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CHAPTER 2
ECUMENICAL WITH THE TRUTH: SAINTLY TALL
TALES
As Mother Teresa grew older, truth became
more and more of a stranger to her. She inflated her
operations and activities manifold in her speeches to
journalists and supporters. Often her statements would have no
connection with reality whatsoever. Many times she had been
captured on television while telling very tall tales about her
work. She prevaricated even in her Nobel prize acceptance
speech.
Journalists did not dare question anything
she said. Perhaps she herself believed what she said. If you
were surrounded by people who were constantly telling you if
said the earth was flat then it had to be flat, then your
sense of perspective would get distorted. That happened to
Mother, plus she consciously tried to oversell herself in
order to propagate her church and her twin causes of
abolishing abortion and artificial contraception from the
world.
She told many what some people call 'white
lies'. These are harmless lies but not becoming of her stature
and piety. Tracey Leonard, the Catholic nurse who did long
stints as a volunteer in Calcutta, describes an incident in
her book where Mother Teresa met her mother in Australia even
before she had the chance of meeting the nun in Calcutta (no
doubt because Mother was hardly ever in her eponymous city):
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She [my mother] met Mother Teresa and
told her I was working in Calcutta. Mother nodded and
said, 'Oh yes, I know her.' It certainly made my mother
feel better even if it wasn't the truth. Even living
saints tell the occasional white lie!1
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This could be a statement from a desperate
petty politician, eager to make an impression. Mother Teresa
was always keen to make an impression on journalists and
backers. She was not so bothered about the poor, especially in
India.
John Unger, one-time president of the West
Virginia International Trade Development Council worked as a
volunteer in Calcutta in 1990. One day Unger accompanied
Teresa to a place where a woman with a baby approached the nun
and said, 'Mother, in my village there is dying and disease.
Can you help?' Mother Teresa threw up her arms and said she
could not help - she was only one person. Missionaries of
Charity constantly said that to the poor who approached them.
But because this was said in the presence of an influential
Westerner, Mother must have got stressed. Obviously her
behaviour was not in keeping with the image, she realised. So
she later told Unger that she prayed about the incident all
night. Unger was thoroughly impressed.2
Who knows if she really did pray through the
humid Calcutta night. Even if she did, perhaps she could have
used her time better if she thought of helping the woman and
the villagers in some small way - if she really cared about
them. But she was really more concerned with keeping up
appearances.
Mother told many Biblical type tales about
herself throughout her life. These were told again and again,
hundreds if not thousands of times. The same story would be
retold as happening 'a few days' or 'a few weeks' back to a
new audience. Particularly vivid was the story about the woman
who was found in the gutters with worms eating everywhere into
her flesh except her face; Mother and her Sisters had to
individually extract the worms. The woman died with these
words on her lips, 'I've lived like an animal, but I'm dying
like an angel.' It is possible the story was made up, as
angels do not have a divine connotation for Hindu women. Then
there is the parable of Mother desperately seeking funds for a
house in London then suddenly opening a purse and finding the
exact amount! In her Nobel speech she told the tale of 'about
fourteen professors from United States from different
universities' visiting her in Calcutta and one of them asking
her, 'Are you married?' Unlikely an American professor would
ask the world's most famous nun such a question. The object of
the quoting the question - true or not - was to give a spiel
about her own holiness, then finish off with a call to Norway
to outlaw abortion.
Only one parabolic tale has been contradicted
- by Mother herself. Writes Navin Chawla, one of her
authorised biographers:
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Once, remembering her Patna days, I
remembered a story I had read about her very first
surgical case on a Calcutta street. According to this
account, she had found a man with a gangrenous thumb
that needed immediate amputation. Thereupon she said a
prayer, took out a pair of scissors and cut it off. The
patient promptly fainted, falling in one direction,
while Mother Teresa fainted in the other. When I
delivered the punch line, Mother Teresa bent double with
laughter. 'A made-up story,' she said, but thoroughly
enjoyed the joke.3 |
It is likely she would not have contradicted
the story had it not portrayed her in less than heroic light.
These are however relatively innocent,
harmless lies, whether told by or about her.
But she herself was the source of serious and
continuous misinformation. No doubt the media exaggerated and
often invented tales about Mother Teresa, but most often it
originated from her. Let us take for instance her comment that
'on the ground floor of Shishu Bhavan [her orphanage in
Calcutta] there are cooking facilities to feed over a thousand
people daily.'4 That there are, but are the facilities used
for the purpose of a soup kitchen? They are not - although,
one would infer from her statement that she was serving a
thousand meals daily from Shishu Bhavan to the public.
I have spent days on end in front of Shishu
Bhavan with a video camera and I know what goes on there. The
soup kitchen at Shishu Bhavan feeds about 70 people a day, and
that too 5 days a week. The daily turn out is about 50 people
for lunch and 20 for dinner, but charity does not come easy
for the poor - they need to possess a 'food card' in order to
get their gruel. It has to be admitted however that the night
time kitchen is not that fussy about the food cards, and I
know of instances when even for lunch, the absence of the card
has been overlooked. Mother's soup kitchen runs on a far
stricter regime at Prem Daan, her other home in Calcutta. The
production of food cards is mandatory here, possibly because
Prem Daan sits in the middle of Dnarapara slum and there is
the likelihood of getting overwhelmed. Here the number of
beneficiaries is around 50 a day, 5 days a week, but only one
meal is served daily. I have the close-up of a food card
captured on video, with its days and corresponding boxes,
which are ticked off by the nuns.
Now, how does one obtain a food card? - The
process is shrouded in mystery, like most of the functions of
the Missionaries of Charity. New ones have not been issued for
some time. There was a vetting procedure involved at the time
of issue and I am told that they were given only to the
'poorest of the poor' - there is an element of truth in that.
However, the handful of Catholic families in Dnarapara, who
cannot be called 'poorest of the poor' by any stretch of the
imagination, have all got cards. They often do not use them.
It is to Mother Teresa of Calcutta's credit
that her soup kitchens feed three times as many people in New
York as they do in Calcutta.
Mother Teresa had not always been so subtle
and circuitous with her claims about the beneficiaries at her
soup kitchen. During the 1970s and early 1980s she used to
make forthright claims about the number of poor people she fed
daily in Calcutta - I am afraid I had no first hand knowledge
of the number she fed at the time, and I therefore endeavoured
to take her word for it; but I soon got confused - for she
sometimes would be feeding '9,000', next minute it would be
'4,000', then again it may change to '7,000'. Chronologically
these numbers do not correlate, as the three figures were
given round about the same time. It is also noteworthy that
her most modest claim, i.e., about 'facilities to cook for a
thousand people daily', was the most recent one, made in the
mid 1990s, when her activities came under increasing scrutiny.
Shortly after her Nobel, she told her friend
and biographer Kathryn Spink: 'In Calcutta alone we cook for
7,000 people everyday and if one day we do not cook they do
not eat.'5 This was a voracious claim - at the time the
Missionary of Charity kitchens cooked for at the most 500
people a day, and that included their vast army of nuns,
novices and Brothers, most of whom do not have any charitable
function. The '7000 people' story was part of a fairly lengthy
parable, similar to the one with 'loaves and fishes' of Jesus.
Mother retold it numerous times, in various parts of the
world, but never in Calcutta itself. It is possible that the
tale would be invoked as a 'miracle' during her beatification
process. In her own words, one version of the story ran as
follows:
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'We have witnessed God's tender care
for us in a thousand different ways. In Calcutta alone
we cook for 7,000 people daily. If one day we don't
cook, they don't eat. One Friday morning, the Sister in
charge of the kitchen came to me and said, 'Mother,
there is no food for Friday and Saturday. We should tell
the people that we have nothing to give them either
today or tomorrow.' I was shocked. I didn't know what to
tell her. But about 9 o'clock in the morning, the Indian
government for some unknown reason closed the public
schools. Then all the bread for the schoolchildren were
sent to us. Our children, as well as our seven thousand
needy ones, ate bread and even more bread for two days.
They had never eaten so much bread in their in their
lives. No one in Calcutta could find out why the schools
had been closed. But I knew. It was God's tender care. I
knew it was his tender loving care.'6
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During the course of a decade, roughly
between 1975-85, many a time did Mother Teresa recount the
story about the government miraculously sending her bread on
account of the schools closing; the body of the story remained
the same, but the opening line would change - 'In Calcuta we
feed 7,000 people daily' would sometimes become '4,000 people
daily', then change back to '7,000' again. Here is how, on one
occasion, she told the parable with a '4000' figure: 'We were
feeding 4000 people each day and these were people who simply
would not eat unless the Sisters fed them. But we had nothing.
Then, about 9.00 a.m. on Friday'...etc. - the rest about the
government schools shutting suddenly and the bread
miraculously coming to the Missionaries of Charity would now
follow.7
In a programme entitled Meet Mother Teresa,
recorded in 1982 for Scottish Television - the video has been
widely distributed in Catholic circles - she told Ian Gall,
'We cater for 7,000 people everyday but we never had to say
no...'
On one occasion the 'number of people that
would not eat unless we fed them' reached 9000: 'You must know
just in Calcutta we feed 9000 people daily.’8 This
claim caused a whiff of embarrassment in even the devoted José
Luis González-Balado, who quickly added, 'Mother Teresa is
among those who least worry about statistics. She has
repeatedly expressed that what matters is not how much work is
accomplished but how much love is put into the
work.'9
This was however not the end of the matter -
a few years later the same González-Balado edited a book of
Mother's sayings, wherein he recounts, in Mother's words, the
miracle of the bread and schools, thus: 'In Calcutta alone we
feed about ten thousand people every day. This means if one
day we do not cook ten thousand people will not eat. One day
the Sister in charge came to tell me...' etc.
Although the passage is quoted in Mother's
name, and although the book itself is called Mother Teresa, In
My Own Words I am prepared to give Mother the benefit of the
doubt; the 'ten thousand' was very likely an invention of
González-Balado, as Mother Teresa had not retold the parable
for a long time. But there could be little doubt Mother would
have approved of such liberties with numbers, as it was all
for the sake of Jesus. It is interesting that González-Balado,
who had earlier been embarrassed about the '9,000' claim, had
become emboldened with time to go a step further. I can see
why - the Teresa cult has come to realise that whatever
outlandish they say about Mother Teresa in the positive, and
whatever bizarre negatives they say about Calcutta, both would
be accepted as gospel truth by the world. And their main
justification (to themselves) in carrying on this game of
deceit is that they are not doing it for their own personal
gain, but for the propagation of their faith. They also
believe that if you repeat a lie thousands of times, it comes
to be regarded as the truth - in achieving this end they have
been successful.
I can see why Mother Teresa and her publicity
machinery were fond of the 'thousands' figure when it came to
feeding people - apart from the obvious and usual business of
inflating figures which became their stock in trade, a figure
of 200 or 300 would not have been Biblical enough. Mother's
stories are almost carbon copies of those in the Bible. In
John 6:9-13, Jesus feeds 5,000 men with loaves and fishes.
Luke (9:13-17) tells us a similar tale with Jesus feeding
5,000 men with five loaves and two fishes. Mark (8:9) tells us
a similar but different parable, and he gives us a figure of
4,000.
The variation in numbers fed as appear in the
Bible is due to the story being told by different apostles;
therefore a degree of variation is to be expected. Also the
same incident is not always described as far as I am aware.
It could be assumed that Mother Teresa
consciously postured as Jesus and therefore invented the
Biblical numbers. Very likely they were not co-incidentally
invented.
I do not think that Jesus would have been
immodest enough to tell self-aggrandising stories about
himself. But the most significant difference between Mother's
tales and those of the apostles is that hers were pure fantasy
(if one assumes, for the sake of those amongst readers who
believe in the literal meaning of the Bible, that the Biblical
happenings were real). During the 1970s and 80s, Mother
Teresa's soup kitchens in Calcutta fed not more than 150
people daily (six days a week); indeed, the total number of
people fed daily by the Missionaries of Charity kitchens in
that period was not more than 500 - this included her vast
number of nuns, novices, and Brothers, most of whom do not
have any charitable functions.
The figure '5,000' has a particular
fascination for Mother, no doubt because of its Biblical
connotation. She once said, 'Today there is a modern school in
that place [in Motijheel slum] with over 5000 children in
it.'10 This appears in a book published in 1986. Earlier, in
1969-70, she had told Malcolm Muggeridge, '...if we didn't
have our schools in the slums - they are nothing, they are
just little primary schools where we teach the children to
love the school and be clean and so on -- if we didn't have
these little schools, those children, those thousands of
children, would be left in the streets.'11
In 1969-70, Mother Teresa's primary schools
catered for not more that 200 (a generous overestimate) in
Calcutta - the figure is not much more today. Nonetheless, I
was prepared to overlook her 'thousands of children' as a
figure of speech - saints are allowed to get carried away,
like the rest of us. But '5000 children' was a calculated lie,
especially as the school in Motijheel has less than 100
pupils. I do not think that there is any school in the world
which caters to 5,000 children from a single site - Calcutta
is of course, extra worldly.
The largest school in India is Calcutta's
South Point - my own alma mater - which, with 11,000 (fee
paying) students, was at one time the largest school in the
world, but is run from six sites. The largest site at
Mandeville Gardens is seven storeys high and caters for 3,000
students - numerically speaking, it is far and away Calcutta's
largest school premises.
Biblical connotation or not, I do not think
it became a living saint to turn 100 into 'over 5,000'.
During the fortnight following Mother's
death, hordes of local and international journalists were
scouring Motijheel slum for stories and reminiscences, for
this was after all, the most famous slum in the world - the
one that launched Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Two journalists
from Ananda Bazaar Patrika spoke to Paltan Roy, a long term
resident of Motijheel. Roy was saddened at Mother's death, but
said, 'Back in the 1950s there were two schools here for a
while, but one of them soon closed down. I have heard that
Mother had done so much for the whole world, but our school
here has remained exactly the same - the same single storey
structure. Could Mother not have added another floor to
it?'12
Mother Teresa frequently said that her nuns
'pick[ed] up' people from the streets of Calcutta. If she said
it once she said it a thousand times. She said it in her
acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize: 'We have a home for the
dying in Calcutta, where we have picked up more than 36,000
people only from the streets of Calcutta, and out of that big
number more than 18,000 have died a beautiful death. They have
just gone home to God.' Mother's 'big number' was wrong, but
more importantly, her basic premise of 'picking up' people is
entirely false. If the situation demanded, Mother put it more
poignantly: 'Maybe if I had not picked up that one person
dying on the street, I would not have picked up the thousands.
We must think Ek, (Bengali for 'One'). I think Ek, Ek. One,
One...'13 On another occasion, she said, 'They
[Western volunteers] pick up all sorts of people for us, but
they do it with a great deal of love.'14 Perhaps
the major source of disappointment for volunteers as they
arrive to work with the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta -
even before they have had the chance to start working - is the
realisation that they would not be part of an angelic team
that would scour the streets of Calcutta gently scooping up
hordes of humanity as they go along. I know of instances when
very young volunteers, disregarding official advice, have
hired taxis and cruised along streets looking for people they
could befriend and bring along to Mother's homes.
The sad truth is, Mother Teresa's
organisation does not pick up people from the streets of
Calcutta - no, not beggars, not lepers, not destitutes, not
the poorest of the poor who she loved so much; they do not
even pick up the babies and children of these people. They do
possess the resources to remove destitutes from the streets,
but they do not utilise them.
I understand this strikes at the heart of the
world image of the Missionaries of Charity, for the abiding
image of the organisation is that of demure nuns wearing blue
bordered sarees stooping to pick up the helpless from the
streets of Calcutta.
It is not true that they do not provide a
'pick up' service at all for destitutes - they do in Rome,
where most evenings a couple of nuns set out in a van,
scouring the streets of Rome for destitutes and prostitutes.
They at first befriend these people and gain their trust,
before inviting them for a meal or a berth - usually on a
later date. Very noble act indeed - but does not happen in
Calcutta. Once when I was waiting in front of Mother Teresa's
large home in Rome's Piazza San Gregorio al Celio, an
ambulance arrived bringing in a man from a hospital - he had
nowhere to go after his medical treatment was over, so he gets
to stay in Mother Teresa's place; this would not happen in
Calcutta, as, unlike in Rome, no arrangement exists between
the Missionaries of Charity and hospitals in Calcutta.
Though the Romans' adulation for Mother
Teresa is somewhat over the top, I cannot blame them when they
say if Mother was doing so much in Rome, how much more must
she have been doing in Calcutta.
The Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta
possess a small fleet of 'ambulances', many of them donated by
businesses and individuals. These vehicles are painted to
appear as ambulances and are fitted with red beacons; they are
exempt from traffic regulations. But their main or sole
function is to provide a taxi service for the nuns. In my
time, I have never seen an 'ambulance' carry a patient or a
destitute. Indeed, most of them do not have the provision to
carry a stretcher, for the rails on the floor have been
removed. The seats on the sides have been replaced by
patterned sofas for the nuns to sit on. On 21 August 1996, I
saw an extraordinary sight, even by the standards of the
Missionaries of Charity - here was an ambulance, donated by
Federal Express (India), filled with chickens; they were being
brought to Mother House for the nuns' annual feast the
following day! I have a photograph of this bizarre spectacle.
Vegetarians amongst the readers will be happy to know that the
chickens had an unexpected extension of their lives, as the
feast was cancelled due to Mother taking seriously ill.
I am aware that many readers will not be
fully convinced about Mother Teresa's nuns not picking up
people from the streets of Calcutta; to say that they do not
provide this vital function which is central to their image is
tantamount to saying that the Pope (or Mother Teresa) is not a
Catholic.
I have therefore tape recorded numerous
telephone conversations with the Missionaries of Charity at
their world famous home for the dying at Kalighat in Calcutta.
These conversations were all recorded during 1995 and 96. Here
is one typical such conversation:-
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Me (pretending to be a concerned
citizen): Ota ki Mother Teresar home? ['Is that Mother
Teresa's home?' in Bengali]
Nun: Speak in English please,...or
Hindi.
Me: There is a man
[sometimes I changed it to a woman] lying in front of
Ashutosh College; he is seriously ill...He is probably
going to die. [Ashutosh College is fairly close to the
home - walking distance in fact]
Nun: Yes, we have beds. Ring the
Corporation ambulance - they'll bring him to us.
Me: Yes,...but...the line is busy. I've been
trying for some time.
Nun: They are always busy. You just
have to keep trying ringing 102.
Me: Can you not
send an ambulance? - he is not very far from you.
Nun: We don't send out ambulances. We
use the Corporation ambulances.
Me: Can you not
help him out this time?
Nun: Look, I have told you, WE DO NOT
HAVE AMBULANCES. (The voice becomes louder and the
temper slightly frayed. At this juncture the nun would
usually disconnect the phone.) |
There would be those amongst readers who have
visited Mother Teresa's home for the dying in Calcutta and
will remember the 'ambulance' that stands at attention at the
front door. Its appearance is like that of a proper emergency
vehicle rearing to go to attend to the sick and the dying. It
however lies dormant all day until 3.45 p.m., when it briefly
comes to life - it leaves the home for the dying for Mother
House with a bevy of nuns; it returns a few hours later with a
fresh batch of nuns. Its work for the day is then complete.
One of Mother Teresa's more high profile fans, the former
California governor Jerry Brown, was a regular traveller in
Mother's ambulances during his stint as a volunteer at the
home for dying: 'At 6 p.m. daily [previously the ambulance
used to leave later] I would get into an ambulance with half a
dozen nuns and some volunteers and ride back to the mother
house for a half hour prayer and the saying of the rosary.
Mother Teresa was always there [at Mother House].'
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Interested readers may like to procure a copy
of The Telegraph, one of the English dailies published from
Calcutta, which gives a list of the ambulance services in the
city, both free and fee-paying; the Missionaries of Charity do
not appear in the list.The more senior of the nuns do not put
up with the inconvenience of travelling with others in the
ambulance mini bus; they get a taxi. I have numerous
photographs of nuns in taxis. A brief taxi ride in Calcutta
costs at least Rs 80 - enough to buy 10 kilos of coarse grain
rice.
One may think that I am being petty about how
the nuns travel; does it really matter if they travel in
taxis? - after all they have precious few luxuries in life.
The sight of nuns in taxis would not have irked me at all, had
I not read over and over again about the 'poor and humble'
means of their travels; again and again, authors have produced
a Biblical picture like that of Jesus and his apostles
trudging through the holy land. The official party line on
transport is provided by Chawla in Mother's authorised
biography: 'The Sisters travel as the poor do. They usually
walk, or if the distance is far, use public
transport.'16
The misuse of ambulances is naturally an
issue in itself, for they could be used to relieve the city's
creaking public health service. Instead of demanding that
Calcutta Corporation provide her with ambulances, Mother
Teresa could bring her resources to the aid of the city's cash
strapped civic body. Also, I find it disturbing that vehicles
donated by individuals and businesses should be misused in
this way. I wonder if Dr Sinha, a Calcutta doctor who donated
an ambulance to Mother Teresa in the memory of his parents, is
aware that the vehicle has never been used for its intended
function.
The image of extreme austerity and 'humility'
of the nuns that have been portrayed by Mother and her
biographers is not quite true. It has been said that the nuns
do not know what the inside of a shop looks like, so unworldly
are they. Mother's nuns are not infrequently seen shopping in
Calcutta's New Market - a 19th century conglomeration of shops
covering 2 sq. km in the city centre. I have got photographs
of nuns buying basic cosmetics in New Market. On 27 December
1997, I photographed some nuns buying expensive Cashmere
shawls in a shop (no. G56) called Kashmiri Corner. In the last
few years nuns have been seen in the popular shopping areas of
Gariahat in south Calcutta, an area of the city they had never
ventured into in the past.
I have rung Mother Teresa's home for the
dying in Calcutta on numerous occasions, and, very often I
have been sternly told by the nun on the other side to speak
in English only, as I kept breaking into Bengali and Hindi. In
a recorded conversation on 7 October 1996, I started off in
Bengali, but very soon realised that there was complete
blankness on the other side, so said a sentence in Hindi, in
reply to which I was sternly told, 'Speak in English.'
It is a well known fact that majority of
Mother Teresa (of Calcutta)'s nuns cannot speak or even
understand rudiments of Bengali, the language of Calcutta;
some of them, being from Bihar, speak Hindi, the language of
north India, and that spoken by the majority of Indians. This
is because the vast majority of the nuns (around 70%) are
recruited from southern India, which has a large Christian
population, and who speak English as a parallel vernacular to
their native languages, which could one of Kannada, Tamil,
Telugu or Malayalam. I have never met a 'poorest of the poor'
in Calcutta who knows even a word of two of English. In India
at large, I am sure there a few Christian people in that
category who speak English - possibly in southern India or Goa
- but they must be very rare indeed; this is because the
relatively compact Christian communities in India have enough
resources to bolster their weakest members.
This begs the question - how do Mother
Teresa's nuns communicate with the poor in Calcutta? - They do
not. They do not need to, as they do not go out into the
streets or the slums to ask about the needs of the poor. But
the problem remains within the homes where the needs of the
residents have to be met. Here the job is done by English,
Italian, German, Spanish, Finnish etc. on one side, and,
gestures on the other. The work on the ground in Mother
Teresa's homes in Calcutta is done entirely by volunteers from
all over the world. And they do it to the best of their
abilities, and some do it very well indeed. But many of them
have told me of their frustration at not being able to speak
to the residents; there are of course, some, who pick up a few
words of Hindi or Bengali and then claim to be fluent in
'Indian'.
It is not a requirement of Missionaries of
Charity nuns to learn the local language, as their official
language is English and a knowledge of English that allows a
concrete understanding of the scriptures is deemed sufficient;
they also move around a great deal from one corner of the
globe to the other, and hence, learning the local lingo would
not be worth its while. However, is it not reasonable to
expect the Calcutta nuns to have a basic knowledge of Bengali?
Is it not reasonable to make it an organisational requirement
for those who are stationed in Calcutta to learn some day to
day Bengali - it was, after all, Calcutta which brought such
glory to Mother Teresa and her Church. Way back in early 1969,
Mother had stipulated that women and men who 'were desirous of
joining [her order] must be able to acquire knowledge -
especially the language of the people they serve.' But that
was at a time when Mother Teresa was a sincere and unknown nun
doing her best with limited resources, before she allowed
herself to be sucked up in the publicity blitz. Over the
years, there has been no effort to allow the nuns any
understanding of the language of the people they are supposed
to serve, at least not in Africa or India.
Mother Teresa herself was not fluent in
Bengali! This may seem some kind of a feat after her 70 years
in Calcutta, but to me it does not come as a surprise - she
was surrounded by Europeans, Anglo-Indians and Christian
southern Indians. She retained an exceptionally prominent
Balkan accent, and her Bengali was stilted and basic - she
used stock phases such as 'I will pray for you', 'Suffering
brings you close to Jesus Christ' etc. She could, if she
wished to, get by adequately with her structured,
grammatically correct Bengali, but she rarely made the effort
What then, of the claim by scores of her
biographers that she had taught the Bengali alphabet to the
children of Calcutta's Motijheel slum in her 1940s when she
was starting out in life as a saviour of the poor? - this
parabolic tale has been told thousands of times. I give a
typical illustration from the account of one of Mother
Teresa's close journalist friends, Franca Zambonini:
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Her first project was a school, and it
is not by chance that she has been a teacher for almost
20 years. She went to Moti Jhil, the poor people's
quarter adjacent to the wall of the school and convent
in Entally. She gathered some children together in an
empty space surrounded by the thatched huts of the poor.
There were no desks, no blackboard, no chalk. With the
help of a man who was lounging nearby, she cleared the
ground of grass and debris, and using a stick, she
traced the letters of the Bengali alphabet on the
ground. She ended her lesson by reciting a poem and
concluded with a prayer. The next day someone brought
her a table and a stool...17
|
This parable, like the account of Moses
receiving the commandments etched on stone, does not hold
ground for many reasons, partly because the inhabitants of the
Motijheel slum are mainly Bihari Muslims and do not speak
Bengali; their language is Urdu or Hindi. Today, there is a
government run primary school in Motijheel, and the language
of instruction is Urdu. Even if, for the sake of argument we
accept that Mother Teresa of Calcutta did indeed teach the
children in Bengali, it is all the more surprising that she
never wrote anything in Bengali in the following 45 years of
her life. She produced a profuse number of letters and
messages in English, mostly hand-written in her familiar
scrawl, many of which have been framed by her admirers
(including by those in Calcutta) and many others been
reproduced in the numerous books written on her. Not one such
letter or message is in Bengali.
A few years back at an auction in Nottingham,
a few words written by Mother Teresa fetched £12018 - I am
prepared to pay substantially more for a similar effort
produced in Bengali.
Mother's 'big number', which is the number of
people that she had claimed in her Nobel Prize acceptance
speech to have 'picked up' from the streets of Calcutta, does
not stand up to scrutiny. Below is a list of time and place of
various claims, and the number on each occasion she claimed to
have 'picked up':-
| Time and Place |
Number Claimed To Have Been "Picked Up" |
| December 1979, Oslo (Nobel Prize Acceptance
Speech) |
36,000 |
| September 1978, Freiburg Cathedral, Breisgau,
Germany (Speech as Special Guest at the German Catholic
Bishops' Conference) |
36,00019 |
| February 1973, Sydney (Population & Ecology
Conference) |
36,00020 |
| February 1973, Melbourne |
27,00021 |
If I am asked what number she had actually
picked up from the streets of Calcutta, I am afraid I would
have to come up with only an informed guess. Technically of
course, the number is negligible, as she had hardly 'picked
up' anybody. Leaving aside that minor detail, if I am asked to
put a figure on how many new admissions her order has to the
home for the dying in Calcutta each year, I would come up with
something between 500 and 700.
Apart from the myth of regularly 'picking up'
people from the streets, the other serious misinformation she
spread in her Nobel speech was about the number of babies born
less because of her programme of natural contraception. She
claimed that 61,273 fewer babies were born in Calcutta in the
previous six years because she was promoting natural
contraception among the poor and the slum-dwellers. This
figure was pure invention. She also said that she was
supplying fertility thermometers and temperature charts to the
poor. Patently untrue, but even if she was, none of the
thousands of journalists present had the courage to ask her
how many of the slum-dwellers could read and plot graphs in
English. She also said that 'the other day' one of the poor
came to thank her for teaching chastity and 'self-control out
of love for each other.' - unlikely!
The figure of 61,273 became
134,00022 in June 1981 in Washington D.C. In 1982,
during the Ian Gall interview for Scottish Television, when Mr
Gall pinned her down (albeit with great deference) on her
views on artificial contraception and an absolute opposition
to abortion, she blithely came out with the monstrous lie: 'In
last 10 years we had 1 million babies less in Calcutta [due to
my method].' The lie shut Mr Gall up, much to her
satisfaction.
Mother Teresa did not have the Gandhian
courage of sticking to unpopular beliefs and proclaiming them.
She could have said - OK, you may not like or believe in
natural contraception but let me keep my weird beliefs. But
she had to lie to make herself popular and accepted.
Mother Teresa had frequently said that
neglect by the family is the greatest poverty - 'the poverty
of love'. In her Nobel speech she spoke about it at length:
'That poverty comes right in our own home, the neglect to
love. Maybe in our own family we have somebody who is feeling
lonely, who is feeling sick, who is feeling worried, and these
are difficult days for everybody. Are we there? Are we there
to receive them?'
It would therefore seem strange that she took
almost a punitive line against those poor people who sought
her help but who had family of any kind, however distant or
however poor. In the assessment of the Missionaries of
Charity, these people (who may be exceptionally poor and
needy) are 'not destitute enough'.
I have here the essence of three telephone
conversations with the home for the dying, which were recorded
on 16 June1995, and 3 and 8 October 1996.
|
Me: I have a woman
with me near Purno Cinema [this happens to be quite
close to the home] who is dying. Will you send an
ambulance?
Nun: We don't send ambulances. Contact
the Corporation. Where is the woman?
Me: She is at my
house.
Nun: Why is she at your house?
Me: Well, err...,
she is my kind of aunt...a distant relative in fact.
Nun: SORRY, WE DON'T TAKE FAMILY CASES.
SHE CAN'T COME HERE. (The voice becomes loud and
irritated)
Me: But she is
homeless and poor. I myself am pretty hand to mouth; I
don't have the resources to look after her.
Nun: That does not matter. Our rule is,
we do NOT take family cases.
Me: But,...will
you not consider?
Nun: I'm telling you, we do NOT take
family cases whether she's poor or not.
Me: What if I make
a small payment?
Nun: We don't have that system. We
can't help you. (At this juncture she would usually
disconnect the phone) |
The system of not having anything to do with
anybody who may be dying or suffering but who may have a
putative family member of any kind is one of the founding
principles of the Missionaries of Charity. The rule was
formulated by Mother herself many years back. Will Mother
Teresa's devotees tell me how this reconciles with her
frequent declaration., 'In your homes you have a starving
Christ, a naked Christ, a homeless Christ. Are you capable of
recognising him in your own homes? Do you realise he is right
there in your midst?' Even if any of us lesser mortals could
manage to recognise the suffering Christ in their own homes
and would endeavour to bring him to the care of Mother Teresa,
who professes to be his ultimate friend, his suffering would
only be compounded by rejection. Since Mother's death, the
'family cases' rule has been relaxed in Calcutta somewhat.
Many a time when I had rung the home for the
dying in Calcutta, the very first question I had been asked
was whether I was ringing about a relative. If the nun on the
other side had not been satisfied that I was not, she would
not continue the conversation any further. In Rome, on the
other hand, it is not asked of the destitutes if they are a
'family case' - they would have to be unwanted, and that alone
would suffice.
Mother Teresa had been habitually economical
with the truth over the last half a century when talking about
her operations. Journalists and authors with or without a
vested interest have often taken cues from her when creating
fantastic tales of charity. But I think when it came to fairy
tales, it was Mother who took the wafer. And, fictions of
glory others manufactured on her behalf had her blessings -
'Journalists can do the work of God' was one of her favourite
sayings.
Audrey Constant's book on her life written
for children is one of the manuscript she personally corrected
and annotated - the author herself said so in a personal
communication: 'Sadly I have not yet met her [Mother
Teresa]...When I wrote the story (which I did with the help of
the Sisters of Charity) Mother Teresa herself amended the
manuscript and she wrote in a copy of the book and sent it to
me. I will always treasure it.'23
This book makes some bizarre claims about the
charitable functions of the Missionaries of Charity including
that they have '122 leprosy clinics'.24 In Calcutta
they have a single leprosy clinic, an open air one, which runs
weekly on Convent Road - average attendance is about 60. The
book also describes Calcutta as a city so overwhelmed by
lepers that a special church has to earmarked for them: 'They
have their own church.'25 There is no such church.
In 1979, Mother Teresa wrote a famous letter
to Morarji Desai, when Mr Desai was (briefly) the Prime
Minister of India. In her letter, Mother severely upbraided Mr
Desai for not outlawing abortion and then she went on to say,
'In Calcutta alone we have 102 centres where families are
taught self control out of love.'26 - meaning of course,
natural family planning centres.
Whatever could she mean by '102 centres'? - I
have thought very long and very hard but could not fathom the
basis of the claim, especially as her order does not have a
single such centre. Could she mean she had natural family
planning advisers in her homes? - At one time she did have
such advisers,...but centres?
The outlandishness of this claim is
mind-boggling - after all, she was writing to the Prime
Minister, although, admittedly, he was far less of a celebrity
than she was.
It does not come as a surprise to me, when
Mother Teresa's friend, the Calcutta based priest Edward Le
Joly, 13 years later, gives the global total of her family
planning centres as '69'.27 None is mentioned in Calcutta.
I may have been bewildered or even amused by
Mother Teresa's figure of '102 centres' of natural family
planning, but I was disturbed by what she said to an assembly
of her 'co-workers' (a large and powerful body of people from
all over the world, who do a lot of the fund raising) in
London on 13 July, 1977. She said, 'We spend Rs 20,000 a week
just on food for the 59 centres we have in Calcutta.'28 This
was not just a slip of the tongue, as the '59 centres'
recurred, in this way: 'They [Sisters] go all over the city
(in Calcutta alone we have 59 centres, the home for the dying
is only one of them). The Sisters travel everywhere with a
rosary in their hands.'29
In 1977 Mother Teresa had 4 centres in
Calcutta, and presently her order has 8 - not counting her 3
large nunneries in the city. So what should we make of her '59
centres'? To a sinner like me, it seems to be a large measure
of saintly license. Alternatively, it could be described as a
symptom of psychosis, or, to use a 19th century term to
describe fantastic story telling, pseudologica fantastica.
Some would of course, sum it up as a plain whopper.
As the whole world knows, Mother Teresa was
the ultimate champion of the poor, especially so in Calcutta.
She made claims on behalf of the poor of Calcutta, such as
this one: 'We deal with thousands and thousands of very poor
people in Calcutta. As you may know, there are over 10 million
people in that city, but up now I am not aware of one woman
among the very poor who has had an abortion.'30 She said this
quite frequently during her lifetime. In other words, Mother
was harking back to her old theme, 'We have always space for
another child. Bring me all your unwanted children.'
I am bewildered by Mother Teresa's claim that
not a single woman amongst 'the very poor' in Calcutta had an
abortion. In Calcutta, one and half million people live below
the poverty line. Even considering that among the poor, a low
female: male ratio obtains because of the migrant nature of
the population, there would be about half a million 'very
poor' women in Calcutta, and most of these women would be of
child bearing age. Did Mother Teresa want us to believe that
she catered for four hundred thousand pregnant or potentially
pregnant women and their children in Calcutta, when her order
does not have a single maternity home or mother and baby unit?
I am told that many years back she used to have a small mother
and baby facility but certainly none exists currently.
A handful of poor women in Calcutta who are
contemplating abortion, are persuaded by the Missionaries of
Charity not to have an abortion and to continue with their
pregnancy. These women are looked after, sometimes as
in-patients, by the Association of Medical Women in India
(AMWI) Hospital, a government run maternity hospital, which
happens to be situated very near Mother House. Historically,
the management of the AMWI Hospital and the Missionaries of
Charity have enjoyed a close relationship. The hospital has
thirty beds, and many of them are occupied by 'Mother Teresa's
women'. These women are taken care of until delivery by the
hospital, and their new-born babies are taken care of by the
Missionaries of Charity - all of them are adopted. Needless to
say, the Missionaries of Charity do not fork out a paisa
towards the upkeep of 'Mother Teresa's women', although they
have been known to send in food from time to time.
When Mother Teresa said that she was not
aware of 'one woman among the very poor' in Calcutta who has
had an abortion, was she deliberately misleading or was she
genuinely misinformed? Who can tell, but she had quoted the
population of Calcutta correctly, which is surprising, as she
was endearingly famous for not having a clue about these
matters. I can therefore assume that she would have some idea
about 'very poor' Indian women's attitude toward unwanted
pregnancies.
It is possible that she knowingly made the
misleading statement - maybe she was too embarrassed to tell
the truth that women in Calcutta, including the city's 'very
poor' women who are supposed by the world at large to be
beholden to her, were uniquely nonchalant about abortion.
Having made many thousands of women around the world give up
abortion, may be she considered it a personal failure that she
had been singularly unsuccessful in Calcutta - but is this the
way to deal with perceived failures?
During my year as a junior house officer at
the Calcutta Medical College Hospitals, I had personally
assisted in numerous abortions, and a number of these were on
'very poor women'. In case I am seen by a section of readers
as some kind an unusual demon in the city of Mother Teresa,
let me point out that every one of us did it - including the
Muslims - except the lone Roman Catholic girl.
Having said that, 'Bring me all your unwanted
children' is the only one amongst Mother's innumerable claims
about her operations in Calcutta which has a germ of truth in
it. However, the children have got to be completely and
utterly unwanted. To illustrate, I shall relate my own recent
experience at Mother's Calcutta orphanage, Shishu Bhavan. The
entire episode has been captured on video.
On 30 August 1996, at around 5 p.m., I found
a small commotion in front of Shishu Bhavan's entrance - a
'very poor' woman, Noor Jehan (name slightly changed at her
own request), was wailing at the top of her voice. She had
with her, her two children, both girls, the younger one about
10 months and the older about 2 years old. The 10 month old
was obviously suffering with diarrhoea and was ill; the 2 year
old was miserable and fed up and was lying on the pavement,
screaming.
I asked Noor Jehan what the matter was. She
told me that she had been thrown out of her home (she lived in
a slum near the Calcutta docks) by her violent husband the
night before and she had arrived at Shishu Bhavan at 10 p.m.
hoping to get some help for her children. She had been let in
by the night porter and had been allowed to sleep in the
courtyard - they had even given her a sheet for her children.
Promptly at 5 a.m. however, she had been thrown out on to the
pavement with a cup of tea. From then on, she had been
alternately pleading and demanding to be let in, so that the
children could have something to eat and somewhere to sleep.
Noor Jehan's entreaties for help were not
entertained by the nuns - the door remained firmly shut in her
face. The baby's hungry wails were ignored. The local
shopkeepers took pity on the woman and gave her some tea and
bread; somebody brought some milk for the children. By the
time that I arrived at 5 p.m., a small crowd of about a dozen
people had gathered and had turned quite hostile towards the
nuns.After a lot of loud banging, a nun appeared at the door.
I asked her why they would not give the woman and her children
some food, and shelter for that night only. The nun explained
that they could do that, but only after the mother had handed
over the absolute rights of her children to the Missionaries
of Charity. In other words, the 'form of renunciation' had to
be signed, or in this case, had to be imprinted with the
impression of Noor Jehan's left thumb. The children would
then, in due course, be adopted by a good Catholic family in
the West - the last bit is my own presumption; the nun did not
actually say it.
Noor Jehan became hysterical at the mention
of 'signing over' her children, and told the nun what she
thought of her, which is untranslatable and unprintable. About
7 p.m., Noor Jehan left Shishu Bhavan, disappearing into an
uncertain Calcutta night, probably to go back to her violent
husband.
She left without much bitterness; as a poor
woman in India, she was used to doors slamming shut on her
face. She knew that the rich and powerful always rejected the
poor. She knew that her children's existence was borrowed. She
however did not know how the world wowed every time Mother
Teresa said, 'There is always room for another child in my
home.'
When Noor Jehan and the shopkeepers were
shouting their loudest at the nuns through the closed door of
the orphanage, a Western woman, who looked like a volunteer,
walked up the pavement and knocked on the door to be let in. I
cornered her and asked her if given Teresa's image and
finances this sort of treatment of a poor woman with children
was acceptable, and, why a helpless woman should be asked to
relinquish the rights to her children to be fed and helped. I
also asked her to let the woman in and feed her children. At
this the memsahib got irritated, and told me that I was
hassling her when I ought to be grateful that she was in my
country helping my poor. I said I was grateful, but was
questioning Teresa's obvious cruelty and matching it with her
pronouncements. Memsahib got more irritated and promptly left
us. I implored her not to come back to India to help 'my
people'. Two years later I realised the woman in question was
the Canadian-Croatian Ana Ganza, who subsequently wrote a
semi-authorised biography of Teresa called Journey of Hope.
After her book was published I wrote to Ganza, reminding her
of the (videod) incident outside Shishu Bhavan and inviting
her thoughts and comments on it. She never replied.
Stark distortions of facts in Mother Teresa's
statements or speeches were evident during the decade 1975-85.
After the mid 1980s she became subtle in her methods, as by
this time, the media were doing most of her work for her.
For instance, when she came to London in
April 1988, journalists stuck to her like limpets. For two
successive nights she took them on walkabouts along London's
'cardboard city', especially under Waterloo bridge. She said,
making the media convulse with devotion:
|
There's much more suffering I believe
now, much more loneliness, painful loneliness of people
rejected by society who have no one to care for them. It
hurt me so much to see our people in the terrible cold
with just a bit of cardboard around them. I did not know
what to say, my eyes were full of tears. There were this
man lying there protecting himself from the cold with no
home and no hope. He looked up and said, 'It's a long
time since I felt the warmth of a human hand.'31
|
Her performance was impeccable, and everybody
was bowled over, even the normally sceptical British public.
But Mother Teresa never made it clear to the media what the
specific purpose of her London trip was - it was to put
pressure on Prime Minister Thatcher and British MPs to support
David Alton's bill to reduce the time limit of abortion from
24 to18 weeks (banning abortion completely was not on the
agenda). The media possibly did not know that her trip had
been funded and sponsored by the anti-abortion lobby.
Her meeting with Margaret Thatcher, and her
departure from Westminster in a car driven by Mr Alton
(Britain's only 'single-issue' anti-abortion MP at the time)
obviously could not be kept a secret, but even so she told
journalists that she had told Thatcher, 'Give me a house, or I
will bring them [the homeless] all in the big
hall,'32, referring to the Great Hall of
Westminster. That was all that she told the media after she
emerged from the meeting, apart from it having been
'wonderful', deviating from her usual 'beautiful'.
Mr Alton, on the other hand, quite
categorically talked about the specific anti-abortion agenda
of the meeting, saying, 'We know her involvement at a very
personal level at this crucial moment will be a decisive
factor.'33 (It was not.)
Now, why did Mother Teresa go to this extent
to camouflage the real purpose of her visit? Because she knew
that abortion was not burning issue in British society, and,
more importantly, that the majority of British population had
always favoured abortion. It was possible that she could have
alienated the British public had she gone on her usual
virulent anti-abortion rant. The theme of homelessness was a
safe emotional string to pull at the time, especially as
'cardboard city' was then emerging as a contentious social
issue.
Mother Teresa was obviously not always so coy
about her anti-abortion stance - only six years previously, in
August 1983, she had gone to Ireland to join the then Irish
Prime Minister Charles Haughey, to campaign against abortion.
This time there was no midnight walkabouts amongst Dublin's
homeless, of whom there was no dearth - she knew that she did
not need to, as the Irish population at the time was
overwhelmingly opposed to abortion.
I feel that a woman of faith such as Mother
Teresa should have had greater strength of conviction. It is
sad that a person so loved as honest and truthful by the world
would resort to such game-playing.
Mother Teresa said, and has been quoted
frequently as having said, 'We depend solely on providence. We
don't accept government grants. We don't accept church
donations...'34 In the Scottish Television
interview, she made the same claim.
This is a very incredible statement indeed.
95% or more of the buildings of the Missionaries of Charity
have been donated by either governments or by the Catholic
church. How she got her first and most famous home from the
Corporation of Calcutta has become folklore, quoted numerous
times in various biographies:
|
And the same day I went to the
municipality and asked for a house. I said I only wanted
some place where I could bring these people, and the
rest I will do myself. The official of the Calcutta
Corporation took me to this place, a part of the Kali
temple, and he said, 'This is the only place I can give
you,' and I said this is just the ideal place...
|
As far as I am aware, in the first few years,
Calcutta Corporation used to give her a small sum of money
also for each resident treated at the home. The home was
therefore called 'CORPORATION OF CALCUTTA : NIRMAL HRIDAY',
and a small board of the same name (written in both English
and Bengali) hung in front of the home until, I believe, the
early1970s. The board appears in the Muggeridge film, and also
in photographs of the home that have been reprinted in many
books on Mother Teresa, such as in Goree and Barbier's book,
which was first published in 1971 (and is still in print).
Indeed, the board still exists - it lies
upside down in a small alcove just inside the main door on the
left hand side. It is now a collector's item no doubt.
Kathryn Spink admits in her book, 'They
[Corporation] granted her, provisionally, a monthly sum of
money and the use of the pilgrims' dormitories attached to the
Kali temple.'35
Mother Teresa's home in Dum Dum, near
Calcutta airport is also built on land donated by the West
Bengal government - the site had been a refugee camp (the
Missionaries of Charity ran one of the smallest camps at the
time) during the Bangladesh war in 1971. After the war ended
the government allowed Mother Teresa to keep the land; the
building was donated by a Catholic foundation, which announces
itself on a marble plaque inside the home. Mother also chipped
in with some of the money she got from the John F Kennedy
Prize - hence the name: 'Nirmala Kennedy Centre'.
One of Mother's newest homes in Calcutta, in
Tangra, is however not on government donated land; she rents
the land from the government. According to Fr Le Joly: '...the
government had given her a very large property for the nominal
rent of one rupee [half cent] a year.' Now why does she rent,
rather than outright own it? In her own words, ' "It is good
that the ownership of the land remains with them," said
Mother, always practical-minded, "because if the roads need
repairs they will have to do them, as it is their property."
'36 All very good, but the biggest building on this property
has no charitable functions, but is the residential quarters
for trainee Brothers. This is another example how the state of
West Bengal and the city of Calcutta are (unknowingly)
subsidising the Missionaries of Charity and its religious
activities.
The order’s newest home in Calcutta - in
Nimtala Ghat Street - is housed in a building donated by the
local Sanganeria family. Although the building was donated in
1988, the home became operational in 1998 - after Mother’s
death.
When lies are peddled, slip-ups will occur,
as happened in Muggeridge's book Something Beautiful for God -
on page 32, Muggeridge says, '...she has never accepted any
government grants in connection with her medical and social
work', only to quote her on page 103, 'We are trying to build
a town of peace on the land that the government gave us some
years back, 34 acres of land.'
Indeed, Mother herself made a similar
slip-up. On 14 January 1992, in a video-taped (and widely
distributed) speech to staff at the Scripps Clinic, California
she said, 'We don't accept government grant, we don't ask the
church for maintenance, we're completely dependent on divine
providence.' But in the course of the same speech about twenty
minutes later she said, 'With the help of government we are
creating rehabilitation centres for them [lepers]. Government
gives me land, I buy material for building...and I pay them to
build their own homes...' I do not think Mother Teresa ever
gave any money to any poor or needy - it was against her
principle. But the statement went down well with her audience.
As recently as June 1997, Mother Teresa was
asking New York's mayor Giuliani to give her a building so she
could extend her AIDS home (a worthy request no doubt), and,
she asked for free parking permits for her nuns. She got the
latter immediately.
If I gave a list of all the Missionaries of
Charity buildings that have been donated by governments and
the church, it will run into a small treatise. Their first
building, where Mother House now is, was bought by funds
provided by the Archbishop of Calcutta - it was bought at a
knockdown price in 1951 as the Muslim owner was fleeing India
in a hurry after the partition of the sub-continent: 'The
largest figure he [Archbishop] could propose was less than the
worth of the land on which the house was built; but
miraculously the offer was accepted.'37
Two of her other buildings in Calcutta, one
by Sealdah railway station, and the other on expensive Park
Street, have been donated by the Church. Neither of these
buildings has a charitable function. In various other parts of
India, such as in Agra, Mother's homes are situated within the
compounds of Catholic churches. In the United States, the
church has bent over backwards to give her property. Her home
for AIDS patients in New York's exclusive Greenwich village
(657 Washington Road) is in a former presbytery. In Italy,
almost all her operations are run from church premises, and
many of these do not have charitable activities. Her nunnery
in Cagliari in Sardinia adjoins a church and when I visited
the place in December 1996, I found the structure being
renovated by the government department that looks after
historical buildings.
And yet, people will continue to believe 'We
don't accept government grants; we don't accept church
donations...' as this has been uttered by the holiest person
of our time. It was a major theme in some of her obituaries.
She said in Carmelite Church in Dublin in
1979, she said, 'The Sisters go out at night to work, to pick
up people from the streets...'38 They do not. Such statements
are so untrue one is at a loss to address them. Sisters retire
early - about 8 p.m., and a major earthquake will not bring
them to the doors, at least not in Calcutta. I have numerous
recorded telephone conversations where I was trying to have
somebody admitted to the home for the dying in Calcutta in the
middle of the night, and the Sisters kept insisting that I
brought the person at 9 a.m. the following morning. (I am not
saying if I turned up at the door with the man, he would have
been turned away.) Indeed, until a few years back, the home
for the dying did not even have a nun staying there overnight
- the building was left to the mercy of sweepers and local
anti socials. Mother agreed to provide two nuns for the night
after intense agitation by some volunteers.
I cannot say that Mother Teresa was
continuously callous and calculating about misrepresenting her
charitable activities - from time to time she became extremely
agitated, especially with people who were close to her, that
she should be represented in such an extreme charitable light.
When, for instance, Edward Le Joly, first wanted to write a
book on her, she erupted:
|
Do it, do it. We are misunderstood, we
are misrepresented, we are misreported. We are not
nurses, we are not doctors, we are not teachers, we are
not social workers. We are religious, we are religious,
we are religious.34 |
This is not the only time she had made a
similar statement. What she had said was the literal truth
about her functions and her world view, but unfortunately such
was her aura that the world decided that she said it because
she was humble and gracious. Predictably, in Father Joly's
book, her message does not come across; he eloquently speaks
about her charitable functions.
I have forgotten how many times I have
written to the Missionaries of Charity (frequently under
registered post) asking for an interview with either Mother
herself or one of her senior nuns to address some of the
glaring distortions of truth emanating either from her or her
aides. I never received any reply.
On 22 April 1996 I managed to find her
authorised biographer Navin Chawla at Nehru Centre, London
addressing a public meeting (on her) chaired by Nicholas
Wapshot, editor of the magazine section of The Times. I asked
Mr Chawla a number of questions from the floor to do with
inflation of facts and figures and the blurred edge between
reality and fiction. Mr Chawla said that statistics were not
important etc. I pointed out that why numbers and figures were
regularly quoted by Mother when statistics were not important
to her. He made no convincing reply. The meeting was rather
hastily terminated.
Mother Teresa herself was the most
responsible for the misrepresentation of her activities. She
did get periods of guilt and remorse that she should be cast
as such a figure of charity, but she would soon lapse into her
usual mode: 'If there are poor on the moon, we will go there'
etc. She was after all, human. I regard her as history's most
successful politician. But her service for her political party
the Vatican, was selfless. |
