Tribute to Dr. Umanand Prasad founder of The University of Fiji Medical School. Requiem for a Healer : A Personal Remembrance of Dr Umanand Prasad (1946-2013) By Satendra Nandan Dr Umanand Prasad was a friend of mine, and of many others. His sudden death in a tragic car accident was shocking and unspeakably sad. A life of great generosity was so brutally snuffed at a daily crossing in Adelaide. Uma, as we fondly called him, was also my colleague for several years and a fellow-writer. He was barely 66 years old, almost the same age as my doctor brother Dr Davendra Nandan of Bayly Clinic ,Lautoka; Daven was Uma’s class- mate in the Fiji School of Medicine and later at the Grants Medical College , Bombay. I learned of his death in Innsbruck, Austria, in a stark one-line email. By a sheer coincidence, a book of mine was being launched at this conference on that fatal Sunday, at 7 pm, among writers and scholars from 25 countries. In my response to the launch, I mentioned Umanand as someone who had worked with me at the University of Fiji and established the UPSM ; and his sedulous attempt to be a writer. I talked about Uma’s generosity as a benefactor of UniFiji and recalled that he had paid $1000 for a book of mine launched in Adelaide in the presence of Don Dunstan. What makes it poignant is the fact that there I was mentioning him ;here he had been dead for several hours. The person who launched my little book , Professor Wolfgang Zach, a renowned scholar of English at the European Centre for the Study of Literatures in English, had visited Fiji five years ago and was most impressed by the garden surrounding the elegant UPSM building. Innsbruck is a garden city between the two ranges of snow-capped Alps. It was established by the Romans around 1500BC. Uma had created this garden from seedlings from many parts of Fiji. Once, on a rainy evening on our way from Suva, I recall , he spotted a rare plant in the wet vegetation by the roadside; he stopped the car and entered the bush and uprooted a seedling to plant in the UPSM garden. It had become a colorful garden like the students from many parts of Fiji studying at this School of Medicine. On that July Sunday evening in Innsbruck one was remembering a friend of Fiji unaware that he had died miles away in another hemisphere. The news of his death reached me on Tuesday at noon : shock, grief and incredulity. And the intimations of mortality of one binding truth of life : that the grim and universal reaper can touch anyone, at any time, in any place, under any circumstance. Death , like exile, leaves its crippling sorrow in the living. So often one has survived by some mysterious grace or someone else’s goodness or care. I’d left Canberra on July 4 for a lecture and reading tour of India and Europe. As was his habit, Uma rang me virtually every Sunday for a chat. On the Sunday before my departure ,he had had a long talk with me about the book ,his memoir, he was compiling about the UPSM in particular and medical education generally in Fiji. He used to call me every Sunday to tell me what chapter he was writing. Occasionally he would read a couple of pages full of what he termed his ‘honest truths’ about the place and the people he had encountered : ‘ the good, the bad , the ugly’ as he put it with cinematic flair. He had a phenomenal memory : it’s said that a good memory forgets the trivial but Uma remembered the details with the sharpness of Ganesha’s scribbling trunk by which he wrote the epic poem Mahabharat.. Nothing seemed trivial to the doctor with a scalpel. I’d once said to him that UPSM was’ the jewel in the crown ‘ of UniFiji : he was drafting a whole chapter on that cliché. I was always a bit flattered whenever he said I’d inspired his two books including The World of the Broken-Hearted , a volume of poems . I was happy he was one of the few doctors writing more than the illegible prescriptions for patients. Uma’s second book Mai Fiji is a moving narrative of growing up in Labasa, about his poverty-laden childhood and youth. It’s a raw portrait of a his parents, especially his father, Mr Nanku, a fascinating character with wit which the son had inherited in no small measure. A segment of the autobiography is published in Stolen Worlds edited by Kavita Nandan and published in 2005, commemorating the 125 anniversary of the arrival of the first Indian migrants to Fiji. It’s a powerful and passionate piece of writing . He attended Kavita’s wedding in Canberra and wrote a poem celebrating the occasion as if he was writing about his own daughter. Kavita had invited him to tell his story –perhaps this was his way of showing his appreciation to a young editor. Umanand was essentially a romantic by nature : he was born in a village in Vanualevu but like many of his generation, he dreamed of old Bombay films of yester years. He knew fragments of many filmy songs on which many of us had grown. Often he attempted to sing these but fortunately for his dinner guests he couldn’t remember the full songs. Sometimes, on formal occasions, he dressed as a Bombay actor, in white and white, with a resplendently embroidered silk scarf, dyed hair and white shoes. I used to tease him : Uma never trust a man who dyes his hair ! I first met Umanand at an overcrowded hall in Auckland where I’d gone to attend a wedding in the family. Uma arrived with his young son Kalpi—he seldom needed an invitation. We met and travelled together to my younger brother’s home in Hamilton near that serene and sacred river ,the Waikato. Walking in the evenings on the tree-lined bank of the river, we became friends and he stayed with us for a few days. Then he left to visit people from Fiji in other parts of the North island—he seems to know most Fiji families who had migrated to New Zealand after the colonel’s betrayal. He was, like many ,deeply affected and shared the disillusion and despair of many citizens of Fiji who had become homeless in their homeland. He’d, it seemed, a relative in every town or city. People, he’d say, are related to me. Uma at the time of the first two coups in 1987 was living in Adelaide and had a thriving medical practice, possibly the most successful Fiji doctor in Australasia. Like many he was profoundly angered and outraged by the terrible betrayal and he penned his thoughts without fear or favour. He didn’t mince his words and was brutally honest in his evaluation of some of the characters in the first coup in Fiji. He joined the Movement for Democracy for Fiji with Don Dunstan and others. When Dr Timoci Bavadra visited Australia with some of his colleagues during 1987, Uma funded their expenses and several stayed in his motel in Salisbury for days. He was most generous and caring ; he understood the enormous tragedy of a small but very special country, so ruthlessly damaged by trusted compatriots --and the complicity of many in this crime of the century for the country of his birth. It was this depth of understanding of the grief of others and the wounds inflicted on a defenseless people by soldiers that made him return to Fiji to start an institution that is designed to heal the sick. I’d never met Sitiveni Rabuka face to face until one fine day Umanand walked with him into my office at UniFiji. I was meeting Rabuka after more than 21 years. I gave him a couple of my books .Two days later Rabuka wrote a piece in the Fiji Times seeking forgiveness from the hurt people of Fiji—a few lines of a poem had affected the colonel and he expressed his apology without reservation. Uma had achieved a kind of reconciliation—healing seemed natural to him and to his nature and he felt I needed to meet the chastened , Christian colonel. Or perhaps he understood human nature better than me. But the highlight of his career was when Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama came and opened the Umanand Prasad School of Medicine (UPSM) . Many of his friends from Adelaide and Fiji were there to witness the occasion and share in his rare achievement. Next year the university got its grant almost doubled. It’s an occasion I regret missing but I had left a written message on the act of healing to be read by a mutual friend. Umanand had gone to Darwin when the city was devastated by Cyclone Tracy at Christmas in 1974 : as if with a divine fury reserved for a great scientist like Charles Darwin. After his volunteer service , he moved to Adelaide, thanks to Don Dunstan, a Fiji-born visionary in South Australia. Don, the dynamic labor premier, and Uma became friends and the boy who sold vegetables in Labasa market on muddy sacks soon became a multi-millionaire from the haggling art of buying and selling fresh vegetables learnt in the Labasa market on Saturdays. More importantly it was sheer hard work, discipline and his ability to cook a meal for a 100 people in a couple of hours. He always fed his guests with a sense of plenty—a very Fijian quality. There are of course many Fijian multi-millionaires in Fiji and outside with some Fiji associations but few have had his sense of service or affection for their mother-country. The million dollars he donated to UniFiji to set up UPSM is but one example. Just as he had educated all his children, mainly daughters, he wanted the same opportunity for the many in Fiji, whether they were from villages or koros, towns or cities. That is why the motto of UPSM was deliberately Path to Service, not Path to Success. There’s a small but significant difference in these two attitudes. He used to tell me that when he was a medical student in India, on a $20 per month scholarship from the ICCR, he spent a lot of his time with iconic figures like Vinoba Bhave and Jay Prakash Narayan: both men inspired millions in India. I think he was miraculously touched by such selfless service and it became part of his personality, not wholly but substantially. Dr Umanand Prasad ,the Foundation Honorary Dean of UPSM, was planning to be in Fiji in December to honour and celebrate the first doctors graduating from the institution that he had created in an act of visionary generosity. Many individuals had helped him , including the two current Vice-Chancellors of USP and FNU. I, too, had a small role but, above all, his very special friend Dr Uma Dutt Sharma of Nadi who closed his thriving dental practice in Namaka to assist his college friend in his pioneering work. But now my friend the Vuniwai from Vanua Levu is gone, I can only remember the lines of an ancient poem in translation: The kite is death, that comes suddenly Out of the blue to conclude the battle. Therefore be on guard and always ready For human life is shaky, fragile, mortal. And you, my friend, fortify soul’s castle With good deeds, since there’s no telling when Death will attack you : morning, evening, noon. Next year the late Dr Prasad was planning to build a Health Centre and residences for students, close to Dr Bavadra’s village ,Viseisei. His another major interest was to inspire a few prominent academics’ interest in the Girmit Centre in Lautoka as a worthy memorial to the generation of his grandparents who had come from the humble villages of UP. He understood their grief and glory ,their sacrifice and gifts to the future of Fiji. Dr Umanand Prasad will be missed by many in Fiji, Australia and India: The three places that so deeply shaped him as a person , friend and family man. He was indeed a man of many parts: his death leaves a deep void in the lives of those who knew him, in the world of the broken-hearted. He wrote a poem once on daanvir Karna, a character in the Mahabharat : the most gifted and gift-giving warrior of the epic. UPSM is Uma’s healing gift to Fiji. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted on: Fri, 30 Aug 2013 04:53:37 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015