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| Edited By: |Source: DNA |Updated: Dec 05, 2017, 01:56 PM IST
Life at the Phoenix ashram was very simple, but it seemed almost opulent compared to life at Sevagram. At home we had functional furniture and lived in houses of wood and corrugated metal; here it was all mud huts and sitting on the floor. But the biggest difference was the food. At both ashrams we raised crops and ate what we grew, but at Phoenix my mother cooked it into meals with great variety and many spices. The food at Sevagram was (to put it plainly) terrible. Every day we got some version of boiled, unsalted pumpkin. Every meal was as boring and tasteless as the one before. Boiled pumpkin for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Ela and I complained to our parents, but they hushed us, pointing out that we were guests and needed to follow Bapuji’s plan. We tried talking to the people who worked in the kitchen, but they told us the same thing: “We are following what Gandhi wants.” Everyone assumed that he had decreed the menu, and so there must be a reason for it. We weren’t the only ones who would have liked a different vegetable now and then, but since no one wanted to appear insolent, no one felt comfortable questioning what we ate.
Little Ela had no such compunctions. Toward the end of a week of eating pumpkin, she’d had enough. With all the righteous anger of a six-year-old, she marched into Bapuji’s mud hut. “You should change the name of this place to Kola ashram!” she declared, using the Indian word for pumpkin.
Astounded by this outburst, Bapuji looked up from his work and asked, “What do you mean, my child?”
“Ever since we came here we get nothing but pumpkin to eat, morning, noon, and night. I am sick of it,” she blurted out.
“Is that so?” Bapuji was genuinely astonished. But he had a sense of humor, so he added, “We must look into it. If what you say is right, then we must indeed change the name.”
For himself, Bapuji ate the barest amount necessary for nutrition and often used fasting as a form of nonviolent protest. But he did not expect everyone to follow his stringent and meticulous diet. He was very busy and seldom attended the communal meals, so he hadn’t even known what we were eating.
That evening after the prayer service, when he usually delivered his sermon, he asked the manager of the ashram to explain why everyone was made to eat pumpkin every day. Munna Lal, the manager, asserted that he was trying to follow Grandfather’s instructions to eat only what was grown on the farm.
“Are you saying that our farm can produce only pumpkin?” Bapuji asked.
“You said we should eat simply, so I thought that’s what you wanted.”
“Simple doesn’t mean you have to eat the same thing all the time.”
The manager looked abashed. “We planted a whole field of pumpkins, and we have such a bumper crop that we do not know what to do with them all. That is why we’ve been cooking so much pumpkin,” he confessed.
Bapuji said that wasn’t very good planning. “We should grow a variety of fruits and vegetables but prepare simple meals.” But he never admonished without a solution. “Now since you have a surplus of pumpkins, please take them to the village and barter them for other vegetables.”
Ela was the hero of the day—and not just because the food improved so quickly. Bapuji used her confronting him as a lesson that we should never stop speaking out against problems. How can we create change in the world if we are afraid to say what is wrong?
(Published with permission from the publisher, Penguin)
