Word: calcutta
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Bengali chauvinist in me got a thrill: "This is Peter Jennings, tonight live from Calcutta." For the first and only time in my life, the great city I was born and raised in hit the big time. Bengalis love to celebrate their language, their culture, their politics, their fierce attachment to a city that has been famously "dying" for more than a century. They resent with equal ferocity the reflex stereotyping that labels any civic dysfunction anywhere in the world "another Calcutta." And why were the American media in Calcutta? For the funeral of an 87-year-old Albanian immigrant...
...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...
...wasn't until she had set up a leprosarium outside Calcutta on land provided by the government that I began to see her as an idealist rather than an eccentric. Lepers were a common sight all over India and in every part of Calcutta, but extending help beyond dropping a coin or two into their rag-wrapped stumps was not. As a child I was convinced even touching a spot a leper had rubbed against would lead to infection. The ultimate terror the city held had nothing to do with violence. It was fear of the Other, the poor...
...left Calcutta as a teenager and did not return to live there for any length of time until 1973. The Calcutta I went back to was vociferously in love with Mother Teresa. The women I had been close to in Loreto House, women who in the '70s had become socialite wives and volunteer social workers, were devoted to Mother Teresa and her projects, especially the leprosarium. Years later, I learned that the volunteer Mother Teresa came to rely on was a Loreto House graduate...
...Strange and Sublime Addressa boy from Bombay visits his uncle's house in Calcutta for his summer vacation. The most enjoyable novel of the three, Address captures a 12-year old's ability to delight in the mundane with a narrative that manages to be at once child-like and worldly. A walk through town becomes a symphony of fragrance and image. The boy's naivete is amusingly depicted during a lazy afternoon when the boy regards a pigeon mating ritual as something akin to a World Wrestling Federation grudge match...