'Whom do you hate?' measuring our love for Jesus.

My sixth-grade teacher was a nun who enjoyed scaring her students. "Did you say goodbye to your mother this morning?" she would ask portentously. "How do you know she'll still be alive when you go home?" We tried not to pay too much attention, but it was difficult to avoid being affected by her dire view of the world and her cheerful certainty that we would never get our place in it quite right.

As I grew up I realized that there was something wrong with her (indeed, she was hospitalized not many years later with serious psychological problems), but one of her famous questions has stayed with me till this day, and haunts me still.

"Whom do you hate the most?" she asked one afternoon, glaring at us across her desk. "Whom do you hate the most?" she repeated, almost coaxingly now. "Go on, there must be someone. You don't have to say it out loud. Just think of the person in your mind." After surveying the room and finding, I suppose, enough guilty looks, she sat back in her chair, folded her arms across her chest, and said smugly, "That's how much you love Jesus."

"No, it's not!" I remember thinking furiously. "That was a trick! It's not fair!"

Trick question or not, it's straight out of Scripture and the truth it reveals has not gotten any easier to accept, even now, thirty-five years later and half a world away.

Whom do I hate the most? Hate is not the word I would use to describe my feelings for Santoshi, but I am quite sure it was people like her that my teacher was thinking about.

Santoshi, divorced and unemployed, wandered into my life fifteen years ago. She was an emaciated, hollow-eyed ghost of a figure who approached me on the road one day, saying she had heard that I "helped people," and would I help her. Specifically, she wanted me to find a sponsor for her son's education and to help her set up a small tea shop so that she could earn a living. I told her I would think about it and beat a hasty retreat.

About a month later, on Christmas Eve, she appeared at our door. I have no idea how she found out where I lived, but there she was. It was pouring rain and freezing cold, and she looked like a drowned kitten standing in the doorway staring at me--her terrifyingly enormous eyes fixed in an almost maniacal gaze.

As it happened, my father-in-law had died that very day and my husband had already rushed off to Bombay for the funeral (our children and I were to follow the next day). In my emotional state, I gave her some money and promised to do whatever I could once we returned. It was the beginning of an incredibly frustrating relationship, the terms and conditions of which seemed entirely in her hands.

Over the years, she came to us with the most amazing variety of dramatic catastrophes, always calmly certain that we could extricate her from them. Her tea shop, which we did help her start, was broken into three times. She was beaten up by her sister and brother and done out of her share of the inheritance (she brought a plastic bag full of the hunks of hair they had pulled out of her head to prove her point). She fell off a moving bus and lay unconscious on the road until someone took her to the hospital. She had heat stroke while in Delhi and had to be hospitalized for intravenous hydration. Her roof fell in during the monsoon. Her son was bitten by a rabid dog. She had high blood pressure, asthma, and often spoke of committing suicide.

It got so that every visit--and there were many--demanded all the endurance and good will we could summon up. She had a habit of creeping in cat-like through the gate, without making a single sound. We would suddenly become aware of a presence at the window and there she would be, peering in with those eyes. Depending on our mood at that moment, we would smile wanly or sigh bravely and put the kettle on for tea.

As time went on, however, my own life became more demanding and complicated. With three children (one of whom has a severe mental and physical handicap), a full-time job, a busy social life, and a house constantly full of guests, I found myself less willing to welcome Santoshi when she appeared at the door. I was even rude on several occasions, and each time she departed I would resolve to do better the next time.

Last week her son came to tell us that she had died, and the question my teacher asked so many years ago came back to me with a dreadful shock. There would never be another chance. I could never "do better" by her. She was gone. It wasn't a trick, it was real life, and she was the inconvenient Christ, the one who comes when we are least prepared to welcome him, the one who shows us just how much--or how little--we really love.