Calcutta has strung up photos and posters of Mother Teresa, as industrious vendors set out figurines and glass-encased photos of the charitable social worker one day before her canonisation at the Vatican in Rome.

“We admired her because she did what we did not have the stomach for – tending to men and women whose limbs were stunted by leprosy, looking after children with lesions, comforting the dying,” writes Calcutta-born film director Sandip Roy in a commentary published by the National Public Radio.

“We looked away when the beggar without hands knocked on the car window with his stumps wrapped in grubby bandages.

“Mother Teresa did not just look that beggar in the eye. She embraced him,” he adds, speaking from his experience as the child of a middle-class Calcutta family.

In the capital of West Bengal state, where Mother Teresa devoted decades of her life from the 1930s through to her death in 1997 at the age of 87, she has long been viewed as a saint.

In the eyes of the city’s impoverished, for whom the Albanian-born nun set up hospitals, orphanages and leper houses under the diocesan Missionaries of Charity Congregation, she was a savior.

Figurines celebrate the impending canonisation. Photo: AAP

At the end of the last month, the city hosted its third Mother Teresa International Film Festival to commemorate her birth anniversary on August 26, and the Mother Teresa of Calcutta Centre continues to promote her message to help others through its study and social work.

The headquarters of the Roman Catholic Church will make official her status of sainthood at the Vatican on Sunday, when she will be canonised in Rome in a ceremony recognising two miracles of healing accredited to her by the Church.