35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

EMPIRE OF THE SOUL
fodder, a profession of human equality being all any religion needed
to gain a substantial following in India.
On one wall hung a large framed photograph of Mother meeting
the pope. John Paul II looked happier than she did.
‘A ma-ann huh-oo wass bl – bla-ee – blah-inn . . .’
‘Blind!’ snapped the nun. ‘A man who was blind. Continue.’
It was agonising to hear, and I felt grateful when the reading
lesson was over and both teacher and pupil disappeared into the
steam outside. On a bookshelf there were twenty-nine copies of a
treatise on prayer by some French cleric, three other Bibles, a fifteenyear-old
National Geographic magazine, and an English dictionary
that began at the tail end of B: buzzard, buzz bomb, buzzer, buzz saw,
by, by-and-by, bye, bye-bye, by-election, Byelorussian . . . I began to feel
sleepy, reading the introduction to Prayer, which stressed that the
activity was not supposed to be a shopping list of desires you wanted
God to fill.
To become a saint, one must suffer much. Suffering begets love
. . . and life among the souls.
– Mother Teresa
‘Who wants to see Mother?’ a crackly old voice snapped.
I looked up to see the curtain covering an inner door briskly
swept aside by a tiny, robust figure clutching an enormous bone
rosary in her hands. Mother Teresa was clearly good at making
entrances. She also seemed far less shy and frail than she did on
film, with some impressive warts on her nose. At eighty-two, she
was certainly more vigorous than many people half her age – like
me – and there was a certain tenacity in her manner I had not expected.
She gripped my hands firmly with hers, saying, ‘Very kind of you
to come all this way. What do you want?’
We sat, and her gnarled and fissured fingers constantly counted
the huge worn rosary beads, causing an incessant clacking noise. I
imagined the thousands, of similar meetings she must have endured,
wondering what I could do to make this one a little different.
I started off with a pretentiously convoluted question about how
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