In my long association of 23 years, some of the most enduring images that I have of Mother (now Saint) Teresa concerned her compassion for those afflicted by leprosy but cured of the disease, who still carried its ravages in their destroyed limbs and lives. Leprosy is a word that most people continue to dread. Yet this was St. Teresa’s special constituency within her world of abject poverty and destitution. To this day the Sisters and Brothers of the Missionaries of Charity continue to touch, feed, treat and offer succour to them just as their founder had done in her days.
Leprosy is back
Most of us are not aware that we continue to face a rising leprosy problem in our midst. In India the disease stood formally eliminated as a public health problem in 2005, when the caseload dropped to one case per 10,000 population, a target set by the World Health Organisation. Unfortunately, with this achievement dropped funding for critical medicines that were still needed to combat the remnants of the disease. The work done by the National Leprosy Eradication Programme (NLEP) has begun to erode as new cases have emerged. Late last year, a sustained campaign was conducted by the NLEP in as many as 149 districts in 19 States. This was the result of an astounding 127,326 new cases detected in 2016.
A life behind each case
For Mother Teresa, leprosy was not a matter of ‘cases’. Behind each ‘case’ was a human being who had suffered the misery of abject humiliation, not merely by society at large but most often by their own families. This would occur when the telltale signs of leprosy could no longer be hidden. By then, the disease had destroyed the nervous system. Fingers and feet could no longer feel pain or heat or cold. They became susceptible to injury. Eventually hands became stumps and the telltale bandages would give them away. The irony was (and remains) that the dread of the disease caused people to hide the early signs until it became too late to avoid deformity. Even those who may have been lucky to find a cure in city hospitals would continue to be shunned. The average city jhuggi cluster will seldom admit even the leprosy-cured in its midst: they must live as complete outcasts in their own ghettoes under the shadow of their own special stigma.
It was for them that Mother Teresa knocked on the doors of the Delhi government in 1975 to plead for some land where she could build a shelter for them: proper dormitories and a small hospital to provide for reconstructive surgery. She was as good as her word. She fittingly named her Delhi ashram after Mahatma Gandhi, whom she once told me she wished she had met. She visited here almost each time she came to Delhi. I mostly accompanied her as she mingled with the residents listening to their sorrow, their little joys and often their anger, directed not at her but at the cruelty of a world that had abandoned them.
One afternoon a woman reached out to her from her cot. She had hidden the early signs of leprosy. When they manifested themselves, her two sons threw her out of her house. Somehow someone brought her to this shelter. Through tears she repeatedly asked Mother Teresa whether her sons would visit her on Diwali, barely a few weeks away. Mother said she would pray that they’d come. As we left the hall, Mother told me that the lady had been a teacher in a renowned girls’ school. Her family had abandoned her to her fate. They would never come. She died soon after, I suspect not from leprosy, but from a broken heart.
The handloom centre
To this day the handloom saris worn by the Missionaries of Charity sisters are woven by former leprosy patients at a weaving centre set up by Mother Teresa in a leprosy colony near the industrial town of Titagarh near Kolkata. Over the years, the leprosy-stricken, driven further and further away from Kolkata, had no choice but to built their huts on the edge of this town, along the railway lines. Over 500 families had found refuge here. When Mother Teresa learned of this, she arrived and helped them with shramdan, to build dormitories, a hospital and a weaving centre. Today the centre is a hive of activity as dozens of men and women produce the distinctive white saris with three blue stripes for which the Missionaries of Charity hold the copyright.
I sometimes encounter criticism of Mother Teresa but to all those who do so I would ask one question: how many of us actually bend down to help those in need with our own hands? How many of us offer succour to these unfortunate brethren? Like Baba Amte, St. Teresa — her birth anniversary falls today — spent her life in actually living Swami Vivekananda’s concept of ‘Daridra Narayan’, in the service of god through service to the poor, destitute and marginalised.
Navin Chawla is the author of the biography of Mother Teresa and former Chief Election Commissioner of India
