Outage: Miracle girl misses telecast

KOLKATA: More than 7,000 km away from the Vatican, in a remote village of South Dinajpur, excitement gripped family members as they sat tight before the television

KOLKATA: More than 7,000 km away from the Vatican, in a remote village of South Dinajpur, excitement gripped family members as they sat tight before the television set to watch Mother Teresa’ s canonisation on Sunday. A prolonged power cut, however, dashed their hopes.

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Monica Besra, 50, on whom Mother had performed a ‘miracle’ to cure her of ovarian tumour, had waited for this day all her life. The outage was a spoiler. She hoped to catch on the repeat telecast in the evening.

Nakor, the modest North Bengal village that boasts of a chapel named after the Albanian nun, organised a special prayer service in the morning, hours before Mother Teresa was canonised in Rome. Besra celebrated the rest of the day with her sons and other residents of the village. “What can I say? I am so happy today. But I missed watching the event live on TV. For me, seeing it was a life ambition,” she told HT over phone.

“Now I have to wait till the evening for a repeat telecast,” said Besra, mother of five children.

The family which owns five bighas of land will not hit the fields on Sunday. Instead they planned to travel to Raiganj with the local church priest to attend an evening service for Mother.

Besra was all praise for the Missionaries of Charity, which Mother Teresa founded in Kolkata in 1950. In October 2003, when the nun was beatified six years after her death, at age 87, a team of the Missionaries of Charity took Besra as well to the Italian capital.

“We spent 22 days in Rome. It was an amazing place,” recalled Besra. “I enjoyed it a lot.”

The tribal woman from West Bengal, became an overnight sensation in September 1998 when she claimed that a picture and a medallion of the world’s most famous Roman Catholic nun had cured her ovarian tumour.

“It was Mother who cured my tumour. I could walk properly and eat rice after she cured me,” added Besra, who believes Mother Teresa gave her a new lease of life.

It was on September 5, 1998— exactly a year after Mother Teresa’s death—that nuns placed a tiny aluminium medallion on Besra’s stomach and prayed for her. “Two sisters carried me to the church since I was too weak to even stand,” she said.

“As soon as I entered (the church), a blinding, divine light emitted from Mother’s photo and enveloped me. I closed my eyes and almost fainted. The next day the pain was gone.”

Besra’s claim was contested by doctors and rationalists alike. Countering her claim in 1998, doctors at the district hospital stated the patient was cured by medicines since her disease( malignant ovarian tumour) was detected at an early stage.

The Pope, last year, recognised a second miracle attributed to Mother Teresa—the 2008 recovery of a Brazilian man suffering from multiple brain tumours, paving the way for her canonisation.