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"Not everyone here speaks Hindi," said a Tamil planner. "But everyone here should know Gandhi," said Petra.
Sayagi agreed with her. "Satyagraha is something else. The willingness to endure great personal suffering in order to do what's right."
"What's the difference, really?"
"Sometimes," said Petra, "what's right is not peaceful or passive. What matters is that you do not hide from the consequences. You bear what must be borne."
"That sounds more like courage than anything else," said the Tamil.
"Courage to do right," said Sayagi. "Courage even when you can't win."
"What happened to 'discretion is the better part of valor'?"
"A quotation from a cowardly character in Shakespeare," someone else pointed out.
"Not contradictory anyway," said Sayagi. "Completely different circumstances. If there's a chance of victory later through withdrawal now, you keep your forces intact. But personally, as an individual, if you know that the price of doing right is terrible loss or suffering or even death, satyagraha means that you are all the more determined to do right, for fear that fear might make you unrighteous."
"Oh, paradoxes within paradoxes."
But Petra turned it from superficial philosophy to something else entirely. "I am trying," she said, "to achieve satyagraha."
And in the silence that followed, she knew that some, at least, understood. She was alive right now because she had not achieved satyagraha, because she had not always done the right thing, but had done only what was necessary to survive. And she was preparing to change that. To do the right thing regardless of whether she lived through it or not. And for whatever reason-respect for her, uncomfortableness with the intensity of it, or serious contemplation-they remained silent until the meal ended and they spoke again of quotidian things.
Now the war had been going for a month, and Achilles was giving them daily pep talks about how victory was imminent even as they wrestled privately with the growing problems of extricating the army. There had been some victories, and at two points the Indian Army was now in Thai territory- but that only lengthened the supply lines and put the army into mountainous country again, where their large numbers could not be brought to bear against the enemy, yet still had to be supplied. And these offensives had chewed through fuel and munitions. In a few days, they would have to choose between fueling tanks and fueling supply trucks. They were about to become a very hungry all-infantry army.