Gandhi talks a lot about his ‘inner voice’ and God telling him everything. But he does not know anything about the explosion. He thinks it was the police at target practice. As a matter of fact it was one of our boys aiming at a target which happened to be the Old Man himself. He is a Hindu refugee from the Punjab. His name is Madan Lal Pahwa. The police had thrown him out of a mosque in which he had been staying since he had come out of Pakistan. Pahwa threw a bomb. He had another with him when a policeman caught him.

The next day Gandhi says that Pahwa probably looks upon him (Gandhi) as an enemy of Hinduism and himself as an instrument sent by God for his removal. He requests the police not to harass Pahwa but to convert him to ‘right thinking’. I want to tell the Old Fellow there is no ‘perhaps’ about it. He is the enemy number one of the Hindus.

Gandhi wants to be different from everyone else. On 26 January everyone goes to see the great parade. Gandhi says he does not like parades and stays in Birla House. I take the day off and take my parents to see it. It is a wonderful tamasha! Thousands of soldiers come down the slope between the Secretariat left-righting; hundreds of tanks, guns, armoured cars follow and rumble through India Gate. They salute Nehru. Nehru salutes them. Airplanes streak across leaving trails of coloured smoke in the sky. Then Nehru tells us that India is the land of Gandhi; India does not believe in tanks, guns, armoured cars or airplanes but in ahimsa.

Gandhi does not like a military tamasha because he has his own special kind of tamasha. The next day he announces he is going to the tomb of Qutubuddin Bakhtiyar Kaki near the Qutub Minar in Mehrauli. It is this Kaki fellow’s death anniversary. Kaki had come to India some 600 years ago and converted many Hindus to Islam. Hindu refugees from Multan drove away the Mussalmans and settled in Mehrauli. They broke the marble screen around Kaki’s grave. But when they hear Gandhi is coming they line the road and shout ‘Hindu-Muslim bhai-bhai’ and serve tea to the Muslims. I am so angry that I want to yell: ‘Bastards! Have you forgotten how your mothers were raped in Multan?’

Gandhi bows to Kaki’s tomb. The Mussalmans ask him, ‘Repeat our fateha.’ Gandhi raises his hands, recites: ‘In the name of Allah, The Beneficent, The Merciful.’ That makes him a Mussalman, does it not? If a Hindu were to kill him he would be reducing the population of the enemies of Hinduism by one.