Читать книгу Daughter Of Midnight - The Child Bride of Gandhi - Arun Gandhi - Страница 17

For two more years Kasturbai waited. For two more years she lived apart from her husband, virtually incommunicado, her only knowledge of him coming from the businesslike letters he sent to his brothers, again only trickles of information filtered down to her through their wives. She was told that Mohandas had opened a law office in Durban. Soon after that she learned that he was regularly sending money to Lakshimidas, sums ample enough to pay off the debts incurred. She also gathered that he had made no mention of any plans to return to India, issued no call for his wife and sons to join him in South Africa.

The months passed, the children took up more and more of Kasturbai’s time, but it was Mohandas who occupied her thoughts. He was so unpredictable, so impetuous, so open and trusting — too trusting, sometimes. Though she had complete faith in him and in God, she worried about how he was living, who his companions were, who was caring for him, who was protecting him from further disappointments in that distant land. Then she heard (not without a pang) that in order to live in a style considered suitable for a successful barrister, Mohandas had moved out of his cramped bachelor quarters and taken a large, well-furnished house in one of the more elegant sections of the city of Durban. Since there was no one but himself to live in it, Mohandas wrote, he had hired a cook and invited several of the clerks who worked for him in his office to move in with him. Knowing his penchant for noble deeds, Kasturbai was not surprised at this, but she reflected, somewhat ruefully, that while she was the one who secretly longed to have a house of her own, it was Mohandas who kept setting up homes for himself — first in Bhavangar, then in London, next in Bombay, and now in South Africa. He seemed always to be creating his own life, and she was beginning to wonder if she would ever become a permanent part of it.

My grandmother must have sensed, once again, that her husband was changing, becoming a new kind of person. But the degree to which he was being transformed was in no way revealed in the second-hand reports she was receiving.

Perhaps my grandfather himself did not understand, could not convey, the significance of what was happening to him during those early years in South Africa. It is only in retrospect, I believe, that we can see that this was when and where the transformation began.

Day by day and step by step, the future Mahatma was discovering truths, inventing strategies, setting patterns, which would guide his own future actions, and inspire future generations of human rights crusaders. The wordless orator, the failed advocate, the self-doubting young barrister who had fled in shame from a Bombay courtroom had vanished. In Durban during these years, another Mohandas was emerging. A Mohandas who was a tireless foe of oppression, and a resourceful servant of the people. He was becoming a sometimes cajoling, sometimes commanding leader of men.

Improvising as he went, he took others with him. His refusal to accept fees for public service (his established rule for all public work thereafter) was announced quite casually on the day he agreed to stay in South Africa and lead the franchise campaign. To ease his way, a number of Durban’s Indian businessmen immediately offered Mohandas generous retainers for legal advice and counsel.

His law practice was soon so remunerative he could pay for his own household expenses in Durban, support his family in Rajkot, and have a surplus left over to spend on his public service endeavours.

This assumption of decency on the part of his adversaries, this belief that they could be reached by appeals to mortality, would become another abiding precept of Gandhian philosophy. Meanwhile, the Gandhi name became synonymous with calls for reform. In the summer of 1894, he organised an association he called the Natal Indian Congress and became its first executive secretary.

Although Mohandas’ attention seemed centred on political activities and social causes, his preoccupation throughout this period was religion. “I had gone to South Africa for travel, for escape from intrigues, for my own livelihood,” he wrote in his autobiography. “But I found myself in search of God …” He asked friends in India to send him books about Hinduism and Buddhism. He studied the Theosophical Society’s English translation of the classic Hindu Upanishads. He learned more about Zoroastrianism in a book called The Sayings of Zarathustra. He read Washington Irving’s biography of the Prophet Mohammed. And he began to glimpse what he later called “the infinite possibilities of universal love.”

Mohandas announced to friends and co-workers that he was taking a six-month leave, beginning in June of 1896. He wanted to travel to India to publicise their cause, he explained; he wanted to make the Indian people aware of the problems their brethren faced in South Africa, and ask Indian leaders to back the campaign for reforms. And — oh, yes — while he was in India, he would also collect his wife and sons and bring them back to live with him in Beach Grove Villa.

Living apart from her husband had been difficult, but living with him was more confusing. Kasturbai reached this conclusion within days after Mohandas arrived in Rajkot in the summer of 1896, ending an absence of more than three years. Not that his homecoming was not sweet, nor that their time together (when they had any time together) was less than blissful.

But her happiness had to be contained, smothered. A wife did not show such emotions in public, not even in her own family, not even before her own children. To express her joy, she cooked all of Mohandas’ favourite foods, but she couldn’t come out of the kitchen to serve him the dishes she so lovingly prepared, let alone sit and eat with him. The honour of serving food to the men of the house was for her eldest sister-in-law Nandkunwarben, who, since the death of Putliba, had been the acknowledged head of the Gandhi women’s household.

They had so much stored up to talk about — what had happened during the past three years to their sons, to the family, to their friends, and to them. Mohandas told her about South Africa and spoke of his plans to take her there. She wasn’t sure at first whether she was excited or frightened by this idea. Then he described the house he had waiting for her and she knew it was a dream in the making. Kasturbai always longed to hear more, but Mohandas was working so long and hard — writing, talking to people, answering the many letters that arrived from South Africa — that he often fell asleep in the midst of their nocturnal conversations. She never had the heart to wake him up just to ask more questions. She would lie there by his side, thinking about this man who was her husband.

She had known him in many guises — as a timid schoolboy, as a passionate and unbearably possessive young bridegroom, as an earnest but uninspired college student, as a bereaved son mourning the loss of beloved parents, as a muddled and lost young husband trying vainly to use his English education to support his family in an ancient Indian culture. But she had never seen him as he was now — a self-assured young lawyer whose advice was respected even by elders: a leader.

This South African experience had made him more thoughtful, more mature, more forceful, and — what was it? — more like himself. As if he were coming into his own. Everyone had noticed the changes in Mohandas, she was sure of that. Her brothers and sisters-in-law treated him with unaccustomed deference now. And Kasturbai could see that Mohandas accepted all this as his due. Or was it simply that he was thinking of his work, and he expected everyone to know and accept the fact that his work came first, before anything else?

Sometimes she felt unsettled, overwhelmed almost, by all these changes. This new kind of husband who had some consuming mission he could not ignore and she did not yet understand. The new respect everyone showed now that he was prosperous and successful, the new urgency of his demands upon himself — all this was puzzling.

And here, amidst it all, her unchanging self — trying to picture the new life waiting for her and her sons in South Africa, wondering what would happen to them in that strange land.

Mohandas had made the house in Rajkot his headquarters for conducting business at home and abroad, and his first order of business was writing, publishing, and distributing a pamphlet entitled The Grievances of the British Indians in South Africa. In this brief discourse, Mohandas detailed soberly and without exaggeration how colour prejudice affected the lives of Indians in South Africa, and discussed what could be done to combat it; he stated, in summary, his basic political tenet: “Our method in South Africa is to conquer this hatred by love.”

“You could ask the boys to help you with all this work,” she said. Kasturbai had been trying for days to devise some way for her sons to spend more time with their busy father. Here it was.

“Harilal’s handwriting is very neat now, and Manilal can help paste the stamps. I’m sure the other children would like to help, too.”

Mohandas thought it was a fine idea. Next day he not only enlisted his own sons and the other Gandhi children in the pamphlet-mailing project, but also asked all the schoolchildren in the neighbourhood to join in. Working together for several hours daily, these young volunteers finished the job in a few days. Ever the pragmatist, Mohandas rewarded them with used foreign postage stamps from his voluminous South African correspondence and, always the instructor, urged them to start stamp collections.

No sooner was the mailing dispatched than Mohandas’ energies were diverted to another community service. News came that bubonic plague had gripped Bombay. Precautions had to be taken in Rajkot.

Mohandas volunteered to work with a local sanitation committee which toured the city, inspecting the homes (and latrines) of rich and poor alike, pointing out disease-breeding conditions. Other committee members disdained to visit the dwellings of the Untouchables, writing them off as hopeless. Mohandas had no such qualms. My grandfather made careful note of this experience. In later years, whenever he embarked on a reformist mission, the first task he assigned to colleagues was to carry and clean buckets of nightsoil.

Bapu believed this was one way to break caste taboos — to emphasise that all honest work was worthy, no essential work was lowly. By this time, Mohandas’ pamphlet (known simply as the “Green Pamphlet” because of the colour of its cover), was drawing comment in newspapers and journals all over India.

Mohandas Gandhi’s words were making his countrymen aware of the previously ignored plight of Indians in South Africa, and his name was being read for the first time (and remembered) by the Indian public.

In September a reporter for Reuters, the British news agency, cabled a brief account of the Green Pamphlet and the stir it had caused, to the London office.

London then cabled a still briefer version to the Durban office, a three-line summary in which Mohandas was quoted (misquoted, actually) as saying Indians in Natal were “robbed, assaulted, and treated like beasts,” with no hope of redress. This distorted report, printed in the Natal Mercury caused an uproar in Durban, and would soon lead to repercussions for him and his family.

Kasturbai was uneasy, too, though trying not to show it. She, who had never travelled more than 100 miles beyond the borders of Porbandar and Rajkot, was now facing the immediate reality of crossing the sea in a ship and living thousands of miles away from home and relatives. Who could tell when or if she would ever see her parents and her brothers again?

She kept reminding herself that when the voyage was over she would have her own home with her own family living all together. She was pleased, too, that their nephew was going with them. At ten, Gokaldas was only a few months younger than her firstborn son would be, had he lived. She felt a pang, thinking of poor Raliatben whose husband had recently died.

Grandmother realised she would have to find a dress that would amalgamate western and eastern cultures. She opted for the dress worn by Parsi women: longer saris, long-sleeved blouses, socks and shoes.

Whites in South Africa regarded Parsis as the most civilised of Asians, so Mohandas had decided this costume would give his family the respectability he sought for them.

“What a heavy price one has to pay to be regarded as civilised.”

Such was my grandmother’s comment, years later, while reminiscing to friends about this period in her life. On board ship, Mohandas insisted that she and the children wear their new shoes and socks from the time they got up till the time they went to bed. This was something they never did in Rajkot, and they hated it. Their feet hurt and their socks got sweaty and smelly. To get his family used to wearing shoes, Mohandas had them spend hours each day walking on the ship’s deck. He walked with them, studying Kasturbai’s posture.

“Be straight, hold your head high,” he kept telling her. For several days she felt as if she would fall at every step.

But she plodded on for Mohandas’ sake, waiting for the night, when she could throw off her shoes and soothe her aching feet. Secretly she yearned for the freedom and peace of Rajkot.

There was none of this nonsense there. She could dress in normal fashion, and walk and sit on the floor as she pleased.

Mealtime was worse than walking — a nightmare for them all. In Rajkot, everyone sat on the floor, each with his own brass plate, when they had meals. But now Kasturbai and the boys had to sit at the table with their legs dangling. The china plates were small, and they were prohibited from using their fingers.

Mohandas watched over all of them like a hawk, endlessly chiding them for not holding the spoon or fork correctly and not using the knife as it should be used. “You must keep your mouth shut when you chew,” he would say.

For Kasturbai, struggling to get food to her mouth with strange implements, this last instruction was too much. Impossible! How could you eat with your mouth shut without making forbidden slurping noises. And the food was impossible, too. Unlike anything she made at home; it was tasteless.

Boiled vegetables and bread! This they had never even seen, let alone tasted. What Kasturbai wanted, above all else, was to cook a proper meal again, one they could eat in the way they enjoyed. She began counting the days until the end of the voyage.

But there came a time when she feared the voyage would never end. They were barely five days from Durban when a violent storm seized them at sea, one of the great summer monsoons common in December in the Southern hemisphere. Both ships were tossed about by gigantic waves. No one could stay on the gale-swept decks. Terrified passengers, most of who were on their first sea voyage, were sent below. Prayers of many religions were said. Almost everyone, including Kasturbai and the boys, soon became extremely ill as the ship’s pitching and rolling turned stomachs inside out. Apart from the ship’s crew, the only person on the Courland who remained unaffected by the turbulent weather was Mohandas. He got his family settled in their cabin, consoled them as best he could, then toured the ship, at the captain’s request, reassuring the other passengers.

Left alone with the whimpering children, Kasturbai tried to comfort them, but her own misery was too great. For what seemed like the longest 24 hours of her life, she lay in the cabin, waiting for the end to come. Each time the ship rolled on its side, she thought it was about to sink. She was convinced they would all drown in this dreadful sea; her only consolation was they would all die together. She vowed she would never set foot on a ship again, if by any chance, she came off this one alive.

At last, the skies cleared and the sun appeared. With fear of death gone and appetites returned, the passengers celebrated their survival. The Gandhis resumed their daily walks on deck. A few days later, on December 19, 1896, there was great excitement aboard both ships when the Courland and Nadir arrived at the port of Durban.

But the festive mood vanished when health authorities boarded the ships before they entered the harbour and declared that no one would be allowed to disembark. The vessels were to be held in quarantine for at least the next five days, because of the outbreak of plague earlier that year in Bombay.

The enforced confinement while the Courland lay at anchor just outside the harbour was nerve-wracking. Mohandas tried to divert the passengers. Games were organised to pass the time, and the Gandhi boys joined in. On Christmas day the Gandhi family was invited to join other cabin passengers and the ship’s officers. Speaking in English, Mohandas celebrated the fact that Christianity, like other great religions of the world, taught peace and nonviolence, but deplored the paradox that Western civilisation often seemed to be based on force. I’ve often wondered what it was like for a pious Hindu wife like Kasturbai to find herself publicly observing the most sacred day of an unfamiliar religion by listening to her husband make a speech to strangers in an unintelligible foreign tongue. Surely this was as bewildering and unsettling as anything that had happened thus far on her first sea voyage.

But there was more to come.

The day after Christmas the quarantine was extended. No explanations were given. But it was becoming clear that the true cause for the docking delay was not plague in Bombay, but an epidemic in Durban — an epidemic of indignation among the whites of Natal. From the offices of Dada Abdullah & Company, Mohandas got reports of what was happening in the city. News had spread that the author of the infamous Green Pamphlet published in India was coming to Durban bent on making trouble.

Garbled press reports had created the impression that Mohandas had condemned all Europeans for ill-treating the Indians. Now the rumour was that Mohandas had arrived in Natal, bringing with him two shiploads of unindentured Indians (more than 800 new immigrants, according to the latest exaggerations). It was said that he intended to swamp the country with these free Indians, these hordes of brown Asiatics fighting for equal rights. Government officials were disturbed. Even some of Mohandas’ white friends, among them his neighbour Harry Escombe, who was Natal’s Attorney General, had come to doubt his good intentions, or, at the very least, to see him as a threat to law, order, and tranquillity in South Africa. Public protest meetings were being held nightly, angry whites were castigating Mohandas and demanding his expulsion.

There was even talk of expelling all Indians from Natal. Most immediately, there were demands that the Courland and Nadir be turned back. There were hints that the government was prepared to pay Dada Abdullah & Company the full cost of returning the passengers to India. Some whites were reportedly offering the ticket refunds directly.

As these reports spread among passengers on the Courland, there was great consternation. Some were ready to go home to India. Others, with homes in South Africa, worried about being separated from their families. Mohandas sought to reassure them all, and sent messages of encouragement to passengers on the Nadir as well.

“Don’t be frightened by these threats,” he told them. “You have as much right to be in South Africa as the whites do.”

But it was harder to reassure Kasturbai. She was dismayed by the news they were receiving; indeed, she was petrified. So many people were so very angry. She couldn’t understand it. She feared for the children, for herself, but most of all for her husband. Kasturbai realised that the anger of the whites was directed mainly at Mohandas and she asked him why they were so agitated. What had he done?

“I’ve done nothing wrong,” Mohandas said. “The facts I reported are true. The demands I made are just — the same demands I have been making in Natal for two years. If only I could explain to them …”

“But they would not hear you — they are too angry,” she said. “How can you make angry people listen to explanations?”

Mohandas had been asking himself the same question.

“We must have faith in God to see us through this crisis.” That was his only answer, but it was answer enough for Kasturbai. So the crisis continued for another 2½ weeks. The S.S. Courland and S.S. Nadir lay at anchor just outside Durban harbour, becalmed by the Natal government’s gamble that passengers could be intimidated into returning to India; or, failing that, could be prevented from landing until public unrest in Durban subsided. With each succeeding day on board, tension mounted, hardships increased. Water and provisions ran low; fresh supplies were tardy in arriving.

Finally, on January 13, 1897, the waiting game was over. The government, its pretexts for delay exhausted, lifted the quarantine. Forty-four days out of Bombay (19 at sea and 25 quarantine) the Courland and Nadir were at last allowed to enter the harbour and dock in Durban.