SISTER'S PRESENCE GAVE CALCUTTA'S SLUMS WORLDWIDE FAME.

Byline: Neely Tucker Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

Vijay Panday lives in the guts of Calcutta.

Cross the bridge over the Hooghly River into the suburb of Howrah, take one of the crowded main streets, turn on another, take a one-lane alley to the left, turn into another lane perhaps 10 feet wide, step into a slender alley with an open sewer running at the edge, turn right through an opening in a concrete wall, walk to the end of a series of low-roofed hovels and there she is, home again.

Forty people live within 30 feet of her two-room house.

``It's very dirty here,'' she says, indicating the sewer that runs in front of her door. ``But when you are poor, it's hard to do much about it. You make one meal for your children and then start thinking about where to get the next one.''

With the death of Mother Teresa, the impoverished people of the world's ninth-largest city - about 12 million strong - have lost the international symbol that defined them for half a century. Immortalized by the Catholic nun, made famous again in the book and subsequent film, ``The City of Joy,'' the slums of Calcutta bear the dubious distinction of being the most notorious in the world.

In these areas, more than 2 million people live in squalor, disease and decay, sweating through summer temperatures that soar above 100 degrees and the riverside humidity almost as high.

People push for space, scrounge for food, step over open sewers, pull rickshaws 2 miles for 10 cents, swat mosquitoes, eat with their right hands, use their left as toilet paper, have families, raise children, and survive on less than $500 per year. Slums are so densely populated, deadly and wracked with misshapen and sometimes leprous forms that they have become synonymous with the back gates of hell.

Now, when Mother Teresa is buried Saturday, the people who live in the slums face a future without their guardian angel. In one sense, it changes nothing; in another, it changes almost everything.

``Mother Teresa was about hope and dignity,'' said Stephen Franz, a mourner standing in line to pay his final respects. ``With her gone, even though her work will go on, there is no single person who exemplifies that spirit.''

Life here is very difficult.

Before daybreak, deep in the heart of the city's worst slum, Vijay Panday awakes. She cooks the morning meal of rice and vegetables for her three children. She feeds them and they scurry off to school, in the faint hope that someday there will be a job for them. It is an opportunity she did not have; like most adults here, she is unschooled and illiterate.

Her husband, a soldier in the Indian army, is posted some 600 miles away. He's home on leave two months a year.

She is not as poor as some. She owns a few tiny huts to rent. Between her husband's salary and her rentals, they make about $30 per month. That is just above the national poverty level of $25 per month. Some 330 million Indians - one-third of the nation and more than the entire United States population - live below that line.

Her two rooms have electricity, a concrete floor and two beds, but no running water or toilet. A ceiling fan beats the stifling air into a breeze.

The streets around Panday's narrow home offer graphic portraits of Calcutta's squalor.

A block away, a lovely little girl, no more than 5, walks on the side of a narrow street. She looks up at a passing rickshaw. She smiles, squats and defecates. Urine runs into the roadway. Nobody notices.

A few yards further on, a heap of rotting garbage is picked over by a goat, a cow and a woman with a basket.

Drills and metal-working machines roar in a stifling hot hole cut into a cement wall. The ``factory'' produces about 500 tin water pots a day. Six men work inside, the temperature is easily above 100 degrees, the air choked with dust, noise, the smell of sweat.

To be fair, it should be said that Calcutta's poverty is not worse than in other parts of the developing world. For example, Saddam City in the suburbs of Baghdad, Iraq, is as poor and dirty, and the Cite section of Kinshasa, Congo, is perhaps worse.

But it was Calcutta that Mother Teresa adopted 51 years ago. And as her work gained international attention, the horrors of Calcutta's poverty rose to equal notoriety.

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