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independent there was such a feeling all over India. My house was a place of conspiracy. My two uncles had been in jail many times, and every week they had to go to the police station to report that they were not doing anything against the government, and that they were still there. They were not allowed to move out of the town but people were coming to them -- and they all had so much hope.
I was a small child but I always wondered, "These people are saying that just by becoming independent, all misery will disappear. How can it happen? I don't see any connection." But there was hope. There was the promised land, very close by; just a little struggle and you would reach it. There was suffering but you were not responsible for it: the Britishers were responsible. It was a great consolation to dump everything on the Britishers.
In fact, I used to ask these revolutionaries who used to visit my house secretly, or sometimes stay in my house for months.... One of them, a very famous revolutionary, Bhavani Prasad Tiwari, was the national leader of the socialist party. Whenever he had to go underground he used to come to my village and just live in my house, hidden. For the whole day he would not come out -- and nobody knew him in the village anyway. But I was after him. He told me again and again, "You bring such inconvenient questions that sometimes I think it would be better to be in a British jail than in your house! At least there I would get first class treatment."
He was a famous leader so he would have got first class treatment -- political prisoners' special class -- with all the facilities, good food, good library. And at least he would get freedom, because first class prisoners were not forced to do any labor. They would write their autobiographies and other books: all the great books these great Indian leaders have written were written in jails. And they would go for walks -- they were put in beautiful places that were not even jails; they were created especially for them.
For example in Poona there was a palace just opposite us, on the other side of the river: the Aga Khan palace. It was a palace. Gandhi was kept prisoner there
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