Sister Nirmala with one of her cousins in Shillong on Sunday. Picture by Bidhayak Das

Shillong, June 27: It was a homecoming that superior-general of the Missionaries of Charity, Sister Nirmala, will never forget. After all, half a century has passed.

Holding aloft the torch given to her by Mother Teresa, a reunion with her relatives and family members in her “mother’s hometown”, Shillong, after 53 years … hers was more than just an ordinary itinerary. As part of a tour of the Northeast, Sister Nirmala is here on a three-day visit. But herein lies the difference: the last time she visited Shillong was in 1951 as a staunch “Hindu” Brahmin girl, when she stayed in her mother’s ancestral home in upper Mawprem.

“Shillong is close to my heart, it is my mother’s place, after all. I have so many relatives here, my cousins, nephews and nieces,” the 70-year-old nun said, as she spent some precious moments with cousins Bindo Lama, five years younger to her, and 74-year-old Yashwanti Debi at Shanti Bhawan behind Governor’s House.

Debi and other relatives were waiting impatiently, braving the afternoon sun, to meet their very own “Kushum” (aka Sister Nirmala), while for the younger members of her family it was the “historic and best moment in a lifetime”.

Sister Nirmala etched a vivid picture of her visits to Shillong as a very small child, her schooldays at Nepali Kanya Patsala in 1945 and then as a 17-year-old student of St. Mary’s College in 1951. She studied there for three months before moving on to Patna and then Hazaribagh.

With her memories layered in the colours of her childhood and youth, Sister Nirmala recalled how she was the most devout Hindu member of the Nepali Brahmin family in which she was born.

She clearly remembers how she refuted the arguments of her cousins during her Shillong visit in 1951 that Catholic Christianity was the best religion.

“I had read Martin Luther’s criticism of the religion and I was then convinced that Hinduism was the best religion,” she said.

But life, like religion, often turns out to be ironic.

With an army officer as a father who was opposed to the idea of converting to Christianity, becoming the “only one in the family” was perhaps not an easy decision for the future head of Calcutta’s Nirmal Hriday.

She had her own doubts after reading about sermons in the Bible but “one single event” at Mount Caramel College in Hazaribagh changed the course of her life. “In school, I had read about Jesus. He even appeared near me when I was offering puja during Sivaratri in a temple. But I thought He was just proud of me as I had read His sermons in a small Bible I had at home,” she said.

It was only on seeing a Hindu roommate as she “knelt down to pray to the Lord after the bells were sounded” on the first day at Mount Caramel made her accept Christianity and experience “the Lord’s calling”.

For the people of Shillong, however, Sister Nirmala is “beyond religion”. While Debi was all but eager to take her “loving sister Kushum” to her ancestral home at Mawprem, thousands of Mother Teresa’s admirers and votaries thronged the Cathedral parish this morning to seek Sister Nirmala’s blessings after the morning service.

The missionary herself summed it up best when she said she was feeling “very happy and content” to have met not just her family, but also “the larger family” in the Northeast.