“The persistent putrid stink, the nasty gash on my wrist where Mohandas had grabbed me and dragged me to the gate… Mohandas had become an abusive and cruel husband who had lost all regard for the one person he claimed to have loved the most. I felt suffocated and trapped,” Kastur wrote in the diary imagined by the author.
A bigger shock was yet to come. After she gave birth to their fourth child, Devdas, Mohandas told her that she will have to sleep in a separate bedroom.
“We shall no longer be man and wife,” he apparently told Kasturba. She had understood that as a faithful Hindu wife, she would have to blindly follow in the footsteps of her husband, no matter how much it violated her sensibilities.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was sworn to poverty, celibacy and the cause for India’s freedom; Kastur spent 62 years of her life juggling the roles of a devoted wife, a ‘satyagrahi’ and sacrificing mother who was eclipsed because of a man who almost became God for India’s multitude.
