Nuzhat and Khattu See The World

We were on our way to the airport for that flight back to Muscat. I was in my 20s, a young woman who had been numb for a few years, weakened from the onslaught of womanhood, a shadow of the unrestrained child I used to be, somehow always in a haze, always elegant and struggling to conceal the rest.

The clunky taxi, smelling like petrol and grease like everything else in industrial Lucknow, made a chaotic stop by a dusty gali. My brother, mother and I got out and met a gaunt dusty man at the entrance. Pigs, an unusual sight in the part of Lucknow I knew, snorted and squealed at what I learned was the entrance of the Muslim cemetery. My heart contracted with the indignity – didn’t this bother anyone else? Maybe the world was too tired by now. I didn’t let anyone know. No one would want to hear me.

The caretaker led us through what looked like a large field, dusty and barren with pebbles and stones scattered throughout. Suddenly we stopped, and someone pointed to the ground in front of me. Nuzhat Bua. She lay buried under where I stood. I wouldn’t even have known if the caretaker hadn’t told me. There was some sort of makeshift marker, a piece of wood or stone half sunk in the grass as if left by an ancient child on the grave of a beloved pet long forgotten. My feet tingled, my heart contracted – shouldn’t I not be standing on top of her? I didn’t want to hurt her, even though I knew I couldn’t.

I said nothing. We said a quick prayer. The caretaker hurriedly pointed to a similar spot on the ground where my grandmother, who had died many years earlier, was buried.

We were soon back in the taxi, and my story continued while Nuzhat Bua’s and her mother’s lay at the bottom of the pig-ridden cemetery in some odd corner of Lucknow that I have never visited since and wouldn’t know how to find again.

Many years later, when I had wrestled with womanhood and flung it to the ground, I would think of Nuzhat Bua again and again. She supposedly wasn’t very well-liked. Some people credited her sharp tongue with her never being married. I was too young to understand, but she was the only adult who ever made sense to me. I’ve heard the same things about me too as an adult, although the times are changing and such women are praised.

The last time I saw her, she was championing my journey to America. I don’t remember our last words, but I hadn’t thought that they would be our last. She hadn’t either. She had recently started travelling for leisure – Muscat, Jaipur, and Hong Kong – and was beginning to discover a friend and accomplice in me, a teenager perched on the precipice of childhood, the country of adults and the rest of my life within sight. We had plans to travel together, my functioning as her English-speaking companion as she took me around the world. I couldn't wait. Neither could she. It was so exciting.

Nuzhat Bua would die in six months, and I never saw her again except very suddenly years later at that cemetery where she still lies, possibly some of her genes part of my body as I move forward in life and see the world we were supposed to discover together. Since then I have seen many things. The Grand Canyon, Hollywood, the White House, Native American reservations, and the Ku Klux Klan. I have even been to Jaipur, straining my eyes to catch Nuzhat Bua still amongst the mass of humanity that is Anywhere, India. But I only see her in dreams, always telling her, “you shouldn’t be here, you are supposed to be dead.” I wonder when those dreams will stop and what it all means.

The Hated One

On October 30, 2011, some young people I had met at the NDTV media institute became one:

""One year," the old man almost growled as he wagged a gnarly finger at his daughter. His son, his younger more menacing version, darkly looked on. "One year, and then you are back."

The young woman stood looking down at the ground with her arms crossed over her chest. She had been leaning against the wall, and if she had had eyes at the back of her head, she would have noticed the chalky whitewash stains that now ran down her back. Her armpits burned, her forehead had been knotted for a few days.

The old man put his finger away and eyed the Sphinx before him. He didn't trust women, particularly silent ones, even if it were his daughter, especially if it were his daughter. She never listened. Well, she'd hear what he'd tell her, she had no choice, but she never listened. She never confided. She always held back. He could tell. It's when those knots would appear above her black eyes, and when a shadow would pass over those eyes, like as if a dark curtain had been drawn between him and her mind. He knew this about his firstborn. He could never break in. She wouldn't let him. She wouldn't let him reach in and touch her thoughts, guide her thoughts. How he hated the woman she was growing up to be, it disgusted him. He didn't like those kind of women. They were ungodly, sickening. They had too much will, they could never be possessed because they'd just lock you out. It didn't matter if you pushed or bought them things. It was like forcing someone to acknowledge that you existed. It was more like pleading. Pleading with someone who was supposed to be obeying you instead. It was insulting. Humiliating. It made him feel like the tempestuous child, it made her the one with the power. She would have the power to deny him an audience. Him. The father. Repeated humiliations from this child since the day she had been born. Her mother, Allah bless her departed spirit, had not been like this. She would listen to him. She would protest but at the end of the day he was the head of the family, and she knew her place. She never questioned his judgment. She did what he told her, what he knew was good for her. She was a good woman. But this daughter of his, how he hated her. If only she would just listen before she ruined herself, ruined herself, and shamed them all. It was only a matter of time before she did, whether she knew it or not.

"If Zafar knew better, he would not permit this. You must keep your honour, or what shame, what shame you shall bring upon yourself."

Shame. Zafar. The things that had been planned for her. The things she wanted to do. All the things she wanted to do, all the thoughts, all the possibilities that were always in her mind. She could never share them, there was no one here to receive them. No one listened to her. No one had ever listened to her. Zafar?  Would he listen to her, would he see her? She remembered the first time she had stopped herself from telling her father the things that had been on her mind. She felt the same about Zafar. And her brother? They were all the same. There was no one here. No, she would have to do this. She would have to step out and see if there were others like her out there."

Nothin' But Mammals

Grandchildren deities of the creator god: Nut of the sky and Geb of the earth

According to one ancient Egyptian creation myth, the creator god who was both male and female gave birth to the cosmos and other gods by masturbating. Nothing unusual - the ancient religions were based on nature's cycles of creation, death, and rebirth (think seasons and harvest). I find it funny how for thousands of years polytheistic traditions around the world worshipped male and female genitalia (and still do in India), but today most people are raised to dread and even ignore their nether-regions. And masturbation? Don't touch that dial!

Delhi Stole My Divinity

From my diary, dated November 30, 2011:

"I'm in some kind of funk. I keep myself very occupied with work, and I try not to think more than 24 hours into the future. I try not to think about dreams, goals, ambitions...

...I don't know what to believe in anymore. I was driven, self-assured, because I believed in God. But that got sufficiently rattled in India. I feel like a steam engine whose engine has gone cold. I feel like I could go 100 mph but I just feel so heavy and hollow. I am trying to figure out what I believe in now, but I can't come up with anything. I feel slow and panicky. Then I remember not to let myself think and feel too much. I remember to let myself be selfish and territorial. I am a house of cards these days. I want to call on God, but I suddenly feel like there could be no such thing. My steam engine's coal room has no fuel anymore.

What a crisis I am in. And you wouldn't know it from my face. I look so calm and speak so softly, like I am sleepwalking. I want to go home, I want to put a distance between myself and my memories of Delhi this past year. Everything hurts too much, and it's been 4 months already."

Museum Directions

There was something very creepy about the Parsi-looking man from the Jehangir Art Gallery. I had asked him to tell me where the Prince of Wales museum was, and even though it was down the street, he'd almost leapt to take me there himself.

What a creepy man. He was probably in his mid-30s, light-skinned, stout, clean-shaven, and with no expression at all. He mumbled and stared directly into my eyes the whole time, and about 2 minutes into our awkward walk to the museum where I could feel him looking me up and down and rubbing his hands with silent slimey glee I told him I could get there myself and I very happily left him behind.

A Death in Bombay

A crowd of men with handkerchiefs wrapped on their heads carried a large coffin through a drizzly sticky muddy busy inner Bombay street.

The coffin was covered with bright green fabric that had Arabic calligraphy on it and strings and strings of red roses and white jasmines.

People stopped to watch as the men quickly moved the coffin into the back of a waiting ambulance.

Some of the bystanders touched their hearts with their fingers and then kissed them.

A small crowd of the nearest passerbys - Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Parsi - started to gather because Death will someday touch everyone.

It is the great equaliser, the unifier.

And I remembered a dream I had in high school half a lifetime ago where I was wandering in some dirty Indian city, and I saw both Hindu and Muslim funeral processions passing by in front of me.

In my dream, I had heard a disembodied voice telling me not to stare because that's how riots get started.

Today I saw my first Muslim funeral procession, and I chose not to stare because I didn't want to make a circus out of it.

As I quickly averted my eyes and started to move on, I passed an Indian man who could've been any Indian man mumbling to himself, to no one, to everyone.

The only words that made it to my ears as I passed him by were, "it's not polite to stare at these things..."

Fiona and the Universe

Dedicated to Fiona Poojara

In Bombay by the sea
By the Arabian Sea
On a humid afternoon
Fiona sat in a cab that was yellow and black
And looked out the window and saw
On the grey tarmac
A black and grey crow with a long black beak
Picking out jiggly thin pink stringy bits from the corpse of a rat
Quite casually

Fiona looked away
These things she said make her upset
She don't want to see

My dear Fiona
Little girl
Raised on birthday parties
With clowns and movie star Miss India guests
And an Anglican school for girls
Long skirts and ladylike shoes
For the girls of Saint Mary the Virgin
Saint Mary the Virgin

It's just life in the foodchain
One death for every birth
One death or more
Somebody to eat somebody else
It's everyone's turn sometime
Nothing personal it's okay
Just life in the foodchain
Don't look away Saint Mary
Look upon your God's glory
One death for every birth
One death or more
Don't look away Saint Mary

Hijab + hood = hijood

From a Times of Oman special in the sports section called 'Ramadhan and Muslim Athletes: Overcoming Greater Obstacles.'

The Cleric's Worst Nightmare

The end of the world is upon us: people now get fatter during Ramadhan, and Kate Moss is the face of Harper's Bazaar Arabia's Ramadhan special (her naughty bits have been covered quite literally for Heaven's sake).

Malcolm and Betty X

"The unease Malcolm had shown toward marrying Betty almost immediately manifested itself in their lives together as man and wife. The challenges they faced were linked, in part, to the general problems that many black Americans encounter when adopting Qur'anic standards for marriage. Many basic beliefs Muslims have about its purposes and duties are at odds with Western Christian values. Another serious issue is the concept of machismo that some African-American males carry into Islam. The Nation had long drawn its converts from the lowest rungs of black society, and many of its flock came from difficult or self-destructive backgrounds. Those who, like Malcolm, had converted while in prison often continued to bear painful scars, both physical and psychological, from that experience. Trauma can last an entire lifetime, and the Nation had no self-help program to assist men in overcoming such emotional problems. Malcolm's prior sexual history had been largely defined by encounters with prostitutes and women like Bea Caragulian. Now he would have an obligation not only to provide financially for Betty but to address her emotional and sexual needs."

- Manning Marable, 'Malcolm X'

The Men and Women of the Nation

"Elijah Muhammad's views about gender relations would be set out in this 1965 manifesto Message to the Blackman in America. To Muhammad, males and females occupied separate spheres. Black women had been the mothers of civilisation, and they would play a central role in the construction of the world to come. Metaphorically, they were the field in which a mighty Nation would grow; thus it was essential for black men to keep the devil, the white man, away from his "field," because the black woman was far more valuable than any cash crop. There was no question that all women had to be controlled; the question was, who should exercise that control, the white man or the black? He also warned against birth control, a devilish plot to carry out genocide against black babies. It was precisely a woman's ability to produce children that gave the weaker sex its value. "Who wants a sterile wom[a]n?" he asked rhetorically.

What attracted so many intelligent, independent African-American women to such a patriarchal sect? The sexist and racist world of the 1940s and 1950s provides part of the answer. Many African-American women in the paid labour force were private household workers and routinely experienced sexual harassment by their white employers. The [Nation of Islam], by contrast, offered them the protections of private patriarchy. Like their middle-class white counterparts, African-American women in the Nation were not expected to hold full-time jobs, and even if Malcolm's frequent misogynistic statements, especially in his sermons, were extreme even by the sexist standards of the NOI, it offered protection, stability, and a kind of leadership. Malcolm's emphasis on the sanctity of the black home made an explicit promise "that families won't be abandoned, that women will be cherished and protected, [and] that there will be economic stability."

Temple women during those years rarely perceived themselves as being subjugated. The [Muslim Girls Training] was its own center of activity, in which members participated in neighbourhood activities and were encouraged to monitor their children's progress in school. At the Newark NOI temple, not far from Temple No. 7, women were involved in establishing small businesses. They also took an active role in working with their local board of education as well as other community concerns. It is likely that Harlem's women made similar efforts. As with those who were working in civil rights, women in the NOI had in mind the future of the black community. What attracted them to the Nation was the possibility of strong, healthy families, supportive relationships, and personal engagements in building crime-free black neighbourhoods and ultimately an independent black nation."

- Manning Marable, 'Malcolm X'

Those Black Kids at School

"The Little children were constantly drilled in the principles of Garveyism, to such an extent that they expressed their black nationalist values at school. For example, on one morning following the Pledge of Allegiance and the singing of the national anthem at school, Wilfred informed his teacher that blacks also had their own anthem. Instructed to sing it, Wilfred complied: "It began with the words...'Ethiopia, the land of the free...' That creates some problems," Wilfred recalled, "because here is this little nigger that feels he is just equal to anybody else, he got his own little national anthem that he sings, and he's proud of it...It wasn't the way they wanted things to go."

...

"When Malcolm went to Mason, you could see a change in him," Wilfred recalled. "Some for the better, some for the worse...He would complain about some of the things the teachers would try to do - they would try to discourage him from taking courses that black people weren't suposed to take; in other words, keep him in his place." It hadn't bothered him particularly during the previous year when white students who had befriended him continued to call him nigger. But now Malcolm was keenly aware of the social distance between himself and others. An English teacher, Richard Kaminska, sharply discouraged him from becoming a lawyer. "You've got to be realistic about being a nigger," Kaminska advised him. "A lawyer - that's no realistic goal for a nigger...Why don't you plan on carpentry?" Malcolm's grades plummeted and his truculence increased. Within several months, he found himself expelled."

- Manning Marable, 'Malcolm X'

Go back to Africa!

"The destruction of a black family's home by racist whites was hardly unique in the Midwest at this time. In 1923, the Michigan State Supreme Court had upheld the legality of racially restrictive provisions in the sale of private homes. Most Michigan whites felt that blacks had no right to purchase homes in predominantly white communities. Four years before the Littles' fire, in June 1925, a black couple, Dr. Ossian Sweet and his wife Gladys, purchased a single-family home in East Detroit, a white neighbourhood, escaping Detroit's largest ghetto, known as the Black Bottom, and were forced to pay $18,500 even though the fair market value of the modest bungalow was under $13,000. On the night the Sweets moved in, despite the presence of a police inspector, hundreds of angry whites surrounded the house and began smashing its windows with rocks and bricks. Several  of the Sweets' friends shot into the mob, killing one man and wounding another. Ossian and Gladys Sweet plus nine others were subsequently charged with murder. The NAACP vigorously took up the case, hiring celebrated defense attorney Clarence Darrow. Despite an all-white jury, eight of the eleven were acquitted; the jury divided on the remaining three. The judge subsequently declared a mistrial, and ultimately the Sweets were freed."

- Manning Marable, 'Malcolm X'

Creative Accounting?

"Don't do any work on the Sabbath yourself, but pay someone else to do it. You obeyed the letter of the law: who's counting? The Dalai Lama tells us that you can visit a prostitute as long as someone else pays her. Shia Muslims offer "temporary marriage," selling men the permission to take a wife for an hour or two with the usual vows and then divorce her when they are done. Half of the splendid buildings in Rome would never have been raised if the sale of indulgences had not been so profitable: St. Peter's itself was financed by a special one-time offer of that kind. The newest pope, the former Joseph Ratzinger, recently attracted Catholic youths to a festival by offering a certain "remission of sin" to those who attended."

- Christopher Hitchens, 'God is Not Great'

A Warning to Seekers of the East

"A faith that despises the mind and the free individual, that preaches submission and resignation, and that regards life as a poor and transient thing, is ill-equipped for self-criticism. Those who become bored by conventional "Bible" religions, and seek "enlightenment" by way of the dissolution of their own critical faculties into nirvana in any form, had better take a warning. They may think they are leaving the realm of despised materialism, but they are still being asked to put their reasons to sleep, and to discard their minds along with their sandals."

- Christopher Hitchens, 'God is Not Great'

A New Island Religion

"In 1964 there appeared a celebrated documentary movie called Mondo Cane, or "the world of the dog", in which the directors captured numerous human cruelties and illusions. This was the first occasion on which one could see a new religion being assembled, in plain view, on camera. The inhabitants of the Pacific islands may have been separated for centuries from the more economically developed world, but when visited by the fatal impact many of them were shrewd enough to get the point immediately. Here were great vessels with billowing sails, bearing treasures and weapons and devices that were beyond any compare. Some of the more untutored islanders did what many people do when confronted with a new phenomenon, and tried to translate it into a discourse that they could themselves understand (not unlike those fearful Aztecs who, first seeing mounted Spanish soldiers in Mesoamerica, concluded that they had a centaur for an enemy). These poor souls decided that the westerners were their long-mourned ancestors, come back at last with goods from beyond the grave. That illusion cannot long have survived the encounter with the colonists, but later it was observed in several places that the brighter islanders had a better idea. Docks and jetties were built, they noticed, after which more ships came and unloaded more goods. Acting by analogy and mimesis, the locals constructed their own jetties and waited for these, too, to attract some ships. Futile as this proceeding was, it badly retarded the advance of later Christian missionaries. When they made their appearance, they were asked where the gifts were (and soon came up with some trinkets).

In the twentieth century the "cargo cult" revived in an even more impressive and touching form. Units of the United States armed forces, arriving in the Pacific to build airfields for the war on Japan, found that they were the objects of slavish emulation. Local enthusiasts abandoned their lightly worn Christian observances and devoted all their energies to the construction of landing strips that might attract loaded airplanes. They made simulated antennae out of bamboos. They built and lit fires, to simulate the flares that guided the American planes to land. This still goes on, which is the saddest but of the Mondo Cane sequence. On the island of Tana, an American GI was declared to be the redeemer. His name, John Frum, seems to have been an invention too. But even after the last serviceman flew or sailed away after 1945, the eventual return of the saviour Frum was preached and predicted, and an annual ceremony still bears his name. On another island named New Britain, adjacent to Papua New Guinea, the cult is even more strikingly analogous. It has ten commandments (the "Ten Laws"), a trinity that has one presence in heaven and another on earth, and a ritual system of paying tributes in the hope of propitiating these authorities. If the ritual is performed with sufficient purity and fervor, so its adherants believe, then an age of milk and honey will be ushered in. This radiant future, sad to say, is known as the "Period of the Companies", and will cause New Britain to flourish and prosper as if it were a multinational corporation."

- Christopher Hitchens, 'God is Not Great'

Why Chris Left Marxism

"Trotsky had a sound materialist critique that enabled him to be prescient, not all of the time by any means, but impressively so on some occasions. And he certainly had a sense - expressed in his emotional essay Literature and Revolution - of the unquenched yearning of the poor and oppressed to rise above the strictly material world and to achieve something transcendent. For a good part of my life, I had a share in this idea that I have not yet quite abandoned. But there came a time when I could not protect myself, and indeed did not wish to protect myself, from the onslaught of reality. Marxism, I conceded, had its intellectual and philosophical  and ethical glories, but they were in the past. Something of the heroic period might perhaps be retained, but the fact had to be faced: there was no longer a guide to the future. In addition, the very concept of a total solution had led to the most appalling human sacrifices, and to the invention of excuses for them. Those of us who had sought a rational alternative to religion had reached a terminus that was comparably dogmatic. What else was to be expected of something that was produced by the close cousins of chimpanzees? Infallibility? Thus, dear reader, if you have come this far and found your own faith undermined - as I hope - I am willing to say that to some extent I know what you are going through. There are days when I miss my old convictions as if they were an amputated limb. But in general I feel better, and no less radical, and you will feel better too, I guarantee, once you leave hold of the doctrinaire and allow your chainless mind to do its own thinking."

- Christopher Hitchens, 'God is Not Great'

An Ordinary Miracle

"Mother Teresa died in 1997. On the first anniversary of her death, two nuns in the Bengali village of Raigunj claim to have strapped an aluminium medal of the departed (a medal that had supposedly been in contact with her dead body) to the abdomen of a woman named Monica Besra. This woman, who was said to be suffering from a large uterine tumour, was thereupon quite cured of it. It will be noticed that Monica is a Catholic girl's name not very common in Bengal, and thus that probably the patient and certainly the nuns were already Mother Teresa fans. This definition would not cover Dr. Manju Murshed, the superintendent of the local hospital, nor Dr. TK Biswas and his gynecologist colleague Dr. Ranjan Mustafi. All three came forward to say that Mrs. Besra had been suffering from tuberculosis and an ovarian growth, and had been successfully treated for both afflications. Dr. Murshed was particularly annoyed at the numerous calls he had received from Mother Teresa's order, the "Missionaries of Charity", pressing him to say that the cure had been miraculous. The patient herself did not make a very impressive interview subject, talking at high speed because, as she put it, she "might otherwise forget" and begging to be excused questions because she might have to "remember". Her own husband, a man named Selku Murmu, broke silence after a while to say that his wife had been cured by ordinary, regular medical treatment."

- Christopher Hitchens, 'God is Not Great'

A Miracle at Mother Teresa's

"I had already helped expose one of the "miracles" connected with the work of this woman. The man who originally made her famous was a distinguished if rather silly British evangelist (later a Catholic) named Malcolm Muggeridge. It was his BBC documentary, Something Beautiful for God, which launched the "Mother Teresa" brand on the world in 1969. The cameraman for this film was a man named Ken Macmillan, who had won high praise for his work on Lord Clark's great art history series, Civilisation. His understanding of colour and lighting was of a high order. Here is the story as Muggeridge told it, in the book that accompanied the film:

[Mother Teresa's] Home for the Dying is dimly lit by small windows high up in the walls, and Ken [Macmillan] was adamant that filming was quite impossible there. We only had one small light with us, and to get the place adequately lighted in the time at our disposal was quite impossible. It was decided that, nonetheless, Ken should have a go, but by way of insurance he took, as well, some film in an outside courtyard where some of the inmates were sitting in the sun. In the processed film, the part taken inside was bathed in a particularly beautiful soft light, whereas the part taken outside was rather dim and confused...I myself am absolutely convinced that the technically unaccountable light is, in fact, the Kindly Light that Cardinal Newman refers to in his well-known exquisite hymn.

He concluded that

This is precisely what miracles are for - to reveal the inner reality of God's outward creation. I am personally persuaded that Ken recorded the first authentic photographic miracle...I fear I talked and wrote about it to the point of tedium.

He was certainly correct in that last sentence: by the time he had finished he had made Mother Teresa into a world-famous figure. My contribution was to check out and put into print the direct verbal testimony of Ken Macmillan, the cameraman himself. Here it is:

During Something Beautiful for God, there was an episode where we were taken to a building that Mother Teresa called the House of the Dying. Peter Chafer, the director, said, "Ah well, it's very dark in here. Do you think we can get something?" And we had just taken delivery at the BBC of some new film made by Kodak, which we hadn't had time to test before we left, so I said to Peter, "Well, we may as well have a go." So we shot it. And when we got back several weeks later, a month or two later, we are sitting in the rushes theater at Ealing Studios and eventually up come the shots of the House of the Dying. And it was surprising. You could see every detail. And I said, "That's amazing. That's extraordinary." And I was going to go on to say, you know, three cheers for Kodak. I didn't get a chance to say that though, because Malcolm, sitting in the front row, spun around and said: "It's divine light! It's Mother Teresa. You'll find that it's divine light, old boy." And three or four days later I found that I was being phoned by journalists from London newspapers who were saying things like: "We hear you've just come back from India with Malcolm Muggeridge and you were the witness of a miracle."

"

- Christopher Hitchens, 'God is Not Great'

The Lawmakers and Their Subjects

"In 1996, the Irish Republic held a referendum on one question: whether its state constitution should still prohibit divorce. Most of the political parties, in an increasingly secular country, urged voters to approve of a change in the law. The did so for two excellent reasons. It was no longer thought right that the Roman Catholic Church should legislate its morality for all citizens, and it was obviously impossible even to hope for eventual Irish reunification if the larger Protestant minority in the North was continually repelled by the possibility of clerical rule. Mother Teresa flew all the way from Calcutta to help campaign, along with the church and its hard-liners, for a "no" vote. In other words, an Irish woman married to a wife-beating  and incestuous drunk should never expect anything better, and might endanger her soul if she begged for a fresh start, while as for the Protestants, they could either choose the blessings of Rome or stay out altogether. There was not even the suggestion that Catholics could follow their own church's commandments while not imposing them on all citizens. And this in in the British Isles, in the last decade of the twentieth century. The referendum eventually amended the constitution, though by the narrowest of majorities. (Mother Teresa in the same year gave an interview saying that she hoped her friend Princess Diana would be happier after she had escaped from what was an obviously miserable marriage, but it's less of a surprise to find the church applying sterner laws to the poor, or offering indulgences to the rich.)"

- Christopher Hitchens, 'God is Not Great'