HOUSTON: An Indian-American neurosurgeon has donated his personal fortune -- some $20 million -- to build a hospital, health clinic and other facilities in his native village in Kerala.

Dr Kumar Bahuleyan, born in a poor dalit family in Chemmanakary, moved to the US where he made millions as a neurosurgeon and lived a lavish life, owning a Rolls-Royce, five Mercedes-Benz cars and an airplane.

But the 81-year-old's rags to riches story took another turn in the twilight of his life when he decided to donate his personal fortune to establish a neurosurgery hospital, a health clinic and a spa resort in his native Indian village.

"I was born with nothing; I was educated by the people of that village, and this is what I owe to them," Bahuleyan said recently in Buffalo, where he has lived since 1973.

"I'm in a state of nirvana, eternal nirvana," he said. "I have nothing else to achieve in life. This was my goal, to help my people. I can die any time, as a happy man."

Those who know him are moved by Bahuleyan's spirit and energy.

About 20 to 25 years ago, when he was earning a fortune as a neurosurgeon, Bahuleyan returned to Chemmanakary and was struck by how little it had changed.

"Not a road, no school, no water supply, no sanitary facilities," he said. "I looked in the (people's) faces and saw the same people living in the same miserable conditions I had grown up with."

He is still haunted, he says, by the cries from his dying brothers and sister in the 1930s. The three younger siblings, all under 8 years old, died of roundworm infestation after drinking polluted water, he said.

"I was the oldest, feeling very helpless, listening to the screams of these dying children, one by one," Bahuleyan recalls.

As an "untouchable," Bahuleyan had to take a roundabout route to school because he wasn't allowed to pass within a few hundred yards of the Hindu temple.

Bahuleyan attended a lower-caste school and reached the top level at age 12 or 13. He went to high school, then a premedical school before attending medical college in Madras.

The local government in Kerala sent him to the United Kingdom for neurosurgical training in Edinburgh, Scotland, where he spent six years before returning home. But he couldn't land a job in his speciality.

"They didn't know what to do with me," he said. "Many people didn't know what neurosurgery was."

So Bahuleyan went to Kingston, Ontario, then Albany Medical College, before coming to Buffalo.
      
During his 26-year career, Bahuleyan was in private practice and served as a clinical associate professor in neurosurgery at the University at Buffalo before retiring in 1999. He made millions of dollars and set up the Bahuleyan Charitable Foundation, which built a clinic in India for young children and pregnant women in 1993, while also installing toilets, roads and a water supply for the villagers.

Bahuleyan's foundation built the Indo-American Hospital Brain and Spine Centre in 1996, starting with 80 beds.
      
To fund the efforts, the foundation in 2004 opened the Kalathil Health Resorts, offering luxury rooms, health spas and exercise rooms.

Bahuleyan's next brainstorm brought him back to Buffalo, where he came up with the idea for the new East India Seven Seas Sailing Co., to be located in the southwestern corner of India near the Arabian Sea.

Early this summer, he spent 50 hours a week preparing at Zimmermann's Seven Seas Sailing School, located on the Buffalo ship canal. Four sailboats are being shipped to India next month.

The long-range plan calls for the school to accept applications from couples willing to spend a few weeks in India, to volunteer in Bahuleyan's hospital and to teach sailing, as part of the "Sailors Who Heal" programme.
     
Bahuleyan and his pathologist wife Indira Kartha now spend half the year here and the other half in India, where Bahuleyan oversees his foundation, gets around on a bicycle and still does almost daily surgery.
    
"My dream is to see this all running without my help, so I can pass away peacefully, knowing that I created something and gave something back," he said. "That would justify my existence."
     
For Bahuleyan, life has come full circle, from rags in India, to the lifestyles of the rich and famous in America and back to his village, where he traded his Mercedes for a bicycle.