The Irish-born educator, Sister Cyril, who spent 67 years in India, changed the lives of hundreds of girls over the years.
She empowered them to live independent lives.
She pulled them out of their trying circumstances where destiny had left them and changed their future.
Sister Cyril passed away on June 24 in Kolkata.
The Telegraph spoke to two women whose lives would have been very different had it not been for Sister.
A rickshaw-puller near Sealdah railway station saw a three-year-old girl with an infant on her lap.
That was in 2003. The rickshaw-puller took the two abandoned girls to Sister Cyril in Loreto Day School Sealdah.
The three-year-old, Maya Shaw, is a 24-year-old woman now. She works as a chef in a resort in Anjar, Gujarat.
The girl, abandoned and left on the streets with an even younger sibling to fend for, now draws Rs 21,000 a month.
Maya Shaw who works as a chef in a resort in Anjar, Gujarat.
The Telegraph“We had no other family. While other girls would have someone or the other coming to meet them, we had nobody. Sister realised that and she would tell the staff to take care of us because we had nobody else,” Shaw told this newspaper.
“Even today, the doors of Rainbow are still open for us,” Shaw said. Sister Cyril had started the Rainbow project to provide education, food, clothing and security to girls from the streets.
Shaw and her sister grew up in the Rainbow home in Sealdah.
Shaw said the rickshaw-puller, whom she calls “uncle”, took them to Sister Cyril because his own daughter was there.
“Sister gave me a name and a home,” she said.
The two sisters would attend classes at Loreto Day School Sealdah.
After completing her higher secondary, Shaw joined a hotel management institute in Kolkata.
For some time, she worked with a confectionery chain in Kolkata before she got the job in Gujarat in January this year.
“Mary Ward, the foundress of the Loreto Congregation, had said that women in times to come will do much... Sister Cyril believed in this and helped girls find their goals,” said Sister Monica Suchiang, a spokesperson for the Loreto Congregation.
Shaw was still in school when Sister Cyril retired as principal from Loreto Day School Sealdah.
“We would go to meet her in Entally and she would say ‘my daughters have come to meet me’,” she said.
“She was a mother figure to so many of us. She is like a tree that gave shelter to so many,” said Shaw.
In the early 1990s, Sister Cyril saw a woman with three girls — one on her and two by her side — queueing up for food off AJC Bose Road.
Sister Cyril brought the family to Loreto Day School Sealdah and told them they would get food and education there.
That was how life began for six-year-old Padma Mukherjee who now works in Bangalore with an organisation that provides medical support to children with cancer.
Mukherjee, 37, earns Rs 35,000 a month now.
“Sister did not just give us food and shelter but raised us to be independent women. She trained us to be integrated into society and not live on the edges,” said Mukherjee.
Mukherjee caught an early morning flight from Bangalore to Kolkata on Tuesday to attend Sister Cyril’s funeral at St Thomas’ Church.
“Sister was an angel in my life and a second mother,” said Mukherjee.
She still remembers how during her school years, Sister would ask the girls to go to the streets outside and give food to the old and ailing.
“Sister taught us social work by making us do for others. When she would get ailing women inside Loreto Sealdah, she would not ask a guard or a help to take care of them. She would herself nurse them, give them bandage or water or whatever they needed,” said Mukherjee.
She said initially, there were a handful of girls at Rainbow. Gradually, the numbers swelled.
“When I was leaving in 2010, there were 350 girls at Loreto Sealdah,” she said.
The Bangalore organisation that Mukherjee works with provides medical support to families of children with cancer who find it difficult to afford the treatment.
“At times it is depressing but it is also satisfying. I am not giving them money from my own pocket, but the parents bless us,” said Mukherjee.
