To settle the matter, a ‘huge meeting’ of the Modh Banias was called. Mohandas was seated in the middle, while community leaders ‘remonstrated with me very strongly and reminded me of their connection with my father’. The boy answered that he was going overseas to study, and that he had promised his mother not to touch a strange woman, or drink wine, or eat meat. The elders were unmoved. For his transgression, the boy would be treated as an outcaste; anyone who spoke to him or went to see him off would be fined. But, as the transgressor recalled, ‘the order had no effect on me’. On 4 September
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