Mother House of the Missionaries of Charity

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Behind a plain doorway at 54A A.J.C. Bose Road, amid the roar of Kolkata, stands the whitewashed house where Mother Teresa lived, prayed and worked from 1953 until she went home to God on September 5, 1997, the day the Church now keeps as her feast. Here she guided the congregation she had founded in 1950 with twelve companions and a fourth vow of wholehearted free service to the poorest of the poor, a family that grew to serve in more than 130 countries. Her tomb on the ground floor is a plain slab where pilgrims kneel and slip written petitions into a box, her tiny room upstairs keeps its wooden cot and desk exactly as she left them, and a small museum shows her sari, her sandals and her letters. Canonized in 2016, the saint of the gutters rests where her work began, and the city's noise falls away at her door.