Freedom at Midnight (43 page)

In Karachi, a weary Jinnah spent his afternoon

prowling the rooms of the immense home that would become at midnight his official residence. Nothing escaped his inquiring eyes. Checking the house's inventory, he discovered, to his consternation, that the croquet set was missing. He gave his young naval A.D.C. his first formal order: find the missing mallets and wickets and return them to his residence.

The man who had first articulated the impossible dream of Pakistan spent the day of August 14 alone in his cottage at 3 Humberstone Road, Cambridge, England. There would never be any triumphant parades through Karachi's streets for Rahmat Ali, no crowds shrieking their gratitude for what he had wrought. His dream belonged to another man now, the man who scorned it when Rahmat Ali first begged him to become its champion. On this day when his great ideal was taking flesh, Rahmat Ali was drafting a new tract, this one condemning Jinnah for accepting the partition of the Punjab, He was talking to the wind. A gratified people would devote a million dollars to the memorial that would mark the burial place of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, but the man whose idea had inspired him would be buried in a numbered grave in a British cemetery at Newmarket, England.

New Delhi, August 14,1947

They set out at sundown. Like an ungainly crane, a player of the nagasaram, the Indian flute, walked alone before their car guiding it down New Delhi's crowded streets. Every one hundred yards the flutist stopped, squatted on the asphalt, and sent an eerie shaft of sound shivering through the dusk. The two holy men in the car behind him stared straight ahead with celestial indifference. They were sannyasin, men dwelling in the highest state of exaltation a Brahman could attain, a state so sublime that, according to Hindu belief, it conferred on those who had reached it more spiritual blessings in one lifetime than an ordinary man might hope to attain in ten million reincarnations.

With their bare chests and foreheads streaked with ashes, their matted, uncut hair tumbling in black strands to their shoulders, they were pilgrims from an ancient,

timeless India. Beside each were the three possessions they were allowed in their life of renunciation: a seven-jointed bamboo stave, a water gourd and an antelope skin.* Each time a silhouette in a sari peered in the windows of their 1937 Ford taxi they averted their gaze. So strict were the rules of their society that not only were they enjoined to renounce all female company, but they were not even allowed to look on a woman. Condemned every morning to cover themselves with ashes, symbolic of the body's transient nature, they lived on alms; eating, without sitting down, the one meal they were allowed each day; and drinking regular drafts of pancha gavia, the blessed beverage composed of equal parts of the five gifts of the Sacred Cow: milk, curds, ghee (clarified butter), urine and dung.

One of the two bore this evening of August 14 a massive silver platter, upon which was folded a strip of white silk streaked in gold, the Pitambaram, the Cloth of God. The other carried a five-foot scepter, a flask of holy water from the Tanjore river, a pouch of sacred ash and a pouch of boiled rice which had been offered at dawn at the feet of Nataraja, the Dancing God, in his temple in Madras.

Their procession moved through the streets of the capital until it came to a stop in front of a simple bungalow at 17 York Road. On its doorsteps, those delegates from an India that venerated superstition and the occult had a rendezvous with the prophet of a new India of science and socialism. As once Hindu holy men had conferred upon ancient India's kings their symbols of power, so the san-nyasin had come to York Road to bestow their antique emblems of authority on the man who was about to assume the leadership of a modern Indian nation.

They sprinkled Jawaharlal Nehru with holy water, smeared his forehead with sacred ash, laid their scepter on his arms and draped him in the Cloth of God. To the man who had never ceased to proclaim the horror the word "religion" inspired in him, their rite was a tiresome manifestation of all he deplored in his nation. Yet he submitted to it with almost cheerful humility. It was almost as if that proud rationalist had instinctively understood that in the awesome tasks awaiting him no possible source of

* The antelope and tiger are considered by devout Hindus to be particularly clean animals; using their skins as mats, therefore, is not likely to defile a caste Hindu.

aid, not even the occult that he so scornfully dismissed, was to be totally ignored.

In military cantonments, at official residencies, naval stations, government offices; at Fort William in Calcutta, where Clive had started it all, Fort St. George in Madras, Viceregal Lodge in Simla; in Kashmir, the Nagaland, Sik-kim and the jungles of Assam, thousands of Union Jacks slid down their flagstaffs for the last time. They were not being formally struck from the Indian skyline on which, for three centuries, they had symbolized Britain's rule of the subcontinent. Mountbatten had made it clear that it was his firm policy that the British flag should not be ceremonially hauled down. Nehru had agreed that "if the lowering of the Union Jack in any way offended British susceptibilities," it should not take place.

And so, as it did every evening, the Union Jack came down those thousands of flagstaff's at sunset, August 14, to go quiet and unprotesting into Indian history. At sunrise August 15, its place upon them would be taken by the banner of an independent India.

At the crest of the Khyber Pass, Captain Kenneth Dance, adjutant of the Khyber Rifles, the only Englishman left along that storied passage, listened as seven tollings of a bell shook the still evening air. A guardroom bell to toll each passing hour had been for decades a tradition on all stations of the Indian Army, since few of its sepoys, before 1939, could afford a watch and fewer still could tell time. As the last toll sounded, Dance climbed to the quarter guard on the roof of the Landi Kotal fort. A bugler with a silver bugle stood poised to sound retreat. Below the two men, dominated by the fort's walls, the road slid its sinuous course down the pass to Jamrud and the portal through which fifty centuries of invaders had spilled onto the plains of India. Every bend along that road, every ocher outcropping bore its cement plaque to mark a battle of the army to which Dance belonged, or commemorate the place where some of his countrymen had died fighting for the historic defile.

The bugler stiffened and raised his instrument. Dance felt a twinge of sadness. An era was ending; and the Khyber Pass, with all its legends, was leaving English hands forever as he lowered the flag to the bugler's melancholy

call. He undipped the flag from its halyard and folded it up, determined to bring it "in safe custody back to England from whence it had come." Then he presented to his regiment a brass bell that he had bought at a ship chandler's in Bombay to replace the guardroom bell. On it he had inscribed one phrase: "Presented to the Khyber Rifles by Capt. Kenneth Dance. August 14, 1947."

Halfway across the subcontinent, in the shell-scarred tower that was the repository of the raj's most sacred memories, another, informal ceremony was taking place. The Tower of the Residency, Lucknow, was the only spot in the British Empire where the Union Jack was never lowered. The tower's walls had been left unchanged since the day in 1857 when the one thousand survivors in the Residency greeted the column that had ended their eighty-seven-day siege during the Indian Army Mutiny. The tower had become the shrine of Imperial India, a symbol of that doughty English ability to hold fast in adversity and, some cynics claimed, of the arrogance that got them there in the first place.

At 10 o'clock on the evening of August 13, the tower's caretaker Warrant Officer J. R. Ireland had hauled that Union Jack down for the last time. Now a team of sappers stood on the floor of the tower, where "over the topmost roof our banner of England flew." One of them took an ax and swiftly chopped the empty metal flagstaff from its base. Another hacked the base out of its masonry foundations. Then the hole was carefully cemented over. No other nation's banner would ever fly from Lucknow's sacred staff.

At 17 York Road, Jawaharlal Nehru had just finished washing the sannyasin ashes from his face and sat down to dinner when his telephone rang. His daughter Indira and his guest Padmaja Naidu could hear him in his study shouting to make himself heard over a bad line.

Both women gasped when he returned. He slumped ashen in his chair, clasping his head in his hands, unable to speak. Finally, he shook his head and looked at them, his eyes glistening with tears. His caller had been telephoning from Lahore. The water supply in the Old City's Hindu and Sikh quarters had been cut. People were going mad from thirst in the terrible summer heat yet women

and children coming out of their mahallas to beg a pail of water were being butchered by Moslem mobs. Fires were already raging out of control in a half dozen parts of the city.

Stunned, his voice barely a whisper, he said: "How am I going to talk tonight? How am I going to pretend there's joy in my heart for India's independence when I know Lahore, our beautiful Lahore, is burning?'*

The vision haunting Jawaharlal Nehru loomed in all its horror before the eyes of a twenty-year-old British captain of the Gurkhas. Riding in his jeep over the humpbacked railway bridge leading into Lahore, Captain Robert E. Atkins counted half a dozen great geysers of sparks gushing into the air above the city's darkened skyline. One image sprang to his mind: the blazing skyline of London on the night of the Great Fire Raid in 1940.

Behind Atkins rode the 200 men of his company, advance element of the column of 200 trucks and 50 jeeps bringing his entire battalion to Lahore. Part of the Punjab Boundary Force, Atkins and his exhausted troops had been rushing toward Lahore since dawn. Unfortunately, while 55,000 men had been designated for the force, the Indian Army had been able to get fewer than 10,000 of them into position by the eve of independence.

Moving through the city toward his assigned bivouac area in the grounds of the Gymkhana Club, Atkins did not see a single human being moving. A sinister, ominous silence, punctuated only by the roar of those distant fires, enveloped his convoy.

That young Englishman, born in Poona in an Indian Army cantonment, was riding into the city because a single ambition had ruled his life: to emulate the career of his father, a retired colonel in the army to which Atkins now belonged.

Peering into the menacing night around him, Atkins suddenly thought of the last evening he had spent with his father a year before. They had been playing billiards in the Madras Club and discussing politics. As they had racked their cues, his father had said, "Yes, India's going to become independent soon, and when she does, there's going to be horrible bloodshed."

My father, thought young Atkins, recalling the prophecy, knows India very well.

New Delhi, Midnight, August 14,1947

No arsonist's hand had lit the little fire burning in the New Delhi garden of Dr. Rajendra Prasad, the president of India's Constituent Assembly. It was a Sacred Fire, consecrated and purified according to Vedic rite by the Brahman priest who sat beside it rhythmically chanting his mantras. Together with earth (the common mother) and water (the giver of life), fire (the energizer and destroyer) composed the material trimurti, or trinity, of Hinduism. It was the indispensable adjunct of every Hindu rite and feast, the impersonal inquisitor of the ordeal by fire, the quasi-divine agent of man's ultimate return to the ashes from which he sprang.

"O Fire," intoned the Brahman priest beside it, "you are the countenance of all the Gods and of all learned men. Yours is the power to penetrate the innermost recesses of the human heart and discover the truth."

As he repeated his atonal chant, the learned men and women who would shortly become the first ministers of an independent India filed past the fire. A second Brahman sprinkled each with a few drops of water. Then they stepped up to a woman waiting with a copper vessel, its exterior whitewashed, its lip covered with palm leaves. As each minister paused before her, she dipped her right forefinger into the vessel, then with the liquid on her fingertip pressed a bright vermillion dot onto his or her forehead. It was the "third eye" that sees the reality behind appearances, a symbol that would shelter its bearers of that mystic sign from the influence of the evil eye or the malevolent designs of those who wished them ill. Thus prepared for the cruel burdens awaiting them, those men and women filed into their flag-draped Constituent Assembly Hall, where in a few minutes they would assume power over one sixth of the globe's population.

The last papers were signed, the last dispatch filed. The time had come to put away forever the Viceroy's ciphers and seals, all the paraphernalia of what had been one of

the world's most potent political offices. Alone in his study, Mountbatten mused to himself. For a little while longer I am the most powerful man on earth, he thought. I am sitting here controlling for the last few minutes of its existence a machine that has had the power of life and death over one fifth of humanity.

As his thoughts rambled on, he remembered a story of H. G. Wells, "The Man Who Could Do Miracles," the tale of a man who possessed for one day the power to perform any miracle he chose. I'm sitting here, living out the last minutes of this incredible office in which men really have had the power to perform miracles, Mountbatten told himself; I should perform a miracle, but what miracle?

Suddenly he sat upright. "By God," he said out loud, "I know. I'll make the Begum of Palanpore a 'Highness'!" With gleeful energy he began to stab the buzzers that summoned his aides to his office.

Mountbatten and the Nawab of Palanpore had become fast friends during the Prince of Wales's tour. During a visit as Supreme Commander to the Nawab and his able, attractive Australian wife, the Begum, in 1945, the Na-wab's British Resident, Sir William Croft, came to Mountbatten. The Nawab's wife had become a Moslem, he said, she had adopted the sari and all other local customs, was performing wonderful social work, but the Nawab was heartbroken because the Viceroy would not accord her the title "Highness," as she was not an Indian.