Mahatma Gandhi’s Pen

by Vishwas R. Gaitonde

Table of Contents

Table of Contents
parts 1, 2, 3

conclusion

I stared at him in disbelief. “Your friend carried Gandhi’s pen on his visit to London and left it behind?”

“No, no. See, the whole thing was a ghastly mistake on my part. The pen did not belong to my friend. It’s mine. I acquired it at an auction and brought it to London for evaluation to crosscheck its authenticity. I must have picked it up with his stuff. I packed the bag in a tearing hurry at the Waldorf when you announced you were going to Bombay.”

“But you must have missed the pen almost immediately.” He knew how to get hold of me in London; he had both my residence and business telephone numbers. Something was awry.

“No, not at once. The pen evaluation was one of many items on my list. It’s only after I got the other business out of the way and looked for the pen I realized what must have happened. After I spoke to the manager and the housekeeping staff, it was too late to get hold of you. All I could do was to take the next available flight out; the situation demanded it. Thank God for First Class.”

“But you didn’t tell me any of this five minutes back when you picked up the package.” His story sounded phony.

“That wasn’t the time or the place. I’d have told you everything in London, after the evaluation, after it was all tied up.”

“Is the pen really Gandhi’s?”

The question might have sounded odd or strange, even irritating, but I really had to know.

“Oh yes, The evaluation is just for reassurance, a formality. Of course, Gandhi used more than one pen in his lifetime. He used this one for many years during his two decades in South Africa. He left it behind when he sailed to India. Some of his descendants still live in South Africa; I purchased the pen from them. Oh, I’m ready to kill somebody if it is lost.”

* * *

I found Mahatma Gandhi’s pen early the next morning when I was repacking my suitcase for our trip to our ancestral village. The pen had slithered under the cloth lining of the suitcase. When I felt the slender lump beneath the lining, how my heart thumped. When my hand closed over the pen, I held an ingot of gold.

I held the pen with reverence, I caressed it with love. Gandhi must have acquired the pen in the dying years of the nineteenth century when he came to South Africa at the age of twenty-three after qualifying as a barrister in London. As a writing instrument crafted in that era, the pen in of itself was a highly desirable collectible. As the pen Gandhi used in the years when he crystallized his political philosophy of truth-force and non-violence (satyagraha and ahimsa), it became a priceless object.

The pen I had regarded as hideous now became exquisite, yet I questioned Gandhi’s taste. I would have expected him, as a young London barrister, to use a slim black pen with a gold clip or something similarly elegant. This pen was so fat — and orange! Then I paused. The colors of India’s flag — saffron, white, and green — were chosen by Gandhi, and saffron denoted sacrifice, the sacrifices that the people of India made during the independence struggle. Saffron, kesar, an expensive condiment, was used in Indian cooking sparingly and only on special occasions. Saffron, denoting renunciation, was the color of the robes of swamis. Was Gandhi already thinking on those lines in the 1890s when he purchased an orange pen? Or was it just the fashionable model of the day?

Such a fat pen; a big, fat pen. But Gandhi was a prolific writer and no doubt wanted a pen that held a large reservoir of ink. A year after he arrived in South Africa, he dedicated himself to improving the plight of the Indian community, crushed under the muddy boots of their South African rulers. As an attorney, public worker, and leader of the Indians, for over a decade he penned petitions and memoranda, wrote letters to the press and worked to promote public understanding and support for the cause of the Indians in South Africa. How much of these communications flowed out of the pen I now held in my hand?

South African law required Indians to carry passes and restricted their movements between provinces. Marriages of Indians were annulled; a marriage was valid, the government declared, only if performed according to Christian rites. For nine years, Gandhi’s campaign of non-violent defiance went on, protesters repeatedly assaulted by the police, Gandhi routinely jailed. At long last, the South African leader, General Jan Christian Smuts, summoned Gandhi for talks. I pictured the scene: the apostle of non-violence and the hardened warrior, sparrow and hawk, facing each other across a polished mahogany table. Through the Smuts-Gandhi Agreement, the government conceded to all of Gandhi’s demands. Did Gandhi sign it with this pen?

Gandhi then sailed to India to join its independence movement. His final letter to South African Indians assuring them he’d always champion their cause — perhaps written with this very pen — was signed, not “M.K. Gandhi” but “The Community’s Indentured Labourer.”

After luxuriating a few more moments in such wistful ruminations, I put down the pen. I had to inform D’Mello the pen had turned up, but I balked at this. The episode had left me unnerved. What if I kept the pen? I could tell D’Mello I never found it, and nobody would be the wiser. How wonderful to possess a relic so intimately associated with a man I deeply admired. I often wondered how the Indians in Uganda might have fared if Gandhi had led us. Many people thought that Big Daddy Amin would have finished Gandhi with a bullet or locked him away in one of his dungeons, never to be seen again. I did not concur; a smart man like Gandhi could devise ways around the machinations of the Butcher of Kampala.

When we started our little eatery, my wife chose the name “Taj Mahal.” I banged the table with my fist — every second Indian eatery in London was called Taj Mahal. My wife said this was just about the only Indian name Westerners related to. But I prevailed, and we called our business “The Mahatma’s Delights.” My wife later became upset at having given in to me when many of our customers, well wishers, ill wishers, historians and critics all, pointed out Gandhi was a vegetarian and so the many meat dishes we served hardly qualified as the Mahatma’s delights. But by now people knew our name and so we did not change it. Nor did we discontinue the meat dishes; our most regular customers craved them.

I played with the pen, removed the cap and stared at the nib, its tip slightly splayed out with so much writing. I held the pen gingerly in my hand and scrawled an imitation of Gandhi’s signature on a piece of paper. I kept going until I completed an imaginary “M.K.Gandhi.” Then I stared in disbelief. The pen had drawn a blue line. Sacrilege! That filthy D’Mello. What audacity to fill this sacred relic with ink! Now Gandhi’s signature appeared on the paper. I would make a good forger; my handiwork bore a close resemblance to the original, though the flow of ink was choppy. But a hundred-year old pen couldn’t be expected to write smoothly.

Gandhi’s pen. Should I keep it? How could I display the pen without having to explain how I came by it? Keeping it would be only for the joy of possession. After wrestling with my conscience for many wrenching and dismal minutes, I did the honorable thing. I phoned D’Mello.

“D’Mello Sahib is not available. He has appointments from morning to night.”

“Well, D’Mello Sahib visited me yesterday to collect an item I brought from London.” I cut in quickly before the secretary could hang up. I did not disclose it was Gandhi’s pen to this curt man. He might well be a servant in the house where D’Mello resided, not a secretary. “I’m leaving town tonight and wanted to let D’Mello Sahib know that the pen — the misplaced item — has been found.”

D’Mello, the man who had appointments from morning to night, called back within eleven minutes, his voice as shrill as an excited schoolboy’s. “You found Gandhi’s pen! Great. This is great! Come over to my place right now. Take a taxi, I’ll pay for it. I’m in meetings, but I can slip out and collect the pen. Don’t leave it with anyone, hand it directly to me. That’s really important.”

So I found myself in a taxi heading to the address D’Mello had given me. We ended in Breach Candy, one of Bombay’s swanky residential districts.

A manservant in a starched white uniform opened the door of the penthouse apartment of a high-rise building. He cut short my explanation and asked me to wait in the living room; I was clearly expected. I sank into the expensively uncomfortable sofa and tried to peer past the beautifully carved rosewood room divider. There was a stunning ocean view from the window; I all but smelt the salty breeze.

D’Mello hurried in a few minutes later, red in the face, his hair tousled, strands plastered across his forehead. He was breathing hard and sweating. A far cry from his London parties where he always wore the prim, manicured look, not a hair out of place on his head.

“The pen, friend!”

He grabbed the pen, dashed into another room and came out with a towel. He spread the towel on a table, unscrewed the pen’s nib and shook the barrel. A splash of ink formed a blue smudge on the towel and then pebbles tumbled out. D’Mello shot a triumphant look my way.

“Ugly, aren’t they? Especially when covered with ink. But after a good jeweler — and Bombay has the best — is done cutting and polishing them, I can tell you, you’ll be hard put to find better diamonds than these.” He smiled as he continued, “How fitting that they rode in Gandhi’s pen and, like him, started in South Africa and ended in India.”

I was in shock, numbed by the enormous risk that I had been subjected to. It was unlikely that the customs officers at Bombay airport would have spotted such carefully concealed goods, but what if they had? Pointing my finger at a tycoon like D’Mello, what good would that have been? They would have laughed at that accusation, coming from a refugee from Uganda who now struggled for a living in England, one who had succumbed to the lure of smuggling to regain his lost station in life. I could be languishing in a Bombay jail right now.

The South Africans had never been more correct than when they chose the nickname for Jimmy D’Mello. Not Hairy Ape, not Gorilla, but Aasvöel, Vulture. The vulture lets the others do the killing, the dirty work. It then gets to feast upon the flesh.