Freedom at Midnight (56 page)

He could not bear the sight, the Sikh youth remembered. He leaped off the roof and, in the confusion and growing darkness, escaped to a tree in whose branches he hid for the next six hours.

"A bad smell was coming from the house, because of the burning bodies," he recalled; "my mother and father did not come out. I knew they had been killed or had jumped into the fire. I saw two girls being carried away. They did not cry. They were unconscious. When there was peace late at night, I came down from the tree. I went into the house. They were all dead. Everybody in the village except the two girls and myself had been killed."

The fourteen-year-old Sikh spent the night in that char-nel house too stunned even to weep. At dawn, he tried to recognize the charred forms of his parents among the blackened bodies of the friends and neighbors whom he had known all his life. He couldn't. He found a blood-

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coated knife lying on the floor and chopped his uncut hair from his head so he could pose as a Moslem. Then he fled.

Horror had no race, and the terrible anguish of those August days in the Punjab was meted out with almost biblical balance, an eye for an eye, a massacre for a massacre, a rape for a rape, a blind cruelty for a blind cruelty. The only difference between Guldip Singh and Mohammed Yacub was their religion. Mohammed too was a fourteen-year-old boy. He lived in India near Amritsar. The Moslem youth was playing marbles in front of the hut in which he lived with his parents and six brothers and sisters, when the Sikhs attacked. He managed to hide in the sugar cane at the edge of his village.

"The Sikhs cut the breasts of some women. The others began to run around with fear," he remembered. "Some of our villagers killed their own wives and daughters to prevent the Sikhs from getting them. The Sikhs speared two of my small brothers through their bodies. My father could not bear the sight. He ran amok. He was running here and there like a madman, swinging a sword. The Sikhs could not catch him in the open fields. They set the village dogs to run after him. The dogs began to bite his legs and so my father had to slow down his running. Then the Sikhs caught him. Some held him tight. They pulled him down, cut him into pieces with their swords, my father. His head, hands and legs were separated from his body. Then they allowed the dogs to eat the body."

Fifty of the five hundred Moslems in Mohammed's village survived the massacre, saved by the intervention of a patrol of the Punjab Boundary Force. Mohammed, sole survivor of his family, was "taken into a truck manned by Gurkha army men to travel to an unknown land which the leaders said belonged to Moslems."

The memory of that terrible upheaval would leave an indelible scar upon the psyche of millions of people. Rare was the Punjabi family that did not lose a relative in the senseless slaughter. For years to come, the Punjab would be an assemblage of traumatized memories, each recollection more poignant, more harrowing than the next; the same terrible accounts of a people suddenly, unfathomably uprooted from the lands to which they had been attached for years and thrown into panicked flight.

A special passion attached Sant Singh, a Sikh, to the land from which he was driven. He had, in a sense,

bought that land with his blood, the blood he had shed for Britain on the beach of Gallipoli in World War I. It had taken him sixteen years to clear and plant the plot he had been awarded, like thousands of other Sikh army veterans, in an area reclaimed by a British canal irrigation scheme between the Ravi and Sutlej rivers southwest of Lahore. He had brought his bride to a tent in which they lived for over a decade, raised his children on that land and built there the five-room mud-brick house that was both his pride and the measure of his life's achievements. Two days before independence, one of Sant Singh's Moslem field workers brought him a pamphlet being secretly passed among the Moslems of the area.

"The Sikhs and Hindus do not belong to this land anymore. They should be driven out," it said. The attack came three days later. Sant Singh and the two hundred fellow Sikhs of his village decided to flee for their lives. He was assigned with five other men under an eighty-year-old former Army sergeant to go on a truck as an escort for the village women. Before leaving, he went to the gu-rudwara, the temple, that he had helped to build. "I came here with nothing," he prayed. "I leave with nothing. I ask only for your protection," he begged the guru Nanak.

Just outside a village called Birwalla the guru's protection ended. Sant Singh's truck ran out of gas. He remembers that "it was dark. We had been driving beside the railroad track instead of on the road to avoid being seen by Moslems. We had been told that they had made a huge roadblock in Birwalla and were killing all the Hindus and Sikhs they could find. We could hear them shouting and shrieking in the darkness, because the town was only a few hundred yards away.

"An elderly Moslem saw us and ran off in the night. We knew he had gone to warn them. Then we heard the voices coming for us. We were terrified. Our leader made the decision that we would shoot all our women. We did not want to permit them to be raped and defiled. We arranged them in three lines side by side sitting on the ground. We bandaged their eyes. One two-month-old baby was feeding at the breast of its mother. We told them to recite the Sikh prayer 'God is truth' over and over again.

"My wife was in the middle. My two daughters were there, my daughter-in-law and my two granddaughters. I tried not to look. I had a double-barreled shotgun. The

others had a .303 rifle, two revolvers and one Sten gun. I quoted the Scriptures to them from the fifth book of the guru's Holy Book, which says, Everything is the will of God, and if your time has come you have to die.' I took out a white handkerchief and told the others I would wave it three times counting to three. Then we would shoot.

"I waved it once and said 'Eck' ['one']! I waved a second time and said 'Do' ['two']! All the time I was praying, 'God don't abandon me.' I raised it a third time. As I did I saw headlights in the distance. I took this as a sign in answer to my prayers. I said we must ask them for help."

"What if the people in the car are Moslem?" said the old sergeant.

"We must ask anyway," I said.

"It was a truck of the army. They were Moslem soldiers, but the officer was a good man, a major. He said he would save us. We kissed his feet. Then we set off again."

Calcutta, August 1947

They were almost 100,000. Since five o'clock they had been waiting for him, inundating the square of Narikeldanga, lining the roof tops around it, hanging from windows, clustered on balconies. Human heads, like a dense array of ripe fruits, seemed to constitute the foliage of its few trees. Eighteen hundred miles from the plains of the Punjab, where Hindu and Moslem killed each other with such sadistic fury, that indiscriminately mixed mass of Hindus and Moslems awaited the appearance of the little man who, with the inexplicable magnetism radiated by his presence, had checked the violence of the most violent city in Asia.

When at last Gandhi's frail silhouette appeared above the crowd of heads ringing his prayer platform, a sort of mystic current seemed to galvanize the multitude. As he contemplated that heaving crowd vibrant with joy and enthusiasm, a sudden doubt gnawed the Mahatma. It seemed too good to be true.

"Everybody is showering congratulations on me for the miracle Calcutta is witnessing," he said. "Let us all thank God for His abundant mercy, but let us not forget that there are isolated spots in Calcutta where all is not well."

Above all, he asked his followers, Hindus and Moslems

alike, to join him in the prayer that the "miracle of Calcutta" would not "prove to be a momentary ebullition."

What one unarmed, nonviolent man was accomplishing in the world's most dangerous city, 55,000 heavily armed professional soldiers were unable to accomplish in the Punjab. The Punjab Boundary Force, put together with such care by the last viceroy and the commander in chief of the Indian Army, was overwhelmed by events. Twelve of the Punjab's districts were aflame; some of those districts covered areas larger than all of Palestine, where 100,000 British soldiers were unable to keep order that same autumn. The Force's tanks and trucks were poorly adapted to the dirt tracks and paths that crisscrossed the Punjab. The ideal force would have contained cavalry, but there were no active cavalry regiments left in the Army, which had once gloried in the horse.

The Force's task was infinitely complicated by the administrative collapse in the province. Cables, mail and telephones suddenly stopped working. For lack of better accommodations, the Indians were forced to govern their half of the Punjab from a house with one telephone line and a radio installed in a toilet.

The situation in Pakistan was far worse. The new nation was verging on chaos. Jinnah's missing croquet set had been located, but little else. Hundreds of railroad cars of material destined for the new state disappeared, were stolen or arrived at the wrong destination. In Karachi, the desks and chairs had not arrived. Government employees had to squat on the sidewalks in front of their offices, pecking out on their typewriters the first official texts of the largest Moslem nation in the world. Inside, their seniors governed their new nation sitting on packing crates and boxes.

The economy was in a turmoil. Pakistan had warehouses bulging with hide, jute and cotton, but no tanneries, factories or mills to process them. She produced a quarter of the subcontinent's tobacco, but did not have a match factory in which to produce matches to light her smokers' cigarettes. The banking system was paralyzed, because the banks' Hindu managers and clerks had fled to India.

It was in the distribution of her share of the equipment of the old Indian Army that Pakistan encountered Indian bad faith that seemed a deliberate effort to jeopardize her

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survival. Of the 170,000 tons of Army stores allotted to Pakistan by the partition agreement, she would ultimately receive 6,000. Three hundred special trains had been destined to carry her arms and ordnance. Three arrived. Opening them, a team of Pakistan officers discovered that they contained 5,000 pairs of shoes, 5,000 unserviceable rifles, a consignment of nurses' smocks, and a number of wooden crates stuffed with bricks and prophylactics.

Those machinations left bitter memories in Pakistan and a deep-seated conviction among many Pakistanis that their Indian neighbors were trying to destroy them. They were not alone in that conviction. Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck, who had been asked to stay on to supervise the division of the Army's goods, informed the British government that "I have no hesitation whatsoever in affirming that the present Indian Cabinet is implacably determined to do all in its power to prevent the establishment of the Dominion of Pakistan."

But it was not India's machinations that were the real threat to Pakistan. The new nation, like its Indian neighbor, was about to be engulfed by the most massive migration in human history. The violence racking the Punjab was producing its inevitable result, the result sought by the desperate men behind it on both sides of the border. From one end of the Punjab to the other, taking whatever possessions they could carry, by car, bicycle, train, mule-back, bullock cart and on foot, terrified people were fleeing their homes, rushing in headlong flight toward any promise of safety. They would produce an exchange of populations, an outpouring of humanity on a scale and of an intensity never before recorded. By the time the movement reached flood tide in late September, five million human beings would clog the roads and fields of the Punjab. Ten and a half million people—enough to form, if they joined hands, a column of miserable humans stretching from Calcutta to New York—would be uprooted, most of them in the brief span of three months. Their unprecedented exodus would create ten times the number of refugees the creation of Israel would produce in the Middle East, three or four times the number of Displaced Persons who had fled Eastern Europe after the war.

For the Moslems of the Indian town of Karnal, north of

Delhi, the word was announced by a drummer marching through their neighborhoods, thumping his drum, proclaiming in Urdu: "For the protection of the Moslem population, trains have arrived to carry them to Pakistan." Twenty thousand people left their homes within an hour, marching off to the railroad station to the beat of that drummer. A town crier informed the two thousand Moslems of the Indian town of Kasauli that they had twenty-four hours to leave. When they were assembled at dawn the following morning on a parade ground, all their belongings, except one blanket apiece and the clothes they wore, were taken from them. Then, a pathetic gaggle of people, they started to walk toward their Promised Land.

Madanlal Pahwa, the man who had cowered in his aunt's house thinking, We're like sheep waiting for a slaughter, left in a bus belonging to his cousin. Everything the family could move went into the bus: furniture, clothes, money, gold, pictures of Shiva. Everything, except its most important member, Madanlal's father. He refused to leave, because his astrologer had told him that August 20, 1947, was not an auspicious day to begin a journey. Despite the warning of a Moslem friend that an attack on the Hindus Was planned for that day, despite the murders and burning that had already occurred, he refused to budge from his home until the moment that was, in his astrologer's judgment, propitious for undertaking a journey: August 23, at nine-thirty in the morning.

No one was immune. The Moslem patients at the Lady Linlithgow Tuberculosis Sanatorium in Kasauli were ordered out of the clinic by their Hindu doctors. Some of them had only one lung; others were recovering from surgery, but they were taken to the sanatorium's gates and told to start walking to Pakistan. In Pakistan the twenty-five sadhus of the Baba Lai ashram were driven out of the buildings where they had devoted their lives to prayer, meditation, yoga and Hindu study. Wrapped in their orange robes, their saint, Swami Sundar, on the ashram's miraculous white horse at their head, they marched off chanting mantras, while behind them a mob set their ashram ablaze.