Free The Gandhian Adventures of Raj & Iqbal: A Novel by Zubin J. Shroff Page A

pao-bhaji, and onion bhajias. That is not enough to sustain a man in such times of national, international, and personal crisis. Then suddenly I got the sweet charming smell of Bombay-duck frying to perfection in spices and salt and sunflower oil. Even though I am not a big fan of Bombay-duck, in times of emergency, one must make do with what is served.
    But then I gathered myself once again and re-firmed my resolve. I told myself I would not fall victim to the charms of the slender Bombay-duck. I am a Gandhian, and the Gandhian must hold firm to his vows when times are tough. After all, did Bapuji not refuse milk even when he was near death due to dehydration and dysentery? Did the great Mahatma not refute temptation even when being washed by the women who served him?
    I thought of my wife and then immediately thought of food and my resolve wavered yet again and my legs trembled and I almost reached out for one of the succulent sweet-sweet tomatoes that beckoned to me like bulbous balls of temptation and sweetness.
    You dirty thing, I screamed at the tomato, how dare you look at me that way. I am a married man, you know.
    Now Bhatkoo and the attendants had moved closer to me, and this gave me some confidence and a boost of energy needed to push my self-sacrificing act to completion. So I pushed on.
    Your redness is offensive and disgusting, I said with disdain, and your bulbousness is dirty and corrosive to the soul.
    I paused and looked over at Bhatkoo and the others. And only at this point did I notice that they were neither angry nor upset but instead were amused at my attempts at abuse. This made me angrier, and I started to yell at the tomato plants and spoke great obscenities in many different Indian languages. The obscenities I cannot repeat here, partly because they would not be understood in the translation, and if they were understood, this account would immediately be classified as pornographic material and seized by the government and burned with great immediacy and precision.
    So suffice it to say that the obscenities I hurled were of graphic and terrible nature, and the volume and intensity at which I hurled them were of admirable depth. But still neither Bhatkoo nor the attendants, all of whom had no doubt heard my abusive advances, made any move to have me thrown out of the deep dark place of the madman and his soil-less plant life.
    And so I decided I would launch a physical assault on the tomato.

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    A s I prepared myself to attack the innocent sweet tomato, I wondered if perhaps I was committing a transgression towards the Gandhian principle of nonviolence. After all, a tomato is a form of life, is it not? And even though the idea that it can hear abusive language is laughable (as I have proven through my merciless abuses that registered no effect), a physical assault is abuse of a different class and nature. I tried to think back over Gandhiji’s autobiography to see if he had allowed for violence under some exceptional situations, but my memory is not so good, and if there was such a passage in his book, I could not recall it.
    But that is just as well, because my hesitation at that point was enough to obtain some success towards the ultimate goal of expungement and ejection of me and my brother in life.
    As I stood there in my attack-stance, thinking about the life story of Gandhiji, one of the sweet innocent tomatoes began to gently sway. Presently, to my shock and awe, the tomato detached itself from its green moist dirt-less vine. I worried that perhaps the tomato will come after me, but of course it is a small fruit with no legs and so it just fell down straight into the glass container with a gentle sound not unlike that of a soft round object falling on hard flat glass.
    I was frozen, unsure if my abuses had caused this detachment. I carefully looked over at the attendants, but miraculously they seemed to have lost interest in my interactions with the tomato hydroponic, and in fact Bhatkoo was