by Joseph McClendon Stevenson

as published in Co-Evolution Quarterly • No. 39 • Fall 1983

Introduction

Is this an exposé? Harsh journalism in the temple? The complaint of a disaffected former believer?
If the subject weren’t a famous do-good operation, if it weren’t a respected religious practice, we wouldn’t even ask. Taboo country: objectivity impossible, ambivalence not permitted, all motives questionable.
This account is not the one-eyed view of expose journalism. Nor the one-eyed view of an embittered true believer. All life with eyes that isn’t maimed sees with a minimum of two eyes. Joseph Stevenson reports that way on an exceptionally worthy activity that has slipped a bit, not too far for easy repair. This too is love, Mother Teresa. Maintenance and improvement is as inspirational as founding (especially in these slipshod days), or what is the Church for?
                                                                                                       Stewart Brand

YOU DON’T STEP OFF A CALCUTTA BUS, you come squirting out from the press of flesh like a wet watermelon seed squeezed between thumb and forefinger. In the summer it’s hot and muggy even at 7 a.m., but compared to the bus ride it feels heavenly.

Up Kalighat Road there is no sidewalk; the street is a river of people and vehicles, the banks lined with shops and hawkers offering rice, fruit, vegetables, tea, tobacco, and sugar; household utensils of brass, aluminum, plastic, and earthenware; cakes and candies, tabla drums and harmoniums, sarongs and saris, rat and cockroach poison; pots and pans, pins, pens, and umbrellas. Many stalls sell incense, religious posters, and plaster statues of gods and goddesses with two arms, or four, or ten; some white skinned, some blue, some black. Old women sitting in the street make intricate garlands of red, white, and gold flowers, for two blocks ahead is Kalighat, the main Kali Temple for Calcutta’s eight million Hindus.

Kali is not one of your “gentle Jesus meek and mild” gods, but a holy terror: a shapely black-skinned lady with her bright red tongue protruding, one of her four arms brandishing a special decapitating sword, wearing nothing but her long hair, a necklace of severed human heads, and a belt of severed hands. My 1978 “Fodor’s Guide to India” says of Kali’s temple: “Once the scene of bloody sacrifices, now the offerings are all incense and flowers,” but the day I wandered into Kali’s courtyard, in the space of ten minutes I watched four goats beheaded with the same peculiar sword with the sickle-shaped tip that Kali holds high. One elderly Brahmin told me confidentially that in some remote places human sacrifice has not been totally eradicated.

In Kalighat Road a lovely brown-and-white cow stands lazily munching on a pile of slightly wilted red hibiscus, and a fat raven pecks at a dead rat. Children in rags laugh and skip down the street. The sound of a bell means you’re about to be run over by a bicycle, a clapper means it’s a rickshaw, and a horn is a taxi. Nobody looks back, nobody moves very much, just enough; clearances are in inches or fractions and collisions are a rarity. There are more than the usual number of beggars here because of the temple; pilgrims who come to worship acquire additional merit by giving alms. I always give something to beggars, except here. I walk this road four times a day; they understand and do not pester. They know I’m one of the crazy foreigners who works for Mother Teresa.

IN 1948, A 38-YEAR-OLD ALBANIAN NUN working in Calcutta with the Sisters of Loreto order resigned her position as principal of a convent school for upper-class girls to devote herself to serving the needs of the poor. By 1950 she had been joined by other sisters inspired by her example and a new order was formed: the Missionaries of Charity. The first permanent Missionaries of Charity care center was opened two years later in an abandoned pilgrim hostel next door to the temple in Kalighat and dubbed “Nirmal Hriday (Immaculate Heart) Home for Dying Destitutes”. In 1965, having by now established facilities all over India for the care of abandoned children, the mentally ill and handicapped, the indigent aged, and lepers, the Missionaries of Charity opened their first overseas house in Venezuela.

Mother Teresa is today acclaimed by many as a living saint, was given the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, and has become an international focal point for people who feel called to work with and for the “poorest of the poor.” In an age when religious orders are everywhere dwindling, the Missionaries of Charity are strong and growing, active now in some 66 countries on six continents. Mother Teresa herself, now 72 years old, spends much of her time these days traveling: visiting her missionaries at work abroad, accepting awards and honorary degrees, and spreading her message of loving service. In spite of the many honors bestowed on her and the obvious successes of her far-flung projects, she continues to live a life of austerity and insists that “the work” is not hers but God’s. In the poor and the needy, the Missionaries of Charity see the body of Christ, the Christ who said, “I was hungry, I was naked, I was sick, and I was homeless, and you ministered to me.” Mother Teresa: “On these words of His all our work is based.”

On April 2, 1982, three days after my arrival in Calcutta I walked in the front door of Nirmal Hriday where it all began 30 years ago. In the three years it had taken me to busk my way halfway around the world from Astoria, Oregon to Calcutta I had seen a lot of human misery, but never so much of it in one place. Along the way I had also been the recipient of a lot of kind hospitality, charity if you will, from all sorts of strangers including the very poor. I felt like it was time to give something back.

NIRMAL HRIDAY HOME FOR DYING DESTITUTES houses men and women in separate parts of the same building in two long dormitory-style rooms with about 50 beds each. In the early days most of the patients brought here were really on their last legs and usually died within a matter of hours or days. The founding principle was that no one should be left to die alone in the street, hungry, sick, destitute and forsaken. Indeed it is difficult to imagine a more bitter fate. This idea is expressed in a quote from Mother Teresa that hangs in a frame on the wall: “The greatest aim of human life is to die in peace with God.”

Today conditions in Calcutta have improved noticeably and there aren’t as many dying destitutes as there used to be. According to the Gonzalez-Balado book “Always the Poor”, five years ago about 70 percent of the patients at Nirmal Hriday “soon died.” I would say that today the percentage is no more than half that. Consequently the emphasis is shifting from comforting the dying to curing the sick, and though the sisters will stoutly deny it, Nirmal Hriday is looking less like a home and more and more like a hospital, with the Missionaries of Charity folk spending most of their time administering medicine and serving food. Most of the cooking and cleaning is done by other Indian helpers who live on the roof.

As you enter the building from the glare of the street, your immediate impression is one of gloom as your eyes strain to readjust. You stand at one end of the men’s ward next to the main nursing station and look down the row of shadowy, skeletal figures sitting or stretched out on their low iron cots. What the lavish writers like to call “the smell of death” hits your nostrils, but mercifully the nose adjusts in time much as the eyes do. The novice sisters in their plain white saris float back and forth with an air of ethereal good cheer. No one pays you the slightest attention. If you have come to help, you don a green apron and wander down the aisle. A patient calls, “Oh brother!” and asks for pani (water). You take his cup and fill it from a bucket. Another wants “A bottle, brother,” and you fetch an empty urine bottle from the toilet.

The food is brought from the kitchen in big steel buckets or aluminum bowls. A heap of rice is served onto each plate with a big spoonful of dahl (thick lentil soup), another of potato-vegetable curry, a piece of fish or perhaps some chicken soup, and the plates are delivered to the patients’ beds. This one wants more dahl, that one more curry, or more soup or bread or milk. Special orders: no soup for this one, or no curry; another complains about the size of his piece of fish. Everyone gets pretty much whatever he wants if we’ve got it. They eat well and often cannot finish what’s on their plates. There are usually plenty of leftovers and these are served to the beggars lined up outside who eat from their own begging cups, plates, tin cans, clay pots or just a few leaves spread on the ground.

After breakfast there are shaves and haircuts to give, finger and toenail clipping, back rubs, and the never-ending trips for water. About half the patients can’t make it to the toilet and require bedpans and urine bottles. Quite a few can’t even manage these and we clean them up, changing the blue pajamas and bedsheets in situ. Distribution and administration of medicines — by pill, liquid, injection, and intravenous drip — is handled mostly by the sisters and brothers of the order, sometimes assisted by foreign volunteers with some medical background. In the last hour of the morning, after lunch and before they run us out at noon, I take a seat on somebody’s bed and play my fiddle. There is no other entertainment here and the patients seem to enjoy my rough-hewn efforts. They show a distinct preference for fast American hoedowns, except for John Smith, an old Anglo-Indian suffering from tuberculosis, who always requests “A Bicycle Built for Two.”

At noon everyone leaves except for the permanent resident-helpers, and the doors are locked. At 4 p.m. we return to serve the evening meal, a last round of medications, and at 6 p.m. the day is over for us. By the time we return at 7 a.m., one or two patients will probably be missing from the ward, now resting on a shelf in the dark room marked “I Am on My Way to Heaven.”

Most people might imagine that working in such a place would be a gruesome business, and certainly it takes a while to adjust to the more disagreeable tasks like changing patients who have soiled themselves, or even to the shocking appearance of men (I worked in the men’s ward) who are little more than skeletons covered with skin. But as I learned what I could do and how to do it, I found a lot of joy, even humor, in the work. For starters, faced with a roomful of dying destitutes, it is virtually impossible to feel sorry for yourself. Life’s little insults and injuries  fade into insignificance when you are forced to consider these unfortunates, what they suffer now and what they have been through in their lives. For most of them this is the best they’ve had in a long time, maybe the best they’ve ever had. It feels good to be a part of this giving.

But it’s a curious thing — and this used to keep me grinning day in and day out at Nirmal Hriday — that there seems to be a fundamental law where human beings are concerned that there is no such thing as “enough.” No sooner do we get what we want but we want more of it or something else. Contentment is a rare bird, and what passes for it usually could be better described as momentary satiety. The wise ones teach that this insatiable craving is the root of all our unhappiness, afflicting the rich and poor alike. I have never seen this more clearly than at Nirmal Hriday. The well-to-do generally mask their frustrations and do not complain in public but the poor have nothing to lose or hide.

Take someone who is dying in the street, a starving, naked human skeleton without enough strength left to stand up, suffering from wounds, dysentery, tuberculosis, gnawed by worms and rats, utterly helpless, destitute and alone in the world. Take this person, wash and dress his wounds, give him clean clothes, three meals a day, a doctor’s care and modern drugs, a bed cooled by a big ceiling fan and the society of his peers — you might think that such a person would be counting his lucky stars at such a change of fortune, if not content at least grateful.

To be sure some of them are, but by the third or fourth day most new arrivals will already be finding fault with their new situation. He doesn’t want rice, he wants bread, his shirt has a hole, his piece of fish is too small or he doesn’t like the soup. I try to give them whatever they want, that’s why I’m there, but I can’t help being amused when a man who a couple of days ago was dying in the gutter is now upset because his shirt has a hole in it.

I shake my head and laugh; they eat better than I do actually. When I get a moment I search the closet for a shirt without a hole, or the kitchen for another banana or more bread. If he thanks me it will be a nice moment, and if he snatches it out of my hand with a scowl the grin comes back and I scratch my head at the wonder of it, this unfathomable thirst. Like as not he’s already got three pieces of bread under his pillow that he stashed there this morning and has already forgotten.

TIM AND I ENTER TOGETHER. Tim is an Australian chemist who volunteered here two years ago and then went to Bangladesh to help train workers in a new government pharmaceutical factory. Now between jobs he has come back to Nirmal Hriday briefly before taking a holiday in Darjeeling. Right away we notice that old John Dodson has been moved from his bed at the end of the room to another near the front door directly under the Madonna that sits in a glass box on the wall, a bed usually reserved for the current patient-in-crisis. Tim takes one look at John and says to me, “He’s dying.” He puts his hand on the old man’s brow. “Yeah, he’s getting cold already … he won’t last an hour I’ll bet. Sit down with him, nobody else will. They’re too busy with food and medicine to sit with the dying.”

It’s a bit of a shock to me. Only yesterday John had been so worried that they were going to discharge him since the wounds on his legs were nearly healed. Now John lies on his back gasping for breath, his eyes half open but rolled up, seeing nothing. I sit down at the head of the narrow iron cot and take the old brown hand that has squeezed mine so often in the past weeks. The hand is cold and so is his face. I fetch a blanket from the closet, but a sister stops me, saying, “Don’t use that, brother, that’s a new blanket.” I climb the stairs to the roof, where they hang out the wash, and find an old one. As I cover John with the old blanket I wonder to myself what the new ones are for.

I take his hand again, stroke his brow, and say, “John, can you hear me?” No response. Tim passes and I ask him, “Do you think he can hear me?” “I think so, but it’s hard to say.” I try again. “John, I brought you the Sunday paper,” I say, feeling somewhat stupid but wanting him to know. He closes his mouth for the first time and puffs his cheeks a few times before resuming the gasping rhythm, but slowing down a little now.

JOHN ERNEST DODSON, AGE 61, BED 49, of Anglo-Indian descent. His lanky body is really too long for these cots, and his toothless mouth lies like a ravine between the great beak of his nose and his long pointed chin. “Hello my dear friend,” he used to greet me every morning, taking my hand in both of his and pulling me down next to him. Then I would hear his complaint for the day — someone took his blanket, or the fan isn’t working, or he hasn’t a cigarette left to his name. “See, my dear friend, my little box is empty,” and he’d show me his little tin cigarette case. “Well, we’ll have to do something about that, John,” I would say. “After all, you’re our superstar.” “Yes, superstar ….superstar.…” he’d repeat rapturously, smacking his lips and then chattering on and on like a lonesome housewife, always at a bit of a loss as to what to do with those long arms and legs in a world designed for smaller frames.

Sometimes I would see him waving at me frantically from the end of the room, and when I got to him he’d just hold his nose and point to some neighbor’s un-emptied bedpan. One of his nearest neighbors was a young man who was blind, deaf, mute, and had difficulty feeding himself. This fellow liked to get up occasionally and walk around very slowly with his arms folded across his chest, sometimes taking a minute or two between steps. Of course he couldn’t see where he was going and frequently collided with whatever part of John’s anatomy was hanging off the bed at the moment. John’s efforts to fend him off were hilarious and usually futile, but we generally took pity and pointed The Walker in another direction.

John was always asking for something, and I usually gave him whatever he wanted. He’d kiss my hands, touch my feet and carry on like a supplicant. “The crafty old devil,” I’d say to myself. I came to think of him as the wolf in the “Little Red Riding Hood” story who put on a bonnet, pulled up the blankets up to his long hairy chin and tried to impersonate Granny. To see John asleep, his pointy, wolfish face with its perpetual stubble of heavy grey beard sticking out from one end of the covers and a knee or a foot or an arm inevitably poking out somewhere else, my imagination easily supplied the bonnet and somehow I’ll always remember him that way.

John’s neighbor, The Walker, was a sad case. He was young, possibly still in his teens, with a sturdy physique, but couldn’t seem to see, hear, speak or deal with a bedpan. He tried to feed himself but more food ended up in the bed or on the floor than in his mouth, so we generally sat down and fed him with a spoon. He did have an excellent appetite. The rest of the day he spent either asleep or staring fixedly into space. Once or twice a week he would take one of his walks. At first it seemed so pointless to me: pouring food into one end of this zombie, collecting the shitty pants at the other, and changing the urine-soaked bed several times in between. This process could go on for another 50 years.

My attitude changed in time. For one thing, it seemed clear that this boy was a victim. It seemed unlikely that he would have grown up so robust had he been crippled from birth, not in India. I theorized that he had suffered some kind of brain damage fairly recently, perhaps from a savage beating, perhaps from an accident of some kind. He displayed not a bit of crankiness, fear or hostility, and given his sweet and cooperative disposition it was hard to imagine that he had brought such a fate upon himself. I also found that he was capable of learning new or forgotten skills. Instead of pouring the water into his open mouth I taught him to hold the cup and drink without assistance. With practice he spilled less and less. One day I watched him make the mistake of fastening his lips on the far instead of the near rim of the cup, and when the water landed in his lap he realized his mistake and corrected it.
By this time he had evolved in my mind from a vegetable, a bed-soiling machine, to a person, one I rather liked despite his shortcomings, especially when contrasted with some of the crosspatch patients in the ward with their senses intact. Then one day as I sat with him rubbing his shoulders (which he obviously liked), suddenly he blurted out “Cha!” — “tea” in Bengali, a beverage to which all Bengalis are wholeheartedly addicted. I felt a kind of a thrill I hadn’t experienced since many years before when I’d managed to teach a sadly neglected 16-month-old baby to walk. I hugged The Walker and ran off to find some cha.

Gopal was another sad case, an incontinent madman who sat or snoozed on his bed, didn’t like to be disturbed and took no interest whatsoever in his surroundings. If handled gently he was usually but not always cooperative about bathing, shaving, bed-changing, medication and meals. Sometimes he would start talking to nobody in particular, often working himself into a pitiful state with the tears streaming down his face. When I left Nirmal Hriday late in May I left Gopal with a new haircut and a sporty moustache. When I returned for a visit in September he was the only man remaining from before but it was two days before I finally recognized him. He had been moved into a dark corner, had a month’s growth of beard, and swung at me wildly when I tried to shave him.

One of the patients suffered from a condition in which there is a rupture in whatever seals off the scrotum from the lower abdomen and consequently what he carried between his legs was nearly the size of a volleyball. This prevented him from walking but otherwise he seemed relatively healthy, certainly not badly emaciated like most of the others. He had a bald head, a sweet face and a disposition to match, never made a fuss about anything, and spoke a few words of English. He seemed to have an uncanny sense of when food was about to be served. Quite often about five minutes before a meal he would motion for me to sit down by his bed and then tell me earnestly, with great emphasis, “I have not rice! ” or “I have not tea! ” or “I have not bread!” One day he really bowled me over. It was not mealtime, and when I bent over to hear his words, he said, “I . . . am . . . melancholy.” I gave him a vigorous back rub, he cheered up and went to sleep.

The most disagreeable patient in the ward I referred to as The Pest. He had been admitted with a grossly swollen belly, and as he improved under the doctor’s care he began to gripe, wheedle and beg. He apparently had a stash of coins secreted somewhere and used to prevail on the volunteers to buy cigarettes for him. (The little conical Indian cigarettes called beedies, consisting of a bit of tobacco rolled up in a leaf and tied with a thread, sell in Kalighat for two paise, or nearly five for a penny.) I put a stop to this eventually when I noticed that not only did he hoard his smokes, never sharing with others, but he was developing a bad cough. I began to give him khaine (chewing tobacco) as I did to most of the others — a little bit every other day. I considered it a much lesser evil than smoking for these men, many of whom were suffering from TB and other lung diseases. A lot of them preferred khaine anyway.

The Pest was the worst beggar in the ward and the only one I can remember who had any money. After I cut off his supply of beedies, he would beg for khaine every time I came by. I soon discovered that he often had a supply hidden away, begging was just a habit with him. If I came within arm’s reach he would fasten onto me and amplify his pitiful pleading. He was ambulatory and would sometimes actually follow me around. Once when I was trying to comfort a patient in real pain I had to beat off The Pest who came slinking up behind and tried to pull me away. Like the squeaky wheel, The Pest got more than his share of grease, but no matter what you gave him he was never satisfied, never grateful, and was universally detested in the ward for his constant griping and utter selfishness.

YESTERDAY WAS EASTER SUNDAY.  John, a Catholic, joined Mother Teresa herself for Mass and Holy Communion. I had arrived in the morning to find all the patients decked out in the best the clothes closet had to offer and each one wearing a garland of flowers. About a dozen Catholic patients, some volunteers and tourists, and the Missionaries of Charity folk were gathered in front of the main nursing station which had been converted into an altar for the occasion. I recognized Mother Teresa from photographs I’d seen, but it was the only time I was to lay eyes on her. She looked heavy, tired and rather grim. I decided not to join the crowd of onlookers rubbernecking the old woman in her devotions, so I faded back into the ward and started shaving Hindus and Muslims. In the afternoon John complained of stomach ache and hardly touched his dinner.

Old John’s starting to let go now. The heavy breathing gradually slows. The fighting is over — for food, for blankets, for shade and cigarettes. I squeeze the wrinkled hand, smooth the wrinkled brow. By now I’m sure he knows I’m here; he knows it’s me, and we both know the time has come. Back and forth people rush with plates of food and loaded syringes. Over our heads Mother Mary looks down sweetly, wearing a few of Mother Teresa’s decorations around her neck — but there is nothing more to be done for this one except to be there.

Tim comes by again. “Feel for the pulse in the neck.” He shows me, but I’m not all that interested. “After they stop breathing it just slowly fades away . . . beautiful.” He is radiant, which I don’t really understand, but this is my first time; I have never seen anyone die before. John has been in and out of Nirmal Hriday several times; Tim had known him when he worked here two years ago. Now he is dying easy, slipping away quietly in a place he obviously considers home. There is no cause for sorrow.

John stops breathing, then starts again, then stops. Half a minute goes by. One last breath flutters the old cheeks, and then all is still. I feel for the pulse as Tim showed me and as he predicted the heart rolls on for a minute or two, and then all is still, peace in the end, and the “spirit” of John Dodson, the mysterious factor that held all these molecules in that certain form for 61 years ceases to dwell therein.

I find it hard to believe that this subtle spirit simply ceases to be. Nothing ever just ceases to be. The universe is a kaleidoscope of matter and energy transformations, but nothing is lost, nothing just disappears. What becomes of this sophisticated organizing and sustaining force, where does it go? Our instruments cannot detect its departure. The diaphragm gives up, the brain swoons, the heart rolls to a stop. What exactly is the moment of death? No one can say.

We often speak of “the miracle of birth,” but where is its mystery? We have watched the sperm and the egg unite, the embryo develop and the baby emerge. We can observe growth and reduce it to biochemical equations but its conclusion remains a mystery — our minds are not equipped to fathom it. In the end we disappear up the shirtsleeve of God, and none can unravel the trick.

To live, we kill the cow and pull up the carrot, swat the fly and poison the rat, and think nothing of it. Without love we cannot grasp it. If we feel anything it’s “better them than us,” but to watch what we love, even a little, wither and die, we are compelled to look, to witness and to wonder, to feel those bonds that unite us with all that lives and the majesty of our common fate. Where the intellect cannot go the heart may lead us to a wordless understanding.

They dressed John in white and put a garland of flowers around his neck, and he lay there for most of the day looking quite stately except for the open mouth which refused to be closed. A new volunteer who had come in late that morning tried unsuccessfully to rouse him for lunch.

THE NOVICE SISTERS who make up the bulk of the work force at Nirmal Hriday, are a sweet and cheerful lot. They live and eat at the “Mother House,” where Mother Teresa also stays when she’s not jetting around the world. They come to Kalighat in a bright blue Peugeot ambulance and pay their respects to the Madonna inside the door before setting to work. Sometimes we ride home in the ambulance with them as Tim and I live not far from the Mother House. All the way the girls chant their Hail Marys and sing simple songs in English. (English is the lingua franca of the Missionaries of Charity who come from all parts of India where there are 14 major languages and countless dialects.) The driver is as wild and aggressive as any Calcutta taxi wallah, weaving in and out of traffic and leaning on the horn, but with the prayers and songs ringing melodiously in our ears, Tim (a Catholic) assures me, “This is the safest vehicle in town — divine protection you know . . .” Even the formidable Head Sister Luke tends to relax and smile a bit during the ambulance ride. She wears the blue-bordered sari these girls will don when they take their final vows after nine years of novitiate.

The novices are not saints or superwomen, and in the course of their work they must overcome the same fears and squeamishness that would trouble anyone else. For psychic armor they are given the doctrine that is central to Mother Teresa’s philosophy: that each person under their care is, in fact, Jesus Christ Himself. When they feed the hungry it is Christ they are feeding, it is His wounds they wash and dress, His suffering they strive to alleviate. Thus armed, they go where others have feared to tread, but they do so with a strange detachment.

It seems as if, in the effort to see Christ in their patients, they fail to see them as they really are. They do what is asked, they perform their tasks with gentleness and good cheer, but they do not chat with the patients, do not know their names, do not relate to them personally, and most unfortunately it seems to me, they leave them to die alone. A dying patient is nearly always put on an i.v. and life-saving drugs may be employed, last requests for tobacco and such will be honored, and I have seen novices dip a finger in water and draw a cross on the forehead (this is a last-minute baptism known in the trade as “giving a ticket”), but as far as sitting down with a patient who obviously has only a few minutes to live, it is not done.

I remember one case vividly. Late one morning I noticed a cot surrounded with people and when I went to investigate, in the center of the crowd I found one of the brothers sitting next to a dying man and a nurse injecting cortisone into his i.v. The man was trying to speak and the brother told me, “I think he just wants somebody to stay with him,” as if this were a rather strange and unreasonable request. He was obviously uncomfortable and said, “It’s almost time for our lunch.” I took the man’s hand and he clung to me tightly as the brother hurried off to his duties. With my free hand I began to rub the man’s brow, and when after a few minutes I paused to adjust my cramped posture, he reached for my hand and put it back on his head. A passing novice eyed my patient for half a minute, dipped her finger in his water cup, gave him a ticket and walked on. Ten minutes later as he breathed his last, all the novices were gathered nearby with their backs to us, saying their farewell prayers to Mother Mary. In peace the breathing ceased, the heart stopped, and it was over.

I rose and walked to the washing place to clean my hands and feet before leaving. When I returned to the ward I found the novices clustered around the dead man, staring in hushed wonder. I had just seen a man’s life come to an end, witnessed that mystery towards which all of us are drifting relentlessly. It’s a moment of real significance, for the dying one and for those who care. To share this moment, to ease and witness this passage has to be the whole point of a Home for Dying Destitutes. “Do they really understand that?” I wondered. While the brother fetched a few last bedpans and the sisters said their prayers, the moment came and went, and nobody saw it but me.
THE SISTER-IN-CHARGE AT NIRMAL HRIDAY is Sister Luke. She is often the only fully ordained sister in the place, the others being novice sisters and brothers. I get the impression that Nirmal Hriday is considered one of the most intimidating of the various tours of duty in the Missionaries of Charity’s charitable empire, and it’s a toss-up which is more intimidating: Death or Sister Luke. Her bark is biting, and after being bitten a few times I dubbed her The Crocodile. Sister Luke has been at Nirmal Hriday for ten years now and it could be she’s due for a change of scene. Normally sisters are shifted every two or three years to avoid personal attachments and dynasties. The consensus among the veteran volunteers seems to be that while she is admittedly often disagreeable, short-tempered and downright rude, as a last resort telling her to “stuff it” seems to work remarkably well to settle things down. Most of us however find it difficult to say this to a nun, and so we tend to lick our wounds and steer clear of The Crocodile.

The other point of conflict with Sister Luke stems from her fondness for employing heroic measures to drag patients back from Heaven’s door: injections, i.v. drips, even violent scolding. This policy seems to fly in the face of the motto on the wall about dying in peace with God and even the Western doctors and nurses who come as volunteers are often startled, if not dismayed, by her life-preserving zeal. She in turn accuses her critics of being euthanasia enthusiasts. “They just want to get rid of my patients,” she declares, “just kill them off, get them out, out, out.” In any case, at Nirmal Hriday today the only attention a dying patient is likely to get from Sister Luke is a poke with a hypodermic needle. The novices give them a wide berth and seem as frightened of death as any other schoolgirls would be. The brothers are more offhand about it, but they never have time either: there is the food and medicine to distribute, the bedpans and so forth. Comforting the dying is left to whatever euthanasia-loving volunteers happen to be around. Of course most of Luke’s heroics postpone the inevitable only briefly. After all, the “medical team” is there only eight hours a day at most.

I do recall one of Sister Luke’s few success stories, a fellow who spent nearly a week in the bed at the head of the room under the Madonna but refused to die. He was constantly surrounded by people, the center of attention, hooked up to i.v.s and continually shot full of drugs. Every day I would figure him a goner, and the next day there he’d be, still hanging on. He was one of our walking skeletons (except he couldn’t walk), all the meat gone, literally skin and bones. Then one day he asked me for a cigarette, and I knew he was getting better. The next day they took him off the i.v. and this time I gave him the cigarette.

As his condition improved he no longer got so much attention. They no longer got sweet curd from down the street and fed it to him with a spoon. Sarah the pretty English nurse no longer spent so much time fussing over him and poking him with her syringe. After a few more days he was moved from the place of honor and back into the ward. Was he glad to rejoin the merely destitute? On the contrary he grew more surly and cantankerous every day. He complained loudly about the food, the clothing and the bedding, and begged continuously for tobacco. His immediate neighbors would tell him to shut up, he became most unpopular. One day as he was sounding off about something, I was sitting with the patient who had “not rice! ” He raised his head to locate the source of commotion and then shook it sadly, murmuring, “Idiot!”

Then came a day when lunch was rather austere: no fish, no dhal, only rice and vegetable curry, and not a great deal of that. We supplemented this with lots of bread and milk, but there was nonetheless a storm of protest, led by this character who Sister Luke had brought back to life. He was so angry and outraged that he refused to eat anything, threw down his plate and made up his mind to leave. He couldn’t walk so he waddled along like a duck, in the crouching position, out the door and into the street.

When Tim and I left at noon we found him hunkered down in the gutter across the road. He waved to us, and after a bit of sign language we understood that he wanted us to carry him down the street to a bigger piece of shade. The noonday sun in May is broiling in Calcutta and I wondered if he might already be reconsidering his impetuous exit. We moved him, gave him a couple of beedies, and left him crouched there with a scowl on his face. At four o’clock he was nowhere to be seen, but the next morning he came back to his bed under the ceiling fans and if not mellow he was at least quiet for a change, having lived through a night in Kalighat, where things go slightly berserk after sundown. Whatever hardships he may have suffered that night, it must have been a bit of a thrill, a last gesture of independence, and in that sense Sister Luke’s efforts were fruitful even if his gesture consisted mainly in thumbing his nose at her.

Sister Luke figures now that they have the drugs at their disposal, what can they do but use them? I guess what I wonder is, why can’t they do both: cure the sick and comfort the dying? The latter was the raison d’être for Nirmal Hriday’s creation — why has it been abandoned?

THE MISSIONARIES OF CHARITY and the volunteers only spend six to eight hours a day at Nirmal Hriday. A small resident clan of Indian helpers live on the roof and the three most visible of these are James, Lucky and the “Speaker of the House.” If Sister Luke is the brains of the place, James is the brawn. Built along the lines of a gorilla with broad, hunched shoulders and skinny, knobby legs, James is always smiling. Nothing can disrupt James’s toothy grin, not Sister Luke’s barking, not even 100 kilos of rice on his back. When heavy bundles arrive, like sacks of rice, flour or sugar, or huge baskets of vegetables, it’s James who carries them in. Anyone who can smile while staggering under a 220-pound sack of rice is a hero in my book. Contemplating some of the morbid and gloomy sects loose in the world today, I have thought about starting a new religion with James as the prophet — a sect dedicated to imperturbable cheerfulness.

Lucky Ram looks like an Indian version of Tweedledum or Tweedledee: well under five feet tall, chunky, and always combing his hair. He does whatever needs doing including the worst of the dirty work: emptying bedpans and cleaning the toilet. When it’s mealtime he helps serve the food, at morning bath time he helps carry patients who can’t walk to the washing place. It’s usually Lucky who sweeps up all the spilled rice, rejected vegetables, fish bones and banana peels after lunch, possibly because he’s built so close to the ground. He can sometimes get deaf but never grouchy, and has a good sense of who needs a bedpan right now and who can wait a minute.

One other Indian fellow who lives in the building, although I rarely saw him do any work, I call The Speaker of the House because the one activity that makes him impossible to overlook is his daily recitation. Every morning at about ten-thirty he takes a seat on an empty bed at the end of the ward and starts reading in a loud voice from a collection of technical manuals in English. He drones on for nearly an hour with a robotic style of delivery: syllable by syllable, without punctuation, steady, monotonous, and loud enough to be heard all over the building. The effect is diabolical — a filibuster designed to drive you out of your everlovin’ mind:

. . . the-pow-er-train-must-be-a-ligned-with-the-
trans-mis-sion-gears-be-fore-the-ma-chine-is-put-in-
to-o-per-a-tion-the-clear-an-ces-must-be-checked-
with-a-mi-cro-me-ter-and-the-man-i-fold-re-moved-
for-in-spec-tion-care-must-be-ta-ken-not-to-dis-turb-
the-high-pres-sure-re-lease-mech-an-ism . . .

Tim claims that two years ago The Speaker was reading the same stuff and doesn’t understand a word of it. My fiddle playing never fazed The Speaker and so “Oh Suzanna” and “Polly Wolly Doodle” were often accompanied by “How to Overhaul Your Bulldozer” along with the sound of conch-shell trumpets and drums drifting over the wall from Kali’s temple. In India you learn tolerance or soon go bananas.

TUESDAY WAS A DARK DAY FOR CHRISTIANITY at Nirmal Hriday. Occasionally we get groups of tourists — I don’t know what else to call them. They come, look around, and leave. This bunch had a movie camera and a whole battery of lights.The sisters discourage picture-taking in the Home but these visitors were permitted to make a few passes through the ward in a great blaze of light. Then most of them evaporated, leaving only a pair of young men who looked like they’d stepped out of the Sears catalog: handsome, clean-cut and coiffured, and immaculately dressed in sporty polyester.

I was shaving patients as they began to work their way down the aisle, stopping to chat with each patient. As they got closer to me I began to hear snatches of their rather one-sided conversations (few of the patients speak any English). I looked up and caught the following: (hand on shoulder, eyeball to eyeball) “Jesus loves you, did you know that?” (no answer) “Do you know who Jesus is?” (no answer, polite smile) “Do you speak English? ” (no answer, but enjoying all this attention). As I turned back to my shaving, from the other side I overheard: (hand on head octopus-style, bent over murmuring) “Jesus . . . Jesus . . . health . . . Jesus . . . health . . . Jesus . . . .” Suddenly he straightened up and said brightly, “There! Feel any better?”

“Sonofabitch!” I said to myself, “They’re trying to heal our patients! Now how do you heal someone who’s suffering from malnutrition? Not only that, they’ve brought along a movie camera just in case one of the old boys leaps out of bed and starts shouting ‘Hallelujah!’” As they neared Gopal I looked up again to catch the action. I had learned only a few words of Bengali, working words for nouns like water, bread, and blanket, but the Indian brothers had told me that when Gopal got excited (which wasn’t really that often) he tended to use rather rude language. One of the Sears mannequins sat down next to Gopal, clamped onto his shoulder and began to preach. Unfortunately he used his left hand, something of an insult in the East where that’s the hand you use to wipe your ass. Gopal flung off the offending hand and began to preach right back. The would-be healer retreated to the end of the cot and tried again, but Gopal matched him verse for verse in what must have been unprintable Bengali.

When the two of them had made the rounds of the entire male ward, having failed to effect any miraculous cures or conversions, they produced a 35mm camera and began taking pictures of each other with various patients (not Gopal). “I’ll sit by this one. Be sure to get the window and the picture of Mother Teresa.” “Put your arm around him . . . that’s it.” “Get one of me talking to him, okay?” “Now take his hand . . . right. That’s good, but don’t talk.” I finally stood up and asked them, “What are you doing?” They told me they were members of the “Celebration Singers,” a gospel choir from the States in Calcutta for a concert to be given at the YMCA. One of them asked me something about the work and then gushed, “Well it certainly is a wonderful opportunity to be used by the Lord.”

Tim was away that particular morning and when I described the action he said, “You should have run them out of there or spilled a bedpan over their heads. They were just using the patients.” I can just see them now, passing those photos around at the old prayer meeting, and all the sweet girls in their spotless gingham frocks trembling in awe of these brave young soldiers of the Lord who ventured even unto the very gates of Death to preach the Gospel to the heathen.

When the evangelists finally decamped I finished up my shaving rounds. Some departing volunteer had left us half a bottle of 1117 aftershave lotion, and I splashed some on old John Smith. “There you go John, now you smell just like a ten-dollar whore.” He grinned and raised his right hand to his forehead in the typical Indian salutation. I looked down the room of freshly shaved and perfumed men and thought, “Best looking bunch of dying destitutes I ever saw.”

MOTHER TERESA IS OLD NOW, and mortal like the rest of us. Starting off alone, faced with the staggering dimensions of poverty and human misery that have swallowed many a do-gooder in India, her work has prospered and spread to the far corners of the globe, encompassing even the “poor-in-spirit,” who despite material advantages strive to end their lives with drugs and alcohol in the wealthy capitals of the world. Thousands have joined her, and millions have felt the touch of her love and concern. Today she is a media figure, a symbol of the helping hand extended to all. Though she denies that she is any more than the willing instrument of God’s love and mercy, she no doubt understands the value of her image as a rallying point for those who wish to help the needy but don’t know where to begin. Governments hang medals on her and she in turn hangs them on Mother Mary, “source of our joy.” Many like me have heard her name flashing across the wires and one day turn up on her doorstep to offer our services. Others donate money, food, medicine and shelter.

Mother has her critics, even within the Catholic Church, who accuse her of a pre-Vatican II “pray, pay, and obey” attitude. She says, “I’m not trying to change anything. I am only trying to live my love, [meet] the need that the person has then, that moment. Somebody said to me, ‘Why do you give them the fish to eat? Why don’t you give them the rope to catch the fish?’ And I said, ‘Our people, they cannot stand. Either they’re hungry or they’re diseased and disabled. They cannot stand. Still less are they able to hold that rope. What I do, I give them the fish to eat, and when they are strong enough we’ll hand them over to you and you give them the rope to catch the fish. ”

As with followers of every visionary, Mother’s successors will not always see things in exactly the same light, nor be sustained by the same depths of faith, energy and love. Time moves on, conditions change, and the original spirit is gradually diluted and mechanized. This is evident at Nirmal Hriday today, partly as a result of the inevitable effects of worldwide expansion and partly because of changes in Calcutta itself. As in government bureaucracies, when problems a body was constituted to attack are alleviated, the committee looks for other work to do.

There is no one to fill Mother Teresa’s shoes when she is gone. The institutions she founded will live on no doubt, but they have already begun to slip away from her direct control and things will likely never again be quite the same. The sign just inside the door at Nirmal Hriday, “Welcome to Mother’s First Love,” becomes a poignant reminder that she no longer has time to come around, even though she lives only a few blocks away.

TO THOSE WHO LOOK TO HER FOR INSPIRATION, Mother Teresa says that if you feel called to the work, begin at home and in your own neighborhood. Are those under your own roof truly bound together in a spirit of unselfish love and kindness? Many modern urbanites don’t know their own neighbors, don’t wish to know them, have no time to take from their own affairs. How much luck do these people, their families and neighbors, have in their quest for happiness? Is this not the root of human alienation and injustice?

Misery is a relative thing, the world will never be free of it. One day you are face-to-face with death, with the rats already nibbling at your toes; a week later your misery is no fish for lunch. American teenagers are miserable if they have no car, and their parents suffer if they have only one. The world is an open text, and if we would truly live and touch the highest peaks, we must look and learn. Loving service is an education and teaches us the meaning of words we have always known.

The work at Nirmal Hriday is exhausting, every muscle is taxed: physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. I discovered some of these muscles to be puny, others appeared that I didn’t know I had. Sister Luke has to be forgiven her short temper and the novices their discipline of studied detachment. I worked for two months; they have dedicated their whole lives to serving others. The last time I visited the Home, I saw Sister Luke, The Crocodile herself, sitting by the patient under the Madonna, peeling a large pink grapefruit and popping the pieces into his mouth.

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Postscript 2018

It is 36 years since I wrote about Nirmal Hriday. The original was handwritten by lamplight in the West Bengal countryside and then copied on an ancient borrowed typewriter. I have left everything in the present tense and done only minor editing, mostly removing about a thousand commas; I used to sprinkle commas everywhere. The piece was published by Stewart Brand in the Fall 1983 “Co-Evolution Quarterly, “ the periodical offspring of his Whole Earth Catalog, later re-branded as the Whole Earth Review. Stewart, an eco-technocrat who had a huge impact on the cultural revolution of the 60s, is now 79 and still breaking new ground, peering into the future with his “Long Now Foundation” — something too complex and fascinating to start talking about here. Suffice it to say that it is a point of pride for me to have his name on a piece of mine.

As for Nirmal Hriday, it apparently still exists in Kalighat much as it did when I volunteered there. Over the years it has come in for criticism at times for the practice of baptizing non-Christian patients (described as “giving a ticket” in my account),  for poor sterilization protocols and for deficiencies in the treatment of pain, though I was not aware of these latter issues when I worked there. I was not involved in the medical side back then and had no thought of a medical career, but lo and behold 18 years later I woke up to find myself working as a hospice nurse in Astoria, Oregon. Funny how things happen.

As for the Missionaries of Charity, in the 20 years since Mother T died in 1997 the order seems to have dwindled considerably. They may be working quietly under the radar, but a cursory search online does not turn up much. Several of their facilities have been attacked by Muslim radicals who willfully slaughter both patients and caregivers, generating much of the news you can find online about the Missionaries of Charity today. Evil takes center stage as always.

Lastly, I can’t send this back out into the world again without saying one thing about meeting Mother Teresa, one of two Nobel Prize winners I have had the honor of shaking hands with. It happened on Christmas 1982, after I had already written this piece. I’d come back to Nirmal Hriday and had been playing Christmas carols on the fiddle in the men’s ward when she came over to me and asked me not to forget to play for the women as well.

Shaking her hand was an experience. It was the hand of a hard-working peasant: large, leathery, and warm. My hand sunk into it like you sink into a soft leather easy chair at the end of a hard day. When I met her she was still reportedly scrubbing floors on her hands and knees several hours a day as a spiritual practice of humble service, and it was that hand that enveloped mine and spoke of a lifetime of hard work and great love. It was a moment in time that I was not expecting and will never forget.

Joseph Stevenson     •     Astoria, Oregon     •     March 2018