Curious Curing

For several years, Monica Besra, a poor 35-year-old Santhal homemaker from the Nakor village of West Bengal's West Dinajpur district, had been suffering from excruciating headaches and an abdominal tumour. Four summers ago, in September 1998, she could not bear it anymore: the tumour had grown so big that she looked seven months pregnant and the pain was unbearable. So she trudged to the Potiram church, some 20 miles away, on the first anniversary of Mother Teresa's death and offered prayers to alleviate her pain.

This was when, as Besra tells the story, the miracle happened. Talking to Outlook last week, she said, "During my prayers, I felt a light from Mother's picture at the church touch my body. I felt uneasy and sleepy. A sister tied a small medallion on a black thread to my upper body and told me to return home and rest. I slept and woke up after a few hours and, for the first time in years, felt light and healthy. The pain had vanished. I could even walk on my own. This was nothing less than a miracle."

The Roman Catholic Church agrees with Besra. The office of Pope John Paul II has cleared this 'miracle'—a significant step towards Mother Teresa's canonisation. Earlier, the Pope had already waived a basic requirement of the canonisation process—that it can begin only five years after the candidate's death—setting the Saint of the Gutters on the fast track to sainthood. Beatification will be the next step if the church determines that the candidate is responsible for a miracle after his or her death. Episcopal Bishop Salvatore Lobo, leading a team compiling 35,000 pages of the Mother's good deeds for the Vatican, told journalists: "This miracle meets the requirements. It is organic, permanent, immediate and intercessionary in nature."

Not everyone believes so. And a raging controversy is on over whether this was indeed a miracle or an organised fraud. Doctors who treated Besra at Balurghat town, some 30 miles from Nakor, for one, believe that there was no miracle involved in her cure. Dr Tarun Biswas of the 300-bed Balurghat Hospital says that Besra first reported to him for treatment in June 1998 and was admitted in the hospital for five days after complaining of continuing headaches and a tumour. "Tubercular meningitis is fairly common here, so I prescribed some drugs which she took. She was improving when she left and never returned. So I assume that she was being cured." Recalls gynaecologist Ranjan Mustafi: "Besra came to me twice in 1998 and 1999, complaining of a tumour in her abdomen. Interestingly, she never asked for specific medicines for her stomach tumour. She asked only for our diagnosis. Whenever I suggested treatment after her checkup, she would ask us just to tell her what to do and that she'd get the medicines from Siliguri, Calcutta or Delhi. This is not how ordinary rural patients talk. We did detect a mass in her right abdomen and a formation in her ovary, but the second time she visited us, after a nine-month gap in 1999, she was cured."

Hospital superintendent Dr Manzar Murshed too was struck by the "unusual" behaviour of "Besra, her relatives and local church authorities". Says he, "Besra was never interested in proper treatment. Why would a patient, not apparently well-off, go without continuing treatment at a government hospital if she was really serious about her complaints?" Murshed says that some church authorities recently pressured the doctors to give them records of Besra's admission in the hospital. "How could any medical authority agree to this? Under the law, we can provide such details only to the police. Why should the church be interested in hospital medical records? Someone wants to build the thesis that Besra's problems were cured not through medical intervention, and we are being asked to confirm the end result, 'No trace of tumour'. My colleagues and I were then requested to participate in a seminar organised by some church authorities here. We stayed away."

State health minister Suryakanta Mishra debunks the miracle theory subtly: "It's a case of medicines administered for some disease and the patient responding along expected lines. There's nothing more to be said." Former health minister Partha De, who has seen the records, is more acerbic: "The whole thing is a fraud." So did the church set up Besra as a beneficiary of a Mother 'miracle'? The Vatican and Mother Teresa's order, the Calcutta-based Missionaries of Charity, are maintaining a studied silence. An unsavoury controversy over Mother Teresa's canonisation was surely the last thing they wanted.