On 18 June 1996, Mother Teresa came to Wales. Her order had bought a small terraced house in a down at heel neighbourhood in Swansea, where she opened her first Welsh centre amidst much fanfare. Men and women of the media turned up in numbers befitting Mother's status as an international celebrity. Much was made of the fact that this was the Missionaries of Charity's 565th centre. The media faithfully reported Mother's words that the four nuns in the home would counsel sufferers from "AIDS and other incurable diseases".1

The media omitted to mention the fact that the home, which was added to the charitable order's statistics as "yet another one" of the ever increasing number of centres, was exclusively a nunnery. The media did not pause to think about Mother's assurance about the nuns' counselling role. These are nuns who lead an excessively secluded life -- they are not allowed newspapers or television. Their knowledge of HIV and AIDS is even more limited than most of the general population's. They belong to that orthodox strain of Roman Catholicism which regards homosexuality as an "abomination". They are not allowed to mention condoms; furthermore, if they have worked in the home for the dying in Calcutta, they would think that re-using needles after washing them in diluted surgical spirit is standard practice. And, so far as Mother herself was concerned, her knowledge of HIV and AIDS was summed up as "the leprosy of the West", which was not unreasonable coming from her background. Many people would argue that counselling does not require any specialist skills, and that empathy is all that you need. I can see their point. I can also see the point of those who say that many HIV positive and terminally ill people are looking for a religious and spiritual experience and not for counselling as we understand it. These people, I am sorry to say, would be hard put to find it at Clifton Hill in Swansea; partly because the nunnery's telephone is ex-directory, but most importantly, because the counselling service does not exist, despite Mother's press statement to the contrary. When I rang the Canon of St Joseph's Cathedral in Swansea, he categorically told me, "The nuns don't do any counselling; their only charitable work is visiting the elderly at home." (Conversation recorded on 2nd October 1996) This is the typical pattern of the myth of Mother Teresa's charitable work. No doubt the media exaggerate and sometimes even invent, but the source most often was Mother herself.  

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."2 That there are, but are the facilities used for the purpose of a soup kitchen? They are not. 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. By some coincidence 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 their cards. It has to be said 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.   If, when Mother Teresa said that at her kitchen at Shishu Bhavan "there are facilities to cook for a thousand people daily", she implied that as many meals were cooked there everyday, then she was right -- if one takes into account the children at the orphanage, plus the twenty or so ayahs who look after the children, plus the few hundred trainee nuns and mature nuns, the number of meals cooked for lunch and for dinner at Shishu Bhavan everyday for all these mouths does no doubt come to "a thousand". However, one could be forgiven for interpreting from Mother's statement that she runs a public kitchen catering for that number.

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 have 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 "9000", next minute it would be "4000", then again it may change to "7000". 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 7000 people everyday and if one day we do not cook they do not eat".3 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. Almost certainly, it will be invoked as a "miracle" during her beatification process. In her own words, one version of the story ran as follows: "We have witnessed God's tender care for us in a thousand different ways. In Calcutta alone we cook for 7000 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 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."4

During the course of a decade, roughly between 1975 - 1985, 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 Calcutta we feed 7000 people daily" would sometimes become ".......4000 people daily", then change back to "7000" 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 AM on Friday ........." etc.-- the rest about the government schools shutting suddenly and the bread miraculously coming to the Missionaries of Charity would now follow.5 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."6    This claim caused a whiff of embarrassment in even the doting devotee Jose Luis Gonzalez-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."7

This was however not the end of the matter -- a few years later the same Gonzalez-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 Gonzalez-Balado, as Mother Teresa had not retold the parable for a long time. But I am sure Mother would have approved of such liberties with numbers, as it was all for the sake of Jesus. It is interesting that Gonzalez-Balado, who had earlier been embarrassed about the "9000" claim, had become emboldened with time to go a step further. I can see why -- the entire Teresa cult has come to realise that whatever they say about Mother Teresa in the positive, and whatever bizarre negatives they say about Calcutta, have come to 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" would not have been Biblical enough. Mother's story is almost a carbon copy of those in the Bible. Here is one of them: "Andrew, Simon Peter's brother, said, "Here is a small boy with five barley loaves and two fish; but, what is that among so many?" Jesus said to them, "Make the people sit down." There was plenty of grass there and, as many as five thousand men sat down. Then Jesus took the loaves, gave thanks and distributed them to those who were sitting there; he then did the same with the fish, distributing as much as they wanted. When they had eaten enough he said to the disciples, "Pick up the pieces left over, so that nothing is wasted." So they picked them up and filled twelve large baskets with scarps left over from the meal of five barley loaves." (John 6:9 -13)

Luke (9:15) tells us the same story, and is consistent with "five loaves and two fishes" and with "five thousand men": "For they were about five thousand men. And he said to his disciples, Make them sit down by fifties in a company. And they did so, and made them sit down. Then he took the five loaves and the two fishes, ........" (Luke 9:13 - 17) Mark tells us a similar but different parable, and surprise surprise, he gives us a figure of 4000: "And they that had eaten were about four thousand: and he sent them away." (Mark 8:9)

There are a number of differences between Mother Teresa's tales and those in the Bible. First, the Biblical incidents, assuming they had happened, were descriptions of different episodes, and not different and differing accounts of the same incident. Secondly, these were tales told by the apostles, and not by Jesus himself; I do not think that Jesus, who Mother Teresa modelled herself on, would have been immodest enough to tell self-aggrandising stories about himself. And, being as they were versions by different apostles, a degree of variation in detail could be expected. Thirdly, and most importantly, Mother's tale was pure fantasy (I am again assuming, 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 (that too six days a week); indeed, the total number of people fed daily by the Missionaries of Charity kitchens at that time 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 "5000" 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."8 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."9

In 1969 -70, Mother Teresa's primary schools catered for not more that 200 (a generous overestimate) in Calcutta -- the figure has remained the same today. Nonetheless, I was prepared to overlook her "thousands of children" as a figure of speech -- saints are allowed to get carried away. 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 5000 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 11000 (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 3000 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 5000".

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.......?"10

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 36000 people only from the streets of Calcutta, and out of that big number more than 18000 have died a beautiful death. They have just gone home to God." Mother's "big number" is 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. That is the way to begin." 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."11 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 loves 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 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, they 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 21st 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 fully 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:-

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 will bring him to us.Me: Yes, ... but .....the line is busy. I have 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 at 6 rather than at 3 45 p.m.] 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]."12 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 does 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 16 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."13

The misuse of the ambulances is naturally an issue in itself; 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 a couple of nuns buying expensive Cashmere shawls in a shop called Kashmiri Corner (Shop No. G56). 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 the 7th of 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 have a working knowledge of 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". This was of course at a time when Mother Teresa was a sincere and unknown nun doing her best with limited resources, and 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. One could argue that when Mother Teresa said "language of the people they serve" she meant the universal language of the poor, which is the language of needs, both physical and spiritual. This is possible, as Mother Teresa looked upon the poor as nameless, faceless, speechless entities without individual identities or needs; they are all Jesus Christ in distress -- not symbolically, but literally. This was at the core of Mother Teresa's beliefs. But the bottom line is -- she did not assuage the distress -- not in Calcutta. 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", "Jesus Christ lives in the leper" 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 40s 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:

"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 ....."14

This parable, like the account of Moses receiving the commandments etched on stone, does not hold ground, not least 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 £12015 -- I am prepared to pay substantially more for a similar product written 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 36000

(Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech)

September 1978, Freiburg Cathedral, 3600016

Breisgau, Germany (Speech as Special Guest at the German Catholic Bishops' Conference)

February 1973, Sydney 3600017  (Population & Ecology Conference)

February 1973, Melbourne 2700018

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 nil, as she had never "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 600.

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: Look, I am telling you, we do not take family cases whether she is 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)

This 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 rules 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.

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 perhaps the only 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."19 This book makes some bizarre claims about the charitable functions of the Missionaries of Charity including that they have "122 leprosy clinics".20 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."21 There is no such church. Mother Teresa was immensely proud of her work in the field of leprosy and she certainly showed some sincerity in this area. But her claim "We care for more than 53000 leprosy patients. With the help of the Indian government we are creating rehabilitating centres for them"22 was a wild one. In the whole of India, her leprosaria have about 3000 residents and they look after another 3000 as outpatients. The estimated total number of lepers in Calcutta was 20000 at its peak in the early 1970s. Currently the estimated total is about 10000. When it comes to incredible and impossible claims made by Mother Teresa or by others on her behalf, the one that I find most bemusing appears in a letter written by her to Morarji Desai in 1979, when Mr Desai was (briefly) the Prime Minister of India. In her letter, Mother severely upbraids Mr Desai for not outlawing abortion and then she goes on to say, "In Calcutta alone we have 102 centres where families are taught self control out of love"23 -- meaning of course, natural family planning. Now, 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 she 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 Father Edward Le Joly, 13 years later, gives the global total of her family planning centres as "69"24. 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 very 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 20000 a week just on food for the 59 centres we have in Calcutta."25 This was not just a slip of the tongue, as the "59 centres" recurred, such as in this way: "They [the 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."26 In 1977 Mother Teresa had 4 centres in Calcutta, and presently her order has 5 -- 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. These gross travesties of truth have been treated as pearls of veracity by the world -- understandably so, as they were pronounced by the holiest person of our time. An (almost) saint cannot of course, lie; perhaps we ought to treat these as parables with hidden and symbolic meaning, or, as apocryphal truths. As the whole world knows, Mother Teresa was the ultimate champion of the poor, especially so in Calcutta. She could therefore make some 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."27 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 women in Calcutta living below the poverty line, 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 the number of "very poor" women in the city, especially as she had always been solely preoccupied with the city's poverty.

I may be wrong, but I feel Mother had knowingly made a 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, are 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?

Mother Teresa would have been horrified to know that during my two years as a junior and senior 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, 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 imagination; 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 (possibly) unprintable. About 7 p.m., Noor Jehan left Shishu Bhavan, disappearing into an uncertain Calcutta night, probably to go back to her violent husband.Noor Jehan 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."

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, "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." "28 The media convulsed with devotion.

All very good, but initially 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 to 18 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) 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"29, 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."30

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 the 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 was overwhelmingly (especially at the time) opposed to abortion.

I may sound sanctimonious, but I think that a person of faith such as Mother Teresa should have greater strength of conviction. I do not think Mother Teresa's hero, St Francis of Assisi would have played to the gallery, rather than declare loudly his own (albeit unpopular) stance on an issue. Never mind St Francis, lesser mortals like David Alton and Cardinal Thomas Winning of Scotland have been doing it. They are, of course, not "living saints".

In the past, Mother Teresa had 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..."31

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 her own words:

"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 (the book is still in print).

Indeed, the board still exists (or will do until such time that this book is published) -- 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.

Mother Teresa's home in Dum Dum, near Calcutta airport is also built on land donated by the West Bengal state 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".

Mother's newest home in Calcutta, in Tangra, is however not on government donated land; she rents the land from the government. According to Father Le Joly:

"..the government had given her a very large property for the nominal rent of one rupee [1.5 pence] 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." "32 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.

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."

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, and no doubt she will also get the former.

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."33

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 building which used to be a 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, I am sure, 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.

I just do not know how to react to statements like: "The Sisters go out at night to work, to pick up people from the streets." I can assure you they do not. They 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 had always been callous and calculating about misrepresenting her charitable activities -- from time to time she becomes extremely agitated, especially before people who are close to her, that she should be represented in such an extreme charitable light. When, for instance, Father 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 is her aura that the world had 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.

Mother Teresa herself was the most to blame in the misrepresentation of her activities. She did get these 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 would go there" etc. She was after all, human.

NOTES

Chapter 2

1. The Western Mail, Cardiff, 19 June 1996

2. Lucinda Vardey, Mother Teresa, A Simple Path (London: Rider, 1995), p. 118

3. Kathryn Spink, For the Brotherhood of Man under the Fatherhood of God -- Mother Teresa of Calcutta (New Malden:Colour Library International,1981),p.88

4. Speech in Dublin, Ireland, 2nd June 1979, as quoted in Jose Luis Gonzalez-Balado (ed.), One Heart Full of Love, Mother Teresa (London: Fount, 1989), p. 44

5. Angelo Devananda, Mother Teresa, Contemplative at the Heart of the World (London: Fount, 1985), p. 60

6. Jose Luis Gonzalez-Balado (ed.), Loving Jesus, Mother Teresa (London: Fount, 1991), p. 28

7. Ibid., p. 156

8. David Porter, Mother Teresa The Early Years (London: SPCK, 1986), p.70

9. Malcolm Muggeridge, Something Beautiful for God (London: Fount, 1971) p. 119

10. Ananda Bazaar Patrika, Calcutta, 11 September 1997, p. 5

11. Teresa de Bertondano (ed.), Daily Readings with Mother Teresa (London: Fount, 1993), p. 38

12. Life, April 1988

13. Navin Chawla, Mother Teresa The Authorised Biography (N Delhi: Penguin, 1992), p. 67

14. Franca Zambonini, Teresa of Calcutta A Pencil in God's Hand (N York: Alba House, 1993), p. 43

15. The Sunday Times, 10 February 1991

16. Jose Luis Gonzalez-Balado, One Heart Full of Love, Mother Teresa (London: Fount 1991), p. 27

17. Ibid., p. 36

18. Teresa De Bertodano (ed.), Daily Reading with Mother Teresa (London: Fount, 1993), p. 57

19. Personal Communication from Audrey Constant dated 26 March 1995

20. Audrey Constant, In the Streets of Calcutta, The Story of Mother Teresa (Norwich: Religious and Moral Education Press, 1980), p. 15

21. Ibid., p. 16

22. Jose Luis Gonzalez-Balado, One Heart Full of Love, Mother Teresa (London: Fount, 1991), p. 21

23. "An Open Letter from Mother Teresa of Calcutta to Prime Minister Morarji Desai, Regarding the Freedom of Religion Bill 1978" as quoted in Eileen Egan, Such A Vision of the Street, Mother Teresa -- The Spirit and the Work (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1985)

24. Edward Le Joly, Mother Teresa, A Woman In Love (Indiana: Ave Maria Press, 1993), p. 189

25. Speech by Mother Teresa to Co-Workers on 13th June 1977 at the Brompton Oratory, as quoted in Jose Luis Gonzalez-Balado, One Heart Full of Love(London: Fount, 1991), p. 61

26. Jose Luis Gonzalez-Balado (ed.), Loving Jesus, Mother Teresa

(London: Fount, 1991), p.34

27. Ibid., p. 93

28. The Guardian, 14 April 1988

29. The Times 14 April 1988

30. The Guardian, 14 April 1988

31. Brother Angelo Devananda, Daily Prayers with Mother Teresa (London: Fount,

1987), p. 91

32. Edward Le Joly, Mother Teresa A Woman In Love, p.165

33. David Porter, Mother Teresa, The Early Years, p. 77

34. Radio Times, 7 April 1990

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[Source: http://website.lineone.net/~bajuu/CHAP2.htm ]