India, Jan. 29 -- On Mahatma Gandhi's 77th death anniversary, an incident comes to mind. My grandmother, who we called Beeji, was in her mid-twenties, and India's independence was not even a year old when she unwittingly became witness to one of the most important events of the 20th century. Beeji revered Gandhi and gave him a lot of credit for getting the nation independence.

It was January 30, 1948. The Mahatma, who had been fasting to stop the communal massacres that had erupted after Partition, was to attend a prayer meet in the garden of Birla House in Delhi. A throng of admiring crowd was waiting eagerly for him. My young grandmother and a couple of her friends being one of them. My grandfather was a civilian employee in the army a...