I first saw Mother Teresa in the summer of 1951, when I started school at Loreto House in Calcutta. The school was run by the Sisters of Loreto according to directives sent from its principal convent in Ireland. During the British raj, Loreto House had admitted very few Indians. By the time I became a student there, the majority of students were Hindu Bengalis, the daughters of Calcutta's elite families, but the majority of teachers continued to be Irish-born nuns. Mother Teresa was no longer affiliated with the Sisters of Loreto, but she came around to our campus every now and then. She had left teaching at another of the Sisters' schools three years before in order to, as she put it, "follow Christ into the slums." The break, as far as we schoolgirls could tell, had not been totally amicable, at least not on the part of the Loreto nuns.

The picture of Mother Teresa that I remember from my childhood is of a short, sari-wearing woman scurrying down a red gravel path between manicured lawns. She would have in tow one or two slower-footed, sari-clad young Indian nuns. We thought her a freak. Probably we'd picked up on unvoiced opinions of our Loreto nuns. We weren't quite sure what an Albanian was except that she wasn't as fully European as our Irish nuns. Or perhaps she seemed odd to us because we had never encountered a nun who wore a sari. There was only one Anglo-Indian nun in our school, and she wore the customary habit. The government had made antimissionary noises but hadn't yet cracked down on missionaries' visa applications.

In the early '50s, we non-Christian students at Loreto House were suspicious of Mother Teresa's motives in helping street children and orphans. Was she rescuing these children to convert them? Her antiabortion campaigns among homeless women were as easy for us to ignore as were the antiabortion lectures our nuns delivered twice weekly. The government had made even very young women aware of the consequences of population explosion.

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Dec. 29, 1975

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