The Miracle

(Just for further clarification: I traveled to Tamil Nadu with a co-worker, Veeranka, who doesn’t speak the local language, Tamil, but can understand bits and pieces. Juliet, another co-worker based in Tamil Nadu, is a native of the state, and was our translator for the week. The village we visited is called Pulicut)

We arrived on Monday afternoon, with interviews scheduled to begin the following day. I was sitting on the clay floor of a cozy house in the village when I first heard about the Miracle. Now, from what I could gather, Pulicut is a fervently religious - Christian - place. At 6am every morning, two hours of (rather catchy) hymns to Mother Mary are pumped through a village-wide P.A system at the decibel level of a rock concert. Mass is broadcast every evening at 6pm over the same system, at the same decibel level. On the cast-iron gate outside the house where I stayed are the words: 'Prise The Lord' (though presumably it means Praise The Lord). I could go on. The story of the Miracle, as I heard it, is this:

Pulicut's old church had been demolished to make way for a new one. Proper prayers were not said over the old church before constructing the new one [if anyone knows what these prayers are called, please let me know]. A number of unexplained deaths soon occurred in the village. People began to suspect that Mother Mary was mad at them.

Then, a week before our arrival, a man with a cell phone camera stood outside the new church at night and snapped a picture of the flagpole. He claims that the lights atop the pole were dim at the time. No other lights were visible. Yet, what you see on the right-hand side of my photo is said to have appeared on his camera: two narrow and sinister-looking red/yellow eyes with white 'pupils' below two blinding sources of light (the pairing of that image with Mary came later).

The people in Pulicut called it a miracle. I didn't know what to call it. Any thoughts?