A Week with Gandhi/June 3, 1942
June 3 , 1942
After twenty-seven hours in the hot, dusty express train from New Delhi, I arrived in Wardha, a small town in Central India, at 8:30 P. M. Ten days earlier I had asked Jawaharlal Nehru to arrange an interview with Gandhi for me. In a few days Nehru wrote from Wardha saying that Gandhi would see me. He advised me to get into touch with Mahadev Desai, Gandhi’s secretary, to fix the time. I informed Desai that any time would do and he wired back: “Welcome—Mahadev Desai.”
As I stepped out of the train at Wardha, a young man in white approached me and asked whether I was Fischer; when I said yes, he told me he had been delegated by Gandhi to meet me. A tonga was waiting. A tonga is a one-horse, two wheeled carriage in which the passengers sit behind the driver with their backs to the horse. We drove through the darkness to the outskirts of town and got out at a house which an Indian millionaire nationalist had bequeathed to the Congress Party for use as a hostel. I slept on a big second-story porch open to the sky. All night an orange-white-green Congress flag fluttered with a kind of Morse-code noise.