Page:Fischer - A Week with Gandhi.pdf/57

 very important because India is ninety per cent village.”

“It is so,” Gandhi stated, “and that of course proves that the people are not divided. It proves that the politicians divide us.”

I told Gandhi that the Moslem bartender in my hotel in New Delhi said to me—although he is a member of the Moslem League and an advocate of Pakistan—that the communal troubles always started where Moslems were a minority and never where the Hindus were a minority. “Fischer,” Gandhi explained, “you have been here only for a short time. You cannot study everything. But if you make any investigations and find that we are wrong or guilty, please say so in a loud voice.”

He had walked me over to a long building made of bamboo. “These are my patients,” he said. He stopped at a bed on which a woman was sitting. She seemed ill. Gandhi talked to her for about five minutes and she laughed and he laughed all the time. “She is one of my best patients,” Gandhi declared.

Dr. Das was with us. I said, in order to provoke Gandhi, “Wouldn’t it be better to leave her to the doctor?”

“No,” Gandhi replied, “there is much quackery in all this.” Then he went into a room which was empty but for a red wooden cradle. The mother took the baby out of the cradle as Gandhi entered.