Restless as Mercury

M. K. Gandhi’s autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, is famously incomplete, stopping abruptly in 1920. But while he gave up writing his memoirs, Gandhi continued to speak and write about his life, family, work, colleagues, those who opposed and venerated him, his hopes, anxieties, challenges, fasts, many jail stints, his enthusiasms, and disappointments. When knitted together, these autobiographical observations, scattered over several pages of the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, as well as in some works that were published in his lifetime under his gaze, make for a gripping and powerful story. ’Restless as mercury’, is how his only sister, Raliyat, described the young Mohandas and her stunningly accurate characterization of her brother provides the title of this work, which Gopalkrishna Gandhi has reconstructed from Gandhi’s own words.