Ghasi Verma says giving is no hardship. “I have food every morning, noon and night. I have heat. What do you want more than that?”

The Providence Journal / Gretchen Ertl

SOUTH KINGSTOWN — There is no one season of giving for this retired university professor.

He gives what he has 12 months a year, every year.

“I have enough. I have a car, I have a home,” says Ghasi R. Verma, a University of Rhode Island mathematics professor emeritus, sitting in his snug Tyler Hall office. “I have nice clothes. Maybe not nice to you,” he says smiling, chin down, eyes inspecting his warm sweater and corduroy pants, a winter parka on his office chair.

“I have food every morning, noon and night. I have heat. What do you want more than that?”

He puts his hands up, shrugs his shoulders slightly. He doesn’t yearn for more; he asks that his family bypass giving him gifts, contributing instead to charitable causes.

Verma’s own charitable works — including the construction of more than 20 hostels for girls studying in Indian schools — have been captured in five volumes of Hindi poetry and prose. One of those was written for his 75th birthday, five years ago, and partially translated into English. It contains contributions from scientists and doctors, and one young author who was once his neighbor — Jhumpa Lahiri, winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Interpreter of Maladies, a collection of short stories. She called Verma and his wife her extended family, “extremely gentle and affectionate people.”

A professor describes Verma in the book as “magnanimous,” with “limitless feelings of selflessness, dedication and sympathetic understanding of the needs of others.” Another puts it more simply, calling him “the rarest of souls.”

VERMA’S STORY, as he tells it, started when he was visiting in his native state of Rajasthan, India, in 1980. It was a day of intense heat, “maybe 110, 115 degrees.” He was at a shop with a friend when he saw four girls holding their books, wilting, waiting for a bus to take them to their village.

It would be a long trip for them, he knew, with many stops before they reached home. He turned to his friend and wondered aloud about the possibility of housing for them, closer to school — a reality, he said, for boys.

But for girls, it’s more of a challenge, Verma said. They have to have secure housing. They can’t board with families like the boys.

Verma’s friend suggested that he raise some money to build such housing.

So Verma traveled around Rajasthan, India’s largest state, which borders Pakistan in the country’s northwest. He sought donations, challenging one village to compete with the next, doing the same in the cities. He added his own funds, too.

“The next year, it was completed,” he says. “Any girl can stay.”

So then, he decided, another hostel would be good.

Each summer, it was the same. Build one, seek funds for another.

More than 20 hostels have followed the first, Verma said, constructed with donations from others and from his own savings and stock market earnings.

“You can only wear one sweater at a time, one coat,” he says. “If you eat three pieces of bread, that’s not good for you. One is enough.”

IT’S QUIET AT URI’s Kingston campus, students deep into final exams or departed for semester break.

On the third floor of Tyler Hall sits Verma, putting in office hours though he retired seven years ago.

“It keeps me punctual,” he said of his daily trip to campus. He sticks to a schedule of before-  and after-lunch hours, reading and visiting with students and faculty. Today, he is reading a science textbook.

“I never studied chemistry or physics,” he says. “It is very interesting.”

Piled up on his desk are books, some with his photo on the cover. He thumbs through the books, pointing out photographs of his family; his wife, Rukmini; of Verma with Indian officials.

“It’s all right,” he responds to a question about how he feels reading page after page written about him. “Too much is not good.”

It’s not why he has spent these many years raising money, and spending his own, to build housing for girls in his native land. He does so because he remembers his early days in India, struggling, earning scholarships to pay for his education.

Verma, who taught at URI from 1964 to 2000, calls himself “a happy guy. I have three sons, they are handsome boys,” and six grandchildren.

When he discussed with the family his idea of sharing what he has to support the education of girls in his homeland, “they all agreed they didn’t need my money.”

“HE IS QUITE revered in India as a mathematician and as a philanthropist,” notes Barbara Kaskosz, a fellow URI math professor who has known him for 25 years — though she just found out the extent of his charitable work.

“I knew he made contributions to the Indian educational system because he always collected textbooks to send to India, but the extent of his contributions I just learned about very, very recently.”

Kaskosz said she recently casually asked him how he was doing. His response, she recalled, was that he felt like a rich man because he has been able to help others.

“He told me he managed to save enough money to make contributions to the Indian educational system.”

And then, she recalled, when he said it was his way of paying back his motherland, “I almost cried.”

Kaskosz is from Poland, and she said Verma’s loyalty to his own homeland reminded her of her birthplace.

“I found it very moving.”

And, she said, she found it fascinating that the elderly professor didn’t send a contribution once to India, but many times, and intends to keep on sharing.

“Oh yes, of course,” Verma says.

THOUGH VERMA SPENDS four months each year in India, he and his wife live in South Kingstown the remainder of the time.

“It is the nicest place. We are lucky we chose the right place to live. Most of the storms go that way,” he said, pointing north.

As a boy growing up with two brothers, their father a farmer, Verma said, “I suffered a lot.” Scholarships took him to college and beyond. He came to the United States, he said, to pursue post-doctoral work at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. Before coming to the University of Rhode Island, he taught for two years at Fordham.

Ask Verma his age, and he responds as a mathematician would: “I am 80 years old, 4 months and 10 days.”

Verma said he doesn’t consider his contributions to be a sacrifice.

“What’s a sacrifice? If I have [just one] piece of bread and break off a piece to share, that’s a sacrifice.

“I have enough.”

Enough to take him back to his homeland each year, where he visits the villages, visits the towns, telling of his intention to contribute to the good of the girls, and asking, can you do the same?

“It is not only my contributions,” he said, that get these buildings constructed. Contributions come in from others, perhaps due to his words of motivation and the example he sets.

“People get encouragement from that,” he said.

That gives him a lot of satisfaction.

Verma smiles: “I enjoy every second of my life.”

afleming@projo.com