Freedom at Midnight (13 page)

He pondered for months over the meaning of his weakness, debating whether he should retreat into a Himalayan cave. He finally concluded that his horrible nightmare was a challenge to his spiritual force thrown up by the forces of evil. He decided he had to accept the challenge, to press on to his goal of extirpating the last traces of sexualitv from his being.

As his confidence in his mastery of his desires came back, he gradually extended the range of nhvsical contact that he allowed himself with women. He nursed them

when they were ill, and he allowed them to nurse him. He took his bath in full view of his fellow ashramites, male and female. He had his daily massage virtually naked with young girls most frequently serving as his masseuses. He often gave interviews or consulted with the leaders of his Congress Party while the girls massaged him. He wore few clothes and urged his disciples, male and female, to do likewise, because clothes, he said, only encouraged a false sense of modesty. The only time he ever addressed himself directly to his nemesis Winston Churchill was in reply to the latter's famous phrase "half-naked fakir.'* He was trying to be both, Gandhi said, because the naked state represented the true innocence for which he was striving. Finally, he decreed that there would be no problem in men and women who were faithful to their vow of chastity sleeping in the same room at night, if they happened, in the performance of their duties, to find themselves together at nightfall.

The decision to have Manu share his pallet in order to guide more totally her spiritual growth was, to Gandhi, a natural outgrowth of that philosophy. During the agonizing days of his penitent's pilgrimage, her delicate figure was rarely out of his sight. From village to village, she shared the crude shelters offered him by the peasants of Noakhali. She massaged him, prepared his mudbaths, cared for him when he was stricken with diarrhea. She slept and rose with him, prayed by his side, shared the contents of his beggar's bowl. One bitter February night, she awoke to find the old man shaking violently by her side. She massaged him, heaped on his shivering frame whatever scraps of cloth she could find in the hut. Finally, Gandhi dozed off and, she later noted, "we slept cozily in each other's warmth until prayer time."

For Gandhi, secure in his own conscience, there was nothing improper or even remotely sexual in his relations with Manu. Indeed, it is almost inconceivable that the faintest tremor of sexual arousal passed between them. To the Mahatma, the convoluted reasoning that had led him to perform what was, for him, a duty to Manu was sufficient justification for his action. Perhaps, however, deep in his subconscious, forces that he ignored had helped propel him to it.

In the twilight of his life, Gandhi was a lonelv man. He had lost his wife and closest friend in a wartime prison.

He was losing the support of some of his oldest followers. He risked losing the dream that he had pursued for decades. He had never had a daughter, and perhaps, the one failure in his life had been in his role as a father. His eldest son, embittered because he felt that his father's devotion to others had deprived him of his share of paternal affection, was a hopeless alcoholic, who had staggered to his dying mother's bedside drunk. Two of his other sons were in South Africa and rarely in contact with Gandhi. Only with his youngest son did he enjoy a normal father-son relation. In any event, whatever the explanation, a deep, spiritual bond was destined to link the Mahatma and the shy, devoted girl so anxious to share his misery during the closing months of his life.

As word of what was happening spread beyond his entourage, a campaign of calumnies, spread by the Moslem League leaders who had opposed his visit, grew up about Gandhi. The news reached Delhi and spread intense shock among the Congress Party leaders waiting to begin their critical talks with India's new viceroy.

Gandhi finally confronted the rumors in an evening prayer meeting. Assailing the "small talk, whispers and innuendo around him," he told the crowd that his grand-niece Manu shared his bed with him each night and explained why she was there. His words calmed his immediate circle, but when he sent them to his newspaper, Harijan, to be published, the storm broke again. Two of the paper's editors quit in protest. Its trustees, fearful of a scandal, did something they had never dreamed of doing before. They refused to publish a text written by the Mahatma.

The crisis reached its climax in Haimchar, the last stop on Gandhi's tour. There, Gandhi revealed his intention to carry his mission to the province of Bihar, where this time he would work with his fellow Hindus who had killed the members of a Moslem minority in their midst.

His words alarmed the Congress leadership, who feared the effect his relation with Manu could have on Bihar's orthodox Hindu community. A series of emissaries discreetly asked him to abandon it before leaving for Bihar. He refused.

Finally, it was Manu herself, perhaps prodded by one of those emissaries, who gently suggested to the elderly Mahatma that they suspend their practice. She remained absolutely at one with him, she promised. She was renouncing

nothing of what they were trying to achieve. The concession that she proposed was only temporary, she assured him, a concession to the smaller minds around them who could not understand the goals he sought. She would stay behind when he left for Bihar. Saddened, Gandhi agreed.

In his immaculate white naval uniform, Mountbatten "looked like a film star" to the twenty-three-year-old captain of the Grenadier Guards just appointed one of his A.D.C.'s. Serene and smiling, his wife at his side, Louis Mountbatten rode up to lay claim to Viceroy's House in a gilded landau built half a century before, for the royal progress through Delhi of his cousin George V. At the instant his escort reached the palace's grand staircase, the bagpipes of the Royal Scot Fusiliers skirled out a plaintive welcome to India's last viceroy.

A faint, sad smile on his face, the outgoing Viceroy, Lord Wavell, waited at the head of the staircase. The very presence in New Delhi of those two men represented a break with tradition. Normally an outgoing viceroy sailed with due pomp from the Gateway of India, while the next steamer bore his successor toward its spans, thus sparing India the embarrassment of having two gods upon its soil at the same time. Mountbatten himself had insisted on this breach of custom so that he could talk with the man to whom he formally bowed his head as he reached the top of the stairs.

For a moment, in the intermittent glare of flash bulbs, the two men stood chatting. They were a poignant, contrasting image—Mountbatten the glamorous war hero, exuding confidence and vitality; Wavell, the one-eyed old soldier, adored by his subordinates, brusquely sacked by his superiors, a man who had sadly noted in his diary not long before, that for the past half decade, his had been the unhappy fate "to conduct withdrawals and mitigate defeats."*

Wavell escorted Mountbatten through the heavy teak

* The Attlee government had treated Wavell in particularly brutal fashion. He had been in London when Mountbatten was asked to replace him, but was given no hint that he was about to be sacked. He learned the news only hours before Attlee made it public. It was only on Mountbatten's insistence that Attlee accorded him the elevation in rank in the peerage that traditionally was offered a departing viceroy.

doors to the viceroy's study and his first direct confrontation with the awesome problems awaiting him.

"I am sorry indeed that you've been sent out here in my place," Wavell began.

"Well," said Mountbatten, somewhat taken aback, "that's being candid. Why? Don't you think I'm up to it?"

"No, it's not that," replied Wavell. "Indeed, I'm very fond of you, but you've been given an impossible task. I have tried everything I know to solve this problem and I can see no light. There is just no way of dealing with it. Not only have we had absolutely no help from Whitehall, but we've now reached a complete impasse here."

Patiently, Wavell reviewed his efforts to reach a solution. Then he stood up and opened his safe. Locked inside were the only two items that he could deed to his successor. The first sparkled on the dark velvet folds of a wooden box. It was the diamond-encrusted badge of the Grand Master of the Order of the Star of India, the emblem of Mountbatten's new office, which, forty-eight hours hence, he would hang around his neck for the ceremonial that would officially install him as viceroy.

The second was a manila file on which were written the words "Operation Madhouse." It contained the able soldier's one proposal for solving India's dilemma. Sadly, he took it out of the safe and laid it on the desk.

"This is called 'Madhouse,'" he explained, "because it is a problem for a madhouse. Alas, I can see no other way out."

It called for the British evacuation of India, province by province, women and children first, then civilians, then soldiers, a move likely, in Gandhi's words, to "leave India to chaos."

"It's a terrible solution, but it's the only one I can see," Wavell said. He picked up the file from his desk and offered it to his stunned successor.

"I am very, very, very sorry," he concluded; "but this is all I can bequeath you."

As the new viceroy concluded that sad introduction to his new functions, his wife on the floor above Wavell's study was receiving a more piquant introduction to her new life. On reaching their quarters, Edwina Mountbatten had asked a servant for a few scraps for the two Sealy-hams, Mizzen and Jib, the Mountbattens had brought out from London. To her amazement, thirty minutes later, a

pair of turbaned servants solemnly marched into her bedroom, each bearing a silver tray on which was set a China plate on which, in turn, were laid several slices of freshly roasted chicken breast.

Eyes wide with wonder, Edwina contemplated that chicken. She had not seen food like it in the austerity of the England she had just left. She glanced at the Sealy-hams barking at her feet, then back at the chicken. Her disciplined conscience would not allow her to give pets such nourishment.

"Give me that," she commanded.

Firmly grasping the two plates of chicken, she marched into the bathroom and locked the door. There, the woman who, as vicereine, would offer in the next months the imperial hospitality of Viceroy's House to 41,000 people, gleefully began to devour the chicken intended for her pets.

The closing chapter in a great story was about to begin. In a few minutes, on this morning of March 24, 1947, the last Englishman to govern India would mount his gold-and-crimson viceregal throne. Installed upon that throne, Louis Mountbatten would become the twentieth and final representative of a prestigious dynasty, his the last hands to clasp the scepter that had passed from Hastings to Wellesley, Cornwallis and Curzon.

The site of his official consecration was the ceremonial Durbar Hall of a palace whose awesome dimensions were rivaled only by those of Versailles and of the Peterhof of the Tsars. Ponderous, solemn, unabashedly imperial, Viceroy's House, New Delhi, was the last such palace that men would ever build for a single ruler. Indeed, only in India, with its famished hordes desperate for work, could a palace like the Viceroy's House have been built and maintained in the twentieth century.

Its facades were covered with the red and white stone of Barauli, the building blocks of the Moguls, whose monuments it had succeeded. White, yellow, green, black marble, quarried from the veins that had furnished the glistening mosaics of the Taj Mahal, embellished its floors and walls. So long were its corridors that in its basement servants rode from one end of the building to the other on bicycles.

This morning five thousand of those servants gave a last polish to the marble, the woodwork, the brass of its thirty-seven salons and its 340 rooms. Outside, in the formal Mogul gardens, four hundred and eighteen gardeners, more than Louis XIV had employed at Versailles, labored to provide a perfect trim to its intricate maze of grass squares, rectangular flower beds and vaulted waterways. Fifty of them were boys hired just to scare away the birds. In their stables, the five hundred horsemen of the viceroy's bodyguard adjusted their scarlet-and-gold tunics as they prepared to mount their superb black horses. Throughout the House, gold-and-scarlet turbans flaring above their foreheads, their white tunics already embroidered with the new viceroy's coat of arms, other servants scurried down the corridors on a final errand. For the last time, they all—gardeners, chamberlains, cooks, stewards, bearers, horsemen—all the retainers of that feudal fortress lost in the twentieth century, joined in preparing the enthronement of one of that select company of men for whom it had been built, a viceroy of India.

In one of the private chambers of the great house, a man contemplated the white full-dress admiral's uniform his employer would wear to take possession of the majestic precincts of Viceroy's House. No flaring turban graced his head. Charles Smith was a product not of the Punjab or Rajasthan, but of a country village in the south of England.

With a meticulous regard for detail acquired over a quarter of a century of service in Mountbatten's employ, Smith slipped the cornflower-blue silk sash of the world's most exclusive company, the Order of the Garter, through the right epaulet and stretched it taut across the uniform's breast. Then he looped the gold aiguillettes that marked the uniform's owner as a personal A.D.C. to King George VI through its right shoulder boards.

Finally, Smith took from their velvet boxes his employer's medal bar and the four major stars that he would wear this morning. With respect and care he gave a last polish to their gleaming gold and silver enamel forms: the Order of the Garter, the Order of the Star of India, the Order of the Indian Empire, the Grand Cross of the Victorian Order.

Those rows of ribbons and crosses marking the milestones of Louis Mountbatten's career were, in their special

fashion, the milestones along the course of Charles Smith's life as well. Since he had joined Mountbatten's service as a third footman at eighteen, Smith had walked in another man's shadow. In the great country houses of England, in the naval stations of the Empire, in the capitals of Europe, his employer's joys had been his; his triumphs, his victories; his sorrows, his griefs. During the war, he had joined the service and eventually followed him to Southeast Asia. There, from a spectator's seat in the City Hall of Singar pore, Charles Smith had watched with tears of pride filling his eyes as Mountbatten, in another uniform he had prepared, had effaced the worst humiliation Britain had ever endured by taking the surrender of almost three quarters of a million Japanese soldiers, sailors and airmen.