Mahatma Gandhi is fasting to protest the riot killings that followed the partition that created Hindu India and Moslem Pakistan in 1947. A fellow Hindu approaches to confess a great wrong. “I killed a child,” says the distraught man. “I smashed his head against a wall.” “Why?” asks the Mahatma (Hindu for “Great Soul”). “They killed my boy. The Moslems killed my son.” “I know a way out of hell,” says Gandhi. “Find a child, a little boy whose mother and father have been killed, and raise him as your own. Only be sure he is a Moslem—and that you raise him as one.”

Reader’s Digest, February, 1992, p. 106