The Saint of the Gutters

On a September morning in 1948, a thirty-eight-year-old Albanian nun stepped through the gates of the Loreto convent in Calcutta and walked into the Motijhil slum. She carried no supplies, no organizational backing, no plan beyond obedience. Two years earlier, on a train bound for Darjeeling, Sister Teresa Bojaxhiu had heard what she described as "a call within a call" — a summons to leave her comfortable teaching post at St.…