LIFE LINES: Rina Agrawal

The girl who fell to her life

Rina Agrawal turned heads at a recent London party, I noticed. “I never forget a pretty face,” slavered a man old enough to be her Bollywood casting director, just out of earshot of his wife.

Her serenity is of a woman who has almost rowed across the river Styx and back. “Every day, we thought, she is going, going..,” remarked a friend.

Rina is an IVF (in vitro fertilisation) expert, a doctor who helps women who cannot conceive naturally to have a baby, claiming a 40 per cent success rate. A “consultant in reproductive medicine and assisted conception”, she was director from 1999 of the London Women’s Clinic at the Hallam Medical Centre until December, 2004 — which is when she was very nearly killed.

In Jordan for a medical conference, she and some colleagues were on their way to the ancient city of Petra when their “hired car skidded and tumbled 200ft down a ravine”. Eventually she was repatriated to London.

“It was quite a dreadful accident,” Rina, whose son is now 15, tells me. “I was in hospital for a year — I had 79 operations.”

She has resumed advising men and women — especially Asian women — on IVF. With minutes of starting a consultation, “I have to ask couples intimate questions, such as how often they make love”.

Asian couples plead with her to keep consultations “hush hush” — “ ‘please don’t let our families know, please don’t call this number, please don’t call that number, we want it to be very private.’ It’s a taboo.”

But change is on the way. Rina reveals that she has been approached discreetly even by single Asian women in their forties who may never had had a relationship. “They have suddenly heard it’s quite possible to have a child because donor insemination is now offered to single women — which wasn’t in the past. Ever since Madonna and Cherie Blair advertised having children at age 46 and 43 respectively, the concept of being an older mother came into vogue.”

Had she ever wondered whether she had been saved so she could give life?

She shakes her head: “I was always a spiritual person and it was my strong faith that pulled me through. I don’t think I am giving life. I have simply become a medium between a couple who wish to have a baby and the divine.”

NEW ROLE: Archie Panjabi

Sexy but not smutty

Once upon a time, a journey across the Black Waters to Bilayat was a momentous undertaking but not any more. Farhad Dadyburjor, who will edit a men’s magazine called FHM, whose India edition is being launched next month, flew into London last week with “India’s biggest supermodel”, apparently a blend of “Penelope Cruz and Sophia Loren”. Then in less time than it takes BA to return lost baggage, Farhad was gone, after the (unidentified) supermodel had been photographed in a studio by Rankin, a top UK photographer whose subjects have included Kate Moss and Heidi Klum.

There will be a massive Mumbai party on October 19 to promote FHM, which Farhad says will focus on the underplayed but booming business of men’s fashion, the influence of Bollywood stars and such designers as Rohit Bal, Manish Malhotra, Narendra Kumar and Rajesh Pratap Singh.

The cover picture, however, he adds reassuringly, will always be a girl — “either a Bollywood actress or a model”.

“The pictures will be sexy but not smutty,” he promises, disclosing he thinks he will hit sales of 95,000.

The plan is for the FHM editions in the UK and in India to swap some material.

Since the British believe that “fair exchange is no robbery”, I suggest FHM UK imports pictures of the Sen sisters, Riya and Raima, and in return sends FHM India photographs of the British Indian actress Archie Panjabi — the Evening Standard magazine recently did a fetching fashion shoot with Archie, whose latest film, A Mighty Heart, in which she stars opposite Angelina Jolie, has just opened in Britain.

YESTERDAY ONCE MORE: Chandran Tharoor (centre) at the India Club in 1949

Strand landmark

The Tharoor sisters, Smita and Shobha, together with their distinguished author brother, Shashi, are congregating at the India Club at 143 Strand on October 5 to present three “historic photographs” to the establishment’s founders.

Their late father, Chandran Tharoor, had been a journalist who had used the India Club, conveniently located opposite the Indian High Commission in Aldwych, as a base while working for the Amrita Bazar Patrika of Calcutta.

“He was in London from 1949 and moved back to India in 1959 to head the Statesman office in Bombay,” says Smita.

Tharoor then transferred to Calcutta, where he lived from 1969-80. “He also moved from journalism to become the advertisement director of The Statesman in Calcutta — which was a shame as we lost a good writer,” adds his daughter.

Tharoor died in 1993, aged only 63.

Smita recalls: “My siblings and I grew up on the stories of 1950s’ London and his life as a young bachelor. V.K. Krishna Menon was the name behind the India Club during its founding but it was people like my father, then aged 19, and other Indian journalists who soon made it a social haven.”

“He wrote a fiercely satirical epic poem in traditional Kerala style commenting on his life, experiences and opinions of London and Londoners, which he performed at the India Club to a traditional Kerala dance,” says Smita. “Some months ago, I was having lunch at the India Club, looking at the pictures on the wall, feeling the broken seats and chipped walls and remembering my father’s stories. I thought it would be a shame if this place died so the idea of celebrating the Indian journalists of the 1950s and raising the profile of the India Club came into my head.”

The India Club’s more claim to fame, I can confirm, was its stuffed paratha (though my friend, Bikash Sinha, swore by its bhuna lamb). Realising my poverty, Joseph, who was more of an institution than long time resident waiter, invariably waived the extra charge he levied on others for the lime pickle. Joseph briefed me on foreign affairs (“the High Commissioner was discussing with the foreign minister — they had masala dosa”) and family matters (“your brother was here yesterday”).

Caught ’n’ bowled: The Mavericks lap dancing bar

On the rocks

The Bank of England has been forced to bail out Britain’s fifth largest lender, Northern Rock, after its 1.5m customers queued to pull their savings out.

In marked contrast, when the Pakistani-founded Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) was closed down in 1991, the Bank of England did not care two hoots (or even one) what happened to its thousands of entirely innocent Pakistani and Indian small business customers. BCCI’s main drawback was that it boasted the best cricket team in the City of London.

Tittle tattle

Spare a thought not for Rahul Dravid but the poor (poorer certainly by a £1,000 fine) England one-day skipper Paul Collingwood, “ a 31-year-old married father of one” as the British media mercilessly pointed out, who has been “caught” in the Mavericks lap dancing bar in Cape Town. In comparison, being caught at slip, gully, behind, mid-wicket, mid-off etc is as far as our virtuous Rahul would go.