Freedom of the Spirit
The last thing she did in her life was to smile. She was bedridden with paraplegia which descended on her quite unexpectedly. She was dancing merrily with a few of her colleagues in the staffroom when she suddenly collapsed. She never danced again. She never got up on her legs anymore. But she kept smiling. Until her last breath. Etilda Laloo was her name. I called her Kong, which was the Khasi way of addressing women respectfully. “Call me mommy ,” she told me many times. “I’m your mother in Shillong.” I was a young man who had just joined a convent school in Shillong as a teacher. Etilda was a senior colleague of mine who extended to me her friendship that bordered on maternal concern, without any inhibition. On this Gandhi Jayanti Day, why did Etilda rise in my memory? I was wondering what I could write about Gandhi on this day? I had written on every Gandhi Jayanti Day and there seemed to be nothing more to say, especially since present India has packed off Gandhi to some...
