A young Laurie Baker came to India during the World War II en route to England from China where he was working as a member of a surgical team. If you are wondering what an architect was doing in a surgical team, Baker had trained himself as a nurse so that he could do of some service during the war.While in India, he met Mahatma Gandhi and that meeting changed his life altogether. He narrated the incident clearly to me when I met him first 20 years ago. "When I met Gandhiji, the first thing he noticed was my shoes. He was fascinated by them. Whenever we met after that, he would ask me, 'Baker, please take off your shoes, I want to show them to these people.'
He was a great man with a great sense of humour and deep-seated caring for ordinary people.'
Baker then told me about the shoes that caught the attention of Gandhiji. "China was cut off from the test of the world and essential raw materials were difficult to come by. So, they dreamt up the idea of creating shoes from pieces of waste cloth. The cloth was dipped in boiling rice water and then pasted on a plank, one layer on top of another till it became thick enough for use."
Gandhiji asked him to stay back in India and take care of the leprosy patients. Baker not only took care of them but also redesigned their sanatorium.
As he worked with the leprosy patients, he met a petite doctor from Kottayam in Kerala, Elizabeth Chandy. He told me with a twinkle in his eyes, "I wooed and won her."
Then, he took her on a honeymoon top the Himalayas but it turned out to be anything but a honeymoon. Both the husband and wife instead of wandering around started treating the leprosy patients. The place was Pithorgarh, now in Uttaranchal.
Both got so involved in their work that they stayed on in Pithorgarh for the next 20 years! Baker not only took care of the leprosy patients but also built hospitals for them.
From Pithorgarh, the couple moved to Peerumedu in Idukki district in Kerala and worked for the marginalised leprosy patents there.
Finally in 1970, they decided to settle down in Thiruvananthapuram. The rest is history, as the cliché goes.
What appealed to me about Laurie Baker was his sense of humour and pleasant demeanour. There would be no dull moment when he talked, and you would come out of his house smiling, happy to have met such a wonderful person.
When I met him in 1995, he said with a naughty smile, “I have grown old. See my stoop. See my skin."
When he was awarded the Order of the British Empire by the Queen of England, his first reaction was a loud laughter and then the comment, “I thought I was working for the demolition of the British Empire."
Anybody who has met Laurie Baker at least once will never forget him or his great sense of humour. Kerala will always remember this Britisher for showing them their roots!
Caption: An activity hall designed by Baker
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