Free Freedom at Midnight by Larry Collins, Dominique Lapierre

his labors. Every morning at a rigidly appointed hour, he gave himself a salt-and-water enema. A devout believer in nature cures, Gandhi was convinced that that was the way to flush the toxins from his bowels. For years, the final sign that a man had been accepted in his company came
    when the Mahatma himself offered to give him a salt-and-water enema.
    At sunup, Gandhi began to wander the village talking and praying incessantly with its inhabitants. Soon he developed a tactic to implement his drive to return peace and security to Noakhali. It was a typically Gandhian ploy. In each village he would search until he found a Hindu and a Moslem leader who responded to his appeal. Then he would persuade them to move in together under one roof. They would become the joint guarantors of the village's peace. If his fellow Moslems assailed the village's Hindus, the Moslem promised to undertake a fast to death. The Hindu made a similar pledge.
    But on those blood-spattered byways of Noakhali, Gandhi did not limit himself to trying to exorcise the hatred poisoning the villages through which he passed. Once he sensed that a village was beginning to understand his message of fraternal love, he broadened the dimension of his appeal. India, for Gandhi, was its lost and inaccessible villages like those hamlets along his route in Noakhali. He knew them better than any other man alive. He wanted his independent India built on the foundation of her reinvigorated villages, and he had his own ideas on how to reorder the patterns of their existence.
    The lessons "which I propose to give you during my tour are how you can keep the village water and yourselves clean," he would tell the villagers; "what use you can make of the earth, of which your bodies are made; how you can obtain the life force from the infinite sky over your heads; how you can reinforce your vital energy from the air which surrounds you; how you can make proper use of sunlight."
    The aging leader did not stop with words. Gandhi had a tenacious belief in the value of one concrete act. To the despair of many of his followers who thought a different set of priorities should order his time, Gandhi would devote the same meticulous care and attention to making a mudpack for a leper as preparing for an interview with a viceroy. So, in each village he would go with its inhabitants to their wells. Frequently he would help them find a better location for them. He would inspect their communal latrines, or if, as was most often the case, they didn't have any, he would teach them how to build one, often joining in the digging himself. Convinced that bad hygiene was
    the basic cause of India's terrible mortality rate, he had inveighed for years against such habits as public defecation, spitting and blowing out one's nostrils on the paths where most village poor walked barefoot.
    "If we Indians spat in unison," he once said, "we would form a puddle large enough to drown 300,000 Englishmen." Every time he saw a villager spitting or blowing his nose on a footpath, he would gently reprimand him. He went into homes to show people how to build a simple filter of charcoal and sand to help purify their drinking water. "The difference between what we do and what we could do," he constantly repeated, "would suffice to solve most of the world's problems."
    Every evening he held an open prayer meeting, inviting Moslems to join in, being careful to recite as part of each day's service verses from the Koran. Anyone could question him on anything at those meetings. One day a villager remonstrated with him for wasting his time in Noakhali when he should have been in New Delhi negotiating with Jinnah and the Moslem League.
    "A leader," Gandhi replied, "is only a reflection of the people he leads." The people had first to be led to make peace among themselves. Then, he said, "their desire to live together in peaceful neighborliness will be reflected by their leaders."
    When he felt that a village had begun to