Freedom at Midnight (34 page)

In yellowing ranks the photos of their school elevens, cricket and hockey teams stared down from their walls, rank upon rank of dark, solemn little faces peering out from under their rugger caps, proudly clutching their hockey sticks and cricket bats. Hindu, Moslem and Sikh, those young men had stood side by side at chapel belting out the robust old Christian hymns, had studied the works of Chaucer and Thackeray, bruised and bloodied each other on the playing fields in pursuit of the manly virtues of the rulers from whom they had now claimed the keys to their subcontinent.

Lahore was, above all, a tolerant city, and communal distinctions between its 500,000 Hindus, 100,000 Sikhs and 600,000 Moslems had traditionally mattered less than anywhere else in India. On the dance floors of the Gymkhana and Cosmopolitan clubs, the distance between the communities was often reduced to a thickness of a sari as Sikhs, Moslems and Hindus rumbaed and did the fox trot together. At receptions, dinners and balls, the communities mingled indiscriminately, and the sumptuous villas of its wealthy suburbs were owned without distinction by Hindus, Sikhs, Moslems, Christians and Parsis.

All that had been a lovely dream, and it was a dream coming rapidly to an end in July 1947. Since January, Moslem League zealots had been holding secret rallies in the areas of the Punjab where Moslems predominated. Using pictures, the skulls and bones of alleged Moslem victims of Hindu atrocities elsewhere in India, they fanned the fires of communal hatred. Occasionally, a mutilated victim himself was sent from rally to rally to display his wounds. A concerted campaign of riots and demonstrations had forced the Hindu-Moslem-Sikh coalition government that had run the province for a decade to resign. As a result, the Punjab's British governor, Sir Evan Jenkins, had been obliged to take its administration into his own hands.

A first wave of violence had erupted in March after a Sikh leader had hacked down a pole flying the Moslem League banner with a cry of "Pakistan murdabad" ("Death to Pakistan"). The Moslems had given his challenge a swift and bloody reply. More than three thousand people, most of them Sikhs, had died in the clashes that had followed. Flying over a series of Sikh villages devastated by Moslem vigilantes, Lieutenant General Frank Messervy, Commander in Chief of the Indian Army's Northern Command, had been horrified by the rows*on rows of murdered Sikhs "laid out like pheasants after a shoot."

The authorities had finally succeeded in restoring order, but since then outbursts of trouble such as that which had destroyed the village of Kahuta, which Mountbatten visited in April, had been occurring with growing frequency.

Inevitably the poison they spread seeped into the streets of Lahore. The man whose tracings on a map would determine its destiny, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, came to the city with his head full of tales he had heard in England of the glamorous Lahore, of its dazzling Christmas season, its hunt ball, its horse shows, its glittering social life. There were few echoes of that Lahore in the city he discovered. Instead, he found "heat and dust storms, riots and burning."

Already, a hundred thousand people had fled its streets in fear. Despite the terrible heat, its inhabitants had given up an old Punjabi summer custom of sleeping outside under the stars. The danger of a stealthy hand slitting a sleeping throat had become too great. In certain parts of the city Moslem youths would lay strips of wire along the road, then jerk them taut in the path of a fast-moving cyclist. Their victims were always Sikhs, whose beards and turbans gave them away.

The most troubled area in Lahore was inside a seven-mile belt of stone, the ancient wall of Akbar enclosing one of the most densely populated areas of the world. There, 300,000 Moslems and 100,000 Hindus and Sikhs, 104,000 people per square mile, seethed like a fermenting foam in a labyrinth of alleys, souks, shops, temples, mosques and dilapidated dwellings. All the odors, the shrieks, the clamors of the bazaars of Asia abounded in that roiling mass of humanity Every open place was a thicket of ambulatory merchants. On round tin trays, on platters balanced on their heads, on rolling carts, they displayed their wares:

puffy spice balls fried in fat, pyramids of oranges, sticky mounds of halva and barfi, Oriental sweets, papayas, guavas, stacks of bananas, glutinous mahogany clumps of dates each surrounded by its black cloud of flies. Children, their eyes whitened by the granular crusts of trachoma, squeezed the syrup from stalks of sugar cane on rusty presses.

There was the jewelers' quarters, its trays sparkling with the gold bangles that were many Hindus' traditional form of savings; the perfumers' quarter with its clusters of incense sticks and Chinese flasks with their exotic essences, from which the perfumer mixed his scents to each client's whim; shoemakers' shops displaying rows of gold-embroidered slippers, their ends tapering to a point resembling a gondola's prow; craftsmen displaying cups and ornaments of vitreous enamel, silver inlaid in pewter, perforated metalwork in spun gold as fine, almost, as cotton candy, lacquered platters and rosewood and sandalwood boxes inlaid with mosaics of ivory and mother of pearl.

There were shops selling arms, daggers, kirpans, the ritual swords of the Sikhs. There were flower merchants behind mountains of roses and garlands of jasmine strung by their children like beads on a string. There were tea rqpr-chants with a dozen varieties of tea from jet black to olive green for sale. There were cloth merchants squatting barefoot in their stalls, bolts of cloth in dozens of colors behind them. There were shops selling wedding turbans cascading in gold trim and embroidered vests in soft floss silk or cotton interspersed with chips of colored glass, the emeralds, rubies and sapphires of the poor—all the trades and commerce of the world succeeding one another in noisy and picturesque confusion. Now murder stalked the cluttered alleys of Old Lahore. It was senseless, wanton murder, its victims selected because a man wore a Sikh's turban or a Moslem's goatee. The murderers were goondas, thugs, of all three communities prowling the Old City for a member of a rival community venturing into their neighborhoods, striking, then melting off into a maze of alleyways.

Death, one British police officer remembered, "could come like lightning. It was over in a flash. Before you could say 'knife' you'd see a body dying in the streets, every door was shut, and no one was in sight."

The killings had maintained an eerily even balance between Moslems and non-Moslems. "The Moslems are one up today," the city's Inspector General of Police John Bannet would note. "Who wants to bet the Hindus get it back tonight?"

Every Saturday, the police prepared two weekly diaries, the Weekly Crime Diary and the Weekly Confidential Political Activities Diary. Unable to decide into which category communal murders should fall, Bannet, with a fine British bureaucrat's regard for thoroughness, ordered them logged into both.

The man who would have to decide into which dominion Lahore would fall was such a controversial figure that the Punjab's governor, Sir Evan Jenkins, refused to offer him the hospitality of his residence. Instead, Cyril Rad-cliffe stayed at Falletti's, a hotel founded in 1860 by a Neapolitan who had fallen in love with a Lahore courtesan. With the fervor of a desperate man, Radcliffe struggled to extract some minimal measure of agreement from the judges who were supposed to assist him. Mount-batten had been right. It was a useless effort.

Whenever he went out, he was assailed by the heat and Indians desperate to influence his decision. Pathetic, terrified people, fearful of seeing a lifetime's accumulation of wealth wiped out by a stroke of his pen, they were ready to offer him anything for a boundary line favorable to their community.

At night, to avoid their importunings, he retreated to Lahore's last "European Only" bastion, the Punjab Club, nicknamed "the pig" by its members.

There, on its lawns, his I.C.S. aide by his side and waiters in white robes flitting through the darkness, the man who knew nothing about India sipped his evening whiskey and soda, and wondered where in the hot and hate-torn city beyond this garden he might find an echo of his glamorous Lahore of legend.

His Lahore would always be the sounds and sights rising through the dark horizon surrounding the Punjab Club's lawns: an occasional shower of sparks from a burning bazaar; the wail of racing sirens; the piercing war cry of the city's rival factions, "Sat Sri Akal" for the Sikhs and "Allah Akbar" for the Moslems; the sinister drumbeats of the fanatic Hindu zealots of the Rashtriya Swayam Sewak

Sangh (R.S.S.S.) thumping like tom-toms in the hostile night.

Thirty-five miles east of Lahore lay the second great city of the Punjab, Amritsar, whose ancient alleyways enfolded Sikhism's most sacred site, the Golden Temple. Encircled by a shimmering tank of water, the white marble temple rose at the end of a marble causeway. Its dome, covered in glittering gold leaf, sheltered the original manuscript of the Sikh's Holy Book, the Granth Sahib, its pages wrapped in silk and covered in fresh flowers daily. So revered was the site that it was swept only with a broom made of peacock feathers.

The six million Sikhs to whom that temple was a shrine practiced the only major religion indigenous to the soil of god-haunted India. With their flowing beards, the hair they never cut piled under bright turbans, their often imposing size and physiques, they represented only 2 percent of India's population, but they made up her most vigorous, most closely knit, most martial community.

Sikhism was born of the impact of monotheistic Islam on polytheistic Hinduism along the warring frontiers of the Punjab, where the two faiths had first collided. Founded by a Hindu guru who, trying to reconcile the two faiths, proclaimed, "There is no Hindu. There is no Moslem. There is One God, the Supreme Truth"—Sikhism was favored under the Moguls with faith's great fertilizer, persecution. Hounded by their cruelty, the tenth and final guru in line of succession from Sikhism's founder converted the religion that had been born to reconcile Moslems and Hindus into a militant, fighting faith. Gathering his five closest followers, the Panj Pijaras ("Five Beloved"), Gobind Singh launched his new-style Sikhism by making the five drink sugared water stirred by a double-edged dagger from a common bowl, an action which shattered their caste. Proclaiming them the founders of his new fighting fraternity, the khalsa, the pure, the guru baptized each with a name ending in Singh ("Lion"). They should, he said, stand out among the multitudes, men so instantly recognizable they could never deny their faith. They would have to develop instead the courage to defend it with their lives.

Henceforth, he ordered, Sikhs would follow the law of

the five K 9 s. They would let their beards and hair grow (kesh); they would fix a steel comb (khangha) in their uncut hair; wear shorts (kucha) to have a warrior's mobility; carry a steel bangle (kara) on their right wrist; and always go around with a sword (kirpan). They were enjoined not to smoke or drink alcohol, have sexual intercourse with a Moslem woman, or eat meat slaughtered as Moslems slaughtered their animals, by cutting their throats.

The collapse of the Mogul empire gave the Sikhs the chance to carve out a kingdom of their own in their beloved Punjab. Britain's scarlet-coated troops had ended their brief hour of glory; but, before collapsing in 1849, the proud Sikhs handed the British the worst defeat they would experience in India at the Punjabi crossroads of Chillianwala.

In July 1947, five million of India's six million Sikhs still lived in the Punjab. They constituted only 13 percent of its population, but owned 40 percent of its land and produced almost two thirds of its crops. Almost a third of the members of India's armed forces were Sikhs, and close to half of the Indian Army's medal winners in two world wars had come from their ranks.*

The tragedy of the Punjab was that while Moslems and Sikhs could live under the British, neither could live under the other. The Moslems' memory of Sikh rule in the Punjab was one of "mosques defiled, women outraged, tombs razed, Moslems without regard to age or sex butchered, bayonetted, strangled, shot down, hacked to pieces, burnt alive."

For the Sikhs, the tales of their sufferings at the hands of the Punjab's Mogul rulers were embedded into a bloody folklore preached to every Sikh child as soon as he reached the age of understanding. At the Golden Temple was a museum designed to maintain alive in the memory of each succeeding generation of Sikhs the details of every indignity, every horror, every atrocity their people had suffered at the hands of the Moslems. In gory profusion, huge oil paintings depicted spread-eagled Sikhs being

* Endowed with some mysterious aptitude for mechanics, they had gravitated to the automotive industry. In India's cities, Sikh truck and taxi drivers were such legendary figures, it sometimes seemed that no one else could—or dared to—drive on the same road with them.

sawed in half for refusing to embrace Islam; ground to pulp between huge stone mills; crushed between meshing wheels studded with blades like gears; Sikh women at the gates of the Mogul's palace in Lahore seeing their infants speared and beheaded by the Mogul's Praetorian Guard.

The failure of the Sikhs to react to the violence done in March to their community had surprised and comforted both the Moslems and the politicians in Delhi. The Sikhs had lost their old martial vigor, it was whispered; they had gone soft with prosperity.

That was a grave misjudgment of their mood. Early in June, while the Viceroy and India's leaders had been reaching agreement in Delhi on India's division, the Sikh leadership had met at a secret council in Nedou's Hotel in Lahore. Its purpose was to decide Sikh strategy in case partition was accepted. The dominant voice at the council was that of the hot-eyed fanatic who had started the March conflagration by hacking down a Moslem League banner with his kirpan. Tara Singh, called "Master" by his followers, because he was a third-grade schoolteacher, had lost many members of his own family in the violence he had provoked, and one passion motivated him now, revenge.

"O Sikhs," he had shouted, in a speech that foretold too well the tragedy soon to overtake the Punjab, "be ready for self-destruction like the Japanese and Nazis. Our lands are about to be overrun, our women dishonored. Arise and once more destroy the Mogul invader. Our mother land is calling for blood! We shall slake her thirst with our blood and the blood of our enemies!"