bleed to death. Entrails spilled onto sidewalks already red with blood;
most everywhere one looked there were dead bodies, while vultures cir-
cled overhead. By the end, at least 5,000 persons had perished and an-
other 15,000 were wounded.
For Mother Teresa and the children, the riots also meant no food de-
liveries. Faced with the prospect of her 300 students going hungry, Mother
Teresa broke one of the cardinal rules of the order: she left the convent
and went into the streets alone to search for food. Years later, Mother
Teresa described the scene:
I went out from St. Mary’s Entally. I had three hundred girls in
the boarding school and nothing to eat. We were not supposed
to go out into the streets, but I went anyway. Then I saw the
bodies on the streets, stabbed, beaten, lying there in strange
positions in their dried blood.... A lorry [truck full] of soldiers
stopped me and told me that I should not be out on the
street.... I told them that I had to come out and take the risk.
I had three hundred children with nothing to eat. The soldiers
had rice and they drove me back to the school and unloaded
bags of rice.^3In the aftermath of the riots, Mother Teresa became weak and ill and was
directed to rest every afternoon for three hours. Her superiors feared that
her condition might make her susceptible to tuberculosis, a malady that
claimed many nuns in Calcutta. Father Van Exem remembered this pe-
riod as the only time he ever saw his spiritual charge cry, frustrated at her
weak condition and inability to carry out her duties.
Finally it was decided that Mother Teresa needed a spiritual renewal
and a physical reprieve from the work at the convent and school. She was
ordered to travel to the convent in Darjeeling for a retreat, which would
allow her to rest and meditate. On September 10, 1946, a day that is now
celebrated annually by the Missionaries of Charity as Inspiration Day,
while traveling to Darjeeling on a dusty, noisy train, Mother Teresa expe-
rienced another call. Later she would have little to say about the experi-
ence, much as she did when she first received her calling to become a nun.
But to one writer, many years later, she offered her memories of that train
ride: “It was on the tenth of September 1946, in the train that took me to
Darjeeling,...that I heard the call of God. The message was quite clear: I
was to leave the convent and help the poor while living among them.”^4
Many years later she also stated that the call was quite clear, “It was an
order. To fail it would have been to break the faith.”^5
ANSWERING THE CALL 27