The state funeral of Mother Teresa in Calcutta, where she looked after the poor, sick and the unwanted for over 50 years, was as grand as her life was austere. The Indian military displayed all the pomp and ceremony it could muster for the diminutive, 87-year-old nun who died on September 5th of a cardiac arrest, leaving behind two saris, a Bible, a rosary and some diaries and pencils.
More than one million people lined Calcutta's streets as the gun carriage used for the funeral of Mahatma Gandhi and prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru carried her body from St Thomas's church where she had lain in state for a week to the 15,000-seat indoor stadium where a four-hour funeral service was held.
Under public pressure, Mother Teresa's funeral procession was doubled to six miles to enable a larger number of mourners to have their last glimpse of the nun they revered.
Playing the sombre Death March, a naval band accompanied scores of soldiers carrying reversed arms alongside the carriage through the streets.
A convoy of vehicles which followed carried nine of the 12 nuns who helped Mother Teresa in founding the Missionaries of Charity in 1950, the only Catholic order founded this century.
But Mother Teresa's burial at Mother House, close to a city slum where she lived for decades, was a private affair attended only by close friends, some nuns and ecclesiastical dignitaries from India and abroad.
Some 12 soldiers fired three volleys each into the air before handing over Mother Teresa's white-coloured coffin for burial.
Here, too, thousands of mourners, in some places 20-deep, crowded police barricades around Mother House in an attempt to catch a glimpse of what was happening inside.
Earlier, thousands of Calcuttans had begun lining the route Mother Teresa's cortege would follow hours before the funeral procession began.
She was Calcutta's beloved icon, worshipped for her work amongst the city's poor, benighted and abandoned, and has already been anointed a saint by them.
Popularly known as the Saint of the Gutters, the Albanian-born nun was awarded the Nobel Peace prize for charity work in 1979.
Though there are no plans yet to construct a memorial at Mother House, people will be able to visit her grave within a few days.
"It will be like when she was alive" said Monsignor Francis Gomes, vicar-general of the diocese of Calcutta. He said the location of the grave had been chosen to make it publicly accessible.
Mother Teresa's niece, Ms Agi Bojaxhiu, one of her few surviving relatives, attended the funeral.
She said she did not know her aunt well, having met her for the first time at the age of 20, but thereafter she saw Mother Teresa often on her visits to Rome.
"I never guessed that she would be revered by the entire world one day," said Ms Bojaxhiu. "To me she was just my aunt."
Ms Bojaxhiu's late father, Lazar, never called his sister by her name, Mary Teresa. His pet name for her was Gonxha, which in Albanian means flower bud, for then she was pink and plump.
Inmates of Mother Teresa's several charitable homes across the city, meanwhile, saw television for the first time when hired sets were installed in time for them to see the funeral.
But almost all of them wanted to pay homage to Mother Teresa at the stadium and were annoyed with the authorities for not allowing them to do so.
Cardinal Angelo Sodano, general secretary of the Vatican and the Pope's special representative at the funeral, said Mother Teresa's life was no humanitarian exploit but a tale of Biblical faith.
He said Mother Teresa saw the face of God in every suffering human being and he urged her nuns to carry forward her good works. "The poor are still with us" he said. "They must be at the heart of our concerns."
In between reading from the Bible and blessing Mother Teresa's body with holy water and incense, Cardinal Sodano was presented with flowers by an orphan, water by a woman recently released from prison and cared for by the nuns, wine by a leper, bread by a deaf and handicapped boy and an empty chalice, filled with the "fullness of Mother's spirit" by Sister Nirmala, the new head of the Missionaries of Charity.
Later, Sister Nirmala pledged to continue her predecessor's work as the only way to remain steadfast to her cause of serving God.
