Freedom at Midnight (8 page)

The aging leader did not stop with words. Gandhi had a tenacious belief in the value of one concrete act. To the despair of many of his followers who thought a different set of priorities should order his time, Gandhi would devote the same meticulous care and attention to making a mudpack for a leper as preparing for an interview with a viceroy. So, in each village he would go with its inhabitants to their wells. Frequently he would help them find a better location for them. He would inspect their communal latrines, or if, as was most often the case, they didn't have any, he would teach them how to build one, often joining in the digging himself. Convinced that bad hygiene was

the basic cause of India's terrible mortality rate, he had inveighed for years against such habits as public defecation, spitting and blowing out one's nostrils on the paths where most village poor walked barefoot.

"If we Indians spat in unison," he once said, "we would form a puddle large enough to drown 300,000 Englishmen." Every time he saw a villager spitting or blowing his nose on a footpath, he would gently reprimand him. He went into homes to show people how to build a simple filter of charcoal and sand to help purify their drinking water. "The difference between what we do and what we could do," he constantly repeated, "would suffice to solve most of the world's problems."

Every evening he held an open prayer meeting, inviting Moslems to join in, being careful to recite as part of each day's service verses from the Koran. Anyone could question him on anything at those meetings. One day a villager remonstrated with him for wasting his time in Noakhali when he should have been in New Delhi negotiating with Jinnah and the Moslem League.

"A leader," Gandhi replied, "is only a reflection of the people he leads." The people had first to be led to make peace among themselves. Then, he said, "their desire to live together in peaceful neighborliness will be reflected by their leaders."

When he felt that a village had begun to understand his message, when its Moslem community had agreed to let its frightened Hindus return to their homes, he set out for the next hamlet five, ten, fifteen miles away. Invariably his departures took place at precisely seven-thirty. As at Sri-rampur, the little party would march off, Gandhi at its head, through the mango orchards, the green scum-slicked ponds where ducks and wild geese went honking skyward at their approach. Their paths were narrow and wound their ways through palm groves and the underbrush. They were littered with stones, pebbles, protruding roots. Sometimes the little procession had to struggle through ankle-deep mud. By the time they reached their next stop, the seventy-seven-year-old Mahatma's feet were often aching with chilblains, or disfigured by bleeding sores and blisters. Before taking up his task again, he soaked them in hot water. Then, Gandhi indulged in the one luxury he permitted himself on his penitent's tour. His nineteen-year-old

grandniece and constant companion, Manu, massaged his martyred feet—with a stone.

For thirty years those battered feet had led the famished hordes of a continent in prayer toward their liberty. They had carried Gandhi into the most remote corners of India, to thousands of villages like those he now visited, to lepers' wading pools, to the worst slums of his nation, to palaces and prisons, in quest of his cherished goal, India's freedom.

Mohandas Gandhi had been an eight-year-old schoolboy when the great-grandmother of the two cousins sipping their tea in Buckingham Palace had been proclaimed Empress of India on a plain near Delhi. For Gandhi, that grandiose ceremony was always associated with a jingle he and his playmates had chanted to mark the event in his home town of Porbandar, seven hundred miles from Delhi on the Arabian Sea:

Behold the mighty Englishman! He rules the Indian small Because being a meat eater He is five cubits tall.

The boy whose spiritual force would one day humble those five-cubit Englishmen and their enormous empire could not resist the challenge in the jingle. With a friend, he cooked and ate a forbidden piece of goat meat. The experiment was a disastrous error. The eight-year-old Gandhi promptly vomited up the goat and spent the night dreaming that the animal was cavorting in his stomach.

Gandhi's father was the hereditary diwan (prime minister) of a tiny state on the Kathiawar peninsula near Bombay, and his mother was an intensely devout woman given to long religious fasts.

Curiously, Gandhi, destined to become India's greatest spiritual leader of modern times, was not born into the Brahman caste that was supposed to provide Hinduism with its hereditary philosophical and religious elite. His father was a member of the Vaisyas, the caste of shopkeepers and petty tradesmen which stood midway up the Hindu social scale, above Untouchables and Sudras, artisans, but below Brahmans and Kshatriyas, warriors.

At thirteen, Gandhi, following the Indian tradition of the day, was married to a totally illiterate stranger named Kasturbai. The youth who was later to offer the world a symbol of ascetic purity absolutely reveled in the consequent discovery of sex.

Four years later, Gandhi and his wife were in the midst of enjoying its pleasures when a rap on the door interrupted their lovemaking. It was a servant. Gandhi's father, he announced, had just died.

Gandhi was horrified. He was devoted to his father. Moments before, he had been by the bed on which his father lay dying, patiently massaging his legs. An urgent burst of sexual desire seized him and he had tiptoed from his father's room to wake up his pregnant wife. As a result of this trauma the joy of sex began to fade for Gandhi. An indelible stamp had been left on his psyche.

As a result of his father's death, Gandhi was sent to England to study law so that he too might become prime minister of a princely state. It was an enormous undertaking for a devout Hindu family. No member of Gandhi's family had ever gone abroad before. Gandhi was solemnly pronounced an outcast from his shopkeeper caste, because to Hindu elders his voyage across the seas would leave him contaminated.

Gandhi was wretchedly unhappy in London. He was so desperately shy that addressing a single word to a stranger was a painful ordeal; to produce a full sentence was agony. Physically, at nineteen he was a pathetic little creature in the sophisticated world of the Inns of Court. His cheap, badly cut Bombay clothes flopped over his undersized body like loose sails on a becalmed ship. Indeed, he was so small, so utterly unremarkable, that his fellow students sometimes took him for an errand boy.

The lonely, miserable Gandhi decided that the only way out of his agony was to become an English gentleman. He threw away his Bombay clothes and bought a new wardrobe. It included a silk top hat, an evening suit, patent-leather boots, white gloves and even a silver-tipped walking stick. He bought hair lotion to plaster his unwilling black hair onto his skull. He spent hours in front of a mirror contemplating his appearance and learning to tie a tie. To win the social acceptance he longed for, he bought a violin, joined a dancing class, hired a French tutor and an elocution teacher.

The results of that poignant little charade were as disastrous as his earlier encounter with goat's meat had been. The only sound he learned to coax from his violin was a dissonant wail. His feet refused to acknowledge three-quarter time, his tongue the French language, and no number of elocution lessons was going to free the spirit struggling to escape from under his crippling shyness. Even a visit to a brothel was a failure. Gandhi couldn't get past the parlor.

He gave up his efforts to become an Englishman and went back to being himself. When finally he was called to the bar, Gandhi rushed back to India with undisguised relief.

His homecoming was less than triumphant. For months, he hung around the Bombay courts looking for a case to plead. The young man whose voice would one day inspire 300 million Indians proved incapable of articulating the phrases necessary to impress a single Indian magistrate.

That failure led to the first great turning point in Gandhi's life. His frustrated family sent him to South Africa to unravel the legal problems of a distant kinsman. His trip was to have lasted a few months; he stayed a quarter of a century. There, in that bleak and hostile land, Gandhi found the philosophical principles that transformed his life and Indian history.

Nothing about the young Gandhi walking down a gangplank in Durban harbor in May 1893, however, indicated a vocation for asceticism or saintliness. The future prophet of poverty made his formal entry onto the soil of South Africa in a high white collar and the fashionable frock coat of a London Inner Temple barrister, his briefcase crammed with documents on the rich Indian businessman whose interests he had come to defend.

Gandhi's real introduction to South Africa came a week after his arrival, on an overnight train ride from Durban to Pretoria. Four decades later Gandhi would still remember that trip as the most formative experience of his life. Halfway to Pretoria a white man stalked into his first-class compartment and ordered him into the baggage car. Gandhi, who held a first-class ticket, refused. At the next stop the white called a policeman, and Gandhi with his luggage was unceremoniously thrown off the train in the middle of the night.

All alone, shivering in the cold because he was too shy

to ask the stationmaster for the overcoat locked in his luggage, Gandhi passed the night huddled in the unlighted railroad station pondering his first brutal confrontation with racial prejudice. Like a medieval youth during the vigil of his knighthood, Gandhi sat in the darkened station praying to the God of the Gita for courage and guidance. When dawn finally broke on the little station of Pietermar-itzburg, the timid, withdrawn youth was a changed person. The little lawyer had reached the most important decision of his life. Mohandas Gandhi was going to say "No."

A week later, Gandhi delivered his first public speech to Pretoria's Indians. The advocate who had been so painfully shy in the courtrooms of Bombay had begun to find his tongue. He urged the Indians to unite to defend their interests and, as a first step, to learn how to do it in their oppressors' English tongue. The following evening, without realizing it, Gandhi began the work that would ultimately bring 300 million Indians freedom by teaching English grammar to a barber, a clerk and a shopkeeper. Soon he had also won the first of the successes that would be his over the next half-century. He wrung from the railway authorities the right for well-dressed Indians to ride first or second class on South Africa's railways.

Gandhi decided to stay on in South Africa when the case that had brought him there had been resolved. He became both the champion of South Africa's Indian community and a highly successful lawyer. Loyal to the British Empire despite its racial injustice, he even led an ambulance corps in the Boer War.

Ten years after his arrival in South Africa, another long train ride provoked the second great turning point in Gandhi's life. As he boarded the Johannesburg-Durban train one evening in 1904, an English friend passed Gandhi a book to read on the long trip, John Ruskin's Unto This Last.

All night Gandhi sat up reading the work of the English social philosopher as his train rolled through the South African veld. It was his revelation on the road to Damascus. By the time his train reached Durban the following morning, Gandhi had made an epic vow: he was going to renounce all his material possessions and live his life according to Ruskin's ideals. Riches, Ruskin had written, were just a tool to secure power over men. A laborer with a spade serves society as truly as a lawyer with a brief,

and the life of labor, of the tiller of the soil, is the life worth living.

Gandhi's decision was all the more remarkable because he was, at that moment, a wealthy man earning over five thousand pounds sterling a year from his law practice, an enormous sum in the South Africa of the time.

For two years, however, doubts had been fermenting in Gandhi's mind. He was haunted by the Bhagavad Gita's doctrine of renunciation of desire and attachment to material possessions as the essential stepping stone to a spiritual awakening. He had already made experiments of his own: he had started to cut his own hair, do his laundry, clean his own toilet. He had even delivered his last child. His doubts found their confirmation in Ruskin's pages.

Barely a week later, Gandhi settled his family and a group of friends on a 100-acre farm near Phoenix, fourteen miles from Durban. There, on a sad, scrubby site consisting of a ruined shack, a well, some orange, mulberry and mango trees, and a horde of snakes, Gandhi's life took on the pattern that would rule it until his death: a renunciation of material possessions and a striving to satisfy human needs in the simplest manner, coupled with a communal existence in which all labor was equally valuable and all goods were shared.

One last, painful renunciation remained, however, to be made. It was the vow of Brahmacharya (chastity, or sexual continence), and it had haunted Gandhi for years.

The scar left by his father's death, a desire to have no more children, his rising religious consciousness—all drove him toward his decision. One summer evening in 1906 Gandhi solemnly announced to his wife, Kasturbai, that he had taken the vow of Brahmacharya. Begun in a joyous frenzy at the age of thirteen, the sexual life of Mohandas Gandhi had reached its conclusion at the age of thirty-seven.

To Gandhi, however, Brahmacharya meant more than just the curbing of sexual desires. It was the control of all the senses. It meant restraint in emotion, diet and speech, the suppression of anger, violence and hate, the attainment of a desireless state close to the Gita's ideal of non-possession. It was his definitive engagement on the ascetic's path, the ultimate act of self-transformation. None of the vows Gandhi took in his life would force upon him such

intense internal struggle as his vow of chastity. It was a struggle which, in one form or another, would be with him for the rest of his life. It was, however, in the racial struggle which he undertook during his first week in South Africa that Gandhi enunciated the two basic doctrines that would make him world famous—nonviolence and civil disobedience.