Mother Teresa: a biography

WAR’S END AND TROUBLED TIMES
By 1945, the war ended and Mother Teresa and her charges moved
back to the convent at Entally. During this period, Mother Teresa had
written home to her mother describing her life in Calcutta. By now,
Drana had moved to Tirana, Albania, where both Aga and Lazar lived.
Drana reminded her daughter that she went to India to work with the
poor; Drana also asked her daughter to recall the woman whom Drana
had taken in, when no one else would. Perhaps this advice spurred
Mother Teresa to rethink her duties in the convent.
No sooner had the hostilities ended with Japan, when India and Cal-
cutta were once more plunged into hostilities and bloodshed. The Indian
National Congress had been busy making preparations for India’s even-
tual independence from British rule. Working with the Congress was the
Muslim League, under the leadership of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, a lawyer.
The League was pressing the Congress for the establishment of a separate
homeland for India’s Muslims to be called Pakistan. The new country was
to be formed from a partition of India.
On August 16, 1946, the Muslim League called a meeting—what
members referred to as Direct Action Day—in Calcutta in the Maidan.
The speeches given by league members inflamed an already passionate
crowd. As a result, for the next four nights, the city was the scene of
bloody riots between Hindus and Muslims. Life came to a grinding halt as
the city was pitched into terror. Militants set fire to shops with people still
inside. Sewers were filled with the bodies of the dead. Men, women and
children, cut by the deadly blades of knives, were left in the streets to
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bleed to death. Entrails spilled onto sidewalks already red with blood;
most everywhere one looked there were dead bodies, while vultures cir-
cled overhead. By the end, at least 5,000 persons had perished and an-
other 15,000 were wounded.
For Mother Teresa and the children, the riots also meant no food de-
liveries. Faced with the prospect of her 300 students going hungry, Mother
Teresa broke one of the cardinal rules of the order: she left the convent
and went into the streets alone to search for food. Years later, Mother
Teresa described the scene:
I went out from St. Mary’s Entally. I had three hundred girls in
the boarding school and nothing to eat. We were not supposed
to go out into the streets, but I went anyway. Then I saw the
bodies on the streets, stabbed, beaten, lying there in strange
positions in their dried blood. . . . A lorry [truck full] of soldiers
stopped me and told me that I should not be out on the
street. . . . I told them that I had to come out and take the risk.
I had three hundred children with nothing to eat. The soldiers
had rice and they drove me back to the school and unloaded
bags of rice.
3
In the aftermath of the riots, Mother Teresa became weak and ill and was
directed to rest every afternoon for three hours. Her superiors feared that
her condition might make her susceptible to tuberculosis, a malady that
claimed many nuns in Calcutta. Father Van Exem remembered this pe-
riod as the only time he ever saw his spiritual charge cry, frustrated at her
weak condition and inability to carry out her duties.
Finally it was decided that Mother Teresa needed a spiritual renewal
and a physical reprieve from the work at the convent and school. She was
ordered to travel to the convent in Darjeeling for a retreat, which would
allow her to rest and meditate. On September 10, 1946, a day that is now
celebrated annually by the Missionaries of Charity as Inspiration Day,
while traveling to Darjeeling on a dusty, noisy train, Mother Teresa expe-
rienced another call. Later she would have little to say about the experi-
ence, much as she did when she first received her calling to become a nun.
But to one writer, many years later, she offered her memories of that train
ride: “It was on the tenth of September 1946, in the train that took me to
Darjeeling, . . . that I heard the call of God. The message was quite clear: I
was to leave the convent and help the poor while living among them.”
4
Many years later she also stated that the call was quite clear, “It was an
order. To fail it would have been to break the faith.”
5
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NOTES
1. Navin Chawla, 
Mother Teresa: The Authorized Biography
(Rockport, Mass.:
Element, 1992), p. 15.
2. Kathryn Spink, 
Mother Teresa: A Complete Authorized Biography
(San Fran-
cisco: Harper & Row, 1997), p. 20.
3. Eileen Egan, 
Such a Vision of the Street: Mother Teresa
—
The Spirit and the
Work
(Garden City, N.Y.: Image Books, 1986), pp. 27–28.
4. Edward Le Joly, 
Mother Teresa of Calcutta: A Biography
(San Francisco:
Harper & Row, 1977), p. 9.
5. Spink, 
Mother Teresa,
p. 22.
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Chapter 3
A NEW DIRECTION AND A
NEW JOURNEY
Few would disagree that Inspiration Day was a turning point for Mother
Teresa. But there have been accounts of her life that have made erroneous
connections between her desire to leave Loreto and her calling on the
train to Darjeeling. One popular story stated that the killings and carnage
she viewed during the August 1946 riots were the sole inspiration for her
leaving. Another account incorrectly stated that she could view the slums
of Calcutta from her bedroom window, which led to her decision.
Mother Teresa was no stranger to the poverty in Calcutta. She had seen
it firsthand upon her arrival as a novitiate and later as a teacher instruct-
ing the children of the poor. But until her train ride to Darjeeling, Mother
Teresa firmly believed that she was carrying out God’s plan for her life and
that she would best serve God as a nun living in Loreto. That was now all
about to change.