When he was young and required to start out working with her (instead of go to a non-existent school), he refused. His mother cleaned toilets, requiring fecal waste to be manually removed to a field far away. The part I found most thought provoking was when Mohan, the teenage toilet cleaner of the basti was brought in.
Anjali’s mother shows her spine of steel several times in the book, sometimes in the course of this new ‘job’ she has picked up in the freedom movement and several times in the ways she has to change her thinking about what should have been a liberal ‘good’ way of being. A clothes-loving Anjali ends up having to burn her lovely clothes in return for dowdy and stiff khadi.
The going is just getting interesting when the next strand hits: the person joining the freedom movement isn’t her father, it is her mother.
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