Venice was full of light when the news came that Gloria had died. I was there for the Vital Voices Venice Dialogue, among women confronting authoritarianism across continents. Grief entered the room, but it did not leave me alone. Almost every woman there had known Gloria or been changed by an idea she set loose in the world. One remembered her wit; another, her attentiveness; another, the permission she gave her to trust her own experience.As the stories moved around the room, sorrow became companionship. I thought: this is what Gloria would have wanted. We were not turning her into a monument. We were doing the work, listening to one another, seated in a circle.A passage to IndiaGloria came to India in her 20s, in1956, drawn by the Theosophy of her mother and both grandmothers and inspired by Gandhi’s non-violent struggle against British colonialism. She began her Chester Bowles scholarship at Miranda House in Delhi, but within two months left the security of college life to travel with Gandhian organisers responding to caste violence in villages. She wrote in a later essay that her feminism was shaped by what she learned then.There, she watched the Gandhians listen before trying to persuade and saw injured communities step back from seeking revenge. Gandhi’s organising principles stayed with her. She taught me that change begins at the bottom and transforms the top; that if you want people to listen, you must first listen to them.She carried those lessons into feminism and distilled their egalitarian spirit into a phrase of her own: “We are linked, not ranked.”India remained part of Gloria’s inner map. Gandhi was at the centre of it, but so were women who widened his inheritance, like the freedom fighter Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, whom Gloria said was her last teacher. She saw his ideas in operation at SEWA, led by lawyer-activist Ela Bhatt, who organised poor self-employed women into the largest trade union of unorganised workers in the world. They confirmed that history is made not only by the “great man” at the top, but by people discovering their collective strength.Meeting GloriaThat belief brought us together. A mutual friend told Gloria how I organised survivors of sex trafficking through my Forbesganj and Kolkata-based NGO Apne Aap Women Worldwide. Then she emailed me, in 2007, to ask whether I had time to take her through my work.That year, I took her in an auto-rickshaw to the Subhash Camp settlement where I worked in Delhi, thinking I had little to show. It began to drizzle. We stood on the steps of a half-built kuccha brick house as several women formed a circle and I translated. My first impression of Gloria was of a curious person who cared. But I was unsure how to bridge the gulf between continents, race and language.Then Gloria spoke her truth. She had left America to escape marriage to her fiancé and had an abortion in England on the way to India. She kept it secret for years, until she met women sharing their abortion stories. She said that telling her secret set her free and taught her the power of collective courage.It changed how I organised. I learnt that sharing our truth as we experience it is better than long theoretical lectures. From Gloria I understood, for the first time, that the most radical thing you can do is be understood.