Gandhi, An Autobiography

“Well, it was done, and the debt cleared. But this became more than I could bear. I resolved never to steal again. I also made up my mind to confess it to my father. But I did not dare to speak. Not that I was afraid of my father beating me. No. I do not recall his ever having beaten any of us. I was afraid of the pain that I should cause him. But I felt that the risk should be taken; that there could not be a cleansing without a clean confession.” (page 27)

After an attempt of suicide being unsuccessful, Gandhi saw the only way to cleanse himself of stealing the servant’s pocket money in order to get the independence was by telling his father of his wrong doings. As described earlier in the book, Gandhi belonged to a family that had no interest to accumulate wealth and was strict to their rites and rituals; hence the magnitude of his act was hard for him to succumb in front of his father. Gandhi knew he had put himself in a situation where justifying himself was impossible as he admitted that no pleasure or advantage was gained in smoking with his friend.

What makes the paragraph more interesting was to read that he could not recall his father beating any of them, implying that he had put a lot of trust being the son of a respectable man in public. Gandhi says that he wasn’t scared of getting beaten up but for breaking a trust that had never happened before. He felt that his father would be ashamed of him or that he would never think of him in a same way as he did before nevertheless he needed it in order to cleanse his sins.

I thought this quote was important as it relates to the theme of ‘trust’ in Hamlet as we read it in class at school. In addition, I can understand Gandhi’s feeling when he says this because being in a similar age to when he experimented his smoking, my parents would be hurt that I have begun a bad habit and without them noticing.