I was seven years old, and I had just understood something that no child should have to understand quite so early: that the thing I wanted most in the world was probably not going to be available to me.
A house with no one to ask
My father was a carpenter. On a good day his wages came to around thirty-seven Indian rupees — less than fifty cents. We did not own a television; I watched programmes standing at the neighbours’ doors. That was ordinary, and I did not resent it.
What I could not get past was the studying. Both my parents had left school after the primary years. Nobody in our neighbourhood had passed grade ten. So when I sat down in the evening with a book, there was no one in the house — or, as far as I knew, on the street — who could tell me whether I was doing it right.
The evening I asked my mother
One evening I asked her to help me. It was not an unreasonable question. Other boys in my class had mothers who sat with them.
She started to cry.
My mother is an emotional woman, and she carried all her life what she called an inferiority feeling — a settled conviction that she was not equipped to help her own children learn. She was not being dramatic. She simply had nothing to give me on that particular front, and being asked for it hurt.
Then she said the sentence that redirected my whole life: “I don’t know how to teach my son. You go and pray to Holy Mother and she will guide you.”
Running to the chapel
When my mother tells me to do something, I do it. I took my grandmother’s rosary and ran to the little chapel in our neighbourhood.
I knelt in front of the Holy Mother and the Infant Jesus, and I said it out loud, because at seven you do not know that you are supposed to whisper:
“Oh my sweet Jesus, I have nobody to help with studies. Can I borrow your mother to help me with studies? If you can help me to learn and study, as I get more education, know more languages and travel to different places, I will tell everyone about you!”
I have thought about that prayer many times since, usually with some embarrassment at its bluntness. A child asking to borrow somebody’s mother. But I meant every word of the second half, and I have spent the years since trying to make good on it.
What I was actually given
She never gave the rosary back, so to speak. From that evening the Holy Mother was my spiritual mother and my mentor, and I stopped thinking of the arrangement as a loan.
I carried the rosary everywhere. I held it while I studied, the way a smaller child holds a hand. That is not a figure of speech I have added afterwards — it is exactly what it felt like at the time, and exactly what I was doing.
The grades came. The B.Com came, then the master’s, then England, then Canada, then the designations. Every one of them was answered prayer before it was anything else, and I have never once been tempted to describe them otherwise.
The debt
The second half of that prayer was a promise, and promises made at seven are still promises.
More education, more languages, more places — and in return, telling everyone about Him. The Santo Prayer Mission is what that promise looks like now that I am old enough to keep it properly. Everything else on this site is a footnote to a bargain struck on a chapel floor in Kerala by a boy who did not know any better than to ask.