‘Meanwhile, brothers and sisters, let us get strong. The Congress men will have to swear again to speak truth, to spin their daily one hundred yards, and put aside the idea of the holy Brahmin and the untouchable Pariah. You know, brothers and sisters, we are here in a temple, and the temple is the temple of the One, and we are one with everything that is in the One, and who shall say he is at the head of the One and another at the foot? Brothers, and this too ye shall remember, whether Brahmin or bangle-seller, Pariah or priest, we are all one, one as the mustard seed in a sack of mustard seeds, equal in shape and hue and all. Brothers, we are yoked to the same plough, and we shall have to press firm the ploughhead and the earth will open out, and we shall sow the seeds of our hearts, and the crops will rise God-high. Brothers, that is the vision of the harvests that will rise, and we shall await, clean, with the heart as clean as the threshing floor, strong as the pivot of the pressing mill, and we shall offer our first rice and our first ragi to the Goddess Supreme. Pray, brothers, pray, for the Mahatma is on the last pilgrimage of his life, and the drums are beating and the horns are twirling, and the very sea, where he’s going to gather and shape and bring back his salt, seems to march forward to give him the waters of welcome. Let us be silent for a while and be united in the One.’
Seenu rang the gong, and the eyes shut themselves in silence, and the Brahmin heart and the Weaver heart and Pariah heart seemed to beat the one beat of Siva dancing.
Strength flowed from the wide heavens into the hearts of all men. And we sent our strength of heaven to the eighty-two pilgrim men of the Mahatma. And we too would start our pilgrimage soon, with Moorthy before us. ‘Prepare yourselves for action,’ said Moorthy, and Siva knows how, but we forgot the blowpipe and the child’s cradle and the letting-off of the morning cattle, and we would go out with him, Moorthy. What is in him, we ask, that binds our heart so? After all, we saw him as a child, sister. And yet. Moorthy told us of the pilgrim path of the Mahatma from day to day; for day after day the Congress committee sent him information, and day after day he received a white paper from the city, and day after day this boy and that young man came up with the Saturday carts or Tuesday carts, and now that there was a bus, sometimes as we sat kneading the vermicelli or cleaning the rice, we would see the tall khadi-clad Volunteers coming by the afternoon bus, and they went straight to Rangamma’s house, and they were shut up with Moorthy, and when they were gone, Moorthy would ask Seenu to ring the gong for the bhajan, and there he would tell us of the hundred and seventy patels that had resigned their jobs — a hundred and seventy, mind you — and of the thirty thousand men and women and children who had gathered at the roadside, pots and beds and all, to have the supreme vision of the Mahatma, and then Rangamma says, ‘Oh no, the Mahatma need not go as far as the sea. Like Harischandra before he finished his vow, the gods will come down and dissolve his vow, and the Britishers will leave India, and we shall be free, and we shall pay less taxes, and there will be no policemen.’ But Dorè, who hears this, laughs and says, ‘This is all Ramayana and Mahabharata; such things never happen in our times,’ at which Pariah Rachanna gets angry and says, ‘It is not for nothing the Mahatma is a Mahatma, and he would not be Mahatma if the gods were not with him,’ and Doré says, ‘Maybe, maybe, Rachanna, I do not know,’ and we say, ‘In five days time he will be by the sea — in three days time he will be by the sea — poor Mahatma, he must be tired out with this walk. Why should he not take a horse carriage or a motor car?’ But Moorthy repeats, ‘No, no, sister, he will not take it. He says he likes our ancient ways, and like the ancients he will make the pilgrimage on foot,’ and our hearts gladdened, for no one ever goes like that to far Kashi, do they? And our Nanjamma says, ‘Oh, yes, when he arrives by the sea, something is surely going to happen,’ and everybody says, ‘Maybe, maybe.’
And when the Monday evening came, we knew it would be the morrow, it would be at five the next morning that the Mahatma would go out to the sea and manufacture salt and bring it home, and we could not sleep and we could not wake, and all the night we heard the sea conches cry like the announcing cry of the Belur conch that goes trailing its ‘om’ through the winkless night, and people wake and music plays, and with torch and hymn is it sought, and with torch and hymn is it brought from the river below to the temple above, and people lie many a night in fearful fervour for some pointing finger of the heavens — so did we lie all through that wakeful night, but no shadow ever flew across the stars, and no dreamer ever woke with a pointing dream. And when the morning was still on the other side of the dark we rose one by one, for we would bathe in the river like the Mahatma, at the very hour, at the very minute. Moorthy and Rangamma were at the river already, and just as the morning was colouring the hills of the Skeffington Coffee Estate, we all said — men, women, and boys, Seenu, Moorthy, Vasu, Nanju, Ramu, Subbu, Govinda—’Ganga, Jumna, Saraswathi,’ and rising up we dipped again and cried out, ‘Mahatma Gandhi ki jai!’ And Priest Rangappa, coming up, says, ‘Oh, you are all earlier than ever today, hmm?’ and we say, ‘Today the Mahatma manufactures salt with his own hands, Rangappa, and we dip with him,’ and he laughs and says, ‘Is that so?’, and we knew why he said this, for as everybody knew now, Bhatta had been writing to him, and Bhatta had asked him to gather the grains and the hay and the money, and we said, ‘Well, another one is lost for us!’
And when we had washed and beaten our clothes, we sat for our meditation and we walked back home, with something new within our hearts. And for the midday meal we gave our men paysam and chitranna as though it were Gauri’s festival, and the men were happy. Why would they not be? And in the evening there was bhajan.
And the next day the white papers told us the Mahatma had taken a handful of salt after his ablutions, and he had brought it home, and then everybody went to the sea to prepare salt, and cartloads and cartloads of it began to be brought back and distributed from house to house with music and clapping of hands. The police do not know what to do, and suddenly they fall on a cartload and the peasants say, ‘Take it! Take it!’ but the police say, ‘You have broken the law,’ and the men say, ‘But we have broken it long ago, and the Mahatma broke it first,’ but the police do not know what to answer, and they drag the men to prison, they drag them and spit on them and would have beaten them had not many and many a white man come to see the pilgrimage of the Mahatma. And so day after day men go out to the sea to make salt, and day after day men are beaten back and put into prison, and yet village after village sends its women and men, and village after village grows empty, for the call of the Mahatma had sung in their hearts, and they were for the Mahatma and not for the Government.
And we said to Moorthy, ‘And when shall we start to march like the Mahatma?’ and Moorthy says, ‘Why, as soon as I get the orders from the Karwar Congress committee,’ and we say, ‘But ask them to send it soon, for ten heads make a herd and one head a cow,’ and Moorthy says, ‘So it is, but I am a small man in the Congress, and I wait for the orders.’ Then Rangamma says, ‘If you want to fight, sisters, let us practise the drill more often, like the men,’ and we say, ‘Of course! Of course!’ and now we stand in Rangamma’s courtyard from the time the hands are washed till the time the cattle come home, and we stand straight and hold our hands against our breasts, and Rangamma says, ‘Now, imagine the policemen are beating you, and you shall not budge a finger’s length,’ and we close our eyes and we imagine Badè Khan after Badè Khan, short, bearded, lip-smacking, smoking, spitting, booted Badè Khan, and as we begin to imagine them, we see them rise and become bigger and bigger in the sunshine, and we feel the lathis bang on us, and the bangles break and the hair tear and the lips split, and we say, ‘Nay, nay,’ and we cannot bear it, and Dorè’s wife Sundri begins to cry out and she says she is frightened; but Ratna, who is by her, says, ‘Be strong, sister. When your husband beats you, you do not hit back, do you? You only grumble and weep. The policeman’s beating are the like!’ and we say, ‘So they are.’ And we begin to get more and more familiar with it. And we say that in a week, in ten days’ time, Moorthy will say, ‘March!’ and we shall march behind him, and we shall do this and we shall do that, and now when we meet Badè Khan our eyes seek his lathi and we find it is smaller than we had imagined, and his shoes have less nails, and his lips are less thick. Rangamma says, ‘Send out rays of harmony,’ and we send out rays of harmony, and we say, ‘No, it will not be so bad after all,’ and we say too, ‘And there is the Mahatma,’ and his eyes, benign like old Ramakrishnayya’s, look down on us with strength and affection. Nanjamma says, ‘No, sister, I do not imagine the Mahatma like a man or a god, but like the Sahyadri mountains, blue, high, wide, and the rock of the evening that catches the light of the setting sun,’ and I say to myself, ‘That’s what he is. High and yet seeable, firm and yet blue with dusk, and as the pilgrims march up the winding path, march through prickles and boulders, thickets and streams, so shall we march up to the top, we shall thump up and up to the top, and elephants may have left their traces, and the wildfire go blazing around us, and yet we shall know on the top is the temple, and that temple is bright and immense, and when the night is slept through, the gong will sound over the pilgrim lines for the dawn procession of the Mountain God’; and so from that day we said we shall call the Mahatma ‘The Mountain’, and we say we are the pilgrims of the Mountain, and whatever thunder may tear through the heavens or the monsoons pour over it, it is always the blue mountain at dusk.