111. A British Nurse's Taunt

Recounting the life in the Yeravda Jail after his release in 1924, Gandhiji gave to the outside world several interesting little known facts about the happenings behind the prison bars. He wrote :

My very efficient English nurse, whom I loved to call 'Tyrant', because she insisted in all loving ways on my taking more food and more sleep than I did, with a smile curling round her lips and insidious twinkle in her eyes, gently remarked after I was safely removed to a private ward escorted by the house surgeon, and herself : "As I was shading you with my umbrella I could not help smiling, that you, a fierce boycotter of everything British, probably owed your life to the skill of a British surgeon handling British surgical instruments, administering British drugs, and to the ministrations of a British nurse. Do you know that as we brought you here, the umbrella that shaded you was of a British make ?"

The gentle nurse as she finished her last triumphant' sentence evidently expected my complete collapse under her loving sermon. But happily I was able to confound her self-assurance by saying, "When will you people begin to know things as they are? Do you know that I do not boycott anything because it is British ? I simply boycott all foreign cloth because the dumping down of foreign cloth in India has reduced millions of my people to pauperism."

I was even able to interest her in the Khaddar movement. Probably she became a convert to it.