When I arrived in Calcutta's claustrophobic chaos in September 1992 I was a seasoned traveller with nine months under my boots. I had already suffered the explosive liquid shits, paranoia and shivering fevers.
I resolved to volunteer for three days at Mother Teresa’s Institute for the Destitute and Dying.
In my mind, I set a three-day limit. I did not want to be seduced into thinking I was the holy selfless saviour. I also did not want to lose precious days of freedom. By the same token, I wanted to be more than a tourist. A trinity of days seemed the right balance.
It took me three days to find the Institute. I kept getting lost because I was lost. The map was indecipherable amid the churning confusion of the streets. The whirlpool of humanity sucked me in and swept me spinning off course down alleyways. Begging women clutching scrawny babies to their breasts followed me down shit-caked streets, whining and pleading. Rickshaw drivers shouted, “You! You!” Touts in thin, filthy sarongs pinched my arm and stalked me for 300 yards, “Change money? Hashish? You want something? Anything I get for you, Bapu?”
Heavy Studebaker taxis lumbered through the choked streets.
Ravens cackled taunts from dripping meat-hook beaks.
Children lay prostrate on the sidewalks, covered in flies. One beggar boy lay with his head in a hole, covered with rocks, like an ostrich. Begging as performance art. He was surrounded by coins that nobody touched.
A herd of goats moved through the traffic, a single biological vehicle of terrified eyes and clattering hooves. Buses blasted by stuffed with limbs and bodies hanging out of the open sides and heaped on the roof.
I finally found the building, signed the register and entered the ward lined with two rows of cots. Each cot held a concentration camp carcass. Skin and bones. Some lay in the fetal position. Many men were missing limbs and had deep festering sores and rotted teeth. One man had no hands and no feet, his limbs were pointed sticks. His skin was scaly and flaked off like a dying fish.
The ward smelled of diarrhea and death. In a back room, the sisters organized meagre medicines for a few, putting the pills into metal bowls with tiny tings. I was surprised and angry to learn that the pills were pretty much just aspirin. There was no real medical treatment. I was angry at Mother Theresa and the Vatican. Did they not have untold riches? Why not provide proper medicines and better care? The ward seemed stark and primitive.
One of the western brothers, an American who had been there for some months, explained the higher purpose. Not to heal but to comfort the poorest of the poor as they took their dying breaths. To offer final grace.
The mornings began with us volunteers taking the men to the bathing vats in a room behind the ward. Some were so frail they could hardly stand. Some refused to get up and we had to half lift and half wrestle them to the vats. I whispered “Ok, ok” as I huffed and puffed and they lamented sorrowful prayers in Hindi, Bengali, Urdu. Often the men had shat themselves overnight, or we found them with their cocks flipped out of their gowns with puddles of piss on the floor. They had been too weak to get up but wanted to spare themselves the humiliation of wetting the bed like a child.
We wrapped them in the bed sheets to form a body bag hammock and carried them that way to the baths. We placed them on the tiled wash basin and dipped into the well with plastic pails, splashing the cold water over their frail bodies.
The water slurped and splashed under my sacrilegious cow-hide hiking boots. We splashed much water at their shit-caked assholes. The flesh on their asses hung like skin off starving elephants. One man shat as I washed him. The turd emerged, a glistening, defiant slug. Matter-of-fact. His face deepened and hardened as he lamented the loss of control. I splashed water at the turd to edge it towards the drain.
This was the morning procession. An intimate celebration of shit. White tourists from affluent countries bathing wretched souls. Their lips had probably never tasted a sip of wine.
When they were back in their cots with clean sheets we handed out bowls of watery, yellow curried potatoes and rice. Some refused to eat, despairing that it would just explode out their asses. We sat and tried to spoon feed them slowly as they pursed their lips against the gruel.
One morning I walked a man to the bathing vats, my hands gripping the fragile wicker basket of his rib cage. I felt his heart jumping like an epileptic bull frog under my fingers. He shuffled obediently. He kept his eyes closed. He was stoic as I splashed him with the cold water.
I lay him back down in his cot and got a metal bowl with water and a dull razor. I soaped up the stiff bristles on the crevices of his caved-in toothless face and down across the sharp Adam’s apple. He shook his head whimpering but I coaxed him with shushes.
Funny how fragile men have such tough hairs, weeds grown like wildfire across the desolate landscape, across ears, nostrils and the back of the neck.
I carefully scraped the razor down into the bristles with short strokes, digging into the minute angles and folds. Then whisking the whiskers in the bowl of water, my thumb easing the tiny hairs out of the razor’s twin blades. I was a sculptor. It took me an hour and then his face was smooth and free of the scraggly, itchy weeds.
He was young again and died that day. The sisters came and pulled a sheet over his head.
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