Freedom at Midnight (50 page)

At Maiden's hotel in Old Delhi, the most famous establishment in the city, a beautiful Indian girl in a sari danced frpm table to table and, with a lipstick, affixed a red dot, a tilak, for good luck onto the forehead of everyone in the place.

In the complaisant shadows of a garden near Connaught Circus, Kartar Singh, a journalist, celebrated his country's freedom with an intensely personal gesture. He used it as the pretext to kiss for the first time Aisha Ali, a pretty medical student he had met a few days earlier. Their embrace was the first gesture of a long and marvelous love story beginning at a most inauspicious moment. Their particular passion was going to run athwart the passions that were about to sweep northern India. Kartar Duggal Singh was a Sikh; Aisha Ali was Moslem.

Despite the exuberance of independence night, the shadows of that coming storm lay already over parts of the capital. In their neighborhoods in Old Delhi, many Moslems were whispering a new slogan put out by fanatics of the Moslem League: "We got Pakistan by right; we'll take Hindustan by force." That morning, a mullah in an Old Delhi mosque had reminded his faithful at prayers that Moslems had ruled Delhi for centuries and—"Inch Allah" ("God willing")—they would do so again. At the same time Hindu and Sikh refugees from the Punjab, packed into makeshift refugee camps around Delhi, threat-

ened to turn the capital's Moslem neighborhoods into a bonfire to celebrate independence.

V. P. Menon, the brilliant bureaucrat who had redrafted Mountbatten's partition plan and coaxed so many princes into acceding to India, passed the midnight hour in his sitting room with his teen-age daughter. When the sound of conch shells and cheering crowds drifted into their quiet parlor, Menon's daughter leaped up and cried out her delight. Her father remained fixed in his chair, no exuberance on his face.

"Now," he said, with a sigh, "our nightmares really start."

For millions of others on the subcontinent, however, midnight, August 14, marked the beginning of a party twenty-fours hours long. In the fort at Landi Kotal in the Khyber, whole sheep roasted over a dozen roaring fires. The officers and men of the Khyber Rifles and the Pathan tribesmen who had been their traditional enemies celebrated with a tribal banquet. The commanding officer offered his adjutant and guest of honor, Captain Kenneth Dance, the piece de resistance, a sheep's liver wrapped in fatty yellow intestines. At midnight, the excited tribesmen grabbed their rifles and, shrieking "The Khyber is ours. The Khyber is ours," sent a pound of lead into the night air.

At Cawnpore, a city cursed by memories of the massacres that had occurred there during the mutiny, Englishmen and Indians embraced publicly. In Ahmedabad, the textile capital where Gandhi had founded his first Indian ashram, a young schoolteacher who had been jailed for trying to hoist India's flag in 1942 was given the honor of raising it over the town hall.

In Lucknow, scores had been invited to a midnight flag raising at the Residence. The engraved invitations had read "National Dress: Dhotis will be suitable." Rajeshwar Dayal, an Indian with fourteen years in the I.C.S., had been shocked on reading it. He didn't even own a dhoti. Such a ceremony under his British employers would certainly have been in white tie and tails. The reception itself was utterly different from the stiffly formal affairs of the raj. As soon as the gates opened, the long table loaded with sweets disappeared under a swarm of saris and strug-

gling children. As he watched India's flag take its place over the Residency, a curious thought occurred to Dayal, one which said much of the manner in which the British had ruled his country. In fourteen years' service in the I.C.S., he thought, he had many, many British colleagues. But he had never had a British friend.

In Madras, Bangalore, Patna—in thousands of cities, towns and villages—people entered temples at midnight to cast rose petals at the feet of the gods, their poignant plea for the blessing of the cosmos on their new nation. In Benares, the leading pastry maker earned a considerable sum peddling an independence cookie in India's national colors, its frosting made of oranges, pistachios and milk.

Nowhere was independence night celebrated with more fervor and enthusiasm than in the great port of Bombay. There, on pavements that often had been slick with the blood spilled in lathi charges, in that city whose history was inextricably intertwined with India's independence struggle, whose streets had witnessed so many demon-stations, hartals, and strikes, an entire people went wild with joy. From the palatial apartment houses of Marine Drive to the distant slums of Pavel, from the villas of Malabar Hill to the clutter of the Thieves Market, Bombay was a lake of light. "Midnight has become midday," wrote one newsman. "It was a new Dewali, a new Eid, a New Years' Eve—it was all the festivals of a land of festivals rolled into one—for this was the Festival of Freedom."

Something less than outright rejoicing inaugurated that festival in a number of dinners and banquets across India. They took place in what had been her old princely states. The day of the maharajas was over; and for some of them, still unreconciled to the loss of their privileges and the end of their world of pomp and splendor, August 15 would be a day of mourning. In his brightly lighted banquet hall, the Nizam of Hyderabad offered a farewell banquet to his British administrators, whose role was ending along with his privileged ties to India's old paramount power. Despite the gaiety of the Nizam's numerous progeny and the elegance of the women present, the dinner had the lugubrious air of a wake. At the end of the dinner, shortly before midnight, the old miser, dressed in a pair of torn and faded trousers, stood and proposed a final toast to the King-Emperor. John Peyton, an English guest, scrutinized

the Nizam's mournful face. How sad, he thought; two hundred years of history ending in one brief, pathetic gesture.

For many Indians, the night they and their countrymen had dreamed of for years was a frightful horror. To Lieutenant Colonel J. T. Sataravala, a Parsi of the Frontier Force Rifles, it would always be associated with the most sickening sight his war-hardened eyes had ever seen. It was the gruesomely mulitated bodies of an entire Hindu family in a flaming ruin in the Baluchistan city of Quetta. Beside them, mutilated with equal savagery, were the bodies of the brave and generous Moslem family that had offered them shelter. Sushila Nayar, a beautiful young doctor assigned by Gandhi to a camp of twenty thousand refugees in the western Punjab, had spent two years in jail and given most of her brief adult life to achieving the moment that midnight, August 14, represented. Now it brought her no joy, no sense of fulfillment. She was conscious only of the misery of her thousands of charges, most of them listening in the night for the sounds of the Moslem hordes they were certain would come to slaughter them.

Lahore, the city that should have been the gayest spot on the subcontinent, was a scene of devastation. Captain Robert E. Atkins, who had led his Gurkhas into the city at sundown, found his camp besieged by pathetic, frightened Hindus. Clutching babies, bedding, a suitcase or two, they begged to be allowed inside the protective circle of his soldiers. Almost a hundred thousand Hindus and Sikhs were trapped inside Old Lahore's walled city, their water cut, fires raging around them, mobs of Moslems stalking the alleys outside their mahallas, waiting to pounce on anyone venturing out. One mob had set the city's most famous Sikh gurudwara next to the Shah Alami Gate on fire, then shrieked with glee at the screams of the wretched Sikhs being roasted alive inside.

Calcutta, the city that should have been exploding in violence, was undergoing a bewildering metamorphosis. It had begun timidly, tentatively before sundown, when a procession of Hindus and Moslems had marched through the city toward Gandhi's headquarters at Hydari House. In its wake the city's atmosphere had begun to change. In the violent jungles of Keldanga Road and around Sealdah station, Hindu and Moslem goondas had sheathed their dag-

gers to join in hanging the Indian flag from balconies and lampposts. Sheikhs opened the doors of their mosques to the adherents of Kali, and they in turn invited Moslems to their temples to contemplate the grotesque image of the Goddess of Destruction.

Men who would have been prepared to cut each other's throats twenty-four hours earlier, now shook hands in the street. Women and children, Hindu and Moslem alike, offered candy to members of the opposite community. The city, that evening, reminded Kumar Bose, a Bengali writer, of the Christmas Eve scene in All Quiet on the Western Front, when French and German soldiers emerged from their trenches to forget for a brief moment that they were enemies.

While India celebrated, the great house that had been the repository of Britain's imperial power in India was undergoing a revolution. From one end of the house to the other, servants rushed along the corridors obscuring or snatching away each of the 6,000-odd representations of the old viceregal seal. Mountbatten was determined that on India's independence day, no Indian was going to wash his hands with a soap stamped with his old imperial seal, or light his cigarette from a similarly emblazoned pack of matches.

One team of servants did nothing but go from room to room replacing stationery bearing the offending words "Viceroy's House," Another group of workmen hung a screen over the enormous seal above the entrance to Durbar Hall.

As their work was going on, a delegation of Indian leaders sent by the Constituent Assembly arrived. Rajen-dra Prasad, the president of the Assembly, formally invited the ex-viceroy to become India's first governor general. It was the second honor the admiral had received that evening. A few moments before, he had learned that his cousin George VI, in recognition of his accomplishments in India, had elevated him a rank in the peerage, from Viscount to Earl.

Mountbatten accepted Prasad's invitation, pledging to serve India as if he were himself an Indian. Then Nehru gave Mountbatten an envelope containing the list of the

men who, with his approval, would constitute the first government of an independent India.

Mountbatten took out a decanter of port and personally filled his visitors' glasses. When he had, he raised his own and said "To India." After a sip, Nehru in turn raised his to Mountbatten. "To King George VI," he said.

Mountbatten heard his words with awe and astonishment. What a man, he thought. After all he's been through, on this, of all nights, he has the elegance, the grandeur of soul to make a gesture like that.

When they had left and before he went to bed, Mountbatten opened the envelope that Nehru had handed him. As he did, he burst into a roar of laughter. In the haste of this great evening, Nehru had not had time to set down the names of independent India's first cabinet. The envelope contained a blank sheet of paper.

In the dark and cavernous Lahore railroad station, a handful of Englishmen made their way toward the waiting Bombay Express. They were virtually the last minor players in an army of British administrators, policemen and soldiers who had made the Punjab the pride of British India, the repository of the very best of Britain's achievements on the subcontinent. Now they were going home and leaving to other hands the canals, the highways, the railroads, the bridges that they and their forebears had built.

As they walked to the train, a group of railroad workers listlessly washed the station platform with a hose. A few hours earlier, the station had been the site of a terrible massacre of fleeing Hindus. Bill Rich, the Englishman who had handed over charge of Lahore's police a few hours earlier, noticed an appalling sight: a group of porters wheeling a luggage cart down the platform. Piled onto it, like bundles heading for the baggage car, was a stack of corpses. Rich himself had to step over a corpse lying on the platform to get his foot onto the stairs leading to his carriage. What amazed him was not the sight of that mangled body at his feet, but his own indifference to it, his sudden awareness of how hardened he had become to the horrors of the Punjab.

Rule Dean, the Amritsar police chief who had sent his band to play Gilbert and Sullivan in the town square,

stared in melancholy gloom from the window of his compartment as the train left the city that had been his responsibility. He could see on the horizon flames devouring dozens of the villages which it had been his duty to protect. Silhouetted by their roseate glow against the night sky, the marauding Sikh bands could be seen destroying them, dancing a kind of wild ballet around the flames. Dean had a feeling of "terrible, overwhelming sadness."

Instead of handing over our charge in a dignified way, he thought, we are leaving chaos behind us. Then, as the express neared Delhi, a dining car was attached to the train. Suddenly, there, among the fresh linen and polished silver, the Punjab, to the former Amritsar police chief who in three months' time would be selling plastics door to door in the London suburb of Welwyn Garden City, seemed a world away.

The ruin at 151 BeHaghata Road was silent. At its gate, a handful of nonviolent Hindu and Moslem volunteers stood watch. Not a single lamp bulb, not even a candle flickered from the broken windows of Hydari House. Nothing, not even the events of this momentous night, had been allowed to intrude on the firmly established routine of the men and women inside. In the spacious room which served as their communal dormitory, they lay stretched out on straw pallets. On one of them, next to his neatly aligned wooden clogs, his Gita, his dentures and his steel-rimmed spectacles, was the familiar, bald-headed figure. While the clocks had chimed that magic midnight and India had awakened to life and freedom, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi had been sound asleep.

"O LOVELY DAWN OF FREEDOM"

Benares, August IS, 1947

At the first cool breath of approaching dawn, the mists began to rise from the water. As they had done since time immemorial, the multitudes came with them to the banks of the great and sacred river, the Mother Ganges, the Supreme Giver of life, to search for a passage to eternity in a ritual immersion in its waters. Nothing could have been more appropriate than that. Benares, man's oldest city, should offer the unique homage of its morning rites for the birth of the world's newest nation, with the dawning of August 15, 1947.