Page:Fischer - A Week with Gandhi.pdf/21

 with a smile, “I am serving you, but you must not eat until the prayer.” I told him I had noticed that the children were not touching their food and so I knew I mustn’t. The thirty-odd people in the room, all dressed in white and squatting on the brown floor, were receiving their food and not eating it. Diners passed food to one another with their hands. A gong sounded, and a tall, healthy looking man in white shorts stopped waiting on the trays and closed his eyes, leaving only a white slit open—it made him look blind—and started a high-pitched chant in which all the others, including Gandhi, joined. The prayer ended with “shaanti, shaanti, shaanti,” which, Dev told me, means “peace.”

I had been given a teaspoon for the vegetable mess, but most people fished it out with their round wheat-cakes folded in four. A woman waitress poured some liquid butter on my wheat-cakes. With a liberal use of salt, the food was not too untasty. I got some sugar to take away the taste of the boiled cow-milk (Gandhi has given up goat milk and now encourages the consumption of cow milk throughout India in the hope that more attention will be paid to the breeding of healthy cattle).

Gandhi ate continuously, only stopping to serve food to his wife, Kurshed, Dev, and me. His hands are big and his fingers are big and well-formed.