Short answers, pulled from the story.
Mahadev Haribhai Desai was an Indian independence activist, scholar, and writer who served as Mahatma Gandhi's personal secretary for twenty-five years. He accompanied Gandhi through repeated arrests, translated Gandhi's autobiography into English, and kept a daily diary from 1917 until the day before his death in 1942.
Mahadev Desai was born on the 1st of January 1892 in the village of Saras in the Surat district of Gujarat. His father, Haribhai Desai, was a school teacher.
Mahadev Desai died of a massive heart attack on the morning of the 15th of August 1942 at the Aga Khan Palace in Pune, where he had been interned alongside Gandhi following the Quit India Declaration. He was fifty years old. Gandhi washed his body and he was cremated on the palace grounds.
Desai translated Gandhi's autobiography into English as The Story of My Experiments with Truth, and translated works by Tagore, Saratchandra Chattopadhyaya, and Nehru into Gujarati. He wrote biographies in Gujarati and English, including The Story of Bardoli (1929), and was posthumously awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1955 for his twenty-two-volume published diaries, Mahadevbhaini Dayari.
Mahadev Desai kept a diary continuously from the 13th of November 1917 to the 14th of August 1942, recording his life alongside Gandhi. Published as the twenty-two-volume Mahadevbhaini Dayari between 1948 and 1997, the diaries provide a detailed chronicle of Gandhi's life and the major events of the Indian independence movement, and were awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award posthumously in 1955.
Mahadev Desai was imprisoned multiple times. His first arrest came in 1921, when he was sentenced to a year's rigorous imprisonment for his writings. He was arrested again in connection with the Salt Satyagraha, then again in 1932 alongside Gandhi and Sardar Patel, re-arrested in 1933 and held at Belgaum Jail, and arrested a final time on the 9th of August 1942 following the Quit India Declaration.