Old-timers could easily revisit half a century back Kerala when Andrew Lloyd Webber's Hollywood blockbuster 'Jesus Christ Superstar' descended in Kerala cinemas as a rabble rouser. Movie aficionados apart, the State's conservative Christian households saw women clad in traditional adukku, chatta and gold earlobes kunukku queuing up to have a live darshan of their Son of God being betrayed by disciple Judas, crucified but resurrected in Calvary under the persecuting Roman Empire.

Sister Rose, burning midnight oil at her MMS convent in Meghalaya 

On a recent visit to Meghalaya in the North East of India I happened to come across such a super woman in sari --Medical Mission Sister Rose Kayathinkara--in the small town of  Mendipathar in North Garo Hills, some 125 km west of Guwahati Airport. It is the shortest route via the neighbouring Assam though there is another route  linked by National Highways through Meghalaya interior but taking a total of 350 km via Shillong. Sister Rose has spent more than 45 years of her life for her brethren living some 3800 km away from her home state.  

My beloved sons: Sister holding a Garo toddler and carrying one on arrival when she was 35.

Come to the basics, Meghalaya has a total area of 22,720 sq km which is almost half of that of Kerala.  With a population of 4 million it comes to almost one ninth of Kerala's. Geographically Meghalaya resembles Kerala's Idukki or Wayanad districts sprinkled with hills and valleys. Landlocked Meghalaya has three international borders-Bangladesh, Myanmar and China. The giant Brahmaputra originates in China, flows via Assam on its north and enters Bangladesh by its west ultimately to ebb out in its final abode, the Bay of Bengal.

In one of the pioneering rubber plantations in Garo Hills

Hailing from Arakkulam on the foothills of the giant Idukki dam to rubber farmers Thommachan and Aleyamma as the eldest of 11 children, Rose became a dedicated member of the  congregation of Medical Mission Sisters in 1969.  Armed with a diploma in Radiography and a degree in Sociology, she was moved by the teaching that 80 percent of Indians were below the poverty line and committed her life to ameliorate the poor and downtrodden. Spurning a call to the war-torn Ethiopia, she chose India and zeroed in to the North East India in 1977.    

Chicks for the homemakers

Her first posting was at Rajabala, then  in the East Garo Hills and lived in a one-room hut for four years before arriving in Mendipathar, her present abode in North Garo Hills. She introduced Rubber to the region that the locals accepted with great reluctance but in course of time it enriched the life of hundreds of residents in 20 villages around. Now you will find concrete houses in place of thatched bamboo huts. Many of the villagers own cars and send their children to the best schools. 

Coconut sapling for the needy

Mendipathar is one of the 60 Assembly constituencies in Meghalaya and comes under Tura parliamentary constituency,  one of the two in the state the other being Shillong.  Though the small town resembles a typical Kerala village fifty years  ago, it has the state's only railway station opened in 2014 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.  It is a 19.75 km extension from Dudhnoi in Assam, on the mainline all the way to Kolkata and the  rest of India.

Addressing Garo women

The most alluring connection between Kerala and Meghalaya is the high literacy achieved through the efforts of Christian institutions during the British colonial past. Christians, Catholic, Presbyterian, Baptist and Pentecostal saw educational and social service institutions thriving. Initially Keralites served as bishops and archbishops in most of the Catholic dioceses. Localisation is taking place at snail pace.

Awards aplenty: this one from Guv R.K. Mooshahari married to a Keralite

Sister Rose soon found the poor Garos, eking out a living by farming rice, coconut, arecanut, cassava, turmeric, etc, and eating betel nuts and pork aplenty in their hilly terrain were being exploited by crafty outsiders, mainly Marwari traders. The farmers were getting only one third of the real value of their produce. She convinced locals to come together under a cooperative movement by opening a small shop to buy and sell goods.

Rail station; CM Conrad Sangma; Fin Sec Vijayakumar; Consultant Dipin Panicker.

Over the years the small enterprise grew into a multitasking multi-crore behemoth-Mendipathar Multipurpose Co-operative Society-with 55 permanent employees of whom 15 are women. We saw a multi-storeyed supermarket building, a three-storeyed  conference complex and a three-storeyed staff quarters named Rose Nivas as a permanent tribute to the Sister who transformed their lives to continue as Chairperson even at the age of 80 because they could not find a replacement.

With Manager Anoop James; Project Coordinator Febin Chacko

She acknowledges that it was K.J. Mathew IAS, the then chairman of the Rubber Board in Kottayam, who suggested to form a cooperative society to bring together the Garo people. She did so and helped the locals to open bank accounts to deposit proceeds from rubber cultivation in the form of subsidies for planting and maintenance. The current executive director of the Rubber Board Dr. K.N. Raghavan also has met her to applaud her for the services in propogating rubber in the North East.  

Celebrating Xmas along with Sister Sicily; Rose Nivas-a lasting niche for Rose

'The Marwari middle men and the armed militants wanted to remove me from the scene for ever. They wanted to kill me, ' Sister confided to me. The militants hijacked the wrong person from the convent. My fellow inmate Sicily was abducted but set free when they realised their mistake.'.   

I bumped into Sister Rose for the first time in 1987 while returning from Tura, 90 km to the south west of Mendipathar. Tura was the home of the ruling political dynasty of the Sangmas,   The Bangladesh border crossing at Nalitabari was just 60 km away. 

Sangmas still rule the roost not only in the Garo Hills but also the entire State. Williamson Sangma who reigned as the first Chief Minister had a district named after him. Purno Agitok  Sangma served as the Chief Minister, Union Minister and Lok Sabha Speaker. His Warton, Pennsylvania-educated son Conrad K. Sangma  is the current Chief Minister with his brother James  Sangma serving as the Finance Minister. Their sister Agatha Sangma who studied ecology in Nottingham is the MP representing Tura. At 29, she also served as the youngest minister in the UPA government. 

While returning from Tura, the bus I was riding to the nearest rail station in Assam suddenly stopped as militants in Kokrajar had declared a flash bandh. I had no way other than stepping down to the potholed road to nowhere. It was late evening. I started to walk.  After an hour or so, I saw the small board of a dispensary in front of a small cottage. I tapped on its rickety doors and was surprised to find a sari clad young woman wearing a miniature wooden cross opening it. It was Sister Rose MMS to find a fellow Keralite seeking food and shelter at a wrong time of the evening. She was so kind that she moved their medicine racks to their kitchen and offered a folding iron cot for me before offering the best meal for supper. 

To begin with this time,  Sister introduced her fellow inmate Sister Sicily Nedumgat from Vazhakulam to us. In the Society there were two more Malayalees to help her-Anoop James from Paravur, Ernakulam as Manager and Febin Chacko, a Malayali from Karnataka as Project Coordinator. A third Keralite around was Dipin V. Panicker of Tiruvalla from IIM Bangalore as Consultant to the Government for Garo Hills.  Son of Professors Dr.T. Varghese Panicker and Anita Koshy of Tiruvalla, Dipin graduated  in engineering from NIT, Kozhikode and  studied public policy in IIM Bangalore before being posted to Garo Hills by the Union government.  I was also pleasantly surprised to find a tablet on the society's swanky supermarket  acknowledging that Governor M.M. Jacob had opened it on 7th March 2006.

Meeting Sister Rose again in Mendipathar after a lapse of 35 years was a surprise and a miracle.  After offering us steaming cardamom tea and cookies,  Sister Rose opened her laptop  to explain away what little mite she had achieved in bringing about a social revolution of Mendipathar. She was to leave at 6 am for  a day-long Provincial meeting of the congregation at Bongaigaon. But she arranged our boarding and lodging in a new high rise conference complex on the MMCS campus. The following morning Febin took us around their field stations.  

In contrast, we found one Mukhendranath Sangma to get our Renault Duster hired from Guwahati to get perfectly cleaned of dust in his car wash. He was a former Trustee of the Presbyterian Church. There were eight churches belonging to various denominations in the small town.  

Sister Rose had been able to attract a large number of State and Union agencies to come to the aid of her adopted village.  MMCS is now the most important non governmental institution in North Garo Hills. The town also boasts of a  Government College and a small scale handloom unit.  Dr. D. Vijayakumar, an Andhra Pradesh IAS officer currently Commissioner and Secretary, Planning and Finance, in Shillong has been very helpful in offering projects and funds. 'They are like mother and son,' Febin confides to me.

No wonder, the union and State governments have been  vying to shower honours for the Society and its mentor Sister Rose. Among many laurels, she was selected twice for the National Cooperative Award, Govt of India and the Pa Togen Sangma award for the best social worker of the State. The latter was conferred on her in 2012 by none other than the Governor Renjit Shekhar Mooshahari, formerly a Kerala cadre IPS officer  married to Malayali Rema Menon. This is one of the awards she cherishes most as the scroll has been signed by the then Chief Minister Dr. Mukul Sangma, currently the opposition leader. She also received the North East Award for the Best Social Worker in 2015.  

Sister Rose celebrates her 80th birthday on August 1. This feature is dedicated to her as a b'day present. All her friends in Kerala including her MMS Sisters wish her many happy returns of the day.