The Meeting in Kolkata

A light hearted essay about a profound experience in my life and the road that led me there.

 
The Meeting in Kolkata

 

I was now someone’s bahu, that’s why I was there in that cab.  It took only twenty-eight years.  Only ‘only’ sounds funny before twenty-eight, especially when one speaks of years.  But that’s how long it took me, yet it hardly felt like any time at all.

 

            I don’t know how the world outside saw me when I was young, but I know how I saw the world.  I lived through the lens of stories.  From the earliest I can remember, perhaps as early as two, all my memories were ones that elicited story lines; a blur of Wizard of Oz, Peter Pan, Sword in the Stone, or Cinderella.  Every remembered fear or joy formed into a Disney-ized version of itself that was so real I must have believed it was when it was happening to me.  This shifted, however, one late summer day.

            A child of three and half doesn’t always appear to have much going on in their head.  Perhaps there are thoughts of the newest cartoon character; excitement over a fresh box of cereal with its magical toy inside; or how to avoid an afternoon nap.  After all that’s what many adults see of these miniature humans.  This wasn’t how my grandmother saw me.  I was her first granddaughter and I was more than a small body I was a spirit, an everlasting soul.  As such, she saw it as her duty to ensure my chances for heaven.  It did nothing short of scandalize her that at that tender age I was still vulnerable to the Devil’s wiles.  Of course, this she blamed on my father.

            My father—her son—wasn’t a religious man.  She rather thought of him as a heathen, but not in a you’re-going-to-burn-in-hell way; after all he’d been baptized, whereas I was not.  He was simply a nature boy.  A hippie just a few years too young to catch that magic bus ride of the late sixties, but old enough to enjoy the fade-out that lead to the mid-seventies disco revolution.

            “I was at Woodstock,” he often claimed proudly.  Though he’d have to clarify Woodstock West.  This began his love affair with the San Francisco Bay area.  Ultimately his settling grounds after a brief life as a carnie.

            I arrived a few years later, in ’76, when having hippy parents wasn’t yet out of fashion in Northern California.  My grandparents had just left for work in Iran, with my father’s three youngest siblings in tow.  Dad still chuckles at the fact the FBI found record of his having joined some young socialists movement when they ran a background check on his father before that move.  My grandfather, a World War II vet, never did see the comic value of it all.  Strange though as he was a notorious joke master.  He always carried around his little black book of jokes that made him tear up before he could finish them.  He died before I knew this side of him.

            A couple of years past, there was a revolution in Iran, my grandparents returned and my dad, a broke single father, decided to ‘visit’ the folks.  Maybe we stayed for weeks or months in that Seattle suburb, I can’t really say, but I know it was the summer of ’79.  This was the summer my grandmother decided to set things right with my soul.  It also happened to be a few months before Mother Teresa of Calcutta would win the Nobel Peace prize.

            Nowadays, when a child of three and a half comes to visit, it may seem natural to most to plop them down in front of the TV.  But what about in a time before Nickelodeon, the Cartoon Network or even on a day when Sesame Street wasn’t on.  The answer was obvious for my grandmother: special news programming.  In other words, what she wanted to watch would do just fine for her young granddaughter, thank you very much.  That program just happened to be about a little woman from Calcutta who worked tirelessly to give care and tenderness to those who were the poorest of the poor and otherwise shunned by everyone around them. 

There was no place in my brain to understand this.  Disney hadn’t produced a movie nor were there fairytales penned extolling the virtues of a selfless maid, unless she was forced into her subservience.  No, I had never heard a story like this before, but I remember sitting on the floor watching it like my mind was of thirteen or thirty.  Yet I was only three.

            Service, God, devotion, heaven, Jesus…all words I’d seldom if ever heard to that point.  Hippies, as my parents were, weren’t always big on organized anything, let alone religion.  So these words were all new and all part of this wonderful story the television shared--my grandmother shared--with me that day.  Afterward she took me for a walk.  I can’t recall the specifics of what she said; just that she used these magic new words.

            We stopped on the side of the road after some time and she looked down at me.  “You’re old enough to choose your baptismal name,” she said, “what do you want to be called?”

            The choice was clear.  The freshest name in my vocabulary.  The name I’d heard in association with God--the being my everlasting soul was to be submitted to through this cleansing process.  The name that went with that story, the one I’d just watched and filled me with warmth.  I nodded my head, “Teresa.”

            My grandmother’s face broke into a satisfied smile.  We turned and headed home.

 

            As i sat in the cab, I thought about how the choice of a three-year-old me had followed me through my life.  From an adamant desire to be a Missionary of Charity (until I discovered boys at sixteen) to years of career work with children and non-profit service.  My dedication to working in such veins led me to New York one year.  New York in turn led me to my husband from India.  And our marriage led me to where I was: in a Kolkata cab.

I was there because I was someone’s bahu.  That’s the Hindi word for daughter-in-law.  The cab drove along the smoggy, crowded streets of Kolkata (the city’s reclaimed name).  I was minutes away from finally meeting the Mother.

            When my cab pulled up to the building, the exterior was non-descript, I thought we might even be at the wrong place.  No, the driver assured us, it’s correct.  I saw the sign: Missionaries of Charity.  A short alley of mostly empty doorways guided us to the entry.  There I saw another sign: Mother Teresa, M.C.  is ‘in’.  This must have meant forever.

            I knew I was too late to meet her in person.  Too late by nine years.  Time didn’t really matter, though, when it came to a meeting of souls.  She and I had been on a crash course for nearly twenty-eight years.

The ante-courtyard was simple with a couple of statues and a small potted garden.  It was there we slipped off our shoes and stepped through another doorway to the inner courtyard.  To the left, upstairs, was the room in which the Mother had lived and passed away.  To the right was the room where I’d find her.  That was where I went.

A large, plain white marble tomb stood center to a host of worn wooden benches.  A simple placard was attached, to remember her by.  On top, fresh marigold petals stated: Works of love are always works of peace.

I knelt down beside her tomb and rested my hands and head.

Hello, I said.

Hello, answered back.

It’s nice to finally meet you.