Meena Beliappa was a rare kind of scholar, who was also a recluse and a saint! Very few people knew Meena when she lived; fewer will remember her after her death. Except those who she constantly worked to serve, and they were always the poor and the dispossessed. During the Seventies and Eighties, she was a name in the field of Indo-Anglian studies and some of her papers in the area were standard reference in the field. Her book on Anita Desai was published by the Writers' Bookshop, Calcutta in 1971 and was digitized by Google Books in 2006. Earlier, in 1966, she had edited, with Rajeev Taranath, a book of Nissim Ezekiel's poetry. Despite these early achievements, in 1986, when she agreed to join IIT Kanpur as Assistant Professor in English after considerable persuasion by Dr. S.K. Aithal and myself, she had been working as an ad hoc instructor at JNU at a pathetic salary of Rs. 800/-. But she was quite content. In fact when she joined IITK and received her first salary, she exclaimed "What do I do with so much money?" I have a strong suspicion about what she did with the money! She lived frugally, spending hardly anything on herself. She was always looking out for people, especially poor students, to help. At work, her preference was always for the Slow Paced class of English and the students adored her. Students she had helped kept coming back to see her; few others did. She had a short tenure at IITK and never saved much. Whatever she did, she spent on poor kids and students. A native of the beautiful hills of Coorg in Karnataka, where she had inherited some property, she decided, after the death of her dear mother, to give away everything and settle down in Nankari, so far from the beautify environs where she had spent her childhood and youth, and so different. Her only companions here were the poor children she taught and their families. They were her family too and she was always happy when with them. Be at peace, Meena. You will always be in the hearts and memories of some of us, though we could never live up to your standards as long as you lived!
