them. We went back again the next day, and the guide promised me that he would return to get some kind of contact information. That he would stay in touch so when I returned, we could find him. Find his family. He did not. Then I lost his information with my WhatsApp crash. All gone. 

Three of the four people I came to help were not. They will not be helped, not by this foundation. Not by anyone. I want that stated here, the truth, because they existed. 

There were two honorable men in this story. One honorable woman. 

As far as international leadership goes, John Germ was in my backyard. If Rotary International was the most likely to partner how fortunate it was to discover the past RI president was just a short drive. And he was immediately willing to meet to hear about this issue. Logical because Rotary India achieved polio free status in 2014, just four years prior. Still fresh news. And how fortuitous to discover in that first meeting with John July 2018, that Sushil Gupta, his good friend of 40 years, was the incoming President-Elect of Rotary International, term 2020/2021. 

I met Sushil in his Delhi office just weeks later. I had stayed at Sushil’s hotel on past trips not knowing of him then. Among others, Sushil owned the JW Marriott near the Delhi airport. We met on a Saturday morning. It was friendship on sight. Both of us highly sensitive to serendipity, coincidence, meanings below the surface, spirit led. He had stories to share about his trips to Varanasi, encouraging me to go as he knew I would get it. He trusted my intentions immediately and I trusted him. He mentioned Many Lives, Many Masters, but I just looked at him with no idea what that meant. It was a book I would discover later. 

It was only hours after we met that Sushil sent his Rotary India leadership team in south India an email announcing his support of the work I proposed. The Hope and Homes for Polio initiative would become a new RI pilot project for his incoming Presidency. He said yes while he was battling a life-threatening disease. I did not know that. No one did. 

My own Rotary Club came through though, even without knowing how or what would develop they offered a check, a token of their support. That token mattered. As it happened, the only token from anyone, ever. 

My next meeting with Sushil was cancelled at the last minute after I had arrived back in Delhi. After returning home, I discovered “Many Lives Many Masters was a book, and the retired author was giving a rare audience in Las Vegas in November, so I attended. Fascinating experience. I had a copy of that book with me which I placed on the speaker chair during lunch with a note about who Sushil was and a request for Dr. Wise to write a special note inside. I returned early and watched him walk out, pick up the book, and write the note. I mailed it to Sushil at Christmas.

I did not see Sushil again, however I sent him field reports, field reports from the pilot project in Kovalam. They went unanswered. All of them. I was left wondering in silence why my sponsor had gone quiet. I learned the truth much later. He had to step down from his year to shine. Sushil’s life made a difference. He was a good man on earth. I am certain he is a good man in heaven. 

The second man came through a year later from my seamstress-lawyer Shajeela, whose connections reached the senior judge at the main judicial center in nearby Trivandrum. It was a memorable day in India, visiting with my seamstress, me sharing the quandary of how I was to find legal help to buy a house - when she just casually announced that she was a lawyer. She is such a fabulous seamstress, and we had so much fun together designing and sewing pretty dresses when I am there. But a lawyer? I had known her for five years by then and had no idea. Shajeela did it all. Expertly. Plus, she ran interference with all the other parties from contracts to construction. She did it all. Perfect English. I knew she was talented beyond her reach, but I had no idea how smart she was and is. See what I mean, serendipity? 

After all the Rotary members across India fell through, Shajeela’s judge friend found a community volunteer named P.K. Nair to watch over the family after I returned to the United States in April 2019. He assumed that role with enthusiasm. I heard that he bought both little girls new dresses. It was only when I returned did, I learn he had died of a sudden heart attack soon after. I lost his contact information when my WhatsApp crashed and lost every message we had exchanged. His name was P.K. Nair. He deserves that. Two honorable men. Both gone. One honorable woman — still here, still remarkable.

Here is what I did before a single brick was laid.

Polio survivors begging the streets of India is not like the US. There is no wheelchair, no crutches, they often have no legs, no arms, no hands. It is hard to look at. So, no one does. I wrote to Prime Minister Modi. I wrote to Azim Premji, one of India's most prominent philanthropists. I wrote to Yogi Baba Ramdev for help, a billionaire who had his own afflictions. Nothing. I flew to Calcutta to meet with Rotary leadership. I traveled to St. Stephen's Hospital in Delhi to meet Dr. Mathew Varghese, the leading orthopedic surgeon treating polio survivors in India. No interest. 

I attended Rotary events across this country on my own money for years, pursuing every person with the power and the resources to move this. Even a regional convention where a polio survivor was stationed outside the enter to the very hotel – laying there curled up in a twisted body - begging. No one noticed. 

Two years. Not one of them responded with action.

According to WHO data, India had 200,000 to 300,000 polio cases per year. Now they are survivors — adults whose childhoods preceded the vaccine campaigns, whose twisted bodies are the living proof of what was eradicated. 

They were the wounded left on the battlefield after the victory parade. India stepped over them. The very point of Elena’s CNN photo documentary on BK in 2015. If her moving publication just months after India declared polio free could not jar them, what made me think I could? But surely, I thought Rotary International would care. 

Just days after Sushil’s email to his south India Rotary leaders, three local Rotary clubs in Trivandrum were each approached to partner on the ground. However, in the months to follow their true motivations were revealed. 

Club One proposed inflating the construction budget so the club could pocket the difference, telling me they had completed 5 similar home building projects for a government program, when it was only one. When they showed me that one home they built had been abandoned, they had run out of money and walked away leaving the young couple getting married without the promised home. 

Club Two — at their first and only meetings with the polio survivor this pilot was to help — they told an illiterate homeless beggar with no money and no credibility with any land seller to “go find the land” himself. Like the first club, they had built a government program home only to discover after that it had stripped bare including the roof and abandoned. 

Club Three, over an hour’s drive, had recently built themselves a new Rotary Building to pay for. It was clear they wanted to assume control of all the funds to hire their real-estate friend. When they realized that would not happen, they stood up two consecutive meetings. I never heard from them again.

Every club wanted control of the money. Every club wanted photographs of themselves doing good work. For months, I experienced short Rotary club meetings followed by drinking parties, where I was the only woman in the room. And always lots of pictures. 

Although undeterred from the project in progress, a formal report of the local club’s egregious behavior was submitted to the local Past District Governor, Suresh Mathew. Although he had been hands on since Sushil's instruction months prior, it went unanswered. Even when submitted to Sushil, it still went unanswered. 

Baffled by the lack of an response, the full report was then submitted to John Germ, Rotary International Past President 2016, and incoming RI Foundation, Chairman. In our follow-up meeting, John was not surprised by these details. It was only then did I learn that most of RI ethical and financial complaints worldwide are from India. A little late. 

The fall of 2018 I approached Habitat for Humanity India to partner on the building in January 2019. They expressed interest in November, then again and again delaying commitment until I arrived in January to do the work, then they declined.

Every Rotary International President who followed Sushil — the German who replaced him, the Indian from Calcutta the year after — showed zero interest. I traveled to yet another large Rotary leadership India gathering in Delhi September 2019 to meet him. I attended Rotary India events across this country for over two years. There was zero interest.

In early 2020, I repackaged the entire initiative as a tribute to Sushil to present to a RI past president. During that meeting in Delhi with Raja Saboo, it was made clear that a tribute to Sushil would be poorly received (an understatement). 

To this day, the one constant I observed throughout Rotary India was a drive for recognition. Harsh but true.

The house was built without Rotary. Without Habitat for Humanity. Without Modi. Without the philanthropists. Without the doctor. Without anyone who made a promise and kept it — except Shajeela, and Biju who worked through the night, and Komar my taxi driver who has picked me up at that Kovalam airport every trip since March 2014 and knows everything about everyone and is not shy about sharing it. He is how I get my updates. And he is part of this story whether he knows it or not. They all stepped in. I hold them all in such high esteem. 

There was one constant through this entire experience, John Germ, Rotary International Past President 2016. It was a long shot when I called his office that July morning 2018 to schedule a meeting to recruit Rotary International support. And it was that first meeting in his Chattanooga TN engineering firm’s office, that John picked up his cell and got Sushil on the phone in Delhi. It was John’s introduction that morning that accelerated this idea to help polio survivors in India, forward to being a RI pilot project, just weeks later. It was John and Sushil together that I formally reported the south India Rotary Clubs bad behavior. Now, years later, it is clear, the power of that phone call. I hold John Germ in both high esteem and affection. 

On March 11, 2020, I caught the last airplane out of Trivandrum before the airport shut down. I landed in Atlanta at 10:30 PM on March 13th. The airports closed the next day.

It happened. This website exists because the record should exist somewhere. 

BK existed — young and bright-eyed and in love with a Spanish woman who fed him biryani with eggs in a market in Delhi, sleeping in an 8x8 barber shop, dreaming of a girl in a village that turned him away. He deserved more. I will never forget him. 

Vinju existed. Mahendra exists somewhere, I hope.

Sebastian's children are the legal co-owners of a blue house in Kovalam, South India. That will not change.

A good man named Sushil Gupta placed the first stone of this foundation. P.K. Nair, a volunteer, bought two little girls dresses before he died so they would know someone cared. Perhaps his last kind deed. 

One house. Three children protected. Two honorable men gone. Three people not reached who will never be.

That is the ledger. This is the final accounting. Every stone had been turned. 

Now, it is The End.

— Janace Allinson Harding Naples, Florida June 2026