His laughter - so childlike, so serene -- so full of human warmth and understanding,
still rings in my ears.

It was in Patna that I heard it for the first time. It was during
Dr. Naicker's and my visit to India almost a year ago. It happened
thus. We were sleeping out in the open, 'neath a clear starry night,
on the lawn of Dr. Mahmud's residence close to the banks of the Ganges.
Viewing it from the lawn one was struck by the awe and majesty of the
mighty oceanic river as she elegantly meandered on her life-sustaining
mission into the Bay of Bengal.

On that particular night, not many feet from where we slept, there
lay on an Indian peasant bed, Bapu, the soul of India's freedom.

While the Ganges, the life-stream of India and its millions, flowed
quietly in the dark, this grassy piece of Indian soil on its bank held
demurely within its embrace one of the greatest moulders of Indian
history.

Just before sunrise,
I was awakened from my sound slumber by ripples of laughter. I put
out my head from underneath a hand-woven khadi bed
sheet which I was using as a covering and lo! what did I behold! Bapu,
with a staff in one hand: and the other resting securely on the shoulder
of a devotee, just about to begin his daily morning walk. He stood
in front of my bed and laughed heartily - a laugh which was all his
own. And then I heard him say: "Are you still sleeping, my son
- don't worry - go on sleeping." And he went on his way.

His laughter will not be heard again. It has been silenced by the
bullets of a mad man. But the reverberations of his laughter will not
cease to ring in my ears, as I am sure, it will not, in the ears of
all those who had the privilege of being in his intimate company.

His laughter was the embodiment of India's will to freedom, of the
hope of the countless millions of peasants and toilers for a better
life, of the desire of the common man everywhere for peace.

Bapu is dead. He gave his life's blood for his people's happiness.
It was spilled on the road of India's freedom which he, with his sublime
spirit and superhuman strength, had blown into the rock of British
imperialism.

His laughter will never again issue forth from his toothless ascetic
mouth. But the characteristics of his laughter have not gone with him.
They are repeated a million-fold in the simple folk of India, the children
of the Ganges, from whom he sprang and of whom he was a part. Bapu's
laughter is a laughter of a people, which at long last has stepped
across Freedom's threshold.

I hope that his laughter, the laughter of universal goodwill and
brotherhood, will help to dissipate the clouds of communal dissension
which have gathered on the Indian horizon and transcending above its
confines pervade the world sorely in need of peace.

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