other opportunities to talk.” I bowed and went away.
I was given the freedom of Sevagram’s guest house—a one-room mud hut with earthen floor and bamboo roof. There are several beds in the room. Leading from the room is a tiny kitchen and also a water room with a stone floor on which stood a large number of tin and brass buckets and two tin washtubs, which “Bai”—the aged maid kept filling with water carried in jars on her head from the village well. Gandhi had told me that I would be in the care of Kurshed Ben, or Sister Kurshed. Miss Kurshed Naoroji is a Parsi, aged about forty. She wore a coarse yellow home spun sari. She had studied singing in France and Italy for six years, but had dropped her musical career fifteen years ago and has since been a constant disciple of Gandhi. Her family are millionaires. Her grandfather, who died during the first World War at the age of ninety-five, was the first Indian member of the British House of Commons. Saklatvala, another Parsi—and a Communist, was the third and last Indian member of the British Parliament.
Kurshed Ben is intelligent and quick. I argue with her that there has been an overemphasis here on Indian nationalism. An independent India, I contend, might become Fascist, and then it would have less freedom than under the British. She re-
