Freedom at Midnight (39 page)

Worst of all, his hands were covered with blood. By declaring a public holiday and letting his Moslem League followers know the attention of his police would be elsewhere, Suhrawardy had set the stage for the killings that had ravaged Calcutta on Jinnah's Direct Action Day in August 1946. It was fear that the Hindus of Calcutta were now preparing to wreak their vengeance for those killings that drove Suhrawardy to call for Gandhi's help.

Rushing to the Mahatma's Sodepur ashram, he caught him on the eve of his departure for Noakhali. He begged Gandhi to stay in Calcutta. Only he, he said, could save Calcutta's Moslems and damp the firestorm of hate threatening the city.

"After all," he pleaded, "the Moslems have as much a claim on you as the Hindus. You have always said you were as much of us as of the Hindus."

One of Gandhi's unique faculties had always been discerning the best in a foe, then subtly working on it, appealing to it. He sensed a genuine concern in Suhrawardy's heart for the fate of his Moslem followers.

If he agreed to stay in Calcutta, Gandhi said, it would be on two conditions. First, Suhrawardy would have to extract from the Moslems of Noakhali a solemn pledge of the safety of the Hindus in their midst. If a single Hindu was killed. Gandhi would have no choice but to fast to death. Gandhi was thrusting on Suhrawardy the moral responsibility for his own life.

When Suhrawardy brought him the pledge he wanted, Gandhi set out the second part of his bargain. He proposed the most incongruous alliance imaginable. He was prepared to stay, provided that Suhrawardy came to live with him day and night, by his side, unarmed and unprotected in the heart of a sordid slum in Calcutta. There, the oddest couple on the subcontinent, they would together offer their lives as the gauge of the city's peace.

"I have got stuck here," Gandhi wrote to Delhi after Suhrawardy accepted his idea, "and am now going to un-

dertake a grave risk The future will reveal itself. Keep

close watch."

Like the peeling leaves of an artichoke, the last pages of Mountbatten's famous calendar came flicking off. To the overworked Viceroy and his staff, those last days of British rule in India appeared "the most hectic of any," and each disappearing page of the calendar seemed to carry its problem. The referendum in the Northwest Frontier Province, which ultimately gave the territory to Pakistan, had to be organized, as did a second referendum, in Sylhet, near the great tea plantations of Assam. There were all the festivities marking independence to be arranged. The Congress leaders insisted that "there should be plenty of pomp" in the grand old tradition of the raj to mark the occasion. Their grim, gray socialism could come later.

Congress ordered slaughterhouses throughout India closed August 15. Free movies were to be offered in all the nation's theaters, and in Delhi every school child would receive a piece of candy and an independence medal. There were problems. In Lahore, a government announcement declared that "in view of the disturbed situation, an active and colorful program has been ruled out." The leadership of the right-wing Hindu Mahasabha, bitter opponents of India's partition, told their followers that "it is impossible to rejoice and participate in the celebrations August 15." They urged their members instead to rededi-cate themselves to the forceful reunification of their mutilated Motherland."

A wrangle over protocol temporarily brought plans for Pakistan's independence celebrations on August 14 to a halt. The proud Jinnah wanted precedence over the Viceroy, despite the fact that technically his dominion would not become independent until midnight. He did not get it.

There were other disappointments in store for the Moslem leader. One of the horses trained to pull the state carriage that he had inherited with the flip of a coin went lame, and the Viceroy had to offer him an open Rolls for his first official drive through the streets of Karachi. Jinnah himself drew up the schedule of ceremonies to mark Pakistan's birth. They had been scheduled to open with a formal state luncheon at his residence on Thursday, Au-

gust 13 until one of his aides delicately reminded the man who was about to become the head of the world's most important Islamic nation that Thursday, August 13 fell in the last week of the Holy month of Ramadan, when faithful Moslems around the world were expected to fast from sunrise to sunset.

While the Viceroy and the leaders of the two new dominions attended to those myriad details, Britain's three-and-a-half-century rule over India was trickling to a close against the background rattle of ice in countless cocktail glasses and stentorian rumble of alcoholic toasts to auld lang syne. All across the subcontinent, a crushing round of parties, at-homes, teas, dinners, farewell receptions marked the passing of an era.

Most of the British in India, of course, those who exercised the rites of commerce which had brought their forebears to her shores in the first place, were staying on. For 60,000 others, however—soldiers, I.C.S. officers, police inspectors, railroad engineers, foresters, communications clerks—it was time to go back to that island they had always referred to as "our home." For some, the transition would be painfully abrupt, an almost overnight move from a superb governor's mansion manned by scores of servants to premature retirement in a country cottage on a pension soon to be ravaged by inflation. There were few who would not miss the good life, the clubs and the polo, the servants and the hunting in the Spartan outlines of the Socialist England to which they were returning. For years it had been a standard joke among the English on the subcontinent that the best view of India was from the stern of a P & O steamer homeward bound from Bombay. Many an Englishman in the coming weeks, however, would remember that sight as the saddest vision his eyes ever rested on.

In hundreds of bungalows the lace doilies, the bridal silverware, the tiger skins and the stories that went with them, the oils of mustachioed uncles lost in the 9th Bengal Lancers or Skinner's Horse, the puggree helmets, the dark and solemn furniture shipped out from London forty years before were packed up for the trip back.

A people whose great fault in India, Winston Churchill would remark, had been their aloofness, departed in a burst of uncharacteristic congeniality. As though implicitly

recognizing the new order that would follow their departure, saris, sherwani tunics and the folds of cotton khadi mixed with the business suits and dresses of the British in clubs and homes across India where they had rarely been seen before. An extraordinary air of friendliness infused those gatherings. It would be unique; a colonizing people were leaving those they had colonized in a burst of good will and friendship.

The bazaar of Old Delhi, Chandi Chowk, swarmed with departing British civil servants bartering Victrolas, a refrigerator, or even a car for Persian carpets, elephant tusks, ivory, gold and silver pieces, even on occasion the stuffed skins of the animals they had never been able to hunt in the jungles of the subcontinent.

There were the sad legacies being left behind, the monuments, the statues, those lonely cemeteries where almost two million Englishmen lay in Oscar Wilde's "wandering graves" by "Delhi's Walls" and "Afghan lands and many where the Ganges falls through seven mouths of shifting sand."

The foreign fields in which they lay would not be forever England, but at least their custody would. Because "it was unthinkable we should leave our British dead in foreign hands," the departing raj had provided for their future administration by Britain's High Commission in India. In England, the Archbishop of Canterbury began a collection for a fund to provide for their upkeep.*

A decision was made to move the famous Well of Cawnpore into which Nana Sahib's rebels had thrown the butchered remnants of 950 men, women and children at the height of the Mutiny to the cemetery of the City's All Souls Church. Its inscription—"Sacred to the perpetual memory of a great company of Christian people, chiefly women and children who, at this spot were cruelly massacred by rebels of Nana Dhondu Pant of Bithur and cast, the dead and the dying, into the well below"—was ordered covered August 15, so as not to offend Indian sensibilities.

* The effort was short-lived, and the harvest it produced was meager. Few sites in India a quarter of a century later are as forlorn and desolate as those British cemeteries going slowly wild for lack of maintenance funds. Screeching monkeys chase lizards across the gray cement slab over Brigadier John Nicholson, who led the post-mutiny assault on Delhi, and from Madras to Peshawar, the weeds and wild grass now obscure the fading inscriptions on the tombs the British left behind.

The departure was characterized by events almost touchingly English in nature. Unwilling to condemn his tough little polo ponies to finishing their lives between the slots of a tonga cart, many an army officer chose to put his mounts down with his service revolver. The hundred hounds in the pack of the hunt of the Staff College at Quetta were put down on the orders of the College's last commandant, Colonel George Noel Smyth, because he was unable to find them suitable homes. The task of killing those "delightful companions with whom we had shared so many hours of sport" was, the Colonel noted, "one of the most painful in his career." Even the Viceroy's staff devoted part of one of its meetings, despite the appalling demands on its time, to debating what should be the proper future of the Indian Kennel Club in a partitioned India.

Mountbatten issued strict orders that everything was to be left behind; all the stern oil portraits of Clive and Hastings and Wellesley, all the sturdy statues of his great-grandmother Victoria, all the seals, the silverware, the banners, the uniforms, the diverse paraphernalia of the raj were to be left to India and Pakistan for whatever use they wanted to make of them.

Britain, his Chief of Staff Lord Ismay noted, wanted India "to look back upon our association of the past two hundred years with pride. It is true," he admitted, "they may not want those reminders, but it is up to them to say

so."

Despite the Viceroy's orders, not all the treasures of British rule would be left behind. On occasion, British officers in the Indian Army walked off with pieces of their regimental silver. In Bombay a pair of assistant inspectors of customs were summoned to the office of their departing superior Victor Matthews.

"We may be liquidating the empire," Matthews growled, "but we're not turning this treasure over to Indian hands." He pointed to a large metal footlocker behind his desk to which he had the only key.

John Ward Orr, one of his two subordinates, timidly opened the box wondering if it would contain some priceless Hindu sculpture, some jeweled Buddha. To his surprise, he saw that it was filled with neat piles of books. He picked up one and immediately understood the nature of the treasure. The trunk was a supreme accolade to the bureaucratic mind. In a land whose temple walls were cov-

ered by the most erotic sculptures ever fashioned by the fingers of man, it contained a selection of the pornography which, during the course of fifty years, Britain's zealous customs officers had adjudged too scabrous to allow onto Indian soil. Orr picked up one, an album called The 39 Positions of Love. The prosaic postures it recommended, he noted, bore about as much relation to the elegant and imaginative delights practiced by the Hindu deities in the temples of Khajuraho as an overweight dowager's waltzing would to the pirouettes of the prima ballerina of the Ballet Russe.

Matthews solemnly extended the key of the trunk to William Witcher, the senior of his two aides. He could now, he declared, leave India secure in the knowledge that the customs' greatest treasure remained in British custody.*

As always, he was alone. Shrouded in silence, Mohammed Ali Jinnah walked through the early morning sunlight toward a simple stone grave in a corner of Bombay's Moslem cemetery. There, he performed a gesture which, in the days to come, millions of other Moslems would perform because of what he had wrought. Before setting off to his promised land of Pakistan, Jinnah placed a last bouquet on the tomb he was leaving behind forever in India.

Jinnah was a remarkable man, but probably nothing in

* The famous trunk remained safe in British keeping for almost another decade. Witcher kept it in his own home, where it was found by his wife, the daughter of an Anglican bishop. The good woman almost collapsed when one day, after her husband had inadvertently left it open, she peered inside. Witcher, in turn, on his departure, passed the trunk oh to Orr. When it was Orr's turn to leave in 1955, there were, alas, no survivors left of the high-minded line of British customs officers who had labored so hard to prevent Indian minds from being exposed to the scurrilous influence of such material. After first selecting two volumes, Le Guide des Caresses and Les Nuits de Harem., from the trunk for the improvement of his French, Orr decided to turn it over, at last, to Indian hands. Noting that it was perhaps the last British treasure to thus pass into Indian possession, he selected as its new custodians a group of young men whose healthy appetites might make them reasonably immune to the trunk's message, the members of the Bombay Rugby Club. Orr himself returned to England. Shortly after his arrival he received in the mail an official document informing him that his colleagues in the British Customs were detaining his luggage at Southampton—for the illegal possession of pornographic material.

his life had been more remarkable or more seemingly out of character than the deep and passionate love that had linked the austere Moslem leader to the woman beneath that tombstone. Their love and marriage had defied almost every accepted canon of the Indian society of their day. Indeed, the woman should not even have been there in an Islamic cemetery. The wife of India's Moslem messiah had not been born into the faith of Mohammed. Ruttenbhai Jinnah had been born a Parsi, the descendants of the Zoro-astrian fire worshipers of ancient Persia, who left the corpses of their dead on watchtowers to be consumed by the vultures.

Jinnah had been forty-one, seemingly a confirmed bachelor,* when he fell in love with Ruttie, the seventeen-year-old daughter of one of his close friends during a vacation at the Mount Everest Hotel in Darjeeling. Ruttie had been equally mesmerized by Jinnah. Her furious father had obtained a court order forbidding his ex-friend from seeing his daughter, but on her eighteenth birthday, with only the sari she was wearing and a pet dog under each arm, a defiant Ruttie stalked out of her millionaire father's mansion and went off to marry Jinnah.