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Spice of Life | Witnessing history from close quarters
The Mahatma passed away and grief and confusion erupted in the entire nation. It took Beeji countless hours to get back home. My grandfather was sick with worry. He had his orderlies searching for her in a city wracked by commotion.
On Mahatma Gandhi’s 77th death anniversary, an incident comes to mind. My grandmother, who we called Beeji, was in her mid-twenties, and India’s independence was not even a year old when she unwittingly became witness to one of the most important events of the 20th century. Beeji revered Gandhi and gave him a lot of credit for getting the nation independence.
It was January 30, 1948. The Mahatma, who had been fasting to stop the communal massacres that had erupted after Partition, was to attend a prayer meet in the garden of Birla House in Delhi. A throng of admiring crowd was waiting eagerly for him. My young grandmother and a couple of her friends being one of them. My grandfather was a civilian employee in the army and was residing in Paharganj at that time. That day, Beeji left home early enough so that she could be seated in the front row and have a clear view of Gandhi.
Around evening, a frail Gandhi was brought out through the garden towards the dais with the help of his grandnieces. It was then that he was shot three times. One of the shells landed next to my grandmother. She picked it up and held it in her hand. She said that she thought of taking it home and showing it to my grandfather but then fear crept in. What if someone saw her with the shell and thought she was a part of the assassination attempt. She flung the shell as far away as she could.
The Mahatma passed away and grief and confusion erupted in the entire nation. It took Beeji countless hours to get back home. My grandfather was sick with worry. He had his orderlies searching for her in a city wracked by commotion.
As a child, I would listen to her in fascination as she would recall the incident. However, as I got older, I would tell her that I wished she had kept the shell. I would tell her that the shell could have got us millions of dollars.
Years later, I went on to become a student of journalism. It was eye-opening to learn that the Mahatma was not as flawless as my grandmother led me to believe. In class, we discussed his book, My Experiments with Truth, and realised that he was just another human being with human failings.
However, history will remember him as the Mahatma who brought the British Empire to its knees through non-violence. He is and has been the inspiration for many other great men, such as Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama.
In Beeji’s last years, I decided to record her recounting the incident, with the hopes of preserving history as an eyewitness account to a momentous event. But alas, the thought came to me too late. She was losing her memory and could not remember much. I felt sad that we could not preserve the event on tape.
The writer is a California-based freelance contributor and can be reached at sonaksethi@gmail.com
