‘My son left me here to die,’ one of the patients screamed at me from his bed. I went over and held his hand.
Stepping out of the hall, I stood at the base of the stairway that led to the nuns’ quarters on the first floor, and the women’s hall in an adjoining wing on that floor.
I felt a sudden tight grip on my ankle.
Looking down, I saw a man huddled in a blanket, sitting on the floor, gasping for breath and holding on to my feet with his hands.
‘Are you a doctor?’ he asked.
‘No, I am not.’
‘I need a doctor. Help me,’ he pleaded, his eyes gleaming as if with anger.
I wondered if these would be his last words.
I quickly looked around for a volunteer, and saw a dozen of them in the hall busy helping the men breathing their last. I realized rather uncomfortably that I could not see a single Indian among them. Why were my fellow billion Indians not here to help? I walked over to a volunteer, who looked Scandinavian, and handed him a piece of paper with the numbers of a few local general practitioners I had scribbled on it.
I headed to the women’s hall on the first floor. In the hall Just at the end of the stairway, I came across a group of Korean volunteers sitting around a large wooden dining table drawing up charts, along with an Indian resident missionary who introduced herself to me as Sister Rukmini.5
‘I took a train from Bhopal twenty-two years ago to come here and meet Mother (Teresa),’ she said.
‘Why did you want to meet her?’ I asked.
‘I had wanted to dedicate my life to working for the needy. Mother was doing that and I joined her.’
‘That’s great. And what are they doing here?’ I asked, pointing towards the group of Koreans at the dining table.
‘They are drawing up a timetable which we will put up in the halls,’ explained Sister Rukmini.
‘But why do I not see any Indian volunteers around?’ I probed.
She paused for a few seconds, and then slowly said, ‘The Kalighat Municipal Corporation donated this temple to Mother Teresa. This is where Mother started her work in India, creating the Missionaries of Charity, out of love and compassion for the most needy. We are grateful to the municipality, but besides that, there has been little support from the locals,’ she replied.
‘Come, look here.’ Sister Rukmini pulled me by my hand to the terrace outside. ‘All these hundreds of people here, they stay away from Nirmal Hriday.’
She pointed, in the dim light of the setting sun, at the mile-long stretch below.
As a stark contrast to the atmosphere where we were, I saw a sea of animated people on the street downstairs. The street was lined with tightly packed shacks occupied with street hawkers energetically selling, to thousands of devotees, items to worship and adore the Goddess Kali’s idol in the adjoining temple.
I hastily ran down the stairway and out on to the street.
‘What are these garlands for?’ I asked a woman, probably in her forties, a rose garland in one hand, a ten-rupee note in the other, who was elbowing her way through the crowd in front of her to the seller sitting in the shack.
‘To offer to Maa Kali, what else for?’
‘Why don’t you visit there?’ I asked, pointing to Nirmal Hriday, located about 50 metres away. ‘That building, there.’
‘I do not know what that building is,’ she screamed, turning to look back at me from her spot, now at the front of the crowd. ‘A temple?’
I asked a young man on the road, ‘Do you know about Mother Teresa’s home?’
‘Yes, right here,’ he replied, pointing with his chin towards Nirmal Hriday, which stood on our left.
‘Have you ever been there?’
‘No . . .’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I’ll catch some deadly virus in there! God knows what kind of people they bring there and the diseases they have!’ he said, alarmed.
A newly married couple was buying a set of utensils made of mud, each piece filled with a special offering to the Goddess. They stood in front of the shop, considering their final selection.
‘Have you ever been to Mother Teresa’s home for the dying?’ I asked as they made their payment to the seller.
‘No,’ replied the man. ‘It is bad luck to be near the dying.’
‘But they are human beings like you. What bad luck can befall you if you offer them your support when they need it?’
‘They are dirty people. I don’t know who they are,’ he said with a scowl.
‘Why do you say they are dirty?’ I insisted.
‘Beggars, poor people, they are brought off the roads . . . who knows what work they did and where they lived?’ he said, shrugging his shoulders as he walked off with his wife, holding their newly purchased offerings for God.
I spent the evening speaking to at least sixty more locals along the street. As night fell, the crowds got thicker. I persisted in seeking their attention.
‘But she has got so much funding!’ someone told me. ‘Mother Teresa got money from everywhere in the world . . . her work doesn’t need us.’
‘No, I have never been there. I cannot touch strange people . . . I would feel weird doing that,’ confessed another person.
‘I have my own worries in life to tend to, baba!’ said one man.
‘Those are poor and sick people,’ another man declared with repugnance.
The contrast was startling—revulsion towards humankind and exuberance towards the Goddess. I could accept that the locals kept away from Nirmal Hriday out of the fear of catching a disease, but I found it baffling that they considered poverty and homelessness ‘dirty’. To be dirty is the physical state of being polluted. Poverty and homelessness, however, are socio-economic conditions. Evidently, here they were conflating an individual’s socio-economic condition with his physical status!
I chose to
