Free Freedom at Midnight by Larry Collins, Dominique Lapierre Page B

of Gandhi's family had ever gone abroad before. Gandhi was solemnly pronounced an outcast from his shopkeeper caste, because to Hindu elders his voyage across the seas would leave him contaminated.
    Gandhi was wretchedly unhappy in London. He was so desperately shy that addressing a single word to a stranger was a painful ordeal; to produce a full sentence was agony. Physically, at nineteen he was a pathetic little creature in the sophisticated world of the Inns of Court. His cheap, badly cut Bombay clothes flopped over his undersized body like loose sails on a becalmed ship. Indeed, he was so small, so utterly unremarkable, that his fellow students sometimes took him for an errand boy.
    The lonely, miserable Gandhi decided that the only way out of his agony was to become an English gentleman. He threw away his Bombay clothes and bought a new wardrobe. It included a silk top hat, an evening suit, patent-leather boots, white gloves and even a silver-tipped walking stick. He bought hair lotion to plaster his unwilling black hair onto his skull. He spent hours in front of a mirror contemplating his appearance and learning to tie a tie. To win the social acceptance he longed for, he bought a violin, joined a dancing class, hired a French tutor and an elocution teacher.
    The results of that poignant little charade were as disastrous as his earlier encounter with goat's meat had been. The only sound he learned to coax from his violin was a dissonant wail. His feet refused to acknowledge three-quarter time, his tongue the French language, and no number of elocution lessons was going to free the spirit struggling to escape from under his crippling shyness. Even a visit to a brothel was a failure. Gandhi couldn't get past the parlor.
    He gave up his efforts to become an Englishman and went back to being himself. When finally he was called to the bar, Gandhi rushed back to India with undisguised relief.
    His homecoming was less than triumphant. For months, he hung around the Bombay courts looking for a case to plead. The young man whose voice would one day inspire 300 million Indians proved incapable of articulating the phrases necessary to impress a single Indian magistrate.
    That failure led to the first great turning point in Gandhi's life. His frustrated family sent him to South Africa to unravel the legal problems of a distant kinsman. His trip was to have lasted a few months; he stayed a quarter of a century. There, in that bleak and hostile land, Gandhi found the philosophical principles that transformed his life and Indian history.
    Nothing about the young Gandhi walking down a gangplank in Durban harbor in May 1893, however, indicated a vocation for asceticism or saintliness. The future prophet of poverty made his formal entry onto the soil of South Africa in a high white collar and the fashionable frock coat of a London Inner Temple barrister, his briefcase crammed with documents on the rich Indian businessman whose interests he had come to defend.
    Gandhi's real introduction to South Africa came a week after his arrival, on an overnight train ride from Durban to Pretoria. Four decades later Gandhi would still remember that trip as the most formative experience of his life. Halfway to Pretoria a white man stalked into his first-class compartment and ordered him into the baggage car. Gandhi, who held a first-class ticket, refused. At the next stop the white called a policeman, and Gandhi with his luggage was unceremoniously thrown off the train in the middle of the night.
    All alone, shivering in the cold because he was too shy
    to ask the stationmaster for the overcoat locked in his luggage, Gandhi passed the night huddled in the unlighted railroad station pondering his first brutal confrontation with racial prejudice. Like a medieval youth during the vigil of his knighthood, Gandhi sat in the darkened station praying to the God of the Gita for courage and guidance. When dawn finally broke on the little station of