The City of Joy, Kolkata

If we have no peace,

it is because we have forgotten

that we belong to each other.

From the MCC Guest House, we made our way through our local Entally Market and then followed the main road for around 8 minutes to arrive at the dark blue entrance of Mother Teresa's House. Endearingly referred to as "Mother's House" by those who live in Kolkata - this simple building serves as the headquarters for the Missionaries of Charity and the burial site of Mother Teresa. People from all around the world gather to pray at the base of Mother Teresa's tomb or attend the early morning/late evening Mass led by the nuns of Missionaries of Charity.

We were in the middle of looking at the prayer bins and catechisms that sat untouched in Mother Teresa's bedroom when we heard a bell ring and quiet shuffle below. Nuns in white and blue sarees began to gather on the floor of the chapel; rosaries in hand, heads bowed, and little piles of worn books laid next to them for evening Mass. Their age-old hymns and recitations joined with the loud honks and horns of the moving city outside to usher in a time of peace.

There is no denying that Mother Teresa led an extraordinary life of love, sacrifice and compassion that can inspire us to similar lives of service. For me, Mother Teresa - an unmarried woman from Albania - exemplified the life of a woman brave enough to defy expectations and moved to a different country to learn about God and serve her new community. I do not think that I have quoted a person from history more for high-school papers than Mother Teresa.

However, our glorification of such historical figures need not require the misrepresentation of the communities in which they found themselves.

In many ways, the city of Kolkata has and continues to be imagined through the experience of Mother Teresa. Word associations for Kolkata from the West often include the words dirty, destitute, orphaned, starving, and dying. Mother Teresa was praised as the"Saint of the Gutters" for her dedication to the poor in the "slums" of Kolkata. Dominique Lapierre's 1985 novel, City of Joy, may have given Kolkata (then Calcutta) a proud, new slogan but it further entrenched this image of this Indian city as site of immense suffering and poverty.

If my short time in Kolkata has taught me anything, it is that Kolkata is way beyond the city of Mother Teresa. Kolkata is India's third largest city and is considered by many to be the country's intellectual, artistic and cultural capital. Not to mention the culinary capital of the world in my biased opinion. In the words of Sandip Roy, a NPR correspondent living in Kolkata, Mother Teresa needs to be recognized "as a part of the patchwork that makes up Kolkata, along with its artists, its filmmakers, its politicians, its cricketers" rather than a maternal embodiment of salvation.

As I pack up all my belongings and prepare to move north to my assignment in Siliguri, I want to remember this lesson as I serve and as I begin to write about the people I meet who are impacted by HIV/AIDS in India.