>Wendy Scarfe is the author of Hunger Town, (2014, longlisted for the Kibble Award), and The Day They Shot Edward, (2018) and I featured her in Meet an Aussie Author in 2015, but until I read this updated edition of A Mouthful of Petals: Three Years in an Indian Village, I had not really grasped what a remarkable woman she is. I wonder, when the good folk of Warrnambool encounter her in the shops, do they realise who she is?

My image of Wendy is based on an elegant publicity portrait, so it's difficult for me to imagine her living in the squalor of an Indian village in the 1960s. But that's what she and her husband Allan did, for three years, and A Mouthful of Petals is the story of their sojourn.

So the book is not your usual travel book, but like the best of travel books it takes the reader into a different world. This is a world in marked contrast to the images we see of an increasingly prosperous India today: Britannica tells me that with its well-developed infrastructure and diversified industrial base, India has made astonishing progress since independence. It's now one of the wealthiest countries in the world by some reckonings; and it's home to three of the biggest and most cosmopolitan cities in the world, (Mumbai, Kolkata, and Delhi). From its massive population it draws on a huge pool of scientific and engineering personnel to be among the world's preeminent hi-tech centres of IT and software; and it's a world leader in cultural exports of music, literature, and cinema. But the country's population is still mostly rural, and India's rapid agricultural expansion still depends on a work force still living in poverty. Literacy is still a long way from being universal and there is a depressing gender disparity too.

A Mouthful of Petals takes us into that world of grinding poverty and ignorance. Allan and Wendy put their social justices principles into practice in the village of Sokhodeora in Bihar in 1960, travelling there to set up an experimental rural school, develop the curriculum, and organise the infrastructure. But they ended up doing much more than that: running night classes; offering family planning advice and resources; doing rescue feeding for starving children; adding shark-liver oil to the kindergarten daily milk supply to cure malnutrition sores; installing lavatories; dealing with exasperating caste issues; and in a village where even matches are a luxury, even setting up the village radio.

'Wendy sister, Allan brother, what can you do about it if the man on the radio tells lies?'

'What do you mean?' we asked in some astonishment.

'He said it was going to rain today but it hasn't rained at all.'

So there was no doubt of the radio being educational. (p.98)

They adopt a little girl called Vidya and suffer guilt when she thrives amid other babies barely clinging to life. And they are not alone in feeling intense frustration when ignorance makes the situation even worse than it needs to be...

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2020/09/18/a-mouthful-of-petals-three-years-in-an-india... ( )