THE COLONY
35
He no longer felt hungry, but experiencing some difficulty in lifting
the stones, he realized he was growing weak.
Tempting dishes continued to appear. Satya went through the
same procedure for several days, drinking only a little water. Then,
growing bolder as he grew weaker (he could hardly raise the stones)
he decided to trust himself and let the authorities know. He stopped
going to the courtyard in the morning and let the food remain at the
door, to be removed by the guard.
His faculties were still clear; clearer, he thought. He had rea–
soned it out, trying to find what purpose, deep within himself (since
none was obvious) he was serving by starvation. At lea'lt, he knew,
it had nothing to do with vanity. Bapu's hunger strikes had drawn
the attention and the prayers of the whole nation-had been directed
against specific wrongs and had always succeeded in wringing a few
concessions. Without a doubt there had been vanity in Bapu's
hunger~
ing. But what of it? He no longer felt a sense of superiority in recog–
nizing the more intimate motives of Bapu's saintliness. It had been
politics-all politics-and therefore, certainly, there was vanity in it.
But vanity is not inconsi'ltent with saintliness. And not only vanity
and not only saintliness: the whole person, with all his imperfections
and the whole ideal life, with all its austerities-the two were in
harmony, even though one hand did not know what the other was
doing. So intertangled were the ideal and the real, that they were
necessarily in harmony; and even if one evolved for himself the loftiest
metaphysics in order to justify a little physical stealing on the body's
side, it did no harm and left no blemish. For the body sometimes
stepped naked out of its shrewdness, throttled itself, died willingly,
gladly, for the sake of the ideal--even if the ideal, as was so often
the case, were foggy and vague, or inexpressible, if clear. All things
human were ironical; but irony merely observed the truth without
destroying it, and a perfect irony was the greatest kindness that existed
on earth.
Well then,
if
it was not vanity that made him go on a useless
hunger strike, what was it? He was beginning to believe in his will
alone, and determined to let it'l working provide the answer. Mean–
while he sat cross-legged on the floor of his cell, motionless for hours
at a time. Sometimes he would sleep the whole day away; at other
times made entries in his diary or slump against the wall, exhausted,
his
features gaunt, the lines about his mouth, which had wavered am–
biguously between pity and pain, now drawn entirely in pity. At
times a strange exaltation would come over
him,
a'l though, were he
