‘I felt a current run through my body’

I am not religious but God fearing. And as a firm believer in that Robert G Ingersoll’s gem ‘The hands that help are holier than the lips that pray’, my super heroine has always been Mother Teresa, better known as the ‘Saint of the Gutters’.

My magic moment came in 1992. Mother Teresa was slated to address a Charismatic Convention at the Loyola College ground. I was a second year student and the founder-editor of Loyola Herald, a students’ magazine of the college. Thanks to my principal Father Xavier Alphonse, I got the opportunity to meet and interview Mother Teresa. That memory is still fresh in my mind. Dressed in a formal chocolate brown shirt and a cream trouser, I waited for my ‘darshan’. The perks of journalism ensured that I was the only student who could walk into the principal’s office without an appointment! But on the D-day, I chose to wait patiently for my turn. And when my name was called out, I genuflected and got Mother’s blessing. Father Xavier Alphonse introduced me. When she placed her hand on my head, I could feel a sort of current run through my body. I choked as she made the sign of the cross, gave me a scapula, a picture of Jesus and said “So you’re the young student journalist?”

But unlike the other ‘chosen few’, my time, post the blessing, was not up. The interview remained with me. Mother Teresa recounted how an old, impoverished man knocked on her door at the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta. It was pouring outside. She called him in and offered him something to eat, shelter for the night and warm clothes. But the elderly man refused to take anything. “I’ve not come to ask you for anything, Mother. I’ve come to give you something”, he said. He pulled out a few coins and crumpled notes, pressed it against Mother Teresa’s palm and exclaimed, “ Mother, I begged the whole day and this is my contribution to your cause.” Mother told me that she considered those few rupees to be greater than the dollars she received from around the globe because that was a gesture straight from the heart. 

I often narrate this incident to students I mentor in public speaking as a classic example of converting heartbeats into words. Mother Teresa had also visited my maternal grandmother’s home in Royapuram, when I was a little boy. 

To me, she was a living saint. The canonisation is just a formal reaffirmation of that truth.