Surprise
Because Life Is a Chance
Cinema The Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mother Teresa changed the lives of countless people. So did the author’s, as the film “Mother Teresa & Me” powerfully reminds her.
On my mother’s bedside table, right up until her death, stood a framed photo of an Indian nun. She wears a white sari with a blue border and is smiling as she holds a baby in her arms: me. It is the first picture of me that my parents received from the Missionaries of Charity, the religious congregation founded by Mother Teresa in 1950. Shortly beforehand, they had decided to adopt me at the beginning of the 1980s. The photo was taken in an orphanage in Bombay, and at that time my name was Kavita.
The same name is borne by one of the two protagonists in the film “Mother Teresa & Me” by the Swiss‑Indian director Kamal Musale. In two parallel narratives, the biographies of Kavita, a young woman living in London, and of Mother Teresa are interwoven.
Kavita’s storyline is set in the present day, while Mother Teresa’s begins in the mid‑1940s in Calcutta, now Kolkata, India.
While Kavita (Banita Sandhu) discovers she is pregnant after an accident and goes to hospital, Mother Teresa—then still a Loreto nun—feels a calling during a train journey to care for the poorest of the poor.
Men, women, street children. Against all resistance—initially from the Catholic Church itself, and shortly afterwards from parts of the population who feared conversions to Christianity—she founded her own order and set up a home for the dying. Yet while she became an icon through her work in the slums, Mother Teresa went through a severe crisis of faith. In a bare cell she wrote despairing letters to God, oscillating between moments of presence and doubt. Only the Jesuit fathers leading retreats for the Loreto order, companions from the very beginning, did she confide her inner distress to. She experienced a profound crisis of faith from which she emerged strengthened. The Swiss actress Jacqueline Fritschi‑Cornaz succeeds in portraying Mother Teresa with down‑to‑earth persistence and warmth. This deeply human approach offers a look behind the saintly myth and shows Mother Teresa as I have always liked to imagine her: a practical woman who could roll up her sleeves and improvise when bureaucracy or religious rules stood in her way. But also a contradictory woman whose strict stance on abortion provoked offence.
How would I feel?
Kavita, too, wants to put her life in order after finding out she is pregnant at the end of her twenties. Her boyfriend has disappeared, and instead of having an abortion at a hospital in London, she cannot bring herself to decide. Because she remembers her birth in a children’s home in Bombay/Kolkata only vaguely, she travels to India. There she meets Deepali, the head of the orphanage where she once lived as an infant. In conversations with her and with other women, Kavita manages to draw closer to the child in her womb and to make a decision.
The film alternates between intimate, quiet moments and big, rough city scenes: crowded streets, rickshaws, shouting vendors, temples, slums. Again and again the question hovers in the air of whether life is a chance—or a burden. The camera stays close to the people living in the alleyways; to the men who are day labourers; to the women who earn their living with small jobs; to children sleeping in their mothers’ arms. And in their midst stands Kavita, arms folded, fighting her inner turmoil. Thoughts of her child run through her mind, as does the question of how much suffering could be prevented by contraception and abortion.
How would I myself feel in the face of such a sight? I, too, slept in a dormitory like that before I came to Switzerland, and I also take a critical view of Mother Teresa’s hardline position on abortion. Even if I might not exist had my biological mother had access to that option.
Unlike many other people adopted from abroad, I never felt the need to go searching for traces of my origins in order to feel “whole”. My parents informed me about my background when I asked, but they never pushed it on me. They would have supported me unconditionally in searching for my birth mother and would have travelled with me to that country if I had wanted. But they also said I should not feel obligated to do so. I am infinitely grateful to them for that. It allowed me truly to arrive. Home is where the people are whom you love and where you feel needed. Mother Teresa, too, did not find her vocation in the place where she was born.
Kavita in the film likewise realises that she does not have to burn every bridge in order to reorganise her life. Changing the world for the better begins with holding a door for someone or carrying their shopping. And that her fear that London has been waiting too long for her is unfounded. The question of whether or not she keeps her child becomes less central; more important is that she takes her life into her own hands. “Life is a chance—take it,” runs a line from a text by Mother Teresa. I owe these chances to her life’s work.
“Mother Teresa & Me” reminds me that it is my free decision how I want to use this life.
Mother Teresa & Me, drama by Kamal Musale, starring Banita Sandhu, Jacqueline Fritschi‑Cornaz, Deepti Naval et al., Switzerland/India, United Kingdom, 2022, 122 minutes.
Text: Monika Bettschen