Monica Besra. Picture by Abhijit Chakroborty

Nakor (South Dinajpur), Oct. 11: She scratches her head, cracks her knuckles and then rolls her eyes. Ask Monica Besra a question and she gets ruffled.

“Don’t ask too many questions or else I will forget everything I have to say,” the tribal woman, in the eye of a raging controversy over the “miracle” cure of her stomach tumour, said. In the last one week, she said, she had given a couple of interviews to the media after the “sisters had given me the go-ahead”.

“But please listen to me. If you still have any doubts, ask the sisters,” she said, in a pleading voice. Then, she rattled off the entire saga of her treatment that had ended in the Nabajiban Ashram of the Missionaries of Charity on September 5, 1999, the day she said she was cured of her stomach ailment through a prayer to Mother Teresa.

“What doctors at Balurghat and other hospitals could not do, Mother did. I am so grateful to Mother,” she said.

Monica fell silent when told about her medical records at Balurghat hospital, which showed she was cured of her “teobo ovarian mass” in May 1999, more than three months before she and the Missionaries of Charity claimed she was cured in a prayer meeting.

Balurghat hospital superintendent M. Murshed said an ultrasonography of her stomach on May 29 that year clearly “established” the tumour had disappeared. “It is not unusual for such ovarian mass to disappear. Such mass is mainly caused by tuberculosis she had been suffering from,” he said.

Besra said she did not know anything about her medical records with the hospital. “I am an illiterate woman. All I know I was cured by Mother. If you want to know more, you talk to the sisters,” she said.

Sister Nirmala, superior-general of the Missionaries of Charity, in a statement released in Calcutta, stood by the miracle cure of the woman. “I am confident that the study of the alleged miraculous cure of Monica Besra through inter-session of the servant of God, Mother Teresa, that is still underway is being conducted thoroughly. I have full confidence in the eventual decision of the Holy See.”

But eminent physicians and surgeons refused to buy the statement unquestioned. “There are abscesses that do appear like tumours and regress with anti-tuberculor drugs like streptomycin, Rifampicin and INH,” said Satadal Saha, a leading surgeon of Calcutta.

Tarun Kumar Biswas, who had treated Besra at Balurghat hospital, said he had given “her Rifampicin, INH, Ethambutol and PZA as she had been suffering from a tubercular disease.”

Curiously, Kanchan Besra, Monica’s sister and a local schoolteacher, said her sister’s “conditioned improved because of prolonged treatment she had undertaken at different hospitals”. She said her sister had “taken a whole lot of medicines and that must have cured her of the disease”.