4

Meeting Babu

MATHURA, 1957

The end of our annual exams heralded the end of high school for Didi and the long-awaited summer break for both of us. Didi and I could barely contain our excitement upon finally seeing Amma once again. “Where are we going to spend the summer?” I asked.

Amma had a twinkle in her eyes that I had not seen in a long time. She asked us to guess.

“Bhagalpur?”

She shook her head, and her smile broadened further.

I screamed, “Jeolikot?”

Still no, but she added, “You love this place more than any other.”

I slowly exhaled. “Jaipur?”

She nodded and scooped us up in a tight hug, her smile illuminating the room.

We started the day-long journey to Jaipur early in the morning, in a quiet coach all by ourselves. This time, I wasn’t the chatty one, for once; Amma was talking to us as though we were her long-lost friends. I loved travelling in the daytime, on trains that cut across farms and cities, snaked along rivers and roads, and thundered through tunnels and bridges. But on this day, as Amma talked, we discovered another landscape, different from the one unfolding outside the gently rocking train.

Ravikant mama had forced open a window into Amma’s past that had been boarded up a long time ago. Now Amma allowed us to peek further. She had actually brought along a few of the daily journals that she had kept during her prison terms, and she read passages from these diaries aloud, filling in the context of those turbulent times in her life and in the country.

Amma described the phenomenon of women courting arrest in large numbers in response to Gandhiji’s call for mass civil disobedience in 1930. Hundreds of thousands of women stepped out of their homes, defying their families and ancient customs, as well as British law. Women joined picket lines, protest rallies, and prabhat pheri marches at daybreak through the streets of cities and towns, singing spiritual songs infused with nationalist fervour. Veiled women made salt on their terraces and in their courtyards, literally shouting from rooftops that they had broken the law.

This dramatic influx of women into the civil disobedience movement posed a logistical problem for the British, whose prisons were not equipped to take in so many women detainees. Hoping to cut to the heart of the problem, the British sent undercover informants into public meetings to identify women who appeared to be ringleaders. Young Shanti’s every step was shadowed by the police, and her rousing public speeches were duly noted.

After she was arrested early in the fall of 1930, she was sentenced to six months in prison. With a wry smile, Amma recalled how the magistrate who sentenced her seemed reluctant to do so—she was barely more than a child. She also fondly remembered the affection shown to her, as the youngest inmate, by the other political prisoners, as well as the stream of visitors who came to bless her and be blessed by her.

This flow of visitors had not ebbed when the British authorities decided to transfer Shanti from Ajmer to the Lucknow jail. Here she found a friend in Shivarani Devi, the wife of one of her favourite contemporary Hindi writers, Munshi Premchand, whom Shanti admired for his honesty and realism. She was also touched by the generosity of Kamla Nehru. The prison guards were noticeably lenient toward the handful of women prisoners who had family connections, and Nehruji’s wife had been permitted to arrange for the delivery of home-cooked hot meals. These she insisted on sharing with Shanti, moved by the girl’s young age and her lack of family.

Most importantly, Shanti witnessed the courage of the many women prisoners who participated in daily meetings and, every morning and evening, joined their voices for an hour in the singing of nationalist songs. The vast majority of these prisoners had no privileged status: they were often from ordinary middle-class families, women with little by way of education who had been arrested for doing what they believed to be right. Many of them—especially those who had small children—were worried about their future after prison. To turn these fears to their advantage, the British authorities offered a pardon to any woman who would apologize for participating in seditious activities and swear an oath to never to do so again. Yet, despite the tempting prospect of official forgiveness and a swift release, Amma could not recall a single woman who accepted this offer.

She sighed briefly. Perhaps because she was still so young, she said, she was one of the more vocal of the women prisoners—she had a fearlessness that adults can ill afford. Irritated by her tendency to speak out, and well aware that she lacked the protection of family, her jailers decided to make an example of her, no doubt hoping to intimidate the other women prisoners into behaving themselves. So, for singing nationalist songs in prison, she was punished with a week in solitary confinement.

Her tiny cell had no light except for a small barred window, no more than a foot wide, halfway up the high wall. She was given a blanket to sleep on, a metal bowl by way of a toilet, a pitcher of water, and two coarse, dry rotis per day. To survive the experience, she meditated as much as possible and ate and drank as infrequently as possible.

Despite my love of snakes, I squirmed and gathered my feet under me as Amma described her visitor one night. No doubt looking for dry ground to escape the monsoon rain, the snake found its way into the cell through a crack near the door. The pale yellow crossbands along its smooth, dark scales shone vividly in the moonlight streaming in through the little window. It was a king cobra. Shanti screamed for help as she struggled to clamber up the rough stone wall toward the window. The guard looked in through the little peephole and told her to shut up, but he stopped short of opening the door, much less trying to remove the snake. Shanti hung from the metal bars of the window for several hours until, at long last, her visitor slithered into some hole in the thick stone walls.

At the end of her solitary confinement, she was not allowed to rejoin the other women prisoners but was instead sent back from Lucknow to Ajmer, where she finished the remainder of her six-month jail term. Immediately after her release, Shanti returned to her family of freedom fighters in Mathura to resume her routine of meetings, picketing, and public speeches.

It was there she learned that Gandhi, arrested the previous May, had also been released from jail and had negotiated a pact with India’s viceroy, Lord Irwin, agreeing to suspend the civil disobedience movement in exchange for a series of concessions from the British, including the elimination of the salt tax, the release of political prisoners, and the repeal of ordinances that limited the scope of Congress Party activities. Rumour was that Gandhi would be travelling to London in the fall, to represent Congress at the second of the British government’s round-table conferences about India’s constitution.

This sounded to her like good news, yet it seemed to make little real difference. Within ten days of her release from prison, she was served a legal notice signed by the governor of the United Provinces commanding her to cease and desist from political activities and ordering her not to travel outside the municipal limits of the city of Mathura. It was not long before undercover police agents began shadowing her again: Shanti laughingly referred to them as her loyal servants. Her well-wishers advised her to go to another province and continue her political activities under a new identity. If she were to be arrested in the United Provinces, it would be regarded as a show of contempt for the governor’s injunction and could result in harsh sentencing.

In the meanwhile, India had acquired a new viceroy, Lord Willingdon, and, all around her, the suppression of civil liberties seemed to be intensifying. Congress workers were being beaten up for handing out meeting announcements or nationalist pamphlets. Anyone suspected of harbouring controversial political views was being thrown into jail without benefit of trial. Newspapers deemed seditious were banned, and public meetings and rallies were routinely broken up by armed police.

In Mathura and other cities, the resistance went underground in response to the repression, while villages remained largely cut off from national politics. So, ignoring the advice of her friends, Shanti decided to rejoin the Congress volunteers who travelled into the heart of the rural hinterlands to bring people news of the nationalist tide that was sweeping the urban areas of the subcontinent. Despite the growing danger, she resumed touring villages with groups of wandering singers who sang stories from the great epic poems, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, spiked with nationalist messages.

Amma read from her diary a description of their tactics. A drummer would walk through neighbouring villages announcing a day-long program of bhajan-puja, devotional song and worship—apparently a harmless religious event. Hundreds of poor and illiterate villagers from nearby areas would attend the event in hopes of spiritual enlightenment and good karma for their next lives. The singers would sing the praise of the gods and sages of ancient times, comparing them to Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. They would also denounce the demons and villains of these epics, equating their sinful actions with those of the British—the traders who came to their country and now pretended to be owners of lives and lands that did not belong to them. Into the mythical narratives, the songs often rolled the history of the forcible expansion of the British East India Company’s commercial activities, the looting of India’s treasures, and the commonplace assumption that killing natives was a ruling power’s natural and necessary duty.

Amma recalled several occasions on which she evaded arrest because a sympathetic Indian informant, planted in the crowd as a police spy, secretly warned her group to move on before the police themselves arrived or the local landlord wised up to the singers’ political tampering with the holy epics. The seeds of rebellion appeared to be sprouting.

Amma paused her story at every station stop, allowing the crescendo of hawkers, tea-sellers, porters, and travellers to take over the quietness of our coach. As the train lumbered out of each station, leaving the loud voices floating behind, she resumed her story, reading aloud from her diary about the impact of a particularly inspiring meeting. On one of her visits back to her home base in Mathura, she was introduced to Subhas Chandra Bose and Kishan Singh, the father of Bhagat Singh, the young revolutionary who had killed a British police officer, John Saunders, in an attempt to assassinate James Scott, the police superintendent responsible for the brutal beating of Lala Lajpat Rai during what began as a peaceful protest.

Bhagat Singh had detonated a bomb in the Central Legislative Assembly specifically to provoke his own arrest. Members of his organization, the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, wanted to challenge the apathy of the millions of Indians, particularly merchants, bureaucrats, administrators, police, and army men, whose willing compliance had enabled a handful of Britons to rule over the teeming millions of the subcontinent. While in jail, Bhagat Singh had fasted for 116 days for equal treatment of Indian and British prisoners. His brief but dramatic life, which ended with his death by hanging on 23 March 1931, ignited the imaginations of many young men and women, including that of young Shanti. She was especially struck by his father’s courage and determination in the face of such a loss.

Shanti managed to continue her clandestine political activities for the better part of a year without getting caught. But the situation in India was rapidly worsening. Ever since Lord Willingdon had arrived, amidst the swirl of protests that followed Singh’s execution, a backlash had been developing among British officials in India, who resented the allegedly conciliatory policies now emanating from London. Taking advantage of Gandhi’s departure for England, the British authorities began deliberately violating the terms of the pact signed in March. In the meanwhile, unrest had spread to the countryside, once it became clear that the British government in India would do nothing to alleviate the plight of immiserated peasants. In October, Nehruji had launched a “no-rent” campaign in the United Provinces, where tens of thousands of tenant farmers were now refusing to pay their landlords.

At the end of December, Nehruji left Allahabad for Bombay to greet Gandhiji on his return. But he never arrived in Bombay. Instead, police swooped down and arrested him, along with his travelling companion, Abdul Ghaffar Khan, leader of the Khudai Khidmatgar and one of Gandhi’s most respected friends. Then, as the new year began, Shanti heard that Gandhi himself had been arrested and all Congress Party organizations banned. Everywhere, Congress leaders were being imprisoned, and a brutal crackdown was underway. Shanti knew that it was only a matter of time before she, too, would be back in jail.

On a cold morning toward the end of January 1932, an informant quietly warned her that a warrant had been issued for her arrest. Inspired by Bhagat Singh’s policy of indifference to punishment, Shanti decided not to wait for the police to find her and instead devised a plan of her own.

In response to Gandhiji’s call for renewed civil disodebience, as well as to protest the wave of arrests, Congress workers in Mathura had planned a nationalist rally to coincide with a festival at a local temple. Protestors would march through the streets to the site of the temple, in hopes of transforming the festival into a mass expression of outrage. Shanti was staying at the house of a physician in Mathura, a well-known Congress sympathizer who was under the watch of the police. A few hours before dawn on the day of the festival, she stole out of the house and made her way to the temple to join the crowds attending the festival.

As the sun rose into the sky, the priest began to recite a religious katha, the opening of the tale unfolding as the large inner courtyard of the temple filled with hundreds of women in colourful saris, the long ends draped modestly over their heads and faces, Men sat separately in the outer courtyard, clapping and swaying. Then, as the marchers arrived at the temple, a chorus of nationalist slogans in the street beyond began to mingle with the Sanskrit chants inside the temple. Suddenly, one of the women threw off the pallu of her sari, boldly uncovering both her face and the furled flag she was carrying, and started running toward the staircase that led to the terrace of the temple. Once on the terrace, Shanti unfurled the tricolour flag with Gandhiji’s beloved symbol of the charkha in the middle, the spinning wheel a reminder of the goal of economic self-sufficiency. Immediately, she began to chant nationalist slogans that were soon echoed not only by the protestors outside but also by the hundreds of people gathered in the temple compound.

Reading from her diary, Amma then described the battalion of police in riot helmets and gear that swiftly arrived to quell the disturbance. They seemed momentarily startled when a young woman began a rousing speech from the top of the temple terrace, and then they started raining down lathis on the white-capped heads that had filled the narrow lanes around the temple. The well-armed police had no trouble beating up and arresting the protestors, but it was more difficult to get the girl herself down from the temple terrace. Because the temple was a sacred place, the policemen were not allowed to enter wearing their leather shoes and gear.

An English police officer shouted for the girl to come down from the terrace right that very minute. She continued her stream of seditious speech with renewed vigour, and the masses of people who had been dispersed by the armed police started to gather again. Some of the police went and fetched a ladder, by which it was possible to reach the temple terrace without actually entering the compound. When Shanti kept ignoring orders to climb down the ladder, the policeman started climbing up himself. As he got closer to the girl, the crowd grew restive, and the sloganeering and gesticulating increased. In response, the officer ordered the rest of the police to redouble their attack on the milling crowds. To stop the vicious beating of the protestors, Shanti agreed to climb down from the terrace, but not via the ladder. She descended the staircase into the courtyard, as nationalist slogans reverberated against the ancient walls.

As the police van moved slowly through the narrow streets clogged with people, the lathis danced mercilessly, breaking limbs and battering skulls. Didi and I winced at Amma’s description of the violence. We could hardly bear the knowledge that such scenes were sickeningly common during the movement for independence, but she shrugged at our discomfort. The British were struggling to contend with massive waves of non-violent civil resistance. Jails around the country were filled beyond capacity with men and women protestors who were often treated more like criminal inmates than political prisoners, unless they had famous last names.

To discourage women from participating in the movement, she told us, the British authorities were considering the introduction of fines, payable by their husbands, parents, or guardians, although they were worried about the political repercussions of measures that would tend to inflame public opinion. For Shanti, such fines would hardly have been a deterrent, as she had no male protector. For the court record, she gave the name of her father simply as krantikari—revolutionary.

As another means of stemming the tide of women prisoners, the British had also resorted to exploiting fears of pollution. Untouchable female staff were employed in jails to make the prospect of imprisonment abhorrent for the mostly upper-caste Hindu women courting arrest. This did not deter Shanti either, as she had been part of Gandhiji’s campaign to end the practice of untouchability and refused to use any caste identifiers with her name.

As before, Shanti was duly arrested and sentenced for the crime of sedition under Section 124A of the penal code—but the similarity with her earlier experience ended there. In preparation for her impending jail term, she had stuffed a khadi-cloth bag full of books on or by political thinkers, from Hammurabi, Plato, and Chanakya to Bertrand Russell, Sun Yat-sen, and, of course, Mahtama Gandhi. What she failed to anticipate was that the relatively benign treatment she encountered during her first term in jail was not to be replicated during her second.

Despite her political prisoner status, she was allotted to Class “C,” the same category as criminal inmates. When she arrived at the prison, two guards trained guns at her, on the jailer’s orders, as a burly woman leapt upon Shanti, tugging at her clothes on the pretext of searching her. In a matter of seconds, Shanti had immobilized her assailant, pinning her offending hand behind her broad back, far from her straining shoulder. Shanti expected the jail guards to split open her skull with their rifle butts at any moment, but the two Indian guards remained immobile, and the jailer ordered the sullen woman to leave Shanti alone.

Shanti tested the patience of the jailer again by refusing to wear the all-black prison clothing given to criminal inmates, demanding the black-and-white striped uniform meant for political prisoners. To her surprise, the English jailer assented to this demand, but he denied her access to the precious duffle bag with all her reading and writing material.

Shanti had been sentenced to eight months of hard labour and was locked up in a dirty cell shared by a number of women who were serving sentences of various lengths for a wide variety of crimes. Amma read to us from her diaries the classification system that she developed to understand the eclectic collection of inmates who shared these filthy, crowded jail cells. She tried to talk with her cellmates to learn about their lives, and ultimately divided them into four categories: a very small number of remorseless women who had deliberately committed violent crimes; women who were framed or who had been foolish enough to be led to commit criminal acts, often by family members; women who had hurt someone in a rage; and women who had no money to pay for a fine or legal defence. Shanti’s assessment was that the majority of the women prisoners belonged in the last category.

There was little room for discussion, learning, or camaraderie in the crowded cells, full of fear and filth. The inmates were not allowed to talk while working on the various tasks allocated to them. Shanti was given a large pile of jute fibre to braid into lengths of rope under the watchful eyes and the prickly prods of the women guards. All day long she had to work on the pile of coarse fibre, which cut into the skin of her hands. When the blisters on her hands became weeping sores, the prison doctor ordered that her task be changed to mending prisoners’ clothing. She detested this task even more than making rope, for she couldn’t help imagining the origins of the stains on these rags, and she gagged at the stench of despair and violence that emanated from them.

At the end of each week, the inmates had to hold a parade out in the yard and stand next to their meagre prison possessions of two metal bowls, a reed mat, and a blanket, to be inspected by the jailer. Shanti refused to take part in this dehumanizing spectacle. The woman guards screamed at her until their voices went hoarse and Shanti’s eardrums buzzed. When she did not budge, they went running to complain to the jailer. The jailer appeared on schedule with other prison officials to inspect the parade of inmates. Shanti was called into the yard and her things were piled next to her by the guard. The stern jailer met her unwavering gaze and then surprised everyone by saying nothing more than, “You should have participated in the parade.”

Much to the further chagrin of the guards, an order then arrived to change Shanti’s assignment to Class B, which promoted her to a cleaner cell of her own and the company of her precious books and diaries. It also meant food that did not look and smell like it belonged in the sewer. In solidarity with the rest of the inmates, however, Shanti insisted on and ate the food served to Class C prisoners. She soon learned that her promotion to Class B had more to do with separating her from the other inmates than with anything related to justice.

Within days of her “promotion,” Shanti was bundled early one morning into an empty compartment of an eastbound train, surrounded by prison guards and armed policemen. At every station, large or small, where the train stopped, the policemen would surround the compartment and train their guns on anyone who dared to come close to it. This only fanned the curiosity of onlookers, some climbing onto distant benches and piles of luggage to try to identify the dangerous cargo being guarded by so many guns. It would take just one person to recognize Shanti, and then the nationalistic sloganeering would start, along with jeering commentary about the impotent police who felt threatened by a young girl. Shanti enjoyed the consternation of the policemen, but she strongly disliked not knowing where they were headed, even after several hours into the train journey.

Finally, just as the warm and dusty afternoon was beginning to cool into evening, they stopped at a station where two men approached the head constable and begged to talk to the young prisoner. They claimed to be Shanti’s close relatives and appealed to the middle-aged Indian constable’s love for his own children, some of whom, they reasoned, must be the same age as the girl in his custody. Their strategy worked well enough that the constable granted them two precious minutes to talk. Amma had understood immediately, of course, that these men who described themselves as family members were in fact part of the widespread network of freedom fighters. They had just enough time to tell Shanti that she was being transferred to the Benares jail, hundreds of miles east of Mathura. They were there to assure her that the network had not lost sight of her, despite her captors’ best efforts.

But Amma had more to tell us, not only about that trip but about her mysterious early years. As she continued to read from her diary we learned how happy she was to hear that her destination was Varanasi, that most sacred of sacred cities, known in ancient texts as Kashi. With a history extending back several millennia, Benares (as the British spelled it) had long been a place of pilgrimage and study, famed for its ghats, where those seeking spiritual release could bathe in the holy Ganga. Several major figures of the early bhakti movement—Kabir, Ravidas, and Tulsidas—had spent much of their lives in the city, and even at that young age, Amma explained, she was drawn to their poetry, with its openly emotional evocation of an immediate connection between the worshipper and the divine. She had never been able to bring herself to believe in God as something personal, she admitted, and yet the songs of the bhakti poets had never ceased to move her.

Shanti knew, of course, that she could not expect to roam the bazaars of Varanasi, which teemed with merchants trading in jewellery, perfumes, and brocade and with pilgrims from far and wide. She did not expect to witness spectacular sunsets on the Ganga, as the sound of bells, chants, cymbals, and conch shells rose from thousands of temples and mixed with the chirps of countless birds that, every sundown, settled into the orchards and forests along the broad banks of the sacred river. But she was also determined not to let her imprisonment prevent her from reliving her memories of the city.

At this, Didi interrupted. “Memories? Had you been in Varanasi before?”

Amma did not move her eyes from her spot on the page. “Yes, a few times, before I left home.”

I was riveted by this and hoped that Amma would tell us more about her childhood. Didi leaned forward in anticipation. But Amma simply continued to describe her jail odyssey.

Much larger than the Mathura jail, the Benares jail was reserved for Class B political prisoners of the United Provinces. Each of the fifty women political prisoners had their own cell and were allowed to organize daily morning events of flag hoisting, singing, and debating. The matron was a gentle Irishwoman who taught English to the children of the inmates in the evening, and she invited young Shanti to join these classes.

This jail also housed nearly four hundred women jailed on criminal charges, most of whom were serving life sentences. Shanti’s contact with the criminal prisoners in Benares was limited to interacting with those who worked as servants in the political prisoner section, but she learned what she could of their stories and found that the circumstances that landed women in jail here fit neatly into the same four categories she had observed in Mathura. All of them would be burdened for the rest of their lives by the stigma of having been jailed.

What made matters worse was that the jail term allowed for no education or training for future rehabilitation. Shanti felt particularly sorry for the inmates who, having no other means of livelihood, had turned to prostitution. Although the British strictly regulated prostitution, brothels had remained legal in India until the 1930s. As new bans came into effect, Indian prostitutes were caught between the laws that criminalized them and the forces that lured them into the trade—which, of course, continued to thrive.

In the Benares jail, Shanti also encountered another class of women prisoners, a small number of Anglo-Indian women. They were housed in a separate section, with facilities that were better than the best offered to Indian political prisoners. With individual servants, balanced meals, and books and journals, this section was like a little retreat within the confines of the massive jail. The treatment of the Anglo-Indian women also stood in stark contrast to the way that male political prisoners were treated. Rasping sounds, made by the regular whippings, and clanking sounds, made by the leg shackles attached to rods that prevented the inmates from sitting or lying down, routinely drifted over the bars and walls that separated the men’s sections from the women’s sections.

We all fell silent at this information, until Amma looked up from her diary. “I learned so much during my jail terms, mostly about the human capacity to inflict and tolerate extreme pain.” But in response to what she was learning, she made a promise to herself to work for prisoner education if she came out of her ordeal alive. At this I recalled how Amma had taught evening classes at the Central Jail in Jaipur. I was proud of my vivid recollection, at which Amma smiled and nodded. “It was one of my most fulfilling activities in Jaipur,” she commented. “My current position has left little room for that kind of personal fulfilment.”

Didi looked a little impatient at this digression. “Yes, yes—and then what happened to you?”

Amma smiled at us both, but, as she often did, she insisted on testing our patience further by embedding her life story within the larger frame of national and world events. She reminded us that when she was back in Mathura in 1932 and 1933, having been released from the Benares jail in August of 1932, Europe was still reeling from the impact of the First World War and the ongoing Great Depression, while the political situation was increasingly unstable. In Britain, Ramsay MacDonald’s second Labour government, elected in May 1929, had collapsed in August 1931, leaving MacDonald as the head of a coalition government in which the Conservatives held an overwhelming majority in Parliament.

In the meanwhile, the British stranglehold in India was steadily loosening, and British revenue from India was declining. The report of the Simon Commission, released in May 1930, had met with well-nigh universal condemnation in India, prompting MacDonald’s Labour government to convene a series of round-table conferences in London. Congress boycotted the first, which opened in November 1930, by which time the civil disobedience campaign was well underway. Gandhiji was in jail, and so was Nehru, who had been arrested in October. Gandhiji did attend the second round-table conference, which took place in the fall of 1931, but, like the first, it failed to produce significant progress on the question of India’s future constitution. In August 1932, MacDonald took unilateral action, announcing the Communal Award, which granted separate electorates in British India to the “forward” castes and to the so-called Depressed Classes, or Scheduled Castes, as well as to Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs, Indian Christians, Anglo-Indians, Europeans, women, and various other interest groups. Gandhiji was fiercely opposed to any such arrangement. As Amma explained, it was an approach calculated to exploit Indian’s ethnic and religious diversity in order to weaken the nationalist movement.

In this attempt to pander to minority interests, however, the British government underestimated Gandhiji’s determination to preserve unity among the biggest bloc of the Indian electorate, the Hindu community. Gandhiji had been unable to bridge the growing rift between the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League, which now clamoured for a separate country under the “two-nation theory.” This theory, first articulated by the poet-philosopher Muhammed Iqbal, had been translated into a political agenda by the barrister Muhammed Ali Jinnah. Now the Communal Award threated to drive a wedge between “caste” Hindus and those considered to be untouchables.

On 20 September 1932, while imprisoned indefinitely in Yervada jail without trial, Gandhiji began a “fast unto death” to awaken Indian society’s conscience to the cruelty of untouchability. The next day, millions of Indians fasted with him for twenty-four hours, as did Shanti and all her associates in Mathura. Gandhiji insisted on referring to untouchables as Harijans, or “people of God,” a term he borrowed from the fifteenth-century bhakti poet Narsinh Mehta, who had used it with reference to devadasis. As I learned many years later, the term had appeared at least a century earlier in a poem by the bhakti poetess Gangasati, in whose eyes a Harijan was one whose devotion to God remained steady in both joy and sorrow. “The great Mount Meru may be swayed,” she wrote, “but never the mind of the Harijan.”

Gandhiji was in his early sixties, and the fast swiftly took a toll on his health. So, just a few days later, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, the leader of the country’s untouchable population, met with Gandhiji and other Congress representatives in Yervada to negotiate an end to Gandhiji’s fast. Unlike Gandhiji, Ambedkar had supported the idea of a separate electorate for the Dalits—a term he preferred to Harijans. But, under the circumstances, he was prepared to agree to a compromise, which took the form of an agreement signed on 24 September. Under the terms of the Poona Pact, as it came to be called, the Hindu community remained as a single electorate, but a total of 148 seats in provincial legislatures were now reserved for the Dalits, more than twice the number specified in the Communal Award. After an overwhelming vote in favour of the pact at Congress Party meetings, Hindu temples were opened to untouchables all over the country. Gandhiji marked this transformation by replacing his political newsletter Young India with the weekly Harijan, which continued to set forth his ideas on non-violence and socioeconomic issues.

Despite criticism from some Congress Party leaders that Gandhiji had abandoned the cause of political freedom in favour of social concerns, the civil disobedience movement continued unabated, and so did British opposition to it. In November 1932, Congress boycotted the third of the round-table conferences organized by the British government to negotiate political reform. In January 1933, nationalist activists around the country were rounded up and imprisoned in a sweep that raised the number of people taken political prisoner to 120,000 in fifteen months. The number of women prisoners still held steady at a little under a quarter of the total. Worried about the influence of communism, the British authorities also imprisoned several trade unionists, including three Englishmen, for organizing an Indian Railway strike that the court deemed treasonous.

Shanti was expecting to be arrested yet again, but she still attended a Congress Party meeting in Mathura, where she led the public pledge of independence. The next morning, a band of policemen arrived to arrest her. She was sentenced to six months of hard labour, for which she was much better prepared than before. Our hard-working Amma even commented that this jail term felt like a respite from the punishing schedule of processions, public meetings, and picketing, and from constantly having to witness the regular beatings and abuse of women and children by the police. In prison Shanti joined many women activists who were familiar to her, and they all helped keep each other’s spirits up through singing, writing, and reading.

Just before Shanti’s six-month term—her third—was to end, Gandhiji suspended civil disobedience in May 1933 for three months. He requested the British government to repeal the draconian ordinances that allowed the police infinite power, and he advocated for the release of political prisoners. He instructed Congress Party workers to continue with individual acts of civil disobedience if they could. He also started a six-week fast to consolidate the gains that had been made on the issue of untouchability. Initially, British authorities ignored Gandhiji’s requests, but three weeks into the fast, when his physical condition started to deteriorate, they released him from jail, along with a large number of political prisoners who were close to the end of their terms, including Shanti.

Shanti emerged from prison into a stifling atmosphere of repression and brutality on the subcontinent. Every day the newspapers carried stories of hundreds of young students being thrown out of colleges and universities for their involvement in or sympathy with the nationalist cause. Every day the newspapers carried stories of Indian government officials resigning in protest against a police state that ruled with iron-tipped lathis and bayonets. Meanwhile, Gandhiji had given over his leadership of the national movement to Jawaharlal Nehru in order to spend more of his time on what he identified as the most crucial social issue of the day, untouchability.

There were other, more personal reasons, as well, for Shanti’s heightened sense of repression at the time her third jail term ended. Now that she was fifteen years of age, instead of seeing her as a young girl with a divine spark, people around her made her feel like an oddity that needed to be tamed. She was constantly reminded by well-meaning benefactors and near-strangers alike that a woman her age was expected to be married already and bearing children. Still, Shanti tried to continue with her usual routine of activism along with her daily practice of reading and writing. Inspired by Gandhiji’s call to end untouchability, she attached herself to volunteer groups to work for its eradication through education. But her unmarried status was now throwing up obstacles for which she was unprepared.

Didi raised an eyebrow. “How could it be harder after all that time? Wasn’t it more difficult as a child?”

Amma looked toward the escaping landscape, but her gaze was turned inward. To the train window she explained that the child who ran away from home to join a group of principled revolutionaries was lucky to be protected and supported by a wide network of patriotic men and women who believed her courage to be divine benediction. The young woman emerging from prison journeys was alone in a man’s world, considered an empty vessel to be filled by someone else’s identity—nothing more than a prize, or a property. She turned some pages of the diary as though looking for something, and then she closed the book to face us squarely.

“Remember, not everyone was fighting for the freedom of the country,” she said, her tone rather acid. For every political activist, there were thousands of people who watched from the sidelines. There were also many who supported the British regime, driven by ancient rivalries of religion and region or, sometimes, by plain old self-interest. When Shanti started volunteering as a Congress Party worker, she came across as many crass opportunists as she did genuine nationalists. “The lesson of my life,” Amma told us, “was not to trust anyone blindly, not even the demigods of the nationalist movement.”

Shanti decided to use the lull in the nationalist movement to earn a high school equivalency certificate offered through Prayag Mahila Vidyapeeth, an educational institution for women, based in Allahabad, that allowed students to study via correspondence. Early in 1934, just a few months after she passed the qualifying exam, a massive earthquake shook Nepal and Eastern India. More than twelve thousand people died in Nepal and Bihar along the foothills of the Himalayas and the northern rim of the Indo-Gangetic plains. Because Agra was on the outside edge of this rim, it was one of the centres collecting donations to be sent on to the worst-hit towns and villages in the region. So Shanti went to Agra to help with the coordination of volunteers and donations. It was during this period that she had to use her Gurkha knife to defend herself from the lecherous soldier.

Following that incident most of her colleagues celebrated Shanti’s courage in fighting back, but one sanctimonious local leader of the Congress Party rudely reminded her of the limits of womanhood. He denounced the moral “character” of women who remained outside the folds of family and marriage, an attack that left Shanti more shaken than she had been by the physical assault.

Martial arts training had not prepared her to immobilize wagging tongues, but it had trained her to face her aggressors. She confronted this well-known middle-aged man and asked him to apologize to her and to womankind in general for his malicious and contemptible views on the “nature” of women. Emboldened by the silence of their senior colleagues, he refused to talk to her any further. Shanti was hurt deeply, as much by the silence of other men whom she respected and had trusted with her life as by the words of the obnoxious man who had first insulted her.

Once back in Mathura, she met with influential Congress Party leaders to complain about the incident. Their deafening silence made her realize the limits of their views on freedom, which did not necessarily extend to the freedom of ordinary women. She decided then to contact the highest authority in the organization and wrote a detailed letter to Jawaharlal Nehru. She received a response four days letter, written by Nehruji, expressing his dismay that a fellow Congress Party leader had insulted women workers. He promised to look into the matter as soon as he could, since he believed that such scandals discredited the nationalist movement and the Indian National Congress.

Shanti waited for a week before sending Nehruji a reminder that she was still waiting for a written apology from the offending Congress leader from Agra. Nehruji’s next letter stated that he had spoken to the man, who had accepted his fault in the matter and promised not to talk to any worker sister again in such a rude manner. He suggested that Shanti should forgive the man and consider the matter resolved. The callousness with which everyone handled the matter wounded Shanti profoundly.

I felt for young Shanti’s wounded pride and shattered trust, but I was not altogether surprised at the meanness of her colleagues. As young as Didi and I were, we were very aware that our lives were filled with quiet, unseen women, dominated by husbands, fathers, and brothers. Some of these men chose to be kind and generous, but none were required not to be selfish or cruel. We knew that our Amma was the anomaly: public speaker, working mother, government official, activist for various causes, talking to men as an equal—even standing up to big boisterous Babu. But the discomfort of many men when they met Amma for the first time was not lost on us. Often they did not know how to address her or how to meet her penetrating gaze. They bowed too low and spoke too little, or they looked right over her head and ignored her, which—despite her diminutive stature—was not all that easy to do.

Shanti was worried that the dismissive reaction of Congress leaders to the public quarrel in Agra would encourage other men in the organization to treat her differently. Her concern was confirmed when she was volunteering for the provincial elections held at the end of that year, which marked the first time that Indian women would be able to vote in significant numbers. Shanti was too young to vote, but she was well-known enough to influence people in their voting. Despite her public stature, however, during one campaign meeting another activist in Mathura tried to put her in her place “as a woman.”

The only counsel her benefactors could offer in response to such insults was to suggest that she either marry or seek sanctuary in a community of nuns. The thought of our Amma as a compliant disciple in some religious order made me giggle—our Amma, who refused to enter any of the innumerable temples that stood in every city and village we had ever been to, the one who reminded us that god lives within all living beings and not in a building (“Why else do we close our eyes in prayer?”), who told us to revere the sculptors who created the statues and the carvings on temple walls, the one who participated in a hunger strike to end the practice of animal sacrifice at the Amber Devi temple in Jaipur.

At my giggling, Amma smiled through her sourness.

“Is that why you married Babu?” Didi asked.

“No, this was a few years before I met him.” Instead, she told us, she had decided to take a break from political activism and focus on her education. She went back to Manoramadevi, who convinced her that education was the first requirement of mental, social, and financial freedom. With the help of her benefactors in Mathura, she retreated temporarily from public life and started preparing for teaching-certificate exams.

Misfortune struck when Manoramadevi passed away quite unexpectedly. Now mentorless and alone, Shanti wanted to honour the memory of Manoramadevi by not giving up the fight for justice and equality. So she decided to follow the example of the nation’s moral beacon, Mahatma Gandhi.

In 1930, Gandhiji had abandoned his home of more than twelve years at the Sabarmati Ashram in order to lead the Salt March, vowing not to return there until the country was independent. In 1936, he established new headquarters in a humble shack in a small village near Wardha, in the heart of central India, surrounded by farms and forests: this was Sevagram Ashram, the place to serve. Here Gandhiji maintained a rigorous routine of selfless service, wrote regularly on social issues, and held meetings with national leaders.

Amma’s voice softened as her eyes caressed the diary pages that contained the accounts of her Wardha days. “I do not have words to describe the feeling of being in the presence of the Mahatma,” she said, almost reverentially.

“The first time I ever saw Gandhiji was in 1934. He was fanning me with a palm-leaf fan as Mirabehn sprinkled water on my face.” She smiled at the memory. “I had fainted and then had nearly been trampled by the throngs of people at the Mathura railway station, all trying to get a glimpse of the Mahatma. When I came to, I found myself in a train compartment, and I heard Gandhiji’s voice asking, ‘How are you feeling now?’ I jumped to my feet and declared that I was fine. Gandhiji held me by the arm and took me to the door of the compartment, where he chastised the crowds for not caring for the life of a young girl in their eagerness to see him. Then, instead of addressing them further, he simply returned to his seat.”

That brief encounter, she said, cemented her resolve to fight not only against colonial rule but against oppression of any and all kinds. Two years later, she was living at Wardha, not far from the village of Sevagram, where Gandhiji had recently set up new headquarters. Everyone there called him simply Bapu, “Father.”

Amma went on to praise the generosity of Jamnalalji Bajaj, to whom she had first written and who had kindly offered her a place at the Mahila Ashram. She also fondly remembered the support she received from the chairman of Wardha’s municipal council, Kanhaiyalalji Bhaiya, and his wife, the writer Satyawati Devi. However, it soon became clear that the training courses at the Mahila Ashram were too rudimentary for Shanti. She wanted to work while studying further, but she wasn’t sure of her options.

Jamnalalji took her to meet Gandhiji for advice. “You are wrong to think that the exams and courses run by the British government are real education,” Bapu told her. She respectfully tried to explain that she could not work in the field of education without the right credentials and that she had worked very hard to gain her high school and other certifications while being in and out of jail. Nevertheless, Gandhiji disagreed that educational credentials were the best markers of a person’s suitability for any task, and he dismissed the need for her to write any further exams.

Shanti then sought refuge with another revolutionary brother’s family in nearby Nagpur, in order to ponder her disagreement with the Mahatma—and to write the teacher’s training certificate exam. Only after having written it a few months later did she return to Wardha.

Jamnalalji, at least, was impressed with the young woman’s resolve to educate herself and others. Yet the elders of Sevagram were convinced that Shanti’s anchorless past could not be a foundation for an acceptable future. The fiercely independent young girl who pushed all existing boundaries had to make way for a more compliant young woman, one who was prepared to work within the frame of her new community. So Jamnalalji decided to take her on as a project and anointed her “Prakashwati”—one who spreads light. With this new identity, on 26 September 1936, at the age of eighteen, she was appointed headmistress of Kasturba Kanya Paathshala, a primary school for girls not far from the edge of Sevagram.

Finally she was safe under the watchful mentorship of Jamnalalji, loved by her adoptive family of activists, students, and residents of Sevagram and Wardha, fulfilled by the joy of teaching young girls, and humbled by learning from the Mahatma himself.

“At the end of each long day, I hugged the cool mud floor of my straw hut in the Mahila Ashram. I was finally home.”

But her sense of happiness and fulfilment was not enough, not even for her well-wishers. Every day she ignored stares, fielded questions, and deflected unsolicited advice related to her marital status.

Soon, the country was ready for its first provincial elections under the new Government of India Act, passed in 1935, which promised autonomy to provincial administrations while firmly keeping the purse strings in British hands. Despite her transition into a new life, Prakashwati received repeated requests to join the Congress campaigns in central and northern India. Eventually, on Jamnalalji’s orders, she went back to Mathura to help with the election campaign, but she could not stay away from her idyllic sanctuary in Sevagram for more than a fortnight.

An interim Congress government came to power in eight of the eleven provinces in early 1937. Many people considered this to be the beginning of self-rule on the subcontinent, but many others were suspicious of the powers granted to the British-appointed governors of the provinces. This was history that Didi and I already knew well. But we kept listening when, after checking some dates in her diary, Amma began to read directly from the transcript of a conversation she had recorded all those years ago.

“Nearly a year after my brief trip to Mathura, I was summoned by Haribhau Upadhyay, one of my many benefactors in Wardha. After failing to convince me to get married and start a family, he wanted me to seek counsel from the Mahatma himself. Haribhauji introduced me to Bapu as I bent down to touch his feet. ‘This is Prakashwati,’ he said. Gandhiji patted my head with a smile. ‘Yes, she does indeed spread light.’

“Haribhauji explained my resistance to marriage and asked the great soul to guide me. ‘Bapu,’ I said, summoning up all my courage, ‘I have decided to spend my life serving the country and the community. I believe that it is difficult to manage the burdens of marital life with the demands of my chosen path.’

“Gandhiji smiled. ‘So you are scared of following a difficult path then?’ When I shook my head vigorously, he continued more seriously: ‘With the right partner, married life can be simple and pure. It can become the means to serve the nation and mankind.’

“I was astonished. ‘But Bapu, a celibate has no shackles! There are many young women in the freedom movement who have adopted this path so that they can dedicate their lives to working for the good of their country.’

“‘You are confusing true celibates with women who avoid marriage to elude responsibilities,’ he replied. ‘If you do not want responsibilities, you can remain unmarried. But, for a woman, true chastity is not found in celibacy. Brahmacharya is a serious vow that should not be used as an excuse to avoid the responsibilities of marriage.’

“I tried to convince him of my intentions. ‘Bapu, I need your guidance to serve the greater good in my own small way. My life is not my own. I find no truer purpose than serving others. I am willing to spend the rest of my life at the Mahila Ashram teaching children.’

“But Bapu remained unmoved. ‘You may succeed in fooling yourself, and society may be fooled as well. But you do not need my permission to fool yourself. A true celibate is one in many millions. My advice to you is that you find a suitable partner and practice self-restraint, living a simple and chaste life together. Chastity is not mere abstinence. It is the willingness to do one’s duty while sacrificing the temptations of pleasure.’

“It went on in this vein for some time. I was distraught. I had failed to convince Gandhiji that I could remain unmarried, dedicating myself to working with and serving others. I had stood proudly by my principles in front of the whole world, but now the greatest man I knew was telling me that a woman could not choose the path of celibacy—that she could be chaste only within the boundaries of marriage. My heart and mind did not agree with him, but I did not have the right words to convince this master of political negotiations.

“I tried arguing with him on one other occasion but faced the same unbending opinion about marriage being the only option for a chaste woman. I did not even protest when he delegated the task of finding a suitable match for me to Dr. Rajendra Prasadji and Jamnalalji. When everyone else had spoken, what did it matter what I wanted?”

The instant Amma stopped reading, Didi jumped in with a question. “So is that when you met Babu?”

Amma closed the diary with a sigh. “No, not right away.” She was able to resist the sporadic matchmaking efforts of her mentors for four whole years. Thankfully, marrying off the stubborn young headmistress of a small primary school in Wardha was not the foremost priority for the architects of an independent nation. These men had more important concerns to occupy them—except for one, who took a personal interest in the matter.

With a note of bemusement that perhaps betrayed her fondness for the memory, Amma mentioned the ardent admiration of Pandit Parmanand of Jhansi, a revolutionary who spent a total of nearly three decades in jail and whom she met in Sevagram during one of his rare spells of freedom, not long before the Second World War began. He respected her desire to serve the greater good but insisted that she would need a husband to protect her and could not possibly find anyone better than him. Amma admitted to us that, in response to repeated invitations, she had journeyed all the way to Kanpur to meet with him, but she claimed she had done so only to suggest that, if he wished to protect her, he could adopt her as a daughter, given that he was nearly twenty-five years older than she was. He was back in jail soon after their meeting, but letters from Parmanandji trying to persuade Amma to change her mind about marriage continued to trickle in for some time.

Amma went on to explain that she met Babu during the Second World War. When the war broke out, Lord Linlithgow, the viceroy of India, unilaterally declared that the country was at war with Germany. Recognizing that Britain needed the support of Indian troops, many nationalists, Hindu and Muslim, saw the war as an opportunity to press for independence, although others felt that India should join the fight against Hitler. As the war escalated, Gandhiji resisted calls to relaunch mass civil disobedience, declaring that he would not seek India’s independence out of the ashes of Britain.

One of the fiercest opponents of support for Britain, Amma told us, was Subhash Chandra Bose, known to many as Netaji, “Respected Leader.” In 1939, Bose had been elected president of the Congress Party, but he openly advocated the use of force against Britain, a position that put him at odds with Gandhiji. As a result, he was effectively ousted from Congress and formed his own radical faction, the All India Forward Bloc. When the war began, the British placed him under house arrest, but, in January 1941, Netaji escaped and travelled to Germany, where he solicited Nazi support for the cause of Indian independence. Amid swirling rumours of Netaji’s secret meetings with Hitler and other Axis powers to launch guerilla warfare, a mysterious man arrived at Gandhiji’s ashram.

Amma described how everything about this man was enormous—his muscular body, his booming voice, and, above all, the stories circulating about him. She heard that he was from Bhagalpur and used to edit Dr. Rajendra Prasadji’s newsletters in Patna before joining the revolutionary wing of the freedom movement. One story said that he worked in a secret outfit that provided intelligence to Netaji. Another story said that he had deserted Netaji after his overtures to Nazi Germany. Yet another story maintained that he had returned to Dr. Prasadji because a bomb he had planted to damage government property killed a person, causing him to question his chosen path to freedom.

Amma paused. Clearly, she was talking about Babu, and she seemed momentarily flustered, as if suddenly presented with emotions that she had long ago mislaid. I did not want her to stop peeling away these layers of her past, but I waited with her, hoping she would continue.

And, almost blushing, she did. At Wardha, she said, Babu had worked at the Rashtrabhasha Prachar Samiti, the institute for the promotion of Hindi as the national language. When he was not writing at his desk at the institute or reading in his small room in the Harijan hostel, he would walk through patches of emerald-green rice fields into the dense forest of teak trees that stretched toward the Dham River, to practice yoga and meditation for hours on end.

“How did you know his routine?” I asked, ever curious.

Amma’s sideways glance was accompanied by an obliging smile. “Our paths crossed a few times.” He was a recluse who did his best to avoid social contact. But it was not easy to ignore his silent, formidable presence in prayer meetings, the only daily ritual he deigned to participate in at the ashram. The ashram was abuzz with rumours about this disenchanted revolutionary, about his evening swims in the Wardha River, his hour-long headstands in the teak forest, and his prowess in stick fighting, which he periodically taught to the boys at the hostel. But since he was clearly not interested in joining the close-knit community at the ashram, Amma—as she claimed—ignored him.

A few weeks after his arrival, as the carnage of the Second World War filled the news, Amma was summoned by Dr. Rajendra Prasadji to his cottage. His wife, Rajvanshi Devi, sat her down with her usual affection. Prakashwati had immersed herself in the ashram and school routines, away from the political milieu that seemed to have no place for her, but she was not aloof from the simmering anger and the dread all around. She wondered if Rajendra babu wanted her to get more involved in the public arena again.

“I was surprised, and honestly a bit disappointed, when he started a lecture on social norms instead.” He ended his speech with a suggestion that “to anchor your restless life and his” Prakashwati should join the new ashram inmate in holy matrimony.

Then I heard that rare, rollicking laughter. “All I could manage to say was, ‘Why would such a handsome man want to marry someone like me?’” Didi and I joined in the laughter, tickled by Amma’s rocking mirth, even if we were not quite sure what was amusing her so much.

The train was slowing down as it approached the next stop, on its unhurried way to Jaipur. I was grateful for the pause, which gave us time to savour the sweetness of our collective smiles. Typically, we would be counting the railway stations and talking about the historical significance of every settlement we crossed. But this train ride was all about an altogether different journey, through Amma’s life via her diaries.

As the train inched onward to pick up speed again, I wanted to take us back to that joyous flash of a moment ago. “So what did Rajendra Prasadji say in answer to your question, Amma?”

But the train had mysteriously left the station of joy. “Rajendra babu said, ‘Rajeshwar will do as I tell him to, because I have his best interest at heart. I hope you trust me enough to accept my suggestion too.’ I could not argue with that.”

Amma turned again to read from her diary, but her pace was halting. “Sinha saheb was waiting for me after the evening prayer meeting. We talked as we walked the short distance to my hut in the Mahila Ashram. He pointed to his short-cropped salt-and-pepper hair. ‘I am not a young man. Most of my life, I worshipped a god I no longer believe in. The only solace of my wasted life is the written word. I like to immerse my tortured mind and soul in others’ writing to stop trying to make sense of this world. I know nothing about marriage, but we have both received the same instruction. I need you to know that I am labeled a fugitive and a deserter by my long-time associates. My family thinks that I am an irresponsible wanderer, and I generally regard myself as a useless burden on this earth. I will do as I am told, but I need you to know that I cannot be the protective husband you might have in mind.’

“I was livid at his presumption of my expectations. I stopped in my tracks, looked up at his startled face, and told him, ‘I have survived raging rivers, fought off man-eating beasts, and defended myself from men as big as you. I do not need protection, much less marriage. It’s what everyone else thinks I need. Nobody cares what I want.’

“We locked stares until he closed his eyes and asked, ‘What do you want?’

“I was still angry. ‘All I want is to walk the path that gives me peace and purpose. All they care about is the stamp of respectability and chastity. If only marriage can provide that stamp, so be it.’

“Sinha saheb did not open his eyes, but through a half-smile he said, ‘Well, then, Prakash. That can be arranged.’”

Didi’s face bore a mix of emotions. “You two should have just lived your idealistic lives. Why bring children into this world?”

Amma tried to gulp away her wretchedness. “You may be right. I wish I had known then what I know now. But my life had not prepared me for a lot of things. I was naïve enough to believe that all I needed to prevail were well-grounded convictions and perseverance. After we got married, despite your father’s ever-present flight risk, I discovered that my desire to have a family to call my own had been rekindled, and I could not conquer it.”

Amma looked from Didi to me, imploring us to understand. “You two are like my two eyes. I could not have carried on without either of you.” I sprang from my perch on the berth to hug Amma, tears stinging my eyes. Didi’s eyes were moist too, but she remained glued to her spot. She pulled her sullen silence around her like a muggy blanket.

It was time to break the silence, and nearly time to end our journey. So I looked at Amma’s watch to see the time and pointed out that we had barely touched the snacks that Rani mami and Dadi ma had packed for us so lovingly in Mathura. Gingerly I opened one of the paper wrappings, stained slightly despite the many layers, to discover a most exquisite delight—a small pile of flaky-soft puris, kneaded with milk and spices, deep fried in ghee. We each helped ourselves, and then I leaned across Amma’s lap to look out the window. The fields that rushed toward the train were parched from the summer heat. The tall arjun, ashok, deodar, and saal trees of the United Provinces had given way to scraggy stunted acacias, khejari, palm trees, and thorny bushes. I inhaled the dry breeze, savouring its hint of fine sand. My excitement at going to Jaipur, the city of my birth, had been restored.

“Amma, why did you leave Wardha?” I wrapped a puri around a spoonful of the tantalizing shallow-fried potatoes, anticipating the flavours of cumin, coriander, chillies, and dried mango powder.

Amma’s sad eyes were riveted to her diary, but she was reading from an invisible book. Slowly, even reluctantly, she told us of her bereavement at Jamnalalji’s sudden passing, in February 1942, at Wardha. Six months later, following the declaration of the Quit India movement, Gandhiji was arrested, along with most other senior Congress leaders, and he remained in jail for nearly two years. Even after his release, he mostly lived in Delhi, and his absence made the ashram seem soulless. As Amma got busier with school and the infant Didi, Babu grew more restless. “When the news of Netaji’s death in an air crash arrived in August 1945,” she told us, “your Babu was more distraught than I had ever seen. It even brought us close, momentarily.”

Even though Amma was pregnant with me, Babu decided to move to Ajmer to take up the cause of a nationalist newspaper there, the Nayjyoti. Amma’s mentors found a job for her in nearby Jaipur, as principal of the Shri Veer Balika Vidyalaya, a private school for girls that, much like the one where she had taught when she was barely twelve, was operated by a wealthy merchant community, in this case the Jains. So she followed Babu to the western frontier of the country, with a toddler in her arms and a baby in her belly. Her new position came with a good salary, as well as accommodations in a large house, to which Babu made periodic visits.

After the end of the Second World War, the struggle for independence entered its final phase. A note of bitterness crept into Amma’s voice as she recalled Gandhiji’s ultimately futile efforts to prevent the country’s partition—a hope shattered forever in July 1947, when the British government passed the Indian Independence Act. Pakistan was created on 14 August 1947, and the following day India celebrated its own birth as an independent nation. But Gandhiji saw no cause for joy. He spent the day fasting, praying for an end to the frenzy of violence that was already gripping the newly born.

Four and a half months later, he was dead. Her voice sinking almost to a whisper, Amma remembered listening in horror as Nehruji’s voice floated out of the radio: “The light has gone out of our lives,” he began, “and there is darkness everywhere.” Amma read from the last few pages of one of her journals, sharing her personal anguish at the loss of her cherished ideal, her Bapu—killed by a madman, Nehruji had called him, who had robbed an infant nation of its father and source of inspiration. And yet, even in her grief, Amma knew that the bullets of the fanatical Hindu nationalist Nathuram Godse could not snuff out the light of Mahatma Gandhi, whose ideals would continue to guide her life and that of her many mourning comrades.

After independence, when it was no longer treason to read it, Babu lost interest in the Navjyoti newspaper. He did come to live in Jaipur for a while, where he found work with another newspaper, Rashtradoot. But his resignation letter was in his pocket, always.

“No draws of family or job were ever strong enough to tie Sinha saheb down.” Amma’s eyes searched our faces. No doubt she could see how much that reminder of our inability to make Babu stay with us had stung. “Of course, we also had the most wonderful neighbours, and the trusty Mangi bai.” Ah, yes.

“Amma, will we see Mangi bai and Bai ki ma? And my friends—Poorna, Anita, Pramila?” I was chirping again, and Amma’s eyes sparkled.

“Yes, indeed. You will see them and more.” She then asked cheerfully, “So who remembers the year Jaipur was founded?”

I raised my hand and spoke at the same time. “I know! The oldest fortification of Jaipur is more than a thousand years old, but the new city was built by Maharaja Jai Singh II in 1727.”

Amma looked to the unresponsive Didi, who was focused on her puri and potato combo, and tried another strategy. “Who can tell me about your earliest memory of Jaipur?”

At this, my mind was transported to a memory that I had not thought about for a long time. I was perhaps two and a half years old, and Didi just over six. In those days we used to accompany Amma to the refugee camps on the outskirts of the walled city. There were hundreds of women and children there, people with missing limbs and missing family members, women staring with vacant eyes who screamed hysterically at the movement of a shadow. Amma led a band of women, organizing those who were not too hurt or sick to cook, clean, and teach the many children in the camp. Everything was covered in a thick layer of firewood smoke and despair that pricked at the insides of our throats and eyes.

I had learned later that nearly fourteen million people had been uprooted for practicing the wrong religion on the wrong side of the border. Nearly one million had died in the bloodletting that accompanied the partition of the subcontinent after two hundred years of colonial rule. The violence of partition was vividly captured by a stark image on the cover of a magazine among Babu’s books that showed an angry goddess Kali stabbing herself, beneath which was the caption “India: Liberty and Death.”

I pushed this memory aside and found another one: Mangi bai sitting on the floor outside my room beside the stubs of her smoked-down beedis, eyes now closed in sleep. I had tried to steal past the snoring sentinel but somehow made a noise that startled her awake. Her knobbly knees knocking against each other, Mangi bai’s arms had flung out as if to hug the trunk of a giant tree, and then she spat out a stream of curse words. Then, terrified of Babu or Amma ever catching her smoking or swearing, she admonished me never to use the words that had come hurtling out of her mouth not a moment ago. I saved the details of the cursing and related to Amma and Didi how much the episode had made Mangi bai and me laugh.

Finally, Didi obliged us with her memory: the rectangular tins, decorated with colourful pictures of telephones, automobiles, or animals, that lined the highest shelf in Amma’s office and stored Amma’s favourite roasted and salted nuts. Amma used to take a handful of the hidden bounty and stuff it into our pockets before we would leave her office for class every morning.

By this time the uneven string of fields was starting to be replaced by signs of urban development. The expanse of arid, sandy terrain outside our window gave way to flat-roofed brick and stone houses, as Jaipur rushed toward us. As the train pulled into the station, Amma began anxiously to scan the crowd of people waiting on the railway platform. At last she spotted a tall figure. Without letting her eyes leave the towering form in the crowd, she spoke loudly so we would hear over the noise. “Sinha saheb has resigned from the college in Shillong. He promised to meet us in Jaipur.”

Babu! I was overjoyed. Didi and I immediately joined our faces with Amma’s to peer through the metal bars of the one window that separated us from the man who was now walking effortlessly alongside the train. When the train jerked to a halt, Babu placed one hand on the cold metal of the bars of the window and slipped his other hand through the bars into the compartment. Didi and I held onto it with all our might, fighting back our tears.