Sisters of no mercy: Spare the children
I can see children playing quietly in the courtyard of the Missionaries of Charity in Tezpur, Assam, some throwing balls at each other. I hear a squall but mostly things are calm in the way they should never be when there are so many kids together, supposedly playing. The games stop as I appear out of the leafy driveway and enter their cemented playground. They become still and take a good look at me until one birdie chirps a loud hello and others follow.
Most children I see are mentally disabled and have associated physical disabilities.
A toddler held in a piece of furniture that looks like a hybrid of a vice and a restaurant child chair, extends his hand sideways for a shake, and crookedly smiles. This is a performance but I sense the boy's genuine warmth and curiosity at seeing a new face; the handshake making me feel welcome.
The children are well trained at receiving visitors, but two months ago, the mission stopped its adoption services. If the they expect me to choose one of them to take home, they haven't been told about the changes.
Another toddler in such a vice-chair has his neck flopping sideways like a droopy cut flower. He has small cushions behind his neck, and two on either side of his small head that seems too heavy for his body. A young nurse in a salwar kameez who is holding an infant tries to straighten him in a movement that strikes me as furtive. But the baby's head is unsteady and at an angle, ready to flop back down any moment. I have no idea how the children feel but my guess - from their lack of alertness and bulging eyes - would be very, very hungry.
I am stopping by to meet the sisters in charge here. Sister Sanjali who supervises the care of the residents, and Mother Superior Pratibha who oversees the running of the centre take me around the clean dormitories and toilets, and tidy play and activity rooms. We talk about their lives. They say they joined the nunnery as 18-year old novices with matriculation certificates to entirely dedicate their life to serving, specifically, the very poorest of poor.
I ask them about new rules for adoption services in a bid by the government to make them more efficient and accountable. Allegations have been made against religious organisations for showing preference for adoptive parents from their own communities. Desperate applicants from the less preferred religious denomination must counter such illicit favouritism by larger cash donations, or bribes. State-affiliated agencies, many of them religious organisations such as the MoC, shall have no room for maneouvre as adoption services are digitised and centralised.
The MoC responded by stalling their adoption services altogether, with several other Catholic orders following suit. They are deeply unhappy with the new rules, as children may now be adopted by single parents. Mother was against single persons adopting children, which excluded the unmarried, divorced or the widowed from the joys of parenting. Objecting to adopt a child is intrinsically suspect, an unstable predatory child molester.
Of all the depressing child-related statistics available in this country these are the most frustrating of all. The numbers of children and parents in the queue for adoption is in the millions, yet, last year, fewer than 3,000 were united.
Apart from the agony of the long parallel queues of children and parents, the women and children's minister Maneka Gandhi said parents also ended up taking home a "little wrestler" rather than the small baby they had set their heart upon. It is a waste that a baby must spend crucial formative months in some ignoble foundling hospital when they ought to be at home being fussed over by their new folks.
But hopefully, this is set to change. Adoption by Indian parents living overseas is to be, thankfully, made easier, too. Applicants may adopt more than one child, even of the same sex, if they so wish, that they could not do before. Parents may happily choose from a larger number of babies, like reverse Sophie's Choice.
These ladies seem kind, gentle and hospitable, but for them to do anything on grounds of their own compassion would be absurd. As a condition for them to remain in the Order they must buy into two ideas unquestioningly: the holy Roman Empire and the covenant of the sisters of the mission founded by the saint Mother Teresa. I ask them about the no single-parent rule and they squirm uncomfortably. There is no point in asking the sisters questions which might need autonomous thought. Jolly and warm, and deeply indoctrinated they are nothing if not unlearned vehicles of the Word.
Monks in the Middle Ages in Europe wrote, gardened, composed music, cooked, baked, did joinery, made beer, had great libraries and spent time making the books they would read. This, while they continued the model of the perfect intense ascetic life. They admit some of the sisters keep journals - meditations on how to live the Christian life - but these are strictly private.
They know of no poet or seer or visionary among them. Besides, there is no place for women to speak their minds in the Catholic Church. The nuns must take comfort in penury by reminding themselves that they are part of something bigger, which is the Order of Mother Teresa, and of something even bigger, infinite and divine: Jesus Christ.
It is dusk and candles have been lit in the sisters' Chapel where there is quiet singing of Adoration in English. The sisters look messianic swaddled in their identifiable habit of white cotton sarees with blue bordering as they pray before a crucifix on the wall with the words "I THIRST" next to it: a nice summary of Catholic asceticism for the generation of iPhone.
The Missionaries of Charity have "6,000 sisters" worldwide, says Mother Superior, though enrolments are dwindling. This is hardly surprising as few of her contradictory beliefs stand up to the scrutiny of modern, contemplative novitiates or aspirants as few young people might go for the life of such penury and subordination, bordering on a cultish fixation with death. The sisters say they coped because they came from poor homes, but the generation of iPhone, like the generation of swine, is not so very exercised by purgatory.
Mother Superior and Sister Sanjali's days, and sometimes nights, are spent watching over the residents with staff to help them. She says there is one boy who has been sobbing inconsolably for his dad who's been gone three months. (She said she became irritated with him once but went away to reflect upon what caused that shortness of temper.)
The oldest resident at the centre Barna, 70, is the other person giving them sleepless nights. She has insomnia and keeps up nights. She too, with her cataract eyes sees me and says a perky 'namaste' with hands folded in the pixie-like way of the children, which is grotesque and demeaning but only I seem to see it this way. The mockingbird-woman wakes up her dorm-mates at night and has a large bruise on her thigh showing through a torn cotton nightie. It seems she rolls off her single bed here in the dormitory. To avoid more hurt she is now propped on a mattress in a corner on the floor. This evening she is awake alone in her dormitory for the severely mentally ill but looking tired as the nurses try to reverse her sleep cycle manually.
All the children who were here for adoption have been passed on to other NGOs. The remaining 18 residents have come after being turned out from hospitals where their exasperated relatives had abandoned them. They really are the least wanted in a country that has poor psychiatric care available anywhere. Most children here were born with learning disabilities while the older inmates are severely mentally ill. Some - among the young and old - suffer both afflictions and need high levels of the right kind of care.
But care is minimal. They see two doctors - a physiotherapist and a psychotherapist - who show up as per their convenience as they charge nothing. Sister Sanjali says the mission does foot medical bills when residents need extra attention. If there were accusations that Mother did not allow analgesics for the dying, there is no evidence here that she was against psychiatric medication.
With no sense of irony they explain the accommodation and recreation areas are divided among the "mentals" and the "psychos", which are abbreviations for mentally disabled - or those who have learning disabilities - and the psychiatric patients respectively, not insults. They think the residents are doing well because of the 'medicines' and leave it at that.
At supper the children (with intellectual disability) eat together like they do everything else. Everyone's plates is heaped with rice and slop with no suggestion of any colour in anyone's steel dinner plate. There are two large aluminium cauldrons. Dinner is proceeding dully along in the section with the 'psychos' too except for a suffocating pharmaceutical ferrous smell in their dining hall.
All worldliness for Mother was ostentation. And some of this self defeating. The MoC does not accept repeat donations from one donor so as to to keep the indulgent rich at bay. They value donations from people for whom to give anything away is a sacrifice.
But in 1981, Teresa accepted the Legion d'Honneur from the Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier, who stole millions of dollars from the impoverished country. While ther, she said that the Duvaliers "loved their poor", and that "their love was reciprocated". She endorsed the aggressively atheist regime of Enver Hoxha in communist Albania which she visited in 1989 and laid a flowers on his grave and a statue of Mother Albania, quite nonchalant about the human rights violations perpetrated through the suppression of religion. She dealt with political realities of her time by ignoring them. The British publisher Robert Maxwell who embezzled £450 million from his employees' pension funds was another. Mother Teresa has been criticised but her moral relationship with dishonest money has hardly been examined.
In the unbending theosophy of the Mother, there is no place for pragmatism, and no public accounting for how these pious ones ever balanced their accounts. She took the unconventional view that women ought to be able to free themselves from the slavery of reproductive duties but only to live chaste lives, but forbade single girls becoming parents. In her Nobel Prize-accepting speech she had told the academy, to their shock, that contraceptives were destroyers of peace. She also opposed abortion.
Mother Teresa loves poverty but not the poor, the late great essayist Christopher Hitchens had said in his famous grating polemic in the 1990s. She told a journalist once: "I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people." Seeing the kids and the elderly here who look frail while they listlessly stand or sit, bony, subdued and well-behaved, I wonder if Mother got what she wanted.