Gandhi’s ‘Family’

It is striking that as I write about Scorching Love: Letters from Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi to His Son Devadas, a collection of 304 letters from Gandhi to his youngest son Devadas, I should feel inclined to begin with my first memory of Gandhi. It was beginning to get dark when someone came frantically running into our house, screamed Gandhiji ki hatya ho gayi! (Gandhiji is no more!) and ran out. I, a seven-year-old child, began crying instantaneously. No meal was cooked in our house that evening. Nor in any house in our neighbourhood in the small town of Mainpuri, Uttar Pradesh. Years later, I would read Verrier Elvin’s account of his mother in London. She “had just gone into lunch when someone, who had heard the news [of Gandhi’s death] on the radio, announced the tragedy and she came away weeping, for it was impossible for her to eat.” And the following in Louis Fischer’s Mahatma Gandhi: His Life and Times:

In New York, a twelve-year-old girl had gone into the kitchen for breakfast. The radio was on and it brought the news of the shooting of Gandhi. There, in the kitchen, the girl, the maid, and the gardener held a prayer meeting and prayed and wept.