He wore a loin cloth, a flimsy wraparound shawl and sandals without stockings even when he crossed the seas to attend the Round Table Conference in the rather formidable company of princes and maharajas and the very stern-eyed British whose stiff upper lips refused to quiver even at the thought of the havoc the weather might have on him, or what his attire implied, but Mahatma Gandhi had one weakness that he let get the better of him.
For 20 years, the apostle of simplicity and non violence nurtured a possession that went with him everywhere. A pocket watch, crafted in fine silver.
In fact there are at least three watches that lie in the National Gandhi Museum that claim to have belonged to the Mahatma, but there is evidence that this silver Zenith watch was his favourite.
And for two reasons. One strange and the other not so strange.
The latter was the fact that it had been presented to him by Indira Gandhi, then still a young girl, following in her father and the Mahatma’s footsteps, the road to India’s struggle for independence.
The stranger reason was the fact that the watch was stolen from him, while he was on a train journey. The date, in Gandhi’s own diary entry was noted as May 25, 1947, the theft took place at Kanpur railway station. The details of the watch were also noted in his inimitable hand: .. ‘it had a radium disc... and also a contrivance for alarm. It was a gift to me. The cost then was over 40. It was a Zenith watch.’
The watch that Gandhi held so dear, that its loss mattered to him who was a standing example of the detachment extolled in the Gita, was a model launched by Zenith in 1915, and in 1920, there is record of a sale of a similar watch for 80 rupees, sold to a buyer in Bombay.
But to come back to the issue on hand.
What was it that made Gandhi prize this symbol of mechanical prowess so closely?
Perhaps, it was the fact that it helped him control the one thing that he had little control over, time.
A stickler for time, the watch was perhaps the only symbol of power he wielded, it helped him make sure others were on time, it imposed, by reference, his sense of punctuality on himself as much as on others.
Later, the same watch proved to be a symbol of the intrinsic goodness of man. While he was in Delhi, at the Birla House where he often stayed, a stranger came up to confess he had indeed stolen the watch, was terribly ashamed of the fact, and would like to return it.
The bells of forgiveness rang loud and clear, as the Mahatma, true to his nature, embraced the ‘thief’, and took possession of the watch.
Today, the little silver alarm watch, after a long sojourn in other lands, is slated to return to India after the much discussed auction in New York, and will join its estranged family of Bapu’s possessions, at the National Gandhi Museum.
