And the likeness of our Holy Mother beckoned my only daughter Alice Joseph Bhatti to join her on the throne.
My daughter did not suffer the pain that her estranged husband meant to cause her by pouring half a litre of sulphuric acid on her angelic face. Instead she ascended to Heaven with our Holy Mother. The throne that had arrived to take her away was already there, that’s the reason none of the people surrounding her noticed her tormentor as he approached her unscrewing the acid bottle and professing his eternal love for her. They were all looking up at the horizon, fascinated by the spectacle of our Holy Mother on her throne.
As is common in such cases, people didn’t recognise the heavenly signs in the beginning and instead first focused on small unusual things, little discrepancies, minor malfunctions. An X-ray machine rolled through the corridors of the ortho ward, came to a stop on the edge of the stairs, then extended its mechanical arm and started whizzing as if it was being controlled by an invisible force and taking photographs for posterity. A patient with an oxygen mask in ICU ripped it out and stood up and started complaining that the smell of roses was making him dizzy. An IV drip in the general ward turned to milk. The skewed wooden cross at the entrance of the Sacred, which had not been repaired or painted in years in the hope that it would make people forget that the Sacred was a Catholic establishment, straightened itself and started to glow amber.
The first witnesses were the residents of Charya Ward. All twelve of them swore that they saw a likeness of Sister Alice Bhatti dressed like our Holy Mother in a blue headscarf, a halo around her head, ascending on a throne held aloft by a flock of peacocks. Their testimony was dismissed by the local Diocese Committee to Investigate the Miracle on the grounds that they all belonged to the Muslim faith and were long-term residents of the psychiatric ward. The very simple fact that they were a fractious bunch, and no two of them had ever agreed on anything, was ignored by the Committee. Also ignored was the historical precedent observed in the apparition of our Lady of Fatima, where the testimony of a thirteen-year-old Muslim boy was considered sufficient despite the well-known fact that thirteen-year-old boys, Muslim or not, dream of nothing but beautiful women and can conjure them up when none exist. The medico-legal officer Dr John Malick also witnessed the apparition and kneeled down and sang the praise of our Lord Yassoo and then of our Holy Mother. His testimony was deemed inadmissible on the grounds that, although born and raised a Catholic, he had official inquiries pending against him that accused him of being drunk on duty, accepting illegal bribes to issue fake injury certificates and running a private practice that dealt solely in written-to-order sick notes.
There were several witnesses who saw a flock of kites, their beaks upturned, flying sluggishly around the throne. They flew so gracefully, they seemed to mock the air that carried them. The Committee concluded immediately that a holy apparition accompanied by scavenging birds like kites must be either the work of the devil or a deliberate attempt to bring an already beleaguered Catholic Church into disrepute. Or at best, they said this was some Choohra folklore emanating from French Colony that was being projected as the work of the Holy Spirit.
Can anybody with an iota of common sense and a grain of love for our Holy Mother suggest that it’s my daughter Alice Bhatti’s fault that there were no doves or white pigeons, which the committee always expects to see at such occasions?
The same committee that took less than nine months to bestow sainthood on a Polish nun in our neighbouring country, despite overwhelming evidence from the local community that she was nothing but a stingy old witch who revelled in the suffering of dark-skinned, malnourished children, didn’t even bother to investigate the sublime acts associated with my daughter Alice Bhatti. There is justifiable anger in the Choohra community that this case was either never sent to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, or, if it was sent, then crucial evidence was misrepresented or deliberately misplaced.
The attitude of the National Diocese was not very different either. The same fathers who encourage the celebration of a man-made and very commonplace statue stuck in a cave that might or might not have shed some tears seventy-three years ago undermined Alice Bhatti’s case for sainthood by ignoring various other testimonies that bore witness to the miraculous and blessed nature of that evening.
Perhaps the Divine Will knows the working of the devious minds that trade in our Holy Mother’s name, turn God’s house into a centre for commerce of the souls and plot their next land grab or scheme to get more money out of the Vatican’s wealthy friends by portraying their native followers as illiterate wretches. How else can you explain that on the morning after that blessed night, out of a clear blue sky, without warning, without any thunder and not a cloud on the horizon, lightning struck the Old Doctor — a two-hundred-year-old peepul tree that had survived three hurricanes and generations of Sacred patients who chopped bits off it for firewood. Sister Alice Bhatti had taken many a serene lunch break under its shadow. Such was the impact of the lightning that the tree split into two, smoke emanated from it for days and never a leaf grew on it ever again.
Freak weather phenomenon was all the Committee had to say about it, as if it wasn’t a committee to validate the claims of a holy apparition but a club of amateur meteorologists.
It’s self-evident that the Committee’s negative verdict was the result of the same prejudices that the local diocese has shown towards what they prefer to call lower castes. They claim to be Yassoo’s children, but at heart they remain devotees of the Hindu goddess Kali, always judging people by their ancestry rather than their devotion to our Lord Yassoo and what they do for Yassoo’s children.
It was asked in their meetings, although the Committee never put it on record, that if it really was our Holy Mother revealing herself, then why wouldn’t she reveal herself to a Catholic from a good churchgoing family and of good education, instead of a junior nurse of questionable character?
And they did make a big deal of her character.
The Committee was quick to pounce on the biographical details and reproduced a number of rumours, as the unfortunate expression goes here, as the gospel truth. They accused her of fornicating with a godless communist in her student days. In another example of their callous approach, they called her a penis-slasher and a Xanax thief. As a grieving father, I suffered the additional trauma of having to read these allegations. They said that she had walked out on her loving husband and was living in sin with another woman, a senior nurse, and that the two of them planned to raise a bastard child as husband and wife. It’s unfortunate because this filth presented as the Committee’s findings — mere rumours, unsubstantiated allegations and lewd innuendoes that are the fate of any working lady in this place — have become a matter of canonical record. Can we blame the poor fathers in our French Colony when they prefer not to send their girls to work?
The Committee of course thought that it clinched the argument by claiming that Alice Bhatti had spent two years in the Borstal jail after a conviction on charges of ‘disorderly behaviour with intent to murder’. First of all this is factually incorrect: she was sentenced to eighteen months but she spent only fourteen months there and her sentence was reduced for good behaviour and exemplary moral character. And also, how can spending time in jail automatically be a proof of someone’s guilt? Did our Lord Yassoo not spend two nights in the Sanhedrin’s prison? As the Committee was writing its verdict with a pen dipped in the poison of prejudice, weren’t there hundreds of thousands of our Lord Yassoo’s followers languishing in prisons all over the world for saying His name or circulating a photocopied page from the Holy Bible, or just for believing in their hearts that Yassoo was the son of God? Try shouting that out in a public square in this place and you’ll be lucky if you only end up in a jail and are not lynched on the spot.