Life and times

The Telegraph’s Mick Brown on his travels

I HAVE JUST COME BACK FROM visiting friends in Kolkata. I first met Sunita when I went to investigate the beatification of Mother Teresa. Sunita and her husband Naresh, who once captained the Indian Davis Cup tennis team, were great friends of hers. For years Sunita sat outside the tiny room in the Mother House (a bleak, grey, pockmarked building, on a congested road) where Mother lived and died, typing her correspondence on a rickety typewriter.

Perhaps the most poignant item in the small museum at the Mother House is Mother’s cardigan, a patchwork of darning and re-darning, so tiny it might have belonged to a child. Along with a bowl, sari, umbrella and the wheelchair she used in her last years, it is one of the few items that could be described as her ‘belongings’, a striking reminder of a life of unsparing asceticism.

Yet Teresa was a divisive figure, even in Kolkata. Following her death, a local newspaper gave vent to a simmering resentment, arguing Kolkata ‘had little reason to be grateful’ to her.

The writer Christopher Hitchens was a particularly hostile critic, calling her a ‘fraud’ who was less interested in caring for the poor than in bullying them into converting to Catholicism. While it’s true that she saw saving souls as part of her mission, in my visits to her ‘home for the dying’ I have seen no evidence of forced conversion.

I interviewed Christopher before he died and liked him, but we disagreed over Mother Teresa. He talked of a plan he was hatching, along with his fellow ‘new atheists’ Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, to establish a group of secular hospital visitors that would seek out dying believers, in the manner of priests at the bedside, but instead urging them to die free from ‘fear of the priest’. I ventured that I didn’t think that would be a kindness. ‘I think it would,’ he replied. ‘Absolutely.’ He could be a tough nut.

ONE OF THE GREAT MYSTERIES of Kolkata is why it seems to attract few foreign tourists. It is India’s most fascinating, and crazy, city – nowhere more so than the Marble Palace. Inside this 19th-century neoclassical mansion, built by a Bengali merchant, Raja Rajendra Mullick, classical Greek and Roman sculptures jostle with kitschy statues of Jesus, Napoleon and Queen Victoria, along with paintings by Joshua Reynolds, Murillo and Rubens (or at least attributed to them). Part of the palace continues to be occupied by Mullick’s descendants. On the day we visited, one was sitting in the gardens in a kurta (a collarless long shirt) and flip-flops, reading a newspaper. Quite how the place survives is a mystery. It charges no admission, and is in a hazardous state of disrepair. There is talk of restoration, but somehow it would only spoil it. Visitors to India invariably head to the Taj Mahal, but take my advice, go to the Marble Palace first – before it’s too late.

A FEW WEEKS EARLIER I had been in Iraq, writing about the excavation of the 4,000-year-old city of Girsu. It was a curiously bracing experience to be driven the 160 miles from Basra airport, at top speed, along a near-empty road, accompanied by a police truck with a man seated on the rear platform with a machine gun. Iraq is still a security risk then, but there is optimism for the future. At the site of Girsu there was talk of building a visitors’ centre. A little premature, perhaps, to think of Iraq as a tourist destination. But walking across the vast expanse of the ancient city is something everybody should have the opportunity to experience – with or without an armed guard.

Mother’s cardigan is a patchwork of darning and re-darning, so tiny it might have belonged to a child