The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [160]
This hadn’t happened to Mitchell. He didn’t expect it to, but by the end of his second week he had become uncomfortably aware that he was performing only the simplest, least demanding tasks at the Home. He hadn’t given anyone a bath, for instance. Bathing the patients was the main service that the foreign volunteers provided. Every morning, Sven and Ellen, who had a landscaping business back in Minnesota, worked their way down the line of beds, assisting men to the lavatory on the other side of the building. If the men were too weak or sick to walk, Sven got the beekeeper or the Anglican minister to help carry the stretcher. While Mitchell sat administering head massages, he watched people who looked in no way extraordinary perform the extraordinary task of cleaning and wiping the sick and dying men who populated the Home, bringing them back to their beds with their hair wet, their spindly bodies wrapped in fresh bedclothes. Day after day, Mitchell managed not to help with this. He was afraid to bathe the men. He was scared of what their naked bodies might look like, of the diseases or wounds that might lie under their robes, and he was afraid of their bodily effluvia, of his hands touching their urine and excrement.
As for Mother Teresa, Mitchell had seen her only once. She didn’t work at the home on a daily basis anymore. She had hospices and orphanages all over India, as well as in other countries, and spent most of her time overseeing the entire organization. Mitchell had heard that the best way to see Mother Teresa was to attend mass at the Mother House, and so one morning before sunrise, he left the Salvation Army and walked through the dark silent streets to the convent on A.J.C. Bose Road. Entering the candlelit chapel, Mitchell tried not to show how excited he was—he felt like a fan with a backstage pass. He joined a small group of foreigners who had already assembled. On the floor in front of them, other nuns were already praying, not only kneeling but prostrating themselves before the altar.
A flurry of head turnings on the part of the volunteers made him aware that Mother Teresa had entered the chapel. She looked impossibly tiny, no bigger than a twelve-year-old. Proceeding to the center of the chapel, she knelt and touched her forehead to the ground. All Mitchell could see were the soles of Mother Teresa’s bare feet. They were cracked and yellow—an old woman’s feet—but they seemed invested with the utmost significance.
One Friday morning, his third week in the city, Mitchell rose from bed, brushed his teeth with iodine-treated water, swallowed a chloroquine tablet (against malaria), and, after splashing tap water on his face and nearly hairless head, went off to eat breakfast. Mike joined him, but ate nothing (his stomach was bothering him). Rüdiger came to the table with a book. Finishing quickly, Mitchell went back downstairs to the courtyard and stepped onto Sudder Street.
It was early January, and colder than Mitchell had expected India would be. As he passed the rickshaws outside the front gate, the drivers called to him, but Mitchell waved them off, horrified at the thought of employing a human being as a beast of burden. Reaching Jawaharlal Nehru Road, he waded into traffic. By the time his bus came, ten minutes later, listing perilously from the passengers hanging out the doors, the winter sun had burned off the haze, and the day was heating up.
The neighborhood of Kalighat, in the south, derived its name from the Kali temple at its heart. The temple wasn’t much to look at, a kind of local branch building, with headquarters elsewhere, but the streets around it were hectic and colorful. Vendors hawked worship paraphernalia—flower garlands, pots of ghee, lurid posters of the goddess Kali sticking her tongue out—to pilgrims swarming in and out of the temple entrance. Directly behind the temple, sharing a wall with it, in fact—and the reason why the volunteers referred to the place as “Kalighat”—was the home.