Freedom at Midnight (41 page)

A long silence followed its last chorus. Then the Indian went to the ballroom door and, glasses in hand, formed an aisle down its steps and out onto the lawn leading toward India's sleeping capital. One by one, their Pakistani com-

rades walked down the passage formed by their ranks into the night. As they did, on either side, the Indians raised their glasses in a final, silent toast to their departing comrades.

They would, as they had promised each other, meet again—far sooner and in far more tragic circumstances than any of them might have imagined that night. It was not on the polo fields of Lahore that those former comrades in arms would have their next rendezvous but on a battlefield in Kashmir. There, the rifles represented by a pair of silver sepoys on the trophy Brigadier Raza had carried away from the Gymkhana Club would no longer be trained upon a common foe. but upon each other.

WHILE THE WORLD SLEPT

Calcutta, August 13,1947

Thirty-six hours before the date fixed for India's independence, Mahatma Gandhi left the restful coconut groves of Sodepur Ashram in search of a miracle. His destination was only ten miles from his ashram, but it might have been light-years away. It was the closest approximation of hell on the surface of the earth, one of the blighted slums of Rudyard Kipling's "City of the Dreadful Night," Calcutta. There, in the meanness and misery of the world's most violent city, the soft-voiced archangel of nonviolence hoped to perform the miracle that the Viceroy's armies could not perform. Once again the artisan of India's independence prepared to offer his life to his countrymen—this time to free them not from the British, but from the hatred poisoning their hearts.

Even in its legends and the choice of the deities it worshiped, the city waiting at the end of the Gandhi's brief ride venerated violence. Its patron saint was Kali, the Hindu Goddess of Destruction, a fiery-tongued ogress garlanded with coils of writhing snakes and human skulls.* Each day, thousands of Calcutta's citizens bent in ado-

* According to Hindu lore, Kali was a suicide, and her husband, Shiva, grief-stricken at her death, went on a mad rampage through creation, waving her body from a trident. Vishnu saved the world by hurling a discus at Kali's body, shattering it into a thousand fragments. Each spot on earth where one of them fell was sanctified, but the holiest spot of all was Kaligat, in Calcutta, where the toes of her right foot came to rest.

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ration before her altars. Once infants had been sacrificed in her honor in secret temples near the city, and her devotees still practiced animal sacrifice, drenching themselves in their victim's blood.

In August 1947, a mirage of prosperity concealed the reality of Calcutta. The lush green sweep of the Maidan, the Georgian mansions and offices of its great trading companies along Chowringhee Road were only a surface veneer, a facade as false as a movie set. Behind them, through awful mile after awful mile, stretched a human sewer packed with the densest concentration of human beings on the face of the earth. It included 400,000 beggars and unemployables, 40,000 lepers. The slums they inhabited were a fetid, stinking horror. Their streets were cluttered lanes lined with open sewers overflowing with their burden of garbage, urine and excrement, each nourishing its hordes of rats, cockroaches, its buzzing clouds of flies and mosquitoes. The water flowing from their rare pumps was usually polluted by the cadavers decomposing in the Hooghly from which it was drawn. Once a week, down those lanes, the pitiless zamindars stalked in search of the rent for each corner in hell.

At the moment when India was about to attain her freedom, three million human beings in Calcutta lived in a state of chronic undernourishment, existing on a daily caloric intake inferior to that given the inmates of Hitler's death camps.

Those slums were breeding grounds for violence in all its forms. Men murdered in Calcutta for a mouthful of rice. With the savage killings of Direct Action Day in August 1946, that violence had taken on a new dimension, this one fed by the solid religious and racial fanatacism animating its Hindu and Moslem communities. Since then, not a single day had passed without its toll of communal murder. Organized into political gangs of goondas (hoodlums) armed with clubs, knives, pistols, vicious steel prongs, called tiger's claws, which could pluck out a man's eyeballs, the two communities faced each other with reciprocal fear and mistrust. While India waited to celebrate her long-sought freedom, they, the wretched of Calcutta's slums, stood poised to compound their infinite miseries in a frenzy of communal slaughter and destruction.

Shortly after three o'clock on the afternoon of August 13, the man who wanted somehow to stop them arrived in

their midst in a dilapidated prewar Chevrolet. Cautiously, Gandhi's car crept down Beliaghata Road past a clump of tin-roofed shacks toward a low stone wall ringing number 151. There, rising over an open patch of dirt the monsoon rains had churned into a muddy slush, was a crumbling ruin, a decaying vision from a Tennessee Williams stage setting.

Once the broad terraces of Hydari House with their Doric pillars and carved balustrades had represented the Palladian dream, transposed into the tropics, of some English merchant prince. Its current owner, a wealthy Moslem, had long ago abandoned it to the rats and cockroaches running rampant in its dingy corridors. Swept out, the dark dry coils of human excrement littering its grounds blanketed with bleaching powder, the toilet—a rarity in Calcutta, which had recommended the building to the Mahatma—repaired, it was ready to receive Gandhi and his followers. There amidst the stench, the filth and the mud, he had now to begin his quest for a miracle.

The people upon whom he would have to work it were already waiting for him, an excited, aroused crowd in undershirts and dhotis. They were all Hindus, and many of them had seen relatives butchered, wives and daughters raped by the Moslem mobs of Direct Action Day. At the approach of his car, they began to shriek Gandhi's name. For the first time in three decades, however, Indians were not cheering Mohandas Gandhi's name. They were cursing it.

Faces contorted with rage and hate, they shouted "Go save the Hindus in Noakhali"; "Save Hindus, not Moslems"; and "Traitor to the Hindus." Then, as Gandhi's car stopped, they produced their welcome for the man half the world believed a saint. They showered the car with stones and bottles.

Slowly, one of its doors opened. The familiar figure emerged. Glasses, slipping down his nose, one hand clutching his shawl, the other raised in a gesture of peace, the frail seventy-seven-year-old man walked alone into the mob's shower of stones.

"You wish to do me ill," Gandhi called, "and so I am coming to you."

At that sight, at his words, the demonstrators froze. Drawing near, the high voice that had pleaded with kings and viceroys for India pleaded with them for reason. "I

have come here," he said, "to serve Hindus and Moslems alike. I am going to place myself under your protection. You are welcome to turn against me if you wish," he continued. "I have nearly reached the end of life's journey. I have not much further to go. But, if you again go mad, I will not be a living witness to it."

He was saving the Hindus of Noakhali by his presence on Beliaghata Road, Gandhi explained. The Moslem leaders who bore the guilt for the slaughter of so many Hindus in Noakhali had given him their word: not a single Hindu would be harmed there on August 15. They knew he would undertake a fast unto death if they failed to keep their promise.

In response to that pledge, he had come to Calcutta. As he had thrust on the Moslem leaders of Noakhali the moral responsibility for the safety of the Hindus in their midst, he was now going to try to persuade the Hindus of Calcutta, like the members of the angry crowd before him, to become protectors of the city's Moslems. Implicit in his effort was the idea that if his plea to Calcutta's Hindus failed and they went on a rampage of killing, it would be at the expense of his life. For, just as he would fast to death if the Moslems broke their word in Noakhali, so he was ready to fast to death if the Hindus ignored his message in Calcutta.

That was the essence of his nonviolent strategy: a contract between the warring parties with his life as the ultimate guarantee of its fulfillment.

"How can I, who am a Hindu by birth, a Hindu by deed, a Hindu of Hindus in my way of living, be an enemy of the Hindus?" he asked his angry countrymen.

Gandhi's reasoning, the stark simplicity of his approach puzzled and disturbed the crowd. Promising to talk further with a delegation from their midst, he and his followers began to take over their rotting mansion.

Their respite was brief. The arrival of Suhrawardy, locus of all the mob's hatred, produced a new explosion. Howling and jeering, the crowd circled the house. A stone crashed through one of its few windows, sending its shattered shards flying across the room where Gandhi sat. A barrage followed, smashing the rest of the windows and beating like gigantic hailstones against the decaying exterior of the house.

Outwardly imperturbable, Gandhi, his shoulders hunched,

his head bowed, squatted cross-legged on the floor in the center of the house, patiently answering his correspondence in longhand. Yet a terrible turning point in Gandhi's life had been reached. On this sweltering August afternoon, only hours before the end of India's long march to freedom, a mob of his countrymen had turned on him for the first time since that January day in 1915 when he walked ashore under the arch of the Gateway of India. For Gandhi, for India, for the world, the crash of the stones against the walls of Hydari House, the hate-inflamed ravings of the mob hurling them, were the first mutterings of the chorus of a Greek tragedy.

Karachi, August 13,1947

"Sir, the plot is on."

Louis Mountbatten stiffened perceptibly at those words. A glimmer of apprehension flicked across his otherwise impassive features. Mountbatten followed the man who had uttered them toward a spot under his plane's wings, where no one could overhear their words.

All their intelligence reports, the C.I.D. officer said, confirmed the details of the briefing Mountbatten had been given in Delhi. At least one and most probably several bombs, they believed, would be thrown at the open car scheduled to carry him and Jinnah through Karachi's streets the following morning, Thursday, August 14. Despite their most intensive efforts, they had failed to apprehend any of the Hindu fanatics that the R.S.S.S. had infiltrated into the city to carry out the assassination.

To Mountbatten's annoyance, his wife had slipped up behind them. She overheard the C.I.D. officer's last phrases. "I'm going to drive with you," she insisted.

"You damn well are not," her husband replied. "There's no reason for both of us to be blown to smithereens."

Ignoring their exchange, the C.I.D. officer continued. "Jinnah insists on driving in an open car," he said. "You'll be going very slowly. I am afraid our means of protecting you are rather limited." There was only one way, in the C.I.D.'s judgment, of averting a catastrophe.

"Sir," he begged, "you must get Jinnah to cancel the procession."

Eighteen hours after an angry mob had stoned the greatest Indian of the century, at 9 a.m. Thursday, August 14, Gandhi's principal political rival prepared to savor the apotheosis of his long struggle.

Mohammed Ali Jinnah had succeeded where the sorrowing leader in the ruins of Hydari House had failed. Despite Gandhi, despite so many dictates of logic and reason, despite, above all, the fatal disease locked in his lungs, Jinnah had divided India. In a few moments an austere assembly hall in Karachi would witness the birth of the most populous Moslem nation in the world. Ranged in the shell-shaped hall's circling rows of seats were the representatives of the forty-five million people Jinnah had led on their Hegira to nationhood.

They were a colorful assembly: stolid Punjabis in gray astrakhan caps and tightly buttoned sherwanis, white versions of a priest's cassock; glowering Pathans; Wazirs, Mahsuds, Afridis, beige-and-gold-flecked turbans twisted over their heads, mustaches scarring their wind-burned faces; short, dark Bengalis, representatives of a province that Jinnah had never visited and whose people he mistrusted; tribal leaders from Baluchistan, women from the Indus Valley, their heads shrouded in satin burqas: women of the Punjab in gold speckled shalwars, tunics, over bell-bottomed culottes.

Beside Jinnah sat the Viceroy, from whose reluctant hands the Moslem leader had prised his state. Mountbatten wore his white naval uniform and the decorations he so loved to wear. He was a splendidly fitting figure for the occasion, the first of the ceremonies which, in the course of the next thirty-six hours, would formally terminate Britain's three-and-a-half-century overlordship of the subcontinent.

A taut smile creasing his composed features, Mountbatten rose to deliver the King's good wishes to his newest dominion. Then Mountbatten, to celebrate an occasion he had hoped would never take place, declared:

"The birth of Pakistan is an event in history. History seems sometimes to move with the infinite slowness of a glacier, and sometimes to rush forward in a torrent. Just now, in this part of the world, our united efforts have melted the ice and moved some impediments from the stream and we are carried in the full flood. There is not time to look back. There is only time to look forward."

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With those words, the Viceroy looked sideways toward Jinnah. His disdaining face, his parchment-dry skin emitted even at this supreme instant no more trace of emotion than the features of a Pharaonic death mask.

"I would like to express my tribute to Mr. Jinnah," he declared. "Our close personal contact and the mutual trust and understanding that has grown out of it, are, I feel, the best omens for future good relations."

As he droned through his ritualistic phrases, Mountbat-ten could not help thinking that he was going to have to risk his life in a few moments because of the obdurate man to whom they were addressed. The viceroy had had no more success in persuading Jinnah to cancel their threatened procession than he had had in trying to get him to abandon his dream of Pakistan. To cancel the ride or to rush through the streets of Karachi in a closed car would have been, Jinnah felt, an act of cowardice. Jinnah would never have demeaned the emergence of the nation for which he had worked so hard with a gesture like that. Come what may, Mountbatten was going to have to expose himself to an assassin's bomb in an open car, at the side of this man he disliked, to celebrate the birth of a nation to whose creation he had been vehemently opposed.