Jyoti Thottam - Sisters of Mokama : The Pioneering Women Who Brought Hope and Healing to India

In my favorite photograph of my parents, they are newlyweds visiting the Taj Mahal, in 1971. They are posing on the long, graceful stone pathway, with the curves of the monument far behind them, decades before India had become pockmarked with construction sites, so the view of the Taj is absolutely clear. The spouts for the fountains in the reflecting pool are idle, but the water shimmers. There are no hawkers, no elaborate system of security checkpoints or shoe removal visible at the stone pedestal in the distance. The only objects between my parents and the monument are a line of trees, manicured into tall evergreen pillars.

Young and serious, they had decided to visit the Taj Mahal during the cool late winter, and the photograph hints at their life before I was born. They stand soberly in their best clothes: my father in a three-button suit and tightly knotted skinny tie, and my mother with the peacock-blue sari that was given to her as a ceremonial gift during their wedding draped modestly around her shoulders.

My parents had been living in New Delhi for years by then. My father moved there in 1961; my mother a few years later. The city, Indias capital, was more than a thousand miles away from the tiny villages in the south where they were born. It was farther than most people in India at that time would travel in a lifetime. My father had come north to work for a civil engineering firm that built some of independent Indias first big roads, dams, and skyscrapers. He still tells the story of the cold, wet weeks he spent in the Himalayas, supervising the construction of a bridge during Indias 1962 war with China.

Most men of his generation went home to find an appropriate wife, but my parents fell in love in the big city. They met in Delhi in 1969, when my mother was twenty-two, living in a hostel and working as a nurse. She had arrived in the city after seven years studying nursing in a small town in Bihar, at a school run by American nuns. He saw her at church, and then again at the market, and fell in love at first sight. He courted her modestlya meal at the home of his elder brother and sister-in-law, an ice cream at Kwality, and eventually the movies, once she trusted him enough to ride on the back of his Vespa scooter.

If you ask her about it now, she repeats this story as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. Of course, there was much more to it. My mother was born in 1946, a year before Partition, when Britains vast colonial empire on the subcontinent was split into two countries, India and Pakistan. Independence had been decades in the making, but except for the principle that Pakistan would be majority Muslim and India mostly Hindu, little was clear about what these new nations would be. Would they welcome or tolerate religious minorities? Could they bind together people who spoke dozens of different languages? Would they ever give redress to the Indigenous people who had been displaced from their land, or those forced to work on it under the oppressions of caste? Without any answers to those questions, hundreds of millions of people had to choose sides and stake their claim to a place, somewhere. This quest sent millions on the move, and unleashed waves of violence in the months before and after Partition, and repercussions for years afterward.

My mother was part of a generation of women who inherited all the burdens of the past and yet found the will and the means to reject them. She pursued her own career, made her own money, and chose her own husband. The demure bride in the photograph was also a woman who made her way into the world and never looked back.

She was a schoolgirl, just fifteen years old, when she left her home at the southern tip of India, in the state of Kerala, and traveled to Bihar, a place known even then as the poorest and most violent in India. The train took her to a small market town called Mokama, built up around a railroad junction at a bend in the river Ganges. It was little more than a few shops serving the railway workers and big landowners. And yet, a few minutes walk from the railway station, there was a grand Catholic church, a hospital, and a nursing school run by a handful of nuns from Kentucky.

My mother remembers the sisters with a mix of emotions: they were strict and enforced their rules mercilessly, they were tall and pale, they spoke with incomprehensible accents, they were uncompromising in their standards, they taught her everything she knows about nursing, they looked after her for years, they indulged her, they changed her life.

Beyond the limits of these family stories, there was so much more I wanted to know. How did she manage to travel so far, at such a young age, when few women dared to leave their homes without the protection of a man? Why Bihar? And why did these nuns choose to start a hospital in Mokama, a town so small it didnt appear on most maps of India? Why did they leave Kentucky and come to this particular corner of India, just months after Partition, to a place that had been scarred by violence between Hindus and Muslims? And why did they fill that hospital with teenage nurses from the other end of the country? Did they have any idea how radical their work would be? They started a hospital and school run almost entirely by women, and they insisted on giving the highest possible standard of care to everyone who walked through the doors, regardless of caste or religion.

These were questions I would have to answer myself, as a journalist, over the course of years of research. I made my first trip to Mokama in 1998, contacting the sisters through what was still the most reliable means of communication: the mail. I sent them a letter asking if I might visit, and then another a few weeks later to let them know which train I planned to take. I was traveling around India at the time, and tried repeatedly to reach them by phone to confirm that they would be able to meet me at the station.