Freedom at Midnight (42 page)

"The time has come to bid you farewell," he concluded. "May Pakistan prosper always . . . and may she continue in friendship with her neighbors and with all the nations of the world."

Then it was Jinnah's turn. He looked like a pope giving an audience to the faithful with his white sherwani buttoned up to the base of his emaciated throat. England and the peoples she had colonized were parting as friends, he agreed, "and I sincerely hope that we shall remain friends." A thirteen-century-old Islamic tradition of tolerance for the beliefs of others would, he promised, "be followed and practiced by us." Pakistan, he declared, "would not be found wanting in friendly spirit by our neighbors and all the nations of the world."

Then, almost before they knew it, the speeches were over, the trial at hand. Side by side, the two men, rivals in so many domains, emerged from the great teak doors of the assembly hall. Waiting before them was the black open Rolls-Royce that was to carry them through their ordeal. The damn thing looks like a hearse, Mountbatten thought. For a brief second, he fixed his eyes on his wife. He had

given her driver strict orders to stay well behind his can He was certain that she would find a way to thwart them.

As they moved toward the waiting car, a series of grisly images forced their way across Mountbatten's mind, a vivid mental picture screened behind his carefully arranged public facade. They had nothing to do with this procession. They were the ghosts of processions past, stirred by the pages of those genealogical charts which had been Mountbatten's passion and relaxation in India. Onto one of their branches, he had meticulously placed the name of his great-uncle, the Tsar Alexander II, noting by his name, "deceased 13 February 1881." Alexander II had been blown into lumps of sodden flesh in Saint Petersburg, by a bomb thrown into his open carriage. Further down that same branch of his family was the name of another uncle, the Grand Duke Serge, killed in 1904 by an anarchist's bomb in an almost identical incident. And on still another page, was the entry bearing the name of his cousin Ena, who had gone to her wedding to Spain's Alfonso XIII, her satin wedding gown covered with the flesh and blood of the coachman killed by a bomb thrown into her carriage. Grotesque phantoms from his family's past, they seemed now to crowd into his open Rolls-Royce along with the young Viceroy.

His eyes met Jinnah's as the car started. They did not speak. He had never known Jinnah to be anything but tense, Mountbatten thought, but now the tension radiating from his being had an almost palpable, living dimension to it. A heart-stopping thirty-one-gun viceregal salute followed them down the drive out into Karachi's streets. There, the crowds were waiting, the enormous, happy, exulting crowds, a sea of anonymous faces concealing somewhere, on some street corner, at some turning, at some window ledge or roof top, the face of the man who wanted to kill them. The three-mile route was lined with troops, but their backs were all to the crowd. They would be useless against an assassin's bomb.

To Mountbatten, it would seem in later years as though that thirty-minute ride had lasted twenty-four hours. They moved at a pace barely faster than a quick walk. The crowd lined every foot of the route, six deep on the sidewalks, clinging to lampposts and telephone poles, dangling from windows, lining roofs. Blissfully unaware of the

drama the men in the Rolls were living, they chanted their "Zindabads" —for Pakistan, for Jinnah, for Mountbatten.

Trapped, the two rolled slowly down that tunnel of faces, running a kind of gauntlet from which at any second a hand grenade could come arching toward their car. Forced to respond to the rejoicing, emotionally charged crowd, they had no choice but to play a farce, to act out a kind of grotesque charade. Mountbatten would never forget having to pump his hand up and down in rhythmic waves, forcing a smile onto his face, while under that exterior, his eyes kept sweeping the crowd, studying those faces, looking for a sullen stare, a pair of frightened eyes, some clue to tell him him "Here! This is where it's going to happen."

It was not the first time he had been in such a situation in India. During the Prince of Wales's tour the C.I.D. had uncovered a plot to throw a bomb in the Crown Prince's car as he rode through the streets of the State of Bhar-atpur on December 8, 1921. Young Mountbatten had been obliged to masquerade as his cousin by riding at the head of the royal procession in the car usually occupied by the Prince.

The memories of that harrowing experience flashed through his mind now as he watched that indiscriminate sea of faces slide past. Which one is it? he kept thinking. Is it that one I'm waving to? Or the one beside him? There were the silly reflections. He remembered a military secretary to a governor of Bengal who caught an assassin's bomb and threw it back; but then Mountbatten reminded himself he had never been able to catch a cricket ball. He kept thinking of his wife behind him, wondering if she had succeeded, as he was sure she had, in countermanding his orders. Yet he did not dare interrupt his vigil for even a second to turn around to see. Ceaselessly, his eyes scanned the horizon above the crowd, radar beacons waiting for the first glint of a piece of metal flying toward the car.

As the cortege came into view from the balcony of his hotel on Victoria Road, a young man tightened his grip on the Colt .45 swelling his coat pocket. While his eyes watched the faces waving from the windows of the building opposite his, he slowly flicked off the safety of his weapon. When Mountbatten's car neared his balcony, G. D. Savage, the young officer of the Punjab C.I.D. who had delivered word of the plot to Delhi, "put up a prayer." He,

in fact, had no right to have that weapon. His service with the Punjab police had ended twenty-four hours earlier; he was on his way home to England.

In their car, Mountbatten and Jinnah continued to mask their apprehension behind their gracious smiles and waves. They were both so preoccupied with the risks they had taken that they had not said a word to each other since getting into the car. The vanity which so many of his critics considered his worst failing was the Viceroy's greatest comfort as the strain mounted. These people like me, he kept telling himself; after all, I have given them their independence. He could not believe there were men in that crowd willing to kill him. His presence, he sincerely thought, might save Jinnah. They just won't kill him, he insisted to himself, when they realize it means killing me at the same time.

On his balcony, Savage held his breath as the car rolled under his feet. He kept his hand fixed on his weapon until the Rolls had passed beyond the range where he could offer its occupants any protection. Then, he went into his room and poured himself four fingers of Scotch.

Ahead of the car now, the huzzahs and Zindabads gave way to a menacing silence. A Hindu neighborhood, Mountbatten told himself; this is where it will happen. For five agonizing minutes, the cortege crept through those muted crowds along Elphinstone Street, Karachi's principal commercial thoroughfare. Almost all its shops and markets belonged to Hindus embittered and frightened by the event their Moslem neighbors were celebrating.

Nothing happened. Suddenly, as welcome as harbor lights to a sea captain after a hurricane, the gates of Government House rose in front of the Rolls. The most harrowing drive of Mountbatten's life was over.

As their car eased to a stop, for the first and only time in their intense, difficult relationship Jinnah relaxed. His glacial fagade disappeared, and a warm smile illuminated his features. He clamped his bony hand on the Viceroy's knee and murmured, "Thank God! I've brought you back alive!"

Mountbatten sat up. What bloody cheek! he thought. "You brought me back alive?" he asked, incredulously. "My God, it's / who brought you back alive!"*

* An intensive effort by the authors of the book to discover whv the plot in Karachi was not executed revealed only one, indirect

Calcutta, August 14,1947

As always, he was ready at the appointed hour. Precisely at five o'clock Gandhi's frail silhouette appeared framed in the doorway of Hydari House. Slightly stooped, his hands resting on the shoulders of the two young girls he called his crutches, he did his quick shuffle through the crowds waiting for him in the house's courtyard.

The ceremony toward which he walked was as rigidly fixed as any of the events in the Mahatma's meticulously ordered days. As Lenin had prepared a revolution in the conspiratorial conversations of the cell, and the Nazis had fashioned theirs in the pompous glitter of their Nuremburg rallies, the regular rendezvous that Gandhi had proposed to India on the long march to freedom had been, appropriately, a prayer meeting.

In cities and villages, in London slums and British jails, neglected only on the rarest of occasions, those prayer meetings had been the favored medium of a genius at human relations for communicating with his followers. He had discoursed to them on the nutritional values of un-husked rice, the evils of the atomic bomb, the importance of regular bowel movements, the sublime beauties of the Gita, the benefits of sexual continence, the iniquities of imperialism, the rationale of nonviolence. Repeated from mouth to mouth, reported in the press, carried on the radio, those daily messages had been the cement binding his movement, the gospel of Mohandas Gandhi.

Now, in the open yard of his crumbling house in a city of fear and hate, he prepared for the last public prayer meeting he would address in an India under British occupation. All day, Gandhi had received delegations of Hindus, to whom he had explained the nonviolent contract that he proposed for Calcutta, hoping that with the constantly reiterated outlines of his doctrine, a new spirit might radiate out across the city from Hydari House. The

testimony offered by Pritham Singh, a bicycle repairman in Jullun-dur. Singh was arrested by the C.I.D. in connection with the Sikhs' part of the plot, the derailment of the Pakistan stores trains. The R.S.S.S. had indeed, he claimed, infiltered its men into Karachi, but the leader, whose grenade explosion was to be the signal to the others to hurl theirs, lost his courage when the car passed him.

presence of almost ten thousand people at his first Calcutta prayer meeting was an indication that he was enjoying at least some success.

"From tomorrow," he told that crowd, "we shall be delivered from the bondage of British rule. But from midnight today," he sadly intoned, "India will be partitioned too. Tomorrow will be a day of rejoicing; but it will be a day of sorrow as well."

Independence, he warned his prayer meeting, would throw a heavy burden on them all. "If Calcutta can return to reason and brotherhood," he said, then, perhaps "all India may be saved." But, "if the flames of communal strife envelop the whole country, how can our newborn freedom survive?"

The man who had won that freedom for India told his audience that he would not be among those rejoicing at its arrival. He asked his followers to mark India's Independence Day as he would, "by fasting and by prayer for the salvation of all India, and by spinning as much as possible," because it was that beloved wooden wheel that carried the message most likely to save their country from disaster.

For all the huzzahs and "Pakistan Zindabads" that had followed his car as it rolled through the streets of Karachi, the birth of the nation that Jinnah would one day boast he had won "with a clerk and a typewriter" was characterized by a puzzling coolness. The ceremonies, The Times of London noted, "were marked by a surprising lack of popular enthusiasm" and "a general air of apathy." It was almost as if some instinctive prescience of the danger attendant on their nation's birth had muffled the enthusiasm of those millions whom Jinnah had led to their promised land.

Strangely, it was in East Bengal, in those areas soon to form East Pakistan—and one day, the battlefields of the Bangladesh war—that the mood was most festive. Khwaja Mohiuddin, East Pakistan's Chief Minister designate, left Indian soil at noon aboard a tiny steamer festooned with Moslem League banners. For hours, the steamer plied through the monsoon-swollen waters of the Gangetic Delta en route to Mohiuddin's new capital at Dacca.

Every time the little steamer stopped at a cluster of huts

or a ramshackle jetty stretching into the muddy delta, scores of tiny rowboats, canoes and sailboats poured out from the shore to greet it, their occupants shouting "Pato-stan Zindabad!"

"Everybody was singing," Mohiuddin's son noted. "You could see the happiness in people's eyes." One indispensable element for the proper celebration of Pakistan's birth, however, was conspicuous by its absence. Not a single Pakistani flag was on display along the steamer's route. Mohiuddin discovered why in Dacca. There were none in all of East Bengal.

In Lahore, center of a Punjab seething with violence and the terrible uncertainty caused by its still-unpublished boundary line, Bill Rich performed his final chores as the city's last British police superintendent. Outside his dingy office, Rich could hear a rhythmic sloshing as a boy threw pails of water on the kas-kas tati, the bamboo slats screening his windows to keep down the fierce heat. He had done what he could to check Lahore's descent into chaos, he thought sadly. It had not been enough. The lovely capital of the Moguls was submerged in a tide of fear and hate. He posted in the Police Order Book, as a record for posterity, a summary of the violence he had witnessed. Then he called in his Moslem successor.

Rich took out a form used for handing over charge. It was divided into two identical halves. On his half he wrote, "I have handed over"; and he signed his name. His successor wrote, "I have taken over" on the other and signed. Rich saluted, shook hands with the few members of his staff he could find loitering about, and sadly walked away.

Thirty-five miles away, in Amritsar, his colleague Rule Dean was going through a similar ceremony late in the afternoon of August 14. Dean took from his safe the Secret Registry, the list of political informers who had received just under 1,000 rupees a month from the Amritsar police. Their number included a member of the city's Congress Committee and one of the men who prepared the amrit, the sugary communion paste of the Sikh's Golden Temple, but Dean had no hesitation turning the list over to his Sikh successor. "No gazetted officer of police," Dean was certain, "whatever his religion or political belief, would deliberately do down an informer."