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THE OTHER inhabitants of the tiny village of Dhulinakod in eastern India tell Selku Murmu he is a lucky man. He was just a simple farmer, they say, and now, thanks to his wife's "miraculous" recovery from cancer, he is a celebrity. Their teasing occasionally gets on his nerves but he does not deny that fortune has smiled on him and his family.
"I'm very proud of my wife," he says of Monica Besra, a Bengali tribal woman who is leaving for Rome to attend Mother Teresa's beatification by the Pope in two weeks' time. "A few years ago we had never been outside our district in West Bengal. Now she will be travelling to this far-off place and she will see many new things".
Five years ago Monica Besra had a stomach tumour and her husband could not afford any further medical treatment. He had spent his last money on a nursing home bill and been forced to take two of his five children out of school. All day he toiled in other people's fields to feed his family.
It was at this point, with hope fading, that the Missionaries...