Page:Fischer - A Week with Gandhi.pdf/38



June 5, 1942

up at four, after a refreshing night under the stars and moon. I slept on a bed made of rope netting attached to four wooden posts. The air during the night was cool. At six-fifteen, Dr. Das, my neighbor, came and said that Gandhi was tired and would not walk this morning. Kurshed brought me a breakfast of tea with biscuits, butter, honey, and mangoes. I ate quickly while flies and ants competed with me. After breakfast I typed notes but interrupted when Dev and Aryanaikam, a huge dark Ceylonese who was a leading Congress educator, came to talk about Russia. I voiced the view that independence was not enough, and that after independence India’s real headaches would start. Kurshed repeated her statement of yesterday that she wanted a free India even if it were fascist. If Bose (Subhas Chandra Bose, president of Congress in 1938, who escaped from India after the be ginning of the war and took up residence in Germany, whence be broadcast against British rule)