On a particularly hectic day, on being asked whether the work hadn't got protracted out of hand, Mother Teresa laughed: "If there are poor on the moon, we shall go there too." Born an Albanian, Mother Teresa came to Calcutta at the age of 18 and in the course of her life's mission of caring for the poorest of the poor, straddled the Indian century. In the process she was revered almost everywhere. Two years after her death, the formal process of canonisation has begun, but in the eyes of much of the world, she was anointed as the Saint of the Gutters in her lifetime. Neither the highest honours that a conscience-ridden world could not bestow, nor the barbs flung at her by a small but noisy band of detractors could distract her from her chosen path. In spite of her early tribulations and much later in life, her many near brushes with serious illness and death, she lived to complete much of her agenda.

The major milestones in Mother Teresa's life are well documented. After almost two decades in Calcutta's Loreto Convent, where she taught geography and catechism, Mother Teresa was permitted to step into the world that lay beyond the security of convent walls to begin her mission which she said was an answer to a "call" that she received on a train journey to Darjeeling. She started with three saris and a five-rupee note. We know where she ended up. She persuaded Calcutta that leprosy was not contagious and got the leprosy-afflicted to build a self-supporting colony at Titagarh that she named after Mahatma Gandhi. She took in the dying and cradled them. One of her happiest memories was of the man who said as he lay dying in her lap, "All my life I have lived like an animal on the streets and now I am dying like an angel." Her prize children, often without limbs or with terminal diseases, were whom she would rescue from dustbins. One of her greatest concerns was for the unborn. In her Nobel Prize speech she called abortionists "murderers", incurring from feminists the title of "religious imperialist".

From a single school, which she started in a Calcutta slum in 1948, the Order grew into a multinational that continued to be run from a small office in Calcutta. In the year before her death, her Order ran 755 homes in 125 countries. During that year the Missionaries of Charity fed half a million hungry mouths in five continents, treated a quarter of million sick, taught over 20,000 slum children and ran homes for the mentally destitute, the leprosy-afflicted, aids patients, the crippled and alcoholics and drug abusers. They ran day crèches, night shelters, soup kitchens and TB sanatoriums. When I once suggested that the Order might crumble after she passed away, Mother replied simply, "I have done for God, and to God and with God, and it is God's work. He is perfectly capable of finding someone when I am gone, somebody who is even smaller." I said to her that she was the most powerful woman in the world. She laughed, thought somewhat ruefully and said, "Where? If I were, I would bring peace to the world." I knew that everywhere she went, monarchs and statesmen received her with rare humility, and because she went in the name of the poor, seldom denied her anything. I asked her why she did not use her considerable powers to bring about peace by lessening war. "War is the fruit of politics, so I don't involve myself, that's all. If I get stuck in politics, I will stop loving," she replied.

On the charge that she converted the poor to her religion, she laughed, "I do convert. I convert you to be a better Hindu, a better Catholic, a better Muslim or Jain or Buddhist. I would like to help you to find God. When you have found Him, you will know what He wants from you." She never met Mahatma Gandhi but like him she chose to identify with the poorest of the poor, for in response to her special vow, this was her constituency. Like Gandhi who wore his dhoti as a loincloth, she wore a sari similar to those of Calcutta's municipal sweeper women, so that she could identify with the poorest of the poor. Later the saris worn by everyone in the Missionaries of Charity would be woven by leper's hands. She often made a distinction between being confused as a social worker, which while she never disparaged, she said she was not; and being religious. She was capable of doing what she could because she did it to and for Him. The mass she attended every day of her life was what sustained her. In the Eucharist she saw Christ in the appearance of bread. In the slums she saw Him in the distressing disguise of the poor and in their broken bodies. There was no difference between the Christ on her crucifix and the Christ that lay dying on the street; they were both one. Without ever deviating from her staunch Catholicism, her great strength lay in adapting herself to her country of adoption -- India.

Although she saw her God in every one whom she met, she never made any distinction between religions or those who practiced none. One of her contemporaries at the Loreto Convent, Sister Marie-Therese Breen, spoke to me of their early days: "There was nothing extraordinary about her. She was a simple nun. Very gentle, full of fun. We never thought that this is where she would end up." With faith, compassion and good work, an ordinary girl became the 20th century's most extraordinary woman.

Navin Chawla, an Indian Administrative Service officer, is author of Mother Teresa, a biography.

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