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“This wasn’t the mahatma we heard about at home. We were told he was a scoundrel and an actor, false to his fingertips.”
    She said, “For our mother’s uncle he was a caste oppressor. That was all that they passed on to us. It was part of their private caste war, their own revolution. They couldn’t think of anything bigger. No one felt they had to know more about the mahatma.”
    Willie said, “If he hadn’t gone to South Africa, if he hadn’t run into that other life, would he have done nothing? Would he have gone on in his old way?”
    “It’s more than likely. But read the relevant chapters again.You will find that everything is fairly laid out, and you will make up your own mind.”
    “How South Africa shocked him. You can feel the shame, the bewilderment. He was in no way prepared for it. That terrible incident in the overnight train, and then the indentured Tamil labourer with the bloody head coming to him for justice.”
    Sarojini said, “Beaten up by the planter to whom he had been indentured. The transplanted serfs of the empire, with no rights at all. You could have done anything with them. The ancestors of our rose-sellers here in Berlin. They’ve travelled far in a hundred years. They can fight their own war now. That should make you feel good. We can’t put ourselves in Gandhi’s shoes. To be faced with the most casual kind of brutality and to have no power in one’s hands. Most of us would have run away and hidden. Most of the Indians did, and they still do. But Gandhi, with his holy innocence, thought that there was something he could do. That was how he began his political life, with this need to act. ‘What can I do?’ And that was how it was at the very end. Just before independence there were very bad communal riots in Bengal. He went there. Some people strewed broken bottles and glass over where he, the frail old mahatma, the man of peace, was to walk. He was by now swamped by his own religious search, but there was enough of the old lucidity left, and he was often during these days heard to say to himself, ‘What can I do? What can I do?’
    “There wasn’t always much he could do. It’s easy to forget that. He wasn’t always the semi-nude mahatma. The semi-religious way he started with in South Africa—the commune, the idea of bread labour, all the mixed ideas of Tolstoy and Ruskin—couldn’t do anything in that situation. In his autobiography his account of his twenty years in South Africa isvivid and full of incident, full of things he is doing. You might think that something big is happening, something that is going to change South Africa, but a lot of the struggle he is describing is personal and religious, and if you step back just a little you will see that the mahatma’s time in South Africa was a complete failure. He was forty-six when he gave up and went back to India. Five years older than you, Willie, and with nothing to show for twenty years of work. In India he was starting from scratch. He would have to think and think, then and later, about how as a stranger he was going to inject himself into a local situation, where there were already many better-educated leaders. It might seem today that things were already happening, and that as the mahatma all he had to do in 1915 was to let himself be carried to the crest. It wasn’t like that. He made things happen. He created the wave. He was a mixture of thought and intuition. Thought, above all. He was a true revolutionary.”
    And Willie said nothing.
    She had taken him far away. She had given him the daily mental exercise of thinking himself back into more desperate places of the world he had seen or known. That had already become a habit of his mornings; and now, in an extension of this morning meditation, he found himself reconsidering his life in India and London, reconsidering Africa and his marriage, acknowledging everything in a new way, hiding nothing, submerging all the pathos of his nondescript past in