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 of person you are, and we are glad to have you here. How long will you stay?” I told him I could stay a few days.

“Oh,” he exclaimed, “then we will be able to talk much.”

A young man walked over to him, bowed low to his feet, and swayed up and down. “Bas, bas,” Gandhi muttered. I imagined it meant “Enough,” and later found that my guess was right. Soon two other young men did the same thing, and again Gandhi shooed them off.

I asked him why he had chosen this village to live in. He said so-and-so, and he mentioned a name which I didn’t get, had chosen it for him. I made no comment, but he noticed that I didn’t catch the Indian name, and so he said Mira Ben was Miss Slade, an Englishwoman who had long been associated with him. He explained that it was her idea that he should live in a village in the center of India, and he had asked her to find the place. He did not wish to live inside the village because it was too unhygienic and noisy. “It is better here, on the outskirts.” The dentist started talking about false teeth, and Gandhi explained to him that the bite in the sets he wore was imperfect. A woman brought out a brass bowl filled with water and three sets of artificial teeth, and I decided to go. Gandhi said, “You will walk with me in the evening and morning, and we will have