A life transformed
Former actress devotes herself to India's forlorn
By Cassie Biggs
Associated Press, July 4, 2007
http://tinyurl.com/2fowan
RISHIKESH, India -- Maggie O'Hara may have left the false eyelashes
and spike heels behind when she ditched Hollywood for the banks of
India's sacred Ganges River, but the fiftysomething still knows how to
command an audience.
Up the winding mountain path, at the home she built for disadvantaged
children in this north Indian town, a crowd of admirers is gathering,
offering cash, checks and even a white sheepskin rug.
Prabhavati Dwabha, as she is now known, drapes it dramatically over
her chest, and laughs.
It's the recognition the Colorado native dreamed of as she struggled
to make it in Hollywood in the 1970s, taking roles most other
actresses avoided -- the bad girls, lesbians and prostitutes.
But though she still loves a bit of drama in her life, the ego has
gone -- shed on a transformational journey that ended here, in the
Himalayan foothills, where for 14 years she has fought to improve
women and children's lives.
With its Hindu temples, yoga ashrams and morning chanting, Rishikesh
couldn't be farther from the cutthroat world of Hollywood and the Palm
Springs, Calif., party where Dwabha's spiritual awakening began.
Ramana's Garden, tucked into the side of the mountain and overlooking
the green-glass Ganges, is home and school for about 200 children from
the lowest rungs of Indian society: the untouchables, the low-castes,
the children of migrant workers from across India, neighboring
Bangladesh and Nepal, and girls.
Many children are refugees
Half of the 60 children who board at the school are from Nepal,
refugees of a decade-long communist insurgency that drove thousands of
villagers into northern India. Many of the girls were rescued from
brothels, the boys from being forcibly conscripted into the
guerrillas' army, says Dwabha, a statuesque woman who participated in
many of the rescues.
Her refusal to submit to Hollywood's notorious casting couch cost her
an acting career. In India, her stand against corruption, prostitution
and discrimination has nearly cost her her life.
In between bites of a beetroot pesto pasta, Dwabha says that eight
years ago a mob armed with sticks turned up at the school and drove
them off the land -- prized by timber merchants for its centuries-old
trees, she says.
"I really thought with integrity, with honesty we could take on
negative elements like liquor mafia, timber mafia, prostitution," she
says. "I've understood you can't. You won't win, they're a thousand
times bigger than we are. Fighting just made me lose everything,
nearly my life."
So she did the next best thing: She rebuilt her school about 4 miles
down the mountain, and added an organic cafe that draws Western
spiritual tourists from nearby Laxmanjhula.
"If the kids are at our school, they're learning English, they're
learning vocational skills, they're getting fed and clothed and
receiving medical care.
"Their parents are less likely to pull them out and either send them
to work or sell them to a brothel or into marriage. It makes a
critical difference and ensures the children can have a livelihood,"
she says.
But a new battle is looming. She lost half her land when a survey map
was redrawn, and now a mountain retreat is under threat from the
timber merchants.
She is touring the U.S., Europe and Asia, where she hopes to raise
some of the $35,000 needed to build an addition to Ramana's Gardens --
where already the kids are sleeping three to a bed.
It's an unlikely transformation for someone who until her arrival in
India wanted nothing more than fame.
"But as hard as I tried to stay single-minded on acting, life was
pulling me in a different direction," she says.
The turning point came one morning in 1978 after an all-night
Hollywood party in Palm Springs. O'Hara, then 28, was facing an
ultimatum -- sleep with the producer for a part or forget about
working in Hollywood again -- when an argument over who would be the
most marketable spiritual guru of the time broke out.
'You're a beggar'
Dressed in spike heels and a string bikini, and clutching a margarita,
O'Hara was hoisted onto a table and commanded to read from one of the
gurus' books.
She recalls the words with absolute clarity: "You're a beggar. And you
know it. And you're always going to be a beggar until you find that
which was never given so can never be taken."
"I knew instinctively that he was right," she says.
"I mean, how much more of a beggar can you be: in a string bikini on a
table in front of 100 men who you want to beg for a part. And I
thought, 'I'm not going to do this. I can't.' So I got off that table,
left Palm Springs, left Hollywood and flew to India."
The desire to give back came some time later during a year spent
living in a cave in the mountains of Rishikesh, where she saw the
day-to-day hardships of the mountain tribes; children kept out of
school, sold into slavery, into marriages; women beaten by their husbands.
A medical clinic was first, then a school. Over the last 14 years,
Dwabha has helped 1,800 children get an education. Hundreds of women
have been trained in tailoring and in growing organic vegetables
bought by Ramana's Garden for the children's food and medicine.
"It's a small difference," she said, "but it's like a stone in a pond.
There will be ripples."
