Revisiting friends in India

It is almost 30 years since Tony Tigwell came back from India and wrote a book about it that has been read all over the world. Called Sakina in India, it described the day-to-day life of a 10-year-old girl in a village near the holy city of Varanasi. It reached down to the very grass roots of rural life on the subcontinent and became a standard geography textbook.

Tony, a teacher and former Labour councillor in Sheffield, sent a copy to Sakina's parents, and never expected to see them again. A few weeks ago, however, his family bought him a return ticket to India for his 65th birthday, and a strange sequence of events has come full circle.

The story, which unexpectedly involves me and a fateful taxi ride, begins in 1978, when Tony spent a year in India on projects run by Oxfam. "I remember going to a small-town market in a dusty field," he says. "This guy was selling locks. I bought one and he said: 'Don't buy that old-fashioned one, buy this new one'." As the man held up a shiny new lock and compared it with the cumbersome old one, it struck Tony that here was an everyday symbol of change.

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Old was giving way to new. Around that dusty market, traditional brass pots and slipper-style leather shoes were being replaced, sweeping away centuries-old assumptions and edging India towards its great world economic status today.

The idea inspired Tony to devise India Alive, a school project funded by the British government to use everyday objects to explore change in the developing world. As part of the project, he went back to India two years later and spent four months meeting families from different religious backgrounds. His mission was to assemble 60 "kits" of objects which typified the families' everyday lives – kettles, goat bells, toys, sandals.

The objects were packed into 30 enormous parcels, each weighing about five stone, and were posted back to England to be displayed in purpose-built boxes. Pupils were encouraged to bring in their own boxes of objects to compare their lives with the Indian children's.

During the trip, Tony spent a fortnight with a Muslim weaver and his family in a small earth-floored house in Takukibowli, a village of 500 people about 20 miles from Varanasi. He took photographs and made tape recordings of Karam Ali, his wife Sabun Nisa Bibi, and their daughter Sakina and six-year-old son Asharaf. The box of objects he collected there included a pair of pink plastic sandals like Sakina's and a copy of her mother's sari.

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Soon after getting back to Britain, Tony was approached by a publisher to use his notes and photographs for a book in a popular series on families in different countries. Published in 1982, Sakina in India is a vivid picture of the way of life still shared by millions of villagers. It shows Karam Ali weaving, Sabun Nisa Bibi cooking and spinning on a wheel made from an old bicycle wheel, Sakina fetching water from the well and playing with Asharaf. She smiles mischievously on the cover. The book sold about 40,000 copies, went into an American edition and was translated into Dutch and Welsh.

"I sent the family a copy, but didn't hear whether they'd received it," says Tony. "And you move on, don't you? The year after it was published, I became a councillor and I was straight into the miners' strike and rate-capping. And that was it until..." he fixes me in the eye "...until your intervention."

I've known Tony since his council days. Eight years ago, I mentioned I was about to fly out to Varanasi to write a travel article. Once there, I would be less than an hour's drive from Takukibowli. If I had time, he asked, could I go and see if Karam Ali and his family were still there and take them another copy of the book?

Two days into a Varanasi heatwave (115F), I hired a taxi that took me through a flat landscape of men herding goats and women winnowing wheat. It looked timeless, but Takukibowli had moved on. It was three times bigger than it looked in Tony's book. The mosque – newly-built when he was there – was now hemmed in by a clutter of tea stalls and barbers' shops. Fields had become houses. The saplings in the photographs were now fully-grown trees.

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The taxi-driver found Karam Ali's house and the family came out to see who I was. Karam Ali, a youngish man in the book, now had grey hair. The taxi-driver explained why we'd come, I held out the book, and Karam Ali burst into tears. Sakina, he said, had died the previous year in childbirth. He showed the book to his wife. She too wept. "Oh dear," said the taxi-driver.

The family invited us in and brought out their much-thumbed copy of the book. They had received it, after all. The old bicycle spinning wheel was still there. At midday, Karam Ali took me to see Sakina's grave. We walked slowly and silently across the fields in the blazing sunshine, with a long procession of villagers behind us. Karam Ali stood by the grave, a simple mound, and lit incense sticks. It wasn't, I thought, the ideal outcome of my visit.

"The news that Sakina had died came as a shock," says Tony. "I felt guilty, in a way, that I hadn't kept in touch. I felt it was a privilege for an urban British teacher to have a relationship with a handloom weaver in India. It sparked off a correspondence and, since then, we've exchanged Eid and New Year cards."

By this time, Tony had long been working at Abbeydale Grange, a multi-ethnic Sheffield school where students could translate Karam Ali's letters. In one of them, he invited Tony to go and stay. His chance finally came in late October, thanks to his family's birthday present. He started to relearn the Hindi he had last spoken three decades ago and flew out.

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"I was excited, nervous," he says. "I knew I'd be made very welcome, but I didn't know whether it would be okay to stay there and I didn't want the family to be put to great expense, so I kept it very low key."

Shortly before he left Britain, there was bad news. Asharaf rang to say his father was in hospital in Varanasi after a tracheotomy. Tony arranged to stay at a hotel in the city. Asharaf, whom he had last seen as a six-year-old, met him there.

"We hugged, then we went to the hospital and Karam Ali and I had a tearful reunion. He was standing in a chaotic crowd waiting to be discharged by a doctor. He was number 55 in the queue. He couldn't speak. He wrote notes in an exercise book for Asharaf to read out."

The three of them drove to Takukibowli, where Tony was showered with rose petals and garlanded with marigolds as he stepped from the car. The family home was bigger and now had electricity instead of oil lamps. The village had many more shops, much more traffic and a cellphone mast looming over it; but it was all still recognisable.

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Tony leafs through Sakina in India to find a picture of a man ploughing with bullocks. In the background is a group of farm buildings. "It's amazing," he says. "That's exactly the same view as I had from the house this time."

He spent four days in the village, sleeping on a bedroll in the family home, playing with Karam Ali's grandsons, walking across the fields, exploring the area by motorbike. "A lot of the time Karam Ali and I just sat writing notes to each other. I don't want to romanticise it, because the family haven't got much income and were worried about him. But I felt totally at home, and honoured to be there.

"They were four very happy days. I played them a tape I made 30 years ago of a goat bleating, and a goat outside the house started bleating too."

By coincidence, my wife Clare and I were in India in October – though not near Varanasi – at the same time as Tony. We met up at a Delhi restaurant the night before he flew home. He was waiting for us, sitting back with a beer, looking at his souvenirs of the trip and watching cricket on a television in the corner. I've rarely seen anyone look so fulfilled.

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Since coming back to Sheffield, he has rung Takukibowli every week and finds that Karam Ali's health is gradually improving. Another trip can't be far away. And the link is a 10-year-old girl called Sakina, still smiling mischievously on the cover of a book that has gone round the world.

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