Under British rule it was illegal for Indians to make or sell their own salt; everyone had to buy it, taxed, from the government. Mohandas Gandhi, sixty, decided to break that law in public. He and seventy-eight followers walked 240 miles in 24 days from his ashram at Sabarmati to the sea at Dandi, and crowds joined at every village. At dawn on 6 April, after a prayer and a bath in the sea, he bent down and picked up a lump of natural salt from the mud. Within weeks, millions across India were breaking the salt law. The words are imagined.