On 11 October 1995, prostitutes in a certain quarter of Calcutta came out in force; they cajoled and coaxed passers-by for money, but not in return for the usual favours. For some reason, they had decided to don white coats, the type worn by doctors, and they made a strange and surreal impact in the midst of the hectic Calcutta street. Each of them had a large collection tin in her hand, which was rattled vigorously as the ladies walked along this congested street in north Calcutta.

The sex workers were collecting money for flood victims. In September devastating floods had struck large areas of West Bengal, the state in India of which Calcutta is the capital. What made the floods especially poignant was its timing -- it had come just before the biggest festival of  70 million Indian Bengalees, the spectacular Durga Pujo. Although in Indian terms, the number of casualties was small, with 200 dead (many of them from snake bites, as is often the case during floods, when snakes and humans climb up to the same elevation), more than three million people were made homeless in the villages surrounding Calcutta. In pure financial terms, the loss was estimated at Rs 1050 million.

The stories of loss and suffering moved millions, including the sex workers. One of them, Uma Mandal, said to newspapermen, "How can we call ourselves human if we don't come to the aid of suffering people in their hour of need? Those who have lost everything in the floods could easily be the members of our own families." 

Sankari Paal, who could not read or write, but had come to know of the devastation through television,  said, "Although I don't personally know anybody who has been affected by the floods, we believe we are very much part of a wider community, and so, it was almost natural for us to come out to help." 1

The sex workers' collection drive was jointly organised by the Institute of Health and Hygiene, the Women's Co-ordination Committee and a neighbourhood club, the Ward no. 48 Milan Sangha. This was merely one of the many hundreds of collection drives and relief measures organised by the citizens of Calcutta, operations that started in September and that lasted almost six months. Schools, colleges, offices, businesses, restaurants and individuals all chipped in. The only organisation that did not feature was the Missionaries of Charity, the multinational charity headed by Mother Teresa, the person who has become synonymous with Calcutta in the eyes of the world. Mother Teresa's absence in the relief operations was not conspicuous in Calcutta. Strange though it may seem to a non-Calcuttan, her order is not known to throw in its lot in these circumstances. In Calcutta, she was known to undertake small niche activities, for which she was generally liked and her order is well-regarded. 

During the aftermath of the floods, in December, when West Bengal was still reeling from the effects, Mother Teresa travelled to USA. She made a highly successful visit to Peoria, Illinois, and when she arrived at the St Mary's Cathedral, she drove the crowds wild with devotion and delight. She said her usual lines, which she had said hundreds of times before:  

I was hungry and you gave me to eat,

I was thirsty, and you gave me to drink, 

I was naked, and you clothed me, 

I was homeless and you took me in, 

I was sick and in prison and you visited me. 

This is exactly what the Missionaries of Charity are doing 24 hours.

Mother's stopover at Peoria was to oversee the renewing of vows by seven nuns of her Missionaries of Charity. She had had a long association with the Diocese of Peoria, and had been "adopted" by the Peoria Diocesan Council of Catholic Women way back in 1958, who had donated $300000 to her causes over the years. After her speech, Mother made an announcement that she would present a "medal" to each of the 750 strong congregation in the cathedral. All were reduced to tears, and many actually swooned when receiving their medal. One of them later said, "My personal impression: Very old, very tiny, very humble. There is something about this woman that brings grown men to their knees. She has gained popularity not by manipulating the media with sound-bytes but by serving the poorest of the poor in places we would never go. She is truly a living saint! ............An air of HOLINESS filled the cathedral."

Shortly after the medal ceremony, Mother Teresa left by private aeroplane, as she had arrived, presumably to visit "places we would never go".2

Although she never lifted a finger during the 1995 floods, in a fairly recent interview with Lucinda Vardey, Mother Teresa had mentioned working during floods in Calcutta. Characteristically however, she does not provide any details about time and place: "For instance, when a large area near Calcutta was flooded and washed away, 1200 families were left stranded with nothing. Sisters from Shishu Bhavan, and also brothers worked all night, taking them supplies and offering shelter."3 This may well have been true on a single occasion, but this is definitely not the usual nature of the work of the Missionaries of Charity. The world however would assume, reading her interview, that Mother jumped in headlong in natural disasters in and around Calcutta.

During the fifty-one years that Mother Teresa had been doing charity in Calcutta, there were about a dozen very major floods near Calcutta, with hundreds to thousands dying on each occasion. The city itself was flooded quite a few times, paralysing urban life, and badly affecting the poor of the city; only during one of those floods, did Mother Teresa offer some kind of help. I do not belittle that assistance, modest though it was. It is however characteristic of the Teresan mythology that, that one occasion has become symbolic of her work -- it is only fair that her inaction during the other floods should receive at least some emphasis.

 On 13 July 1995, Shahida, a 16 year old mother of a one year old child, got badly burnt. Shahida used to live in the Dnarapara slum, which surrounds Mother Teresa's Prem Daan centre in Calcutta. She had great difficulty trying to get herself admitted into a state hospital; there were no beds as usual. In the end she managed to get into the NRS Hospital, a state hospital. She was thrown out in less than three weeks, before her wounds had started to heal. She did not have the financial means to get private medical care -- in India, even the middle classes cannot quite afford private medicine. So she picketed Calcutta Corporation in protest. She set herself up in a tent in front of the Victorian red brick building of Calcutta Corporation. She lay there a few weeks, while infection was slowing seeping into her burns. While her husband was at football matches and her father was busy selling fruit, her mother sat with her, crying silently, cuddling the baby.  

Shahida failed to move the hearts of the Calcutta Corporation officials. Finally, a Corporation worker, Sonnasi Das, took pity, and contacted Dr Amitabha Das, from the charity HEAL. Dr Das had this to say, "Though the immunity of pavement dwellers is high, bacteraemia and other infections could set in any time and she will die. She needs skin grafting, otherwise she will develop contracture, that is, her calves will get stuck to her lower thighs." The painkillers Dr Das prescribed Shahida, still on the pavement, did not quite help: "The pain is so great and even when I try to sit up, blood trickles down my legs."

During her various representations for assistance, she appealed to Mother Teresa for financial help, so she could buy private care. (Contrary to international mythology, Mother Teresa does not have a hospital in Calcutta). Shahida appealed to the Missionaries of Charity not because they are a natural port of call for helpless Calcuttans, but because they were one of the many she approached, and also because, being from the slum beside Prem Daan, she was a neighbour of theirs. The appeal went up to Mother directly who very considerately asked her nuns "to look into the matter".

Shahida was swiftly turned down by the Missionaries of Charity, because she was "not destitute enough", i.e., she was "a family case", a clause regularly applied during the vetting of indigents by the Missionaries of Charity in India; the organisation is ever watchful that "family cases" do not slip in. 

Finally Shahida's fortunes turned. On 30 August, she was accepted by the Islamia Hospital, for free. The Rotary Club of Calcutta also made a modest financial contribution toward her treatment. She was given adequate care and treatment, and was nursed in a private room. She improved, and within days she was throwing tantrums like any other 16 year old. By this time she had begun to make headlines, and the entire city breathed a sigh of relief. 

On 21 October 1995, Shahida died, leaving behind a baby. Her death made headline news in Calcutta, where pavement dwellers and slum dwellers are dispensable.  

Everybody blamed the government and the corporation, for their heartlessness and lack of facilities.Nobody pointed a recriminatory finger at Mother Teresa, as she is not seen in Calcutta as a saviour. The world however sees her as such, and Mother Teresa has done a great deal over the last few decades to make the world think that way.

Shahida's unfortunate tale did not end with her death, as she left behind her baby daughter  Marjina. By May next year, it was apparent that Marjina, who was now 16 months old, had tuberculosis. The charity HEAL again chipped in with moderate assistance, but medicines had to be bought. The baby's grandmother Jubeida, was getting more and more desperate by the day. The baby's father Ziarul (the late Shahida's husband) was an occasional street vendor, and although fond of the baby, could not be trusted upon -- besides he was often in prison. Jubeida was getting apprehensive over the baby's long term future and was reluctant to take the responsibility of another girl child, who had to be married off in due course. She decided adoption was the best option, and Ziarul also reluctantly agreed. I am not aware if Jubeida went back to the Missionaries of Charity, but I know that the organisation did not come forward with help of any kind.

Mother Teresa herself was far too busy for such mundane happenings in Calcutta, for the United States was preparing for presidential elections, and in May 1996, she again found herself in Washington D.C. On 1 June 1996, she met the  Republican candidate Bob Dole (the US Catholics' consensus candidate) to exhort him to run the election on an extreme anti-abortion platform. The intimate details of this private (but no doubt political) meeting have not been made public, but Mr Dole found the living saint "inspirational" and in possession of  "a good sense of humour", and of  "not a bad business card".  Mother Teresa gave Mr Dole, his wife Elizabeth, and his daughter Robin "miraculous medals", and also a card that read:

The fruit of silence is prayer 

The fruit of prayer is faith 

The fruit of faith is love 

The fruit of love is service 

The fruit of service is peace 

Mother Teresa is a woman of passion where abortion is concerned. This frail woman would often travel all over the world to prevent individual cases of abortion -- I do not know if faith can move mountains, but it obvious that it can and did move living saints. As far as disasters in India are concerned however, the saint had proved surprisingly hard to move -- when I look at local and national disasters in Calcutta and India, I can find very few indeed where Mother Teresa had gone in to help.

In December 1984, three and a half thousand people died in Bhopal from inhaling toxic gas, leaked by the multinational giant Union Carbide, in the worst industrial accident the world has ever seen. The number of people actually affected cannot be logged as the effects are long-standing and future generations would probably continue to suffer.

Mother Teresa, whose post-Nobel reputation within India was then very high indeed, rushed in to Bhopal like an international dignitary. Her contribution in Bhopal has become a legend: she looked at the carnage, nodded gravely three times and said, "I say, forgive." There was a stunned silence in the audience. She took in the incredulity, nodded again, and repeated, "I say, forgive". Then she quickly wafted away, like visiting royalty. Her comments would have been somewhat justified if she had sent in her  Missionaries of Charity to help in any way. But to come in unannounced, and make an insensitive comment like that so early on, was nothing short of an insult to the dead and suffering. In the wider world however, her image became even more enhanced, as she was seen even more like Jesus Christ, who would turn the other cheek, although in this instance the cheek was not hers. People in Bhopal were not amused; it is said that the only reason Mother escaped being seriously heckled was by dint of being an elderly woman.

Mother Teresa's propaganda machinery handled her Bhopal trip in the following way:

As she was present to the agony of Calcutta, and that of India's other great cities, so Mother Teresa was present to the anguish of Bhopal, a city four hundred miles to the south of Delhi, when a cloud of smoke enveloped a crowded slum on the night of December 3, 1984. The Missionaries of Charity, who had long been working in Bhopal, escaped being among the victims because the death-bringing gas was blown by the wind in a different direction....... Even while the dead were being cremated or buried, Mother Teresa rushed to Bhopal with teams of Missionaries of Charity to work with the Sisters already on the scene. "We have come to love and care for those who most need it in this terrible tragedy", said Mother Teresa, as she went from centre to centre, from hospital to hospital visiting afflicted people.5

This is an extremely clever play of words, as "Mother Teresa was present to the anguish of Bhopal" means literally that; "teams of Missionaries of Charity" means the couple of nuns who accompanied Mother to Bhopal; but the verb "work" is employed in a very broad sense. "The Missionaries of Charity (who) had long been working in Bhopal" is however entirely true, as they have had a small but neat home for destitutes (called "Nirmal Hriday", like the one in Calcutta) for many years.

Another of Mother's biographies has a photograph in it with the following caption:     "Helping A Survivor of the Chemical Leak at Bhopal, December 1984" 

The photograph concerned shows Mother daintily offering a marigold flower to a woman moribundly lying in a hospital bed. "Helping" no doubt, but not in the sole sense that the world would expect of Mother Teresa.

 The September 30,1993 Latur earthquake in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, is the biggest natural disaster -- though not in terms of deaths alone -- in the history of India. 8000 people died and five million lost their homes and all their possessions. Over two hundred NGOs rushed in to help, and many are working to this day, as the rebuilding of a large district, both physically and emotionally, can take decades. Many charities have come forward to  actually rebuild entire villages from the rubble they had been reduced to. The government has already put in a special grant of Rs 8 billion.

The world obviously thinks Mother Teresa had put her heart and hands into the operation, as it instinctively assumes that in any disaster in India, especially of that magnitude, she would have a presence, if not the biggest one. The Missionaries of Charity never came to Latur. (Neither had they gone to Uttarkashi in the foothills of the Himalayas, where an earthquake had killed 1500 people on 20 October 1991.)

Stock-taking of the earthquake in Latur took a few months, and rebuilding began in full earnest around January 1994 and around February Mother Teresa got preoccupiedwith more weighty matters -- when the process of re-building was going on in full swing she had been obliged yet again, to come to the United States, this time to the country's supreme court in order to file a "friend-of-the-court" brief for one Alexander Loce. Mr Loce had been convicted of trespassing into an abortion clinic to stop his estranged ex fiancee from having an abortion -- his indictment had not been heavy, but he did appeal, but little did he know when he did so, that he would have a saint as a co-defendant. While in Washington DC, Mother also took the opportunity to appear on television before the American nation along with the President and the Vice President.She mesmerised the nation in her National Prayer Breakfast speech where she talked about the evils of contraception and abortion, and about charity -- Latur was many thousands of miles away.

Alexander Loce and Shahida Khatun -- two people, two worlds. One literate, well off, living in suburban New Jersey, the other an illiterate, teenage mother living in a Calcutta slum, daughter of a Bihari Muslim immigrant worker. Is this not the scenario that Michael J Farrell, editor of America's National Catholic Reporter, was alluding to when he talked about two different strands of "human evolution" -- one a rich man in the US, the other a "poor man in a back street in Calcutta, who, unable to hack it any more, lies down and dies."? Perhaps, unlike Shahida Khatun, Mr Loce was not a "family case".

The government of India came in for criticism for being tardy in spending the $246 million loan that it had received from the World Bank for the rebuilding of Latur, but nobody commented on the inaction on the part of the Missionaries of Charity, whose assets (just the Indian slice of them) are of a similar value.

The summer of 1994 found Mother Teresa of Calcutta, in Calcutta for a few months; in October she left once again for another punishing schedule of instructing the world about the values of prayer, humility and charity, and most importantly, about the blight of abortion; fund-raising was also on the (undisclosed) agenda. This time she decided to make the Vatican her first stop, as she often had done on her international whistle stops. While she was passing through Bombay catch her plane for Rome, authorities in Bombay got hold of her and got her to present the deeds of some newly built houses in Latur to some of the villagers who had lost their dwellings in the earthquake -- the authorities at the time were coming in for more and more international criticism for being slow and clumsy in spending the World Bank loan, and they had naively presumed that having Mother Teresa present the deeds would attract the world's attention to the government's work. The world however  presumed otherwise -- looking at pictures of Mother Teresa bending down humbly to present the papers of houses to villagers, they very naturally thought that Mother herself had been instrumental in building those houses. The international Catholic media was not going to let this opportunity of getting free publicity at the expense of the government of India and the World Bank slip from their grasp -- "All In A Day's Work for Mother Teresa" was how they captioned Mother's photo with the villagers.

The world media have little appetite for facts -- they never told the story of how the readers of an Indian newspaper (the Malayalam Manorama)collected Rs 20.61 million for the earthquake victims and got architect Laurie Baker (who lives in India) to rebuild villages. They never reported that although Latur is a thousand miles from Calcutta, the Calcutta based Hindu charity the Ramakrishna Mission and numerous Christian charities have worked ceaselessly in Latur. When on 18 December 1995, the chief editor of Malayalam Manorama handed over the keys to 163 reconstructed houses to the villagers of Banegaon at a ceremony at Killari, the epicentre of the earthquake, it did not even make headline news in India.

 On 20 August 1995, a week before Mother's 85th birthday, 200 people died in the Ferozepur rail crash near Delhi. Mother's contribution?-- Special prayers on her birthday. Mother never forgot to pray for victims, but did she did slip up once -- in October 1979, after her Nobel award was announced, the Corporation of Calcutta gave her a civic reception. On 23 October, the eve of the reception, three carriages of a packed train plunged into the Hooghly river at Jangipur, in West Bengal itself, hardly 100 miles from Calcutta, killing 350 people. Mother forgot to mention the victims in her speech the following evening, -- possibly from excitement about her impending trip to Oslo.

On 11 September 1995, 22 children (13 girls and 9 boys) died in an explosion hardly 40 miles from Calcutta in West Bengal's Howrah district, where the Missionaries of Charity, especially Missionary Brothers of Charity have a largish centre. The children were making fireworks for the forthcoming festive season in an illegal factory. 18 more children were seriously injured. The youngest dead was 9 year old Sheikh Mahidul. The factory solely employed children (1500 of them) who worked from 6am to 6 pm for an average weekly wage of Rs 65 per week. In this particular instance the children were making "chocolate bombs" (so called because the individual crackers are wrapped in aluminium foil like pieces of chocolate). 

The explosion destroyed a third of the large factory building and rocked the whole village of Haturia. Trees were uprooted and concrete pillars along with children's bodies were tossed up in the air and landed in a nearby pond. Sabera Bibi lost all her four children.10

The incident caused some stir in Calcutta, possibly as a result if guilt pervading the middle classes, for whose entertainment the fireworks were obviously destined. There is hardly a family (of middle class and above) in India which has not employed a child servant at some point. In India child servants and child labourers (there are 55 million of them) remain nameless but after the Haturia incident the Calcutta newspapers took the unusual step of publishing the names and ages of all the dead and injured children.

There are at least two dozen organisations in India working to eliminate the ancient tradition of child labour and child slavery. They have achieved much but there is a long way to go. The South Asian Coalition of Children in Servitude (SACCS) even organised two long marches, in 1993 and 1994, one from the east to the west of the country, the other from north to south -- no mean feat, considering the size of the nation and the climatic conditions. Nobody expected Mother Teresa to speak out against the practice of child labour, as it would be too political for her. Furthermore the "anti-slavery movement" is tainted by a substantial leftist presence. She had frequently said, "We are not concerned about the cause of a problem, we look after the effects." The village of Haturia happens to be half an hour's drive from Mother Teresa's Howrah centre, where large number of her Brothers learn to be good Christians. Their contribution towards the "effects" of the carnage? -- You ought to have guessed by now.

On the eve of Christmas eve 1995, in the northern Indian town of Mandi Dabwali, not very far from Delhi, 1200 children were celebrating their end of school term with a giant party in a marquee at the rather inappropriately named Rajiv Marriage Palace. Presumably as a result of a short circuit, the marquee caught fire around 2 pm. From the fumes and from the resulting stampede, 360 children died along with 50 adults. Some families were totally wiped off. The local hospitals did not have the means to cope with a crisis on such a scale, and for days severely burnt children were ferried between local hospitals and Rohtak Medical College. The incident put a cloud of grief over New Year celebrations in the entire north of India, and for days a large field near the scene of the disaster was converted into a giant cremation site, with charred remains, often two or three unidentified bodies stuck together burning in silent grief under the wintry sky. The state of Haryana declared an official three day mourning period. The citizens of the entire nation did whatever they could to help, and donations flooded in. Doctors and other volunteers came up in droves to offer their services. Members of Manav Seva Samstha, a local voluntary organisation co-ordinated a massive blood donation drive.11Once again, the Missionaries of Charity were not around, once again not conspicuous by their absence. Two days later, during Christmas mass at "Mother House" in Calcutta, special prayers were said for the dead.

When the plague struck India in 1994, Mother Teresa arrived at the Vatican on one of her frequent visits. As she arrived at Rome airport, she was ceremoniously quarantined there. Pictures of her being taken away for quarantine were circulated all over the world -- the natural assumption was that she had been working knee deep with plague sufferers. She had had no involvement whatsoever either during or after the plague with treatment or prevention.

If one is led to suppose that Mother's paucity of action was a recent phenomenon, let us go back to 1979, the Nobel year. Jyotirmoy Datta, a conservative Calcutta intellectual, not known for his opposition to Mother Teresa, wrote a stark account of the problems encountered by the middle class inhabitants of a Calcutta neighbourhood when faced with an old destitute woman found dying on the streets. This, according to international perception, is a quintessential "Mother Teresa scenario", for her image is that of a roving angel who came and whisked off the sick and the suffering from the streets.

Finding 102 (the Calcutta Corporation ambulance line) perpetually engaged, Datta decided to call the Missionaries of Charity. Twice he was told he had the wrong office of the Sisters and on the third occasion he got through to Mother Teresa herself (although already widely known as a "living saint", she had not quite acquired a detached celestial lifestyle -- she would pick up the ringing phone herself) on 247115. Mother said to him in "a mellow, reassuring and beautiful voice", "Please persevere with 102; if the ambulance doesn't come, then let me know."

Persevere he did and eventually a Corporation ambulance did come and take the old woman away. "Blessed is this city", writes Datta, "the phone may fail and ambulances might break down, but where else in the world can you dial a number and have a living saint answer the call?"12

Less than two months later Mother Teresa was collecting her Nobel peace prize in Oslo -- and, being feted by the media as the "saint of the gutters" who picked up vagrants from the streets of Calcutta, unaided in any way by anybody else. 

In India, disasters, natural and unnatural, are as numerous as the Hindu deities. I have only mentioned some major ones. For the poor in India, everyday existence is punctuated with unfortunate happenings which are so predictable that they can hardly be called disasters. These "minor" incidents (on an Indian scale) usually go unreported in the Indian media. For example, on 20 April 1996, 500 slum-dwellers in Calcutta became homeless within an hour when a fire razed their shacks to the ground. They also lost all their modest earthly possessions. Without the luxury of a social security system, the Indian poor are blessed with a remarkable amount of resourcefulness -- within hours of the fire, the men and women started rebuilding their shacks. Some voluntary organisations lent a helping hand, but not amongst them Calcutta's (and the world's) most famous one.

Indeed, Mother Teresa spent such a large part of every year outside of India, it would have been impractical for her to help out in that country's problems and calamities.  

From 1978 and up to and including the year of her death 1997, she spent every summer and monsoon -- barring 1994 -- in Europe and the United States. Her pattern would be to leave in early June and return end-September or early October as the downpourings of monsoon were giving way to the mellow autumn sunshine. (Most of the sub-continent's problems and pestilences occur in summer and monsoon.) In 1994 too, she did go to Europe and the United States, but initially made a long winter visit, to attend a number of highly politicised anti-abortion meetings. In October 1994 she left yet again for Europe and the US.

 I could go on and on, filling page after page with dense examples of disasters and crises where Mother Teresa had had no involvement whatsoever. For me, a Calcuttan, born and bred, it does not come as surprise, as I know her order has no infrastructure -- indeed it had never been her intention to create an infrastructure for such work, as she had frequently said, "I'm not a social worker." But what I find somewhat disturbing is that she remained inactive when children were hurt or killed, or were at the risk of being orphaned, as in the case of Shahida, who appealed to her personally; this did not sit comfortably with her "Child First" philosophy. But then, for her the unborn child is far more important than the actual child: 

Many people are very very concerned with the children of India, with the children of Africa where quite a few die of hunger, and so on. Many people are also concerned about all the violence in this great country of the United States.

These concerns are very good. But often these same people are not concerned with the millions who are killed by the deliberate decision of their own mothers.  

And this is what is the greatest destroyer of peace today -- abortion which brings people to such blindness.13

 It might appear from the above account that Mother might have retired, may be she had withdrawn from day to day work, or even risen above such. Whether or not that was the case is open to debate, but when it came to important matters, no small detail escaped her attention. When the Vice President of India came to Calcutta on a two day visit in July 1996, Mother Teresa delivered him a letter. It was to protest against the demolition of church wall in Bandel (a township near Calcutta) and to urge the government to rebuild the wall.

Chapter 1 

1.  Kalantar, Calcutta, 12 October 1995 

2. Communiqué of the Catholic Diocese of Peoria (December 1995), Peoria, Illinois,  USA 

3. Lucinda Vardey, Mother Teresa, A Simple Path, Rider, London 1995 

5. Eileen Egan and Kathleen Egan, Prayertimes with Mother Teresa, Doubleday, New York, 1989, p. 110 

6.Christianity Today, 4 April 1994, v. 38. no. 4, p. 75 

7. National Prayer Breakfast, Washington DC, 3 February 1994  

8. National Catholic Reporter, 17 March 1994 

9. Asian Age, London, 12, 19 December 1995 

10. Frontier Magazine, Madras, 20 October 1995 

11. The Telegraph, Calcutta, 25 December 1995; India Today, Delhi, 15 January 1996 

12. Amrita Bazaar Patrika, Calcutta, "Mission of Mercy", 12 October 1979 

13. National Prayer Breakfast, Washington DC, 3 February 1994

[ Source: http://website.lineone.net/~bajuu/CHAP1.htm ]