ABSTRACT
A few weeks after the death of Petra Kelly, Gandhi and I were sitting at Wardha. It was early morning and Gandhi had his hot water, his reductionist answer to constipation, in front of him. I sat with my third glass of tea, content to watch the morning with the Mahatma. I was still intrigued by the gossip and rumours of the week, regarding the suicide of General Gerd Bastian and Petra. As the facts trickled in, one felt a sense of unease and dismay, especially as the sadness of suicide had given way to a murder mystery. Now, there was a different sense of ending. I felt Petra Kelly’s death seemed to mark the political end of the Green Movement. It would now become policy, banalised as a few laws which would be unravelled only through the cryptography of experts. One more sphere for corrupt inspectors. Deep in thought, I didn’t realise that Gandhi, who had started spinning, was watching me quietly. His face became interrogative, an iconic question without words, I asked unnecessarily, ‘Spinning already?’ He nodded and looked at me questioningly. ‘Spinning stories’, I said in reply, and he added, ‘Let us combine the two’. I hate handwork, whether knitting or gardening, but jumped readily and clumsily because I desperately needed to talk. A confused radical needs some handiwork and I needed to talk to Gandhi. About Petra, but Petra, only as an entry point into my own environmentalist world. e Indian Express of the day had an article by the politician Jaya Jaitley. Both Jaitley and her colleague George Fernandes had known Petra for years, swung in her halo, in fact swung her halo as a hula-hoop. Jaitley was now asking the German government to
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institute ‘an enquiry. . . . [to] examine the possible motives of new Nazis, international gun runners, those who want old NATO secrets kept under wraps’.
