A day in the city of miracles

Over the course of 24 hours Mick Brown witnessed a miracle, was stroked by a eunuch and saved a dying horse. It could only happen in Kolkata

When Mother Teresa died in 1997, the Catholic church found itself in need of a miracle. It arrived the following year when a tribal woman named Monika Besra was admitted to a home of Mother Teresa’s order, the Missionaries of Charity, in West Bengal some 200 miles north of Kolkata. She was afflicted with a large tumour in the stomach that was said to be incurable, and expected to die. Instead, she awoke one morning to find that the tumour had gone – thanks, it was said, to the divine intercession of Mother Teresa. This was the miracle the Church required to proceed with the beatification of Teresa, the first step towards her eventual elevation as a saint.

The location of the miracle was fortuitous, for the name of Mother Teresa has long been synonymous with Kolkata, the city where she had ministered to the poor for almost 50 years. It is also a city where miracles seem to occur on a daily basis.

Rudyard Kipling called it the city of dreadful night – a place of unspeakable poverty, famine and disease. But to me it has always been the city of magic, enthrallment and of a haunting, ruined beauty – a testament to the tenacity and vibrancy of life in what can often seem like the most taxing of circumstances.

It is a miracle that Kolkata should even have grown into a city at all, built on a malarial swamp at the estuary of the Hooghly River, a continuation of the Ganges, a location that would prove perilous to the British adventurers, merchants and soldiers who lived and died there. Its streets are chaotic; its climate frequently unbearable. Step on to the streets in high summer and within a minute your clothes will be sticking to your body, obliging you to seek out the nearest air-conditioned coffee shop, electronics store or hotel lobby in search of respite. For the thousands of homeless and destitute people who live on its streets, the poorest of the poor, whom Mother Teresa served, simply to survive is the greatest miracle of all.

It took the Catholic church four years to accumulate and examine the evidence necessary to beatify Mother Teresa and affirm that the healing of Monika Besra was indeed, by all the criteria required, a miracle.

And so it was that in 2003 I travelled to India to meet her.

In Kolkata, with the photographer Raghu Rai and his assistant Shamik, I took the overnight train from Howrah station and headed north, past the congested slums skirting the city and into the Indian countryside. We arrived in the town of Malda at dawn, hired a taxi and set off through the Bengal countryside, stopping occasionally to ask for directions. It had begun to rain.

We passed down an avenue of eucalyptus trees, through a hamlet of mud huts, their walls painted white and yellow, and daubed with the hammer and wheatsheaf – the symbol of the Communist party of India – finally arriving at a collection of mud houses, with thatched and corrugated iron roofs.

Dressed in a vivid orange sari, Monika Besra came out of one of the houses. She was unusually tall for a tribal woman, of indeterminate age with

j Worshippers gather for prayer in the waters of the Hooghly river, a distributary of the Ganges, in Kolkata