Mother Teresa: An Authorized Biography

Chapter One

The Hidden Treasure

Mine was a happy family. I had one brother and one sister, but I do not like to talk about it. It is not important now. The important thing is to follow God’s way, the way he leads us to do something beautiful for him.

Mother Teresa’s constant insistence on the insignificance of her personal life meant that she spoke little about her early years. When she did so it was to stress that hers had been a childhood rendered harmonious by small, everyday things and the support of a loving family. Time and time again in later years, she would insist upon the importance of the hidden and the ordinary life, pointing out that the carpenter’s son from Nazareth had spent thirty years doing humble work in a carpenter’s workshop before assuming his public role, and using this as an illustration of the exemplary humility of Jesus. So unconcerned was she about accuracy in relation to the chronicling of her own life, and so disinclined actually to read anything written about her, that for many years and in a succession of books her birthdate was erroneously recorded as August 27, 1910. It even appeared in the Indian Loreto Entrance Book as her date of birth. In fact, as she confided to her friend, co-worker and American author Eileen Egan, that was the date on which she was christened Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu. The date that marked the beginning of her Christian life was undoubtedly the more important to Mother Teresa, but she was nonetheless actually born in Skopje on the previous day.

Her background was, according to the insights provided by her brother, Lazar, and a cousin, Lush Gjergji, indeed essentially ordinary. She was the youngest of the three children born to Nikola and Dranafile Bojaxhiu, both of whom were Albanian but who had come originally from Prizren, a city that during their daughter’s childhood was part of Yugoslavia but had belonged at one time to the kingdom of Serbia. Nikola was descended from a large and prosperous family with a long tradition of trade. He was a merchant and entrepreneur drawn to the town of Skopje by its role as a commercial center. According to the local parish priest, immediately on his arrival in Skopje, Nikola bought a house and gradually, thanks to involvement through a friend in a successful building firm, came to own a number of properties, in one of which the Bojaxhiu family lived. Initially Nikola supplied medicines for one of Skopje’s leading doctors. Later he went into partnership with a rich Italian merchant who traded in a wide variety of goods, including oil, sugar, cloth, and leather, and he began to travel to different parts of Europe on business. A capable man who sat on the town council and became a leading figure in Skopje’s civic life, a supporter of the arts and of the local church, and a gifted linguist who spoke not only Albanian and Serbo-Croat, but also Turkish, Italian, and French, Nikola was a strict disciplinarian who took a keen interest in his children’s education. He was stern at times and expected high standards of them, reminding them that they must not forget whose children they were. Yet his homecomings were always eagerly awaited, partly because he was invariably the bearer of gifts, but primarily because he was also a talented storyteller who kept his young audience amused with enthralling tales of his travels.

In later life Mother Teresa would carry with her very traditional ideas about the function of the woman in the home, ideas for which Drana Bojaxhiu provided the role model. In one of the infrequent references the adult Mother Teresa made to her family background, she remembered how, while her father was away working, her mother busied herself about the house, cooking, mending, and performing other domestic tasks, but as soon as her father returned, all work stopped. Her mother would put on a clean dress and comb her hair and ensure that the children were fresh and tidy to greet him.

Lazar, who was three years older than Agnes, recalled those early events as being peaceful and pleasant. Yet they took place against a background of political turbulence of the kind that engendered strong patriotic feelings and a deep sense of national identity. The year in which Agnes was born (1910) witnessed the first Albanian uprising. Two years later the first Balkan war broke out as part of the unrest in the Balkan States that would contribute to the outbreak of the First World War. Internal fighting went on in both Serbia and neighboring Albania. Albania won its independence in November 1912, thus depriving Serbia of the coastline to which it aspired and that it would only acquire with the creation of Yugoslavia as a federation of Serbia and five other states. An atmosphere of hostility prevailed between Albania and Serbia and, rooted as it was in both races, the Bojaxhiu family could hardly remain unaffected by the conflict. Nikola Bojaxhiu, with his extensive and well-established business interests, was a man not without political interests also, who showed his sympathy for the Albanian freedom fighters by providing them not only with financial support but also with hospitality.

On November 28, 1912, the proclamation of Albanian independence by its national leaders was marked in the Bojaxhiu household with revelry and celebrations. Nikola was by nature a sociable man whose home provided a warm welcome for guests ranging from the poor of Skopje to the town’s archbishop. On that particular night the house was filled with leading Albanian patriots who talked and sang to the accompaniment of mandolin playing into the early hours. Their host made no secret of his commitment to the Albanian nationalist cause. That same commitment involved him in a movement established after the First World War to have the province of Kosovo, with its predominantly Albanian population, joined to a greater Albania. It was in pursuit of this objective that in 1919 Nikola Bojaxhiu traveled some 160 miles to a political gathering in Belgrade. He left home, together with his fellow city councillors, apparently in the best of health. He returned in a carriage with the Italian consul, on the brink of death. Hemorrhaging severely, he was taken to the local hospital where emergency surgery failed to save his life. Nikola Bojaxhiu was only forty-five when he died. A question mark still lingers over the circumstances of his death, but there were those among his family and the medical profession who were convinced that he was poisoned.

The shock of the sudden loss of her husband was a devastating one for Drana Bojaxhiu, compounded by the fact that following Nikola’s death, his Italian business partner appropriated the assets of the business. Drana’s own relatives were merchants and landowners with large estates in Novo Selo to which she had some claim, but she possessed no documents to establish her rights and was in any case disinclined to pursue the matter. Consequently she and her children were left with little but the roof over their heads. For the first time the Bojaxhiu children experienced what it was to be without financial security. Drana did not, however, allow it to detract from their happiness. She went through an initial period of grief, during which she leaned heavily on the support of her eldest child, Aga, who was fifteen at the time, but afterward she assumed her new role as provider with all the strength of character of which she was undoubtedly possessed. Thus it was very largely under the influence of her devout mother, and her insistence on the value of the nonmaterial riches of kindness, generosity and compassion for the poor and weak, that the foundations for Agnes’s future apostolate were laid. Agnes was only eight years old when her father died. Home, she would assert in later life, is where the mother is. In old age particularly the physical attributes that Mother Teresa shared with her mother became strikingly apparent, but they undoubtedly shared other characteristics also, to a point where some of the adult Mother Teresa’s very distinctive sayings were almost a word-for-word echo of her mother’s spiritual directives. Hence, for example, the often repeated instruction: Be only all for God.

If the Bojaxhiu home had always been open to all, there had invariably been a special welcome for the poor. An elderly woman had come regularly to the house for meals. Welcome her warmly, with love, Nikola instructed them. My child, never eat a single mouthful unless you are sharing it with others. It was an approach to people and to possessions that Drana Bojaxhiu, serious, highly disciplined, and deeply religious as she was, both shared and complemented. She took to sewing and embroidery and selling cloth to provide not only for the material needs of her children but also for those of people who were even less fortunate. The family table continued to be a gathering place for the poor for whom she cared with a gentle warmth. Years later Lazar would recall questioning his mother as to who the people who shared his meals were. Some of them are our relations, was the response, but all of them are our people. No one ever left empty-handed.

At least once a week Drana would visit an old woman who had been abandoned by her family, to take her food and clean her house. She washed and fed and cared for File, an alcoholic woman covered with sores, as if she were a small child. The six children of a poor widow became part of Drana’s own family when their mother died. Agnes would sometimes accompany her mother on her errands of mercy, for Drana was eager that the lessons of love in action and the importance of leading a Christian life, albeit without deliberately attracting attention to one’s own virtue, should be communicated to her children. When you do good, she instructed them, do it quietly, as if you were throwing a stone into the sea. Such lessons were instilled by solid example. One story recounted by Mother Teresa, more because it contained a spiritual lesson than because it provided an insight into her own background, recorded how one day her mother brought home a basket of good apples. Calling her three children to inspect for themselves how perfect and unflawed each apple was, she then placed a rotten apple in the middle of them and left the basket covered. Next day the children were again summoned to examine the state of the apples. Many of them had begun to rot. The process was used to demonstrate the corrupting influence of mixing in the wrong kind of company.

The family that prays together, stays together was one of the adult Mother Teresa’s much used axioms. The Bojaxhiu family had been Catholic for many generations. Prayer was an integral part of their family life. Every evening they assembled to pray together, and regular attendance at the local Catholic church was a source of considerable support to them. In Albania the Catholic population, even during the years preceding the wars, was never more than 10 percent, the majority of the population being Muslim. In Serbia for centuries the majority faith had been Orthodox. Neighboring Croatia was largely Roman Catholic, but there was a long history of hostility between Croatia and Serbia. As the focal point of worship for Albanians representing a minority religion, therefore, the parish church of the Sacred Heart in Skopje performed not only a spiritual role but also one of preserving a culture and sense of identity. At the same time the coexistence of different religions in the increasingly atheistic population of Skopje called forth a certain tolerance. Drana was an active member of the Sacred Heart congregation, and her younger daughter followed in her footsteps. Agnes was, in Lazar’s recollection, a naturally obedient and thoughtful child, whose example her mother tended to cite to her two other children. From a very early age she went readily to church services. She was educated first at a convent-run primary school but then went on to a state school, and so it was from her home and from the church that she received her religious instruction. The Bojaxhiu family were musical. Singing, playing instruments, and even composition was an accepted part of family life. Learning to play the mandolin presented Agnes with no particular difficulties and, again, her musical gifts found an outlet at the church of the Sacred Heart. Like her sister, Aga, she joined the church choir, where together in time they would become known as the church’s two nightingales who were frequently singled out for solo parts.

By the age of twelve Agnes felt herself called to the religious life, an intensely personal experience on which she would not elaborate, other than to say that it did not take the form of any supernatural or prophetic apparition: It is a private matter. It was not a vision. I’ve never had a vision. Until Agnes went away to become a nun herself she had never even seen one. Yet the possibility of her youngest child being called to the religious life did not come as a total surprise to Drana, who intimated on more than one occasion to her other children that she did not feel that Agnes would be with them for long, either because of her poor health, for Agnes had a weak chest and was prone to chronic coughs, or because she would be called to give herself to God. For six years Agnes thought and prayed about it. By her own admission there were times when she doubted whether she had a vocation, but in the end she was convinced that she was being called to belong completely to God. Our Lady of the Black Mountain at Letnice helped me to see this.

The annual pilgrimage to the chapel of the Madonna of Letnice on the slopes of Skopje’s Black Mountain was the highlight of the parish year. The Bojaxhiu family would go in a horse-drawn carriage to join groups of pilgrims, both Catholic and non-Catholic, who made their way, singing and praying, up the hillside as an act of faith. There were times, however, when in the interests of Agnes’s delicate health, Drana would arrange for her to visit the shrine when there were not quite so many other people present. Agnes was fond of praying alone in the chapel, and the periods spent there appear to have been a source of both physical and spiritual sustenance to her for the remainder of the year. They also gave her the confirmation of her vocation that she sought.

It was a Croatian Jesuit priest, Father Jambrekovic, who provided her with a litmus test during periods of doubt. He had become the priest at the Sacred Heart in May 1925 and introduced the young people of the parish to many things, teaching them about medicine, science, poetry, drama, and even orchestral conducting. It was he who set up in Skopje a Sodality of Children of Mary, a Christian society for girls, of which Agnes became an active member. She was a popular child with an appealing sense of fun and plenty of female friends, although shy with boys and inclined at times to be somewhat withdrawn and introverted. The sodality introduced her to, among other things, the challenges of St. Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises: What have I done for Christ? What am I doing for Christ? What will I do for Christ? Agnes was fond of reading. A library initiated by Father Jambrekovic kept her supplied with books. He also established a mixed Catholic youth group with a program of walks, parties, concerts, and other outings, and in general he had a profound effect upon the spiritual and cultural life of his young parishioners. His response to Agnes’s question as to how she could know whether God was really calling her was that joy was the proof of the rightness of any endeavor. Joy, he maintained, was the compass that pointed the direction in life.

As a Jesuit, Father Jambrekovic passed on to his parishioners news of the missionary work undertaken by the Society of Jesus as part of a widespread wave of enthusiasm for the missions encouraged by the writings of Pope Pius XI and prevalent at the time. In 1924 a number of Yugoslavian priests had left for India to undertake missionary work in Bengal, in the archdiocese of Calcutta. Sent first to the seminary at Kurseong and subsequently allocated to the district of 24-Parganas on the outskirts of Calcutta, and to the Sunderbans, from India they wrote fervent and inspiring letters about the work of missionaries among the poor and the sick. Their writing, the occasional visits of missionaries to Skopje, and Father Jambrekovic’s own enthusiasm for the work gave a focus to Agnes’s vocation. As a very small child she had dreamed of serving the poor of Africa. Although it had been Africa which first captured her imagination, the letters that came through from India drew her attention in a different direction. Agnes impressed all those around her with her detailed knowledge of the activities undertaken by different missions. She spent longer periods of retreat at Cesnagore, and by the time she was eighteen she was convinced that her own calling was to be a missionary, to go out and give the life of Christ to the people.

By then the generally exemplary if occasionally mischievous child had grown into an attractive young woman whose active contribution to the life of the community was much valued. She was a born organizer and something of a driving force in all the activities she undertook. At school she had done well, although not quite as well as her elder sister, Aga, and she had already discovered a certain gift for communicating her knowledge to others. Some of her own classmates came to her for extra tuition. At various junctures she had harbored hopes of a career in music or writing. A passionate lover of poetry, she composed poems herself. Two articles she wrote were published in the local newspaper, and there were those about her who felt that she had a talent in that direction, which should be pursued. The decision to become a missionary nun was not an easy one. It was undoubtedly a struggle, for there is every reason to believe that Agnes was a young girl deeply attached to her family and one who relished the prospect of having her own home and children. When in October 1981 an Australian journalist asked whether the mother of thousands had missed having her own child, Mother Teresa’s response was Naturally, naturally, of course. That is the sacrifice we make. That is the gift we give to God. She was quick to point out the many compensations and rewards of her life of chastity. By then her immensely extended family had provided her with thousands of children, men and women to love. The sacrifice was nonetheless real. To join a missionary order as she did in the 1920s entailed not only the commitment to chastity but most likely also the prospect of a lifetime of total separation from her blood relatives, friends, and homeland. At that time there was little opportunity for home visits, or travel by family members to distant lands. Yet Agnes applied to join the Loreto Sisters, the Irish branch of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, about whose work the Yugoslav priests in Bengal had written with a fervor that she found compelling.

When first Agnes informed her mother of her intention, Drana initially refused her consent, not because she was surprised or disapproved but because she wanted to test the strength of her daughter’s conviction. When it became apparent that Agnes would not be swayed from her decision, Drana went to her room, closed the door, and remained there for twenty-four hours. Eventually, not without an element of considerable personal sacrifice, she gave her daughter her blessing, but with the warning that she must give herself totally and faithfully to God. Years later, looking back on that crucial decision, Mother Teresa recalled how her mother had reminded her that she must be only, all for God and Jesus. If I had not been true to my vocation she would have judged me as God would judge me. One day she will ask me: ‘My child, have you lived only, all for God?’

By 1928 Lazar had already been away from home for several years. He had first won a scholarship to study in Austria, and then joined Albania’s Military Academy. On September 1, 1928, Albania became a monarchy under King Zog I, and the young Second Lieutenant Bojaxhiu enlisted in the army of the newly crowned king. Although later Lazar would comment on how very like his deeply religious mother Mother Teresa was, at the time the news of Agnes’s vocation came as a surprise to him. He wrote her a somewhat imperious letter inquiring whether she really knew what she was doing. You think you are important, was Agnes’s defiant response, because you are an officer serving a king with two million subjects. But I am serving the King of the whole world.

On the Feast of the Assumption 1928, Agnes joined the pilgrimage to Letnice for the last time, and on the evening of September 26 she boarded a train for Zagreb. Katoliĉke misije, Catholic Missions, a Zagreb periodical that, with its regular reports of Catholic missionary work undertaken by Croatian and Slovene missionaries in India, had contributed to the shaping of Agnes’s vocation, reported how about a hundred tearful people were present to wave her off on her journey from Skopje to an unknown land. Agnes’s hope was that she was destined for the motherhouse of the Loreto Sisters in Rathfarnham, Dublin. For some time she waited with her mother and Aga in Zagreb to be joined by Betika Kajnc, another young woman wanting to join the Loreto Order. Then finally, on October 13 she parted from her mother and sister, and together with her new companion set off on a long and grueling train journey across Europe. At the time the Loreto Sisters had a hostel in Paris, and it was in Paris that, with the assistance of an interpreter from the Yugoslavian embassy, the two girls were interviewed by Mother Eugene MacAvin, the Sister in charge at Loreto House, Auteuil. On the strength of the meeting, Mother Eugene MacAvin recommended them to the mother general of the order, Mother M. Raphael Deasy at Rathfarnham, Dublin.

The two girls received their postulant’s caps at Loreto Abbey, Rathfarnham, on October 12, 1928, but they spent only six weeks there, during which time they concentrated primarily on learning English, the language in which their spiritual studies would be conducted. Understandably in view of its brevity, their stay left only the impression of two quiet young women, dutifully struggling with a new life in a language that was completely strange to them. Agnes Bojaxhiu spoke not a word of English on her arrival but she had inherited something of her father’s gift for languages and she was further helped in her efforts by Mother Mary Emmanuel McDermott who was a postulant with her at Rathfarnham. It was nonetheless no easy task, and in order to facilitate their progress, the two postulants from Yugoslavia were asked never to speak to each other in their own language, a directive to which they were both consistently faithful. On December 1, 1928, they set sail for India and a new world of separation and service. By then Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu had chosen the name of Sister Mary Teresa of the Child Jesus—after Thérèse of Lisieux, the Little Flower who had pointed the way to holiness through fidelity in small things, Mother Teresa was at pains to emphasize, not the great Teresa of Avila. Her traveling companion had taken the name of Mary Magdalene.

The long voyage through the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, and, finally, the Bay of Bengal can only have heightened the girls’ sense of isolation from all that was familiar. Christmas was celebrated at sea. Together with three Franciscan missionary nuns who were also on board, they sang Christmas carols round a small improvised paper crib beneath a canopy of glittering stars. Their primary regret, Teresa’s first contribution to Catholic Missions on January 6, 1929, recorded, was that there was no Catholic priest on board to celebrate Mass.

Her first landfall close to the land of dreams was at Colombo, where the tall, fruit-laden palms and the beauty of nature in general left her astonished. She observed the life in the city with strange feelings. Half-naked Sri Lankans, their skin and hair glistening in the hot sun, the men who like human horses pulled their little carts through the congested streets, her own journey in one of those carts against her natural inclinations and praying all the time that her weight would not be too heavy for the puller to bear—all these experiences left a powerful impression and were set down on paper. So too was the fact from which she evidently derived much comfort, that a Catholic priest would be a fellow passenger for the final stages of the voyage:

So now we had Mass daily, and life on board no longer seemed so desolate to us. We did not have a very solemn New Year’s Eve but all the same we sang the Te Deum in our hearts. Thanks be to God, we began the new year well—with a sung Mass which seemed a little more majestic to us.

Madras was the next port of call, and there the indescribable poverty and strange customs of the people shocked her profoundly. Her contact with the poor of Skopje had by no means immunized her against the extremity of the need she encountered there.

Many families live in the streets, along the city walls, even in places thronged with people. Day and night they live out in the open on mats they have made from large palm leaves—or frequently on the bare ground. They are all virtually naked, wearing at best a ragged loincloth. . . . As we went along the street we chanced upon one family gathered around a dead relation, wrapped in worn red rags, strewn with yellow flowers, his face painted in coloured stripes. It was a horrifying scene. If our people could only see all this, they would stop grumbling about their own misfortunes and offer thanks to God for blessing them with such abundance.

The two young women from Yugoslavia arrived in Calcutta on January 6, 1929, but their first encounter with Kipling’s city of dreadful night was a brief one. Only one week later they were sent to begin their novitiate in earnest in Darjeeling, a hill station some seven thousand feet up in the foothills of the Himalayas. On May 23, 1929, Teresa of the Child Jesus was formally made a Loreto novice. An entry in the Indian Loreto Entrance Book records that on that date she received the holy habit. Monsignor Ferdinand Périer, the archbishop of Calcutta who, many years later, would play a vital role in her initiation to another form of religious life, was present at the ceremony at which her change of name and commencement of two years of intensive training in the spirituality and work of Loreto was officially confirmed. The novitiate was a period of preparation and probation for the religious life. For Loreto nuns it also involved preparation for their particular apostolate of teaching, an apostolate that suited Sister Teresa’s talents and fulfilled some of the early aspirations which the religious life might otherwise have required her to relinquish. Dressed in the cumbersome black habit and veil that, with scant regard for the Indian climate, the Loreto novices wore in those days, she embarked upon the new life, which also involved the learning of Hindi and Bengali, with industry and good cheer.

In 1991 at Loreto House, Calcutta, Sister Marie Thérèse, a Loreto nun who had come out to India one year ahead of Sister Teresa, remembered the young novice as having been a great girl, very jolly and bright, full of fun. She didn’t know much English in those days but it was marvelous how she picked it up. She was always a great worker too. Very hard working. She was also a very kind and charitable sort of person even as a young nun.

Following her first temporary vows on May 24, 1931, Teresa began teaching in the Loreto convent school in the relatively privileged environs of Darjeeling. She also worked for a brief period helping the nursing staff in a small medical station. Again the November 1931 issue of Catholic Missions provided a record of her first experience of close proximity with the suffering poor of India:

Many have come from a distance, walking for as much as three hours. What a state they are in! Their ears and feet are covered in sores. They have lumps and lesions on their backs, among the numerous ulcers. Many stay at home because they are too debilitated by tropical fever to come. One is in the terminal stage of tuberculosis. Some need medicine. It takes a long time to treat them all and give the advice that is needed. You have to explain to them at least three times how to take a particular medicine, and answer the same question three times.

On one occasion a man arrived with a bundle from which protruded what the young novice at first took to be two dry twigs, but which proved to be the emaciated legs of a boy so weak he was on the point of death:

The man is afraid we will not take the child, and says, If you do not want him, I will throw him into the grass. The jackals will not turn up their noses at him. My heart freezes. The poor child! Weak, and blind—totally blind. With much pity and love I take the little one into my arms, and fold him in my apron. The child has found a second mother.

Already for her there was an intimate and mysterious relationship between the vulnerable Christ and the suffering people she encountered. In the hospital pharmacy hung a picture of Christ the Redeemer surrounded by a throng of suffering people on whose faces were engraved the torments of their lives. Each morning before she opened the door to a veranda packed with desperately sick people she would look at that picture:

In it is concentrated everything that 1 feel. I think, Jesus, it is for you and for souls!

So it was that the incident of the tiny blind child she held enfolded in her apron became the crowning point of her working day:

Who so receives a child, receives me, said the divine Friend of all little ones.

Sister Teresa’s deeply spiritual attitude to suffering, and indeed to all other aspects of the religious life, did not pass unnoticed. Sister Marie Thérèse remembered her prayerfulness being a source of amicable teasing that was taken in good part. In other respects she was for the most part unremarkable, not particularly educated, not particularly intelligent. In fact it was for her ineptitude at lighting the candles for Benediction that some remembered her best.

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From Darjeeling she was sent to Loreto Entally, one of six schools run by the Loreto Sisters in Calcutta. There, in one of the eastern districts of Calcutta, she taught first geography and then history in an impressive collection of buildings sited in a sizable compound enclosed by high walls. She held no formal qualifications to do so, but in those days, as Sister Marie Thérèse pointed out, not so much store was set by formal qualifications. Those who could teach were simply given the opportunity to do so, and Sister Teresa proved to be more than competent in the classroom. Inside the imposing classical-style gateway to Loreto Entally stood a boarding school catering especially for girls from broken homes, to orphans, and children with only one parent. Here English was the first language used. In the same compound, however, was St. Mary’s high school for Bengali girls, where lessons were conducted in Bengali and English was taught as a second language. It was run by a sister order affiliated with the Loreto Sisters whose members, known as the Daughters of St. Anne, were Bengali women. They dressed in saris and taught in their own tongue. It was in this Bengali high school that Sister Teresa was to teach and gradually to become known as the Bengali Teresa to distinguish her from the Irish Sister Marie Thérèse.

During her earliest days in Calcutta the Bengali Teresa also taught at St. Teresa’s primary school, some distance from the confines of Loreto Entally. To suggest that the walls of Loreto divorced their occupants from the poverty that coexisted so uneasily with all the grandeur of a colonial city of key importance, is to do the Order an injustice. The particular vocation of the Loreto nuns, to which over the years they have been faithful with great effect, was to tackle the problems of poverty through education. In 1935 Sister Teresa found herself brought into direct contact with the realities of deprivation among the pupils at St. Teresa’s. So poverty-stricken were the conditions in which she found herself teaching that she was obliged to begin lessons by rolling up the sleeves of her habit, finding water and a broom and sweeping the floor, an act that occasioned much amazement among children accustomed to seeing people of only the lowest castes undertake such menial tasks. The room in question had once been a long chapel but was now divided up to accommodate five classes. At other times she was required to teach in what she pronounced was something more like a stable, or simply outside in a courtyard. When first she saw where the children slept and ate she was, to use her own expression, full of anguish. It is not possible to find worse poverty, she wrote. Yet the discovery of this poverty was accompanied by a lesson concerning the compensatory capacity for happiness. The mere act of placing her hand on each dirty little head occasioned, she discovered, extraordinary joy. From that day onwards they called me ‘Ma’, which means ‘Mother’. How little it takes to make simple souls happy!

On May 24, 1937, in Darjeeling Sister Teresa committed herself to her vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience for life, and in doing so became, as was then usual for Loreto nuns, Mother Teresa.

Shortly before she did so one of the slum children she had come to know came to her looking pale and sad:

He asked whether I would be coming back to them, because he had heard that I was going to become Mother. He began to cry, and through his tears he said, Oh, don’t become Mother! I held him to me and asked him, What is the matter? Do not worry. I will be back. I will always be your Ma.

Every Sunday she went to visit the poor in the bustees, the slum areas of Calcutta. She had nothing to give them by way of material assistance, for poverty both of spirit and fact was a mark of her own life. Somehow she invariably managed to come by the shabbiest things in the community, those things which no one else wanted. There were more patches and darns in her sheets than there was original material. The misshapen, deformed feet of her later years were the consequences of the concealed but persistent wearing of second-hand shoes that did not fit her properly, but the experience of mixing with India’s poor was already reinforcing the lesson of her childhood: that the absence of material things did not necessarily impair the capacity for happiness. It showed her that her presence alone was frequently enough to bring them joy. Oh God, how easy it is to spread happiness in that place, she wrote after one visit to a woman who possessed so desperately little but who greeted her arrival with an overwhelming display of happiness. Give me the strength to be ever the light of their lives, so that I may lead them at last to you!

At Entally there was a Sodality of Mary that operated in a very similar fashion to the sodality to which Mother Teresa herself had belonged as a girl in Skopje. Under the spiritual directorship of a Belgian priest, Father Julien Henry, and with Mother Teresa’s encouragement, its members visited patients in a local hospital and went into the slum of Motijhil, which sprawled, with its improvised shacks and its mud alleyways teeming with life, just the other side of the walls of the Entally compound. These visits to the bustees became the subject of subsequent discussion and were constantly related to the Gospel message. Mother Teresa, one of her pupils—who would later join her in her work as a Missionary Sister of Charity—recalled, was not only our teacher, she was all the time drawing us to Christ. Whether we were Christian, Hindu or Muslim, she used to talk to us about Jesus. Especially she would tell the story of the Samaritan woman. How Christ was thirsting for water, and how he is thirsting for love, and about the visitation, how Our Lady went in haste because charity cannot wait, and we must not lose time or pass by.

Throughout the war years the need in Calcutta mounted. Bengal suffered devastatingly from the disruption occasioned by the demands of a war into which India had been drawn by Britain without prior consultation. The year 1943 brought a famine, the effects of which were intensified by the sequestering of river boats by which rice might otherwise have been delivered from Bengal’s paddy fields. Several million people lost their lives, and many more converged upon Calcutta in quest of food or the means to earn their livelihood. Sister Marie Thérèse recalled the increased number of war babies left on the doorsteps of Loreto, and the bedlam that prevailed when she found herself presented with twenty-four babies to bottle-feed. For most of the war, however, while the Japanese forces were in nearby Burma, the three hundred orphans and other children at Loreto Entally were evacuated to convents outside the city. The Entally compound was taken over as a British military hospital, and its dormitories were reserved for the wounded. Mother Teresa, however, remained in Calcutta. The Bengali school was moved to Convent Road, and when she had taken her final vows as a Loreto Sister she succeeded a Mauritian Loreto nun, Mother Cenacle, as its headmistress and superior in charge of three or four Loreto nuns and a bigger community of Daughters of St. Anne. The Bengali Teresa was determined that the teaching work would not be interrupted.

The fact that she stayed when others chose to leave did not fail to make an impact on her pupils. She was happy in her work and well-liked by those whom she taught. Her mere absence from the refectory at meal times was enough of a punishment when the girls misbehaved. Not long after her appointment as headmistress she had written to her mother:

This is a new life. Our center here is very fine. I am a teacher, and I love the work. I am also Head of the whole school, and everybody wishes me well.

By then Drana was living in Tirana, Albania. Her elder daughter, Aga, had remained with her in Skopje until 1932 but had then moved to Tirana to live with Lazar, where she worked first as a translator from Serbo-Croat into Albanian and subsequently on Albanian radio. Together the children had contrived to persuade their mother to join them, and in 1934 she had moved to the Albanian capital.

Dear child, came her mother’s somewhat stern reminder from there. Do not forget that you went to India for the sake of the poor.

She added another insight that sowed an unmistakable seed for her daughter’s future:

Do you remember our File? She was covered in sores, but what caused her far more suffering was the knowledge that she was all alone in the world. We did what we could for her but the worst thing was not the sores but the fact that her family had forgotten her.

The story of how she rescued a woman who had been left to die on the streets of Calcutta was one that Mother Teresa would afterward tell to audiences throughout the world. What caused that woman to weep, she informed them, was not the fact that she was half-consumed by maggots and on the point of death, but that the person who had deserted her was her son, that she was alone and unwanted even by her own family.

Conventional wisdom has it that in the face of the poverty, hunger, ignorance, and despair she had seen, albeit so far only in a limited way, Mother Teresa began progressively to feel that something more was being asked of her. Yet those who shared her life as Loreto nuns knew nothing of any dissatisfaction, and neither, when he met her for the first time in 1944, did the priest who was to become one of the closest