The slender volume compiled by Mahendra Meghani from the The Last Phase, the final part of Pyarelal Nayar’s loving and scrupulously detailed account of Mahatma Gandhiji’s life, is enveloped by the presence of many voices and contexts, past and contemporary. A condensed version of Rajendra Prasad’s introduction appears here; the tone is calm and compelling, bearing as it does the stamp of close association with the Mahatma. Pyarelal Nayar’s preface is a compilation of his introductory remarks from The Last Phase as well as The Early Phase. As one who walked alongside, the greatness of Nayar’s account of Gandhiji’s last years, where his ‘experiments with truth’ as he attempted to convert these into praxis were put to the final test, lies in the details he is able to scrupulously cull from his own notebooks as well as those of Gandhiji’s, including published sources.   Meghani’s own note as the editor of the compilation brings the urgency of the present knocking on the doors of the past. Compiled five and a half decades later in the wake of the Gujarat carnage in February 2002, the volume reveals in a searing fashion the similarity of the contexts: Noakhali, Bihar and Delhi in 1947 and Gujarat in 2002. Faced with the barbarity and the cowardice of contemporary times, Meghani acknowledges helplessness and hopes that ‘Pyarelal’s labours in recapturing the past may induce us to introspect and may inspire us to act in the present.’ The realization of the absence of a figure like Gandhiji stabs the reader. For a generation brought up on received versions of his personality, the volume presents an aged Gandhi, bewildered by the gloom and despondence in his heart, all too human in the grief which he felt for the world that had suddenly gone quite insane. His greatness is therefore all the more evident in the superhuman endeavours which he made as he walked barefoot and unflinching over endless tracts of fields sown with thorns, trying with love and patience to achieve some peace in the hearts of men.   Culled from the nearly 2200-odd pages of Pyarelal’s The Last Phase, which is the tenth volume of his biography, Mahatma Gandhi, Meghani’s compilation presents a collage of arresting moments from the last 21 months of Gandhiji’s life. Pyarelal’s narrative begins with Gandhiji’s release from detention in the Aga Khan Palace ...