"Walk Alone"

Correspondents assigned to the East Bengal tour of Mohandas K. Gandhi have been holed up for the past fortnight in the remote Moslem village of Shrirampore. To get to the nearest telegraph office, they had to walk 30 miles. Even after this extraordinary effort, most of their dispatches missed the point: while deadlock and deterioration attended Hindu-Moslem relations at the London Conference, at New Delhi and elsewhere, Gandhi had turned his back on politics, was seeking a solution on another plane. A few weeks ago he was quietly advising on every move of the Congress Party. Now he was so uninterested that no one bothered him with details of the momentous London talks. To a correspondent he said:

"I find myself in the midst of exaggeration and falsity. I am unable to discover the truth. Truth and nonviolence, by which I swear and which have sustained me for 60 years, seem to fail to show the attributes I have ascribed to them. ... I see no light through the impenetrable darkness. I find that my theories of nonviolence do not answer in the matter of Hindu-Moslem relations. I have come here to discover a new technique."

How to Cross a Bridge. At Shrirampore, in a region called Noakhali, he settled down in a small, tin-roofed cottage in a dense tropical forest surrounded by ponds, coconut and betel palm groves and paddy fields. He dismissed his retinue of ipo people except for a stenographer and a teacher, who thought Gandhi at 77 not too old to learn Bengali. Often at Shrirampore Gandhi sang Rabindranath Tagore's Ekla Chalo (Walk Alone). Out one day for his afternoon walk, Gandhi tried to cross a bamboo-stick bridge, slipped and was saved from a splash by his teacher. Murmured Gandhi (who rarely misses a chance at homely symbolism): "Crossing bamboo bridges requires great skill. ... I shall try to acquire it by practicing."

To bridge the gap between Hindu and Moslem, the Mahatma each day visited at least one Moslem family to discuss the spiritual causes behind communal strife. More & more Moslems (including 20 special bodyguards) were attending his prayer meetings. All the doctors in the section were Hindus and had fled during the rioting; Gandhi, whose medical theories include sunbaths, hip baths, milk and fruit-juice diets was tending the Moslem sick.

Asked how long he would stay in this retirement, Gandhi said: "There is no limit. ... It may even be a lifetime. My object is to make Hindus and Moslems brothers and sisters. I can but make an attempt, success can be granted only by God. I shall do or die in Noakhali . . . even if all the Hindus go away, I shall be the solitary Hindu in Noakhali."

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