CRUEL INJUSTICES ARE A PASSING STORM

MY FRIEND Gandhi was a shy boy. He hid a volcanic intellect inside a skinny frame. There was no feature that had him stand out in a crowd, save maybe his beak-like nose.

Miss Coomaraswamy, the sixmonth locum teacher, had a special fondness for him. Not affection.

Just a sadistic streak that extended to constantly pinching the underside of his underfed avian arm. He curled up in torment the moment she tottered down the uneven classroom aisle.

“What’s wrong, boy?” she screeched as if Cruella De Vil had suddenly come to life in our Chatsworth classroom. The rest of the row theatrically leaned away as Gandhi took the full brunt of her frustrations. We speculated that she came from an unhappy home to behave with such venom.

Those were the days long before Childline and the Human Rights Commission.

“You must go tell the office,” Priti admonished him.

The boy Gandhi had neither the will nor the strength to so much as walk by the principal’s office let alone lay a complaint.

Miss Coomaraswamy was just a passing storm even though her six months spanned a millennium for the little Gandhi. That injustice did not fire my classmate up like his famous namesake. Gandhi went through the year at school and mysteriously disappeared after the Christmas holiday.

He reappeared almost 50 years later on the rain-swept stands of the Kingsmead Cricket Stadium.

“Howzit ekse, you forgot me?” he chuckled balancing two pints of frothy lager on gym membership arms.

I squinted quizzically in the drizzle and then that chicken nose hit me like a Black Friday trolley. “Gandhi!”, I screamed.

It was as if we had hardly been apart. The lager was happily shared and we caught up the decades carefully avoiding any mention of the dreaded Coomaraswamy. It turns out Gandhi did eventually live up to the expectations his parents had in naming him.

Spurning private practice, he works as a human rights lawyer in an NGO in the Free State of all places. To re-ignite our friendship I couriered him two pieces to read. The one was Ramachandra Guha’s monumental, Gandhi: The Years That Changed The World.

The other a much shorter essay, Married to the Mahatma: The Predicament of Kasturba Gandhi.

It seemed a fitting choice too as yesterday marked Kasturba’s martyrdom in a British jail at the height of the Indian independence struggle in 1944.