Book Review 2011 Week 2
MOTHER TERESA: HER PEOPLE & HER WORK
DESMOND DOIG
COLLINS FOUNT PAPERBACK 1976
PART II
Chapter 2: Calcutta: Setting for a Mission
• Calcutta, once known as the City of Palaces because of its pretentious public buildings and its extravagant private residences set in well-tended gardens, has always been a problem, because it has attracted swarms of rural people who quickly lose whatever roots they have and become squatters either in festering slums of their own creation or in the streets of the city.
• In 1947, when India became free and Bengal was divided to create East Pakistan, millions of refugees streamed into the already over-populated city. They never left. Rather, they have been joined every year and every day by other refugees from the flood, famine and drought-prone areas that form the hinterland of Calcutta.
• With few exceptions, the palaces are now slums in which surprisingly large numbers of people live. But these are not the real slums. Because slums in Calcutta do not mean seedy tenements fallen on bad days. There are enough of those.
• Calcutta slums are either acres of bamboo and earth-plastered shacks with sagging tiles roofs, without sanitation and the basic amenities of water and electricity, or they are rebukes of tin and hessian and any waste that can serve as a roof.
• Some can hardly be called hovels, they are so mean. Then there are the open slums: the city pavements, the traffic islands, the arcades and porticoes where the homeless and the destitute find shelter of a sort.
• Nobody really knows, but there are thought to be close to a million pavement dwellers in Calcutta, people who are born on the streets, live on the streets and die on the streets.
• Calcutta slums are not confined to any particular part of the city so that they can be avoided or remain unseen. They are everywhere: cheek by jowl with modern city towers, prosperous shopping centres, affluent housing estates, respectable middle-class colonies, or with other slums which are a roof, a wall, or a smell better off than they.
• The fact that Calcutta is vigorous, intellectual, rich and politically aware, makes its poverty all the more tragic, because this sickness of epic proportions is often taken for granted, lived with, excused, and has become an attitude of mind that wonders what better can be expected of a neglected city in a poor country.
• So, one can move from air-conditioned flat to air-conditioned office through festering refuse dumps and colonies of near-naked people without a twinge of conscience, without feeling and, all too often, without seeing.
• One can leave a restaurant, with the maître d’hôtel still in a tuxedo or at least a lounge suit, where the cost of a meal would keep an entire pavement family alive for months, and growl impatiently at beggars crowding outside.
• Or one can emerge from Calcutta’s extraordinary New Market, where almost everything and anything is available under one decaying roof, followed by porters laden with your purchases, and haggle over the scant fee they demand, let alone notice that some of them are too old or too young.
• These are not incidents out of the ordinary, and they are not intended to portray a massive callousness of spirit. In truth, they happen all the time as each well-defined stratum of Calcutta society jostles with the other.
• The shock, the horror, the unease, the sympathy is there but under veneers of indifference often so carefully cultivated as a defence. How otherwise to live in a city piled with garbage because there are too few conservancy trucks to collect the putrefying mess, a city still menaced by open drains and hopeless lack of sanitation.
• Can one ever become accustomed to people bathing and defecating on the streets? A city where public hospitals are so crowded that patients lucky enough to be admitted often lie on the floor between beds and in corridors? Where the unlucky can sicken and die on the city pavements?
• How to accept living in an ivory tower as I do, the unending panorama of squalor, poverty, stagnation and hopelessness just the width of a potholed road away from manicured gardens where children in frilly dresses, attended by servants, play?
• Then, there is the corroding climate of Calcutta fraying tempers into outbursts of mob and political fury even as it eats into steel and concrete and brick and flesh.
• Foreigners coming to Calcutta are apt to suffer from culture shock in the time it takes to drive from the airport to the city centre. To them as to at least one high-powered group of city planners, Calcutta is a dying city and the only remedy is to leave it.
• To most Indians, Calcutta is a strange and filthy place best avoided. Those who live in Calcutta view their city with an extraordinary love and emotion: those who have ever lived here seldom forget it, not for its filth and poverty but for its friendliness and its charm and its almost old-world graciousness, its quite incredible intellect.
• As great cities go, Calcutta is not very old, just old enough to make its Anglo-Indian familiarly interesting.
Chapter 3: Father Henry and his Secrets
• When she was twelve, Agnes Gonxha Bejaxhiu was quite sure she was going to become a nun and when, two years later, she was told of the work of the Irish Order of the Sisters of Loreto, she knew where she was going to spend the rest of her life.
• In India. ‘It’s a mission country,’ she explained many, many years later, when I asked her what had brought her so far from her native Skopje, now in Yugoslavia.
• Born on 27 August 1910 and brought up in a large and happy Albanian family, it must have been hard to leave home and sail off to country so unknown, so remote, when she was only seventeen. But then she had made some difficult decisions already, like deciding to dedicate her young life to God’s work.
• She arrived in India, like thousands of nuns before her, without fuss or fanfare and was sent immediately to Darjeeling to teach in the Loreto convent there.
• At that time Darjeeling, under the British Raj, was a popular and genteel hill resort where the Governor of Bengal and all his staff and every affluent Calcuttan would repair to escape the summer heat and enjoy such Himalayan delights as promenading and riding on the Mall, dancing and dining at the Gymkhana Club or taking tea on Government House lawns and gazing unendingly at the magnificence of Mount Kanchenjunga and the romantic ranges of Sikkim and Bhutan.
• Darjeeling was also a premier center of European education. So the young novice, Agnes Gonxha Bejaxhiu, who took her first vows in Darjeeling on 24 May 1931 and the name Teresa – ‘The Little One’ – began her life in India teaching the well-to-do young.
• From Darjeeling, Mother Teresa came to the Loreto Convent in Calcutta which stands in one of the most crowded and down-at-heel localities surrounded by slums, shamefaced factories and marshalling yards of one of the city’s most congested railway stations.
• Close by are the man-made mountains of the city’s refuse dumps and over all, when the wind is wrong, hangs the nauseating stench of neighbouring tanneries.
• But the Loreto School, Entally, is an oasis of well-kept buildings, emerald lawns and smartly uniformed children. The girls are, for the most part, orphans or the children of broken marriages and they come from all races and communities.
• To this school, first as a teacher and then as its principal, came the young nun, Mary Teresa. She took her final vows in 1937 and she is remembered there still as a joyous spirit, an energetic, dynamic and totally dedicated nun.
• Father Henry is an old and faded man but remarkably beautiful, if ‘beautiful’ may be used to describe his old-world manners, his charm, his aura of godliness and even his quaint European accent.
• In an inner sanctum, stuffy from lack of use, Father Henry told us a story that at first seemed pointless to our quest.
• ‘Every man has his limitations. And I must tell you mine. In 1913, I was on my way to Mass, joyous like all the young boys with me, when I heard the call. I would become a missionary. Go to India never to return home. Just like that. Never to return home.
• I come from Dampremy, in Belgium, the center of the coal-mine area, but I’m from a family of glass-blowers. In 1938, October, I landed in India never to go home. By 1948 I was screwed down here, in charge of the Bengali community. Our church was in Entally where Mother was Headmistress.
• ‘We both have a secret. Only she doesn’t know my secret and I don’t know her secret. But it’s the same secret. We are working in a parallel way.
• ‘Prayer without action is no prayer at all; she believes that. So every Thursday we had a meeting to serve the country and serve the neighbour.
• ‘We, that is the Sodality of Our Lady, are made up of girls from the sixth class to the eleventh class.. Age twelve to twenty.
• ‘From 1941 to 1947 Mother Teresa and I worked together. We have this secret. We want to work for the poorest of the poor. On Saturdays, we had social activities. We went to people in hospitals to comfort them. Or into bustees, the slums. Afterwards we would gather and discuss what we had learned.
• ‘Mother has a magic in her. Her search is to experiment with God, to experience God. She got some girls from Solidarity and made them do penance and serve the country and serve the neighbour.
• ‘At that time there was this beggar woman who came to Mother for help. She was given a good feed and slept in Mother Teresa’s bed. Mother called her “Granny”. This is loving the neighbour in action.
• ‘Hindu and Muslim women wanted to join the Sodality and social classes. They wanted to help. That was in 1947; independence was in the air. Mahatma Gandhi had said, “Make no laws unless you consider the poorest person you know.” It was an inspiration.
• ‘In 1947 the Archbishop of Calcutta asked me, “Imagine that a European nun teaching Indian girls starts an Order to work amongst the poorest of the poor,” I said, “Your Grace, that plan humanly speaking is impossible, but it is needed.” He said, “If it is needed then God will bless it.”
• ‘At that time I left Calcutta for a retreat and I was told I wouldn’t find Mother Teresa any more when I got back. You see, she still had her secret.
• ‘Then one day a lady in a sari with a blue border comes in and asks “Where is Moti Jheel?” I answer, “You should know it well; it is the slum on the other side of your convent wall.”
• ‘Mother de Senacle, a Mauritian nun, was principal of Entally at that time and a great protector of Mother Teresa. She took twenty girls from Moti Jheel, the slum which is just across the wall from the Convent, and tried to educate them. After a year only two were left. It was not an atmosphere the poor were used to even though they were made at home on the verandah with a good Sister looking after them. That is why Mother Teresa had to leave the Convent.’
• The story as I knew it was that Mother Teresa’s room at the Convent looked out upon the acres of squalor and poverty and the unattended sickness of Moti Jheel and that she was increasingly disturbed by what she saw.
• She asked permission to go into these slums with such meager aids as she could lay hands on, a few tablets of aspirin, bandages, iodine, and the powerful will to help. Perhaps she did not know it then, but there would be no turning back. As a comparatively cloistered nun she need never have crossed the barriers serving the poor and merging with the poor.
• Father Henry opened one of three large, cloth-bound books, mumbling about people from his parish who had gone to war, to sea, to foreign countries to settle, who had married and had children and had died, all leaving something of themselves in these volumes, personal scrap-books of Father Henry that were more deeply loved than parish registers.
• Unbelievably, there it was, page fifty-two, illustrated with a fading photograph of a young nun in the black and white habit of the Loreto Order. ‘On the eighteenth of August 1948, Reverend Mother Teresa is leaving St Mary’s, Entally, for Patna. She intends to dedicate herself in the future to the poor and abandoned people, living in the slums of Calcutta. For this very difficult work she puts all her confidence in the Immaculate Heart of Mary.’
• ‘So,’ said Father Henry, ‘she went to Patna, to the medical nuns, where she met Mother Denger, an American, who started the Order to heal the sick.’ Mother Teresa realized from the moment she left the sheltering Loreto convent that she needed much more than her ability to teach.
• While attending to the poor single-handed she was confronted with a man with a gangrenous thumb. Obviously it had to be removed. So she took a pair of scissors and, one can imagine, a prayer, and cut. Her patient fainted one way, and Mother Teresa the other.
• She was face to face every day with lepers, the hopelessly tubercular and sufferers from every possible disease clamoring to be cured.
• ‘So,’ said Father Henry, ‘She learned a lot in Patna and returned to Calcutta, and she told Mother Denger that her Order would subsist only on what the poorest of the poor could eat. On Mondays, rice and salt, on Tuesdays, salt and rice, on Wednesdays, rice and salt, and so on. And the good Mother Denger said, “It’s criminal. You will all die.”
• ‘When Mother returned she was joined by Subhasini Das, who is Sister Agnes, and Magdalene Gomes, now Sister Gertrude. I remember our first meal together. It was provided by God. Mother didn’t want to eat, but I said, “You must.” That is like her.
• ‘And their programme, it was impossible. At 5.30 they were in church. By 7.30 they were already on the streets with their bags working in a sweepers colony, visiting the sick, teaching. Mother Teresa found a small room in Moti Jheel, about nine by nine, and rented it for five rupees a month, where she made a school.
• Father Leichien, who was procurator of a mission looking after lepers, told me, “She’s a mad woman.” When I met him again and asked how the mad woman was doing he said, “Make no mistake, the finger of God is there.”
• Father Henry continued. ‘More and more girls were joining Mother Teresa,’ mostly girls whom she had taught in Entally, and they had found themselves temporary accommodation in the house of a Bengali Christian where they were sleeping side by side like sardines and praying to get a permanent house.’
• ‘Just then a Muslim gentleman was emigrating to Pakistan and selling his house. He knew the Jesuits well; he had studied in St Xavier’s. I offered a lakh (£7,500), which was less than the price of the land, and he agreed.
• ‘So this property that once belonged to a rich Muslim became, and remains, the Mother House of the Missionaries of Charity and already the three houses have been extended to accommodate the rapidly expanding Order.’
• Mother Teresa and her growing family had not yet moved into the Mother House when they decided to start a home for dying destitutes. The need for one had become starkly obvious when Mother Teresa had found a woman lying on the pavement outside one of Calcutta’s busiest hospitals. She was so desperately ill, that she appeared unmindful of her feet having been gnawed away by rats and cockroaches.
• Mother carried the woman into the hospital only to be told that her precarious condition and her poverty did not allow her to be admitted. One can imagine her anguish and despair when the woman died on the streets where she had been found. ‘Cats and dogs are treated better than this,’ Mother said sadly.
• Father Henry said, ‘She’s the salt of the earth mixing the earth and enriching it. But she’s an obstinate woman. She has no organization. The thing about her is, “I belong to you whenever you need me and I’ll help you.” She feels directed. Like a tree, her branches spread out and give shelter.
• ‘So now, the people of Moti Jheel gathered money to start a small home for the dying destitutes. It is called Nirmal Hriday, the Place of the Pure Heart.
• ‘Then people objected because they didn’t like the smell of dying so they had to close the place, choosing a pilgrim’s rest house, near the great temple of Kalighat, which was then occupied by thugs and loafers who used it as a place for gambling and drinking.
• ‘Mother Teresa chose Kalighat not, as some of her early critics claimed, to convert people to Christianity at the very vortex of Hinduism, but because she knew that most of the city’s destitutes go to Kalighat to die. It is the wish of all devout Hindus in the city to be cremated in this sacred spot.
• ‘As expected, there was opposition to Mother Teresa in Kalighat. She and her nuns were threatened. Fortunately, Mother Teresa was winning friends in high places.
• Father Henry was consulting his watch and there was a sound of voices in the other room. Speaking quickly and plucking memories at random, the picture he created was of a dynamic woman, an irresistible force, charged with the love of God, hurrying to do His work. A portrait spiritually powerful and yet very human.
Chapter 4: The First Sisters: Poverty their Dowry