Freedom at Midnight (57 page)

For most refugees, the major concern at the instant of their departure was to save what few possessions they could. B. R. Adalkha, a wealthy Hindu merchant in Montgomery, wrapped 40,000 rupees in a money belt around

his waist "for bribing the Moslems along the way not to kill us." Many, particularly wealthy Hindus, tended to have their life savings in jewels and gold bangles. One Hindu farmer outside Lahore carefully wrapped all his wife's gold and jewelry in packages and tossed them into his well. He planned to return one day with a diver to recover them. Mati Das, , a Hindu grain merchant in Rawalpindi, packed the fruits of a life's efforts, 30,000 rupees and 40 tolas of gold, into a little box. To make sure he would not lose it, he tied it to his wrist. It was a useless precaution. In a few days' time, a Moslem assailant would steal the box by the simple expedient of cutting off Das's arm.

The most precious possession of Renu Braunbhai, the wife of a poor Hindu peasant in the Mianwalli district, was untransportable. It was her cow. The devout Hindu had a special veneration for the aging beast. Sure that "the Moslems would kill it to eat it," she set it free. Overcome by the beast's mournful stare, she accomplished a last action on its behalf. She took vermilion powder and pressed a red tilak dot on its forehead to bring it luck.

Alia Hydar, a wealthy Moslem girl from Lucknow, managed to flee by plane with her mother and sister. They were leaving for a lifetime, but like tourists setting out on a trip, they were allowed only twenty kilos of luggage. She could never forget the pathetic morning they spent in the family kitchen weighing out their most precious possessions on the scale that their domestics had used for weighing flour and rice. Her sister finally selected her red-and-gold embroidered wedding sari. Her mother picked her blue velvet prayer rug, its surface emblazoned, curiously, with the star of David. Alia took a Koran, its cover in rosewood inlaid with mother-of-pearl.

The concern of Baldev Raj, a wealthy Hindu farmer near Mianwalli, was not to save his wealth before leaving, but to destroy it. Certain that they would be attacked and robbed during their flight, Raj and his five brothers took the contents of the family safe to the roof of his home. He was not going to "let my money fall into the hands of some lazy Moslem." They heaped their currency notes into a pile. Then, weeping hysterically, they lit the most extraordinary bonfire their eyes would ever behold: their lifetime savings going up in flames.

Some left determined to return. Ahmed Abbas, a Mos-

lem journalist from Panipat, north of Delhi, had always opposed Pakistan, and it was not to Jinnah's Promised Land that he chose to flee, but to Delhi. Going out of the house, Abbas's mother hung a sign on the door. "This house belongs to the Abbas family, who have decided not to go to Pakistan," it read. "This family is only temporarily going to Delhi and will return."

For Vickie Noon, the beautiful English wife of one of Pakistan's most important men, Sir Feroz Khan Noon, a harrowing flight began—with the arrival of an unknown messenger on her doorstep in Kulu, her vacation home. It was in a Hindu area near Simla, which had gone to India.

"They're coming for your house tonight," he said. She had two shotguns and a revolver that belonged to her husband, who was already in Lahore. She armed two trusted Moslem servants with the shotguns. Although she had never fired a gun in her life, she kept the revolver herself. As darkness fell, she could see bursts of flames flare up in the valley leading toward her home, the houses of her Moslem neighbors being set ablaze by Hindu mobs. Slowly, that chain of fires crept toward her. The twenty-two-year-old girl kept thinking of a line that a pair of Americans she had met in the valley had taught her. They were Buddhist converts and the statement was a cornerstone of their new faith: "Everything is transitory." Suddenly at eleven o'clock a violent downpour extinguished the fires below her. She was saved. The next morning she fled to the safety of the palace of a close friend, the Hindu Raja of Mandi. Her relief would be temporary.

In fear and bitterness, hatred and rancor, without warning or careful preparation, they thus set out, first in thousands, then hundreds of thousands, finally inundating in their wretched millions the roads and railways of the Punjab. They were going to pose a terrible problem to the two new nations struggling to survive, a menace of epidemic, famine, of resettlement on a mind-numbing scale. They became, inevitably, the carriers of the terrible hysteria sweeping the Punjab, spreading its virus wherever they passed with their tales of horror, creating, in turn, new outbursts of violence to throw still more helpless people onto the roads. Their terrible migration would alter forever the face and character of one of the historically richest swaths of earth on the globe. Barely a Moslem would remain at many of the sites where the Moguls had

produced one of Islam's great flowerings. Barely a thousand Sikhs and Hindus would remain behind of the 600,000 who had dwelt in Lahore. In late August, as the violence reached a crescendo, anonymous hands performed before fleeing a gesture that was an epitaph to Lahore's lost dream, a silent and bitter commentary on what freedom's first hours had meant to so many Punjabis. Someone laid a black wreath of mourning at the base of the city's famous statue of Queen Victoria.

Calcutta, August 1947

This time, they were half a million waiting for him. The "miracle of Calcutta" still held. Five hundred thousand dark faces, Hindus and Moslems in one fraternal cohort, covered the immense sweep of Calcutta's Maidan, whose green expanse had once been the preserve of the polo ponies and white-flanneled cricketers of India's British masters. Gandhi himself, in the charitable breadth of his vision, could not have imagined a spectacle to match it. On this August day, the day fixed by the Moslem calendar for the great Islamic festival of Id el Kebir, the crowds had come to his evening prayer meeting in unprecedented numbers.

Since sunup, tens of thousands of Hindus and Moslems had flown past the windows of the crumbling ruin in which the elderly leader had taken up residence, seeking his blessing, offering him flowers and sweets. As it was Monday, his day of silence, Gandhi spent much of the day scrawling his visitors little notes of gratitude and good wishes on the backs of old envelopes that were his personal stationery. As he did, thousands of Hindus and Moslems paraded together through the streets in which just one year before they had been slaughtering each other with appalling fury. They chanted slogans of unity and friendship, swapped cigarettes, sprayed each other with rosewater, exchanged cakes and candy.

When Gandhi finally reached the platform raised for his prayer meeting in the middle of the Maidan, a wild burst of enthusiasm swept the crowd. At precisely seven o'clock, visibly moved by the spectacle of so much love and brotherhood shimmering before him, Gandhi rose and joined his hands in the traditional Indian sign of greeting to the

crowd. Then the aging Hindu leader broke his pledge of silence to cry out in Urdu, the tongue of India's Moslems, "Id Mubarak" ("Happy Id") to that inextricably mixed multitude.

For hundreds of thousands of Punjabis, the first instinctive reflex action in the cataclysm shaking their province was to rush toward the little brick-and-tile buildings that offered in each important town a reassuring symbol of organization and order—the railroad station. The names of the trains that, for generations, had rumbled past their concrete platforms were elements of the Indian legend and measures, as well, of one of Britain's most substantial achievements on the subcontinent. The Frontier Mail, the Calcutta-to-Peshawar Express, the Bombay-Madras had, like the Orient Express, the Trans-Siberian and the trains of the Union Pacific, bound up a continent and sown along their tracks the benefits of technology and progress.

Now, in late summer 1947, those trains would become for hundreds of thousands of Indians the best hope of fleeing the nightmares surrounding them. For tens of thousands of others they would become rolling coffins. During those terrible days the appearance of a locomotive in scores of Punjabi stations provoked the same frenzied scenes. Like a ship's prow cutting through a heavy sea, those engines rolled through the mass of scrambling humans choking the platforms, crushing to a pulp of blood and bone the hapless few inevitably shovel into their path. Sometimes their passengers would have been waiting for days, often without food and water, under the remorseless sun of a summer that the monsoon refused to end. In a concert of tears and shrieks, the crowd would throw itself on the doors and windows of the cars. They jammed their bodies and the few belongings they carried into each compartment until the train's flanks seemed to expand from the pressure of the humans inside. Dozens more fought for a handhold at each door, on the steps, on the couplings until a dense cluster of humans enfolded each car like a horde of flies swarming over a sugar cube. When there were no handholds left, hundreds more scrambled onto their rounded roofs, clinging precariously to their hot metal until each roof was lined by its dense covering of refugees.

Crushed under that load of misery, with the odor of coal smoke overwhelmed by the stench of sweating bodies, with their whistle shrieks drowned by the shouts of the wretches they carried, the trains rolled off, bearing their pitiful burdens to death or to a Promised Land.

For Nihal Bhrannbi, a Hindu schoolteacher, his wife and six children, that voyage to safety never even began. After waiting for six hours for their train to leave the station of the little Pakistani town in which he had taught for twenty years, Nihal and his family finally heard the shriek of the locomotive's whistle. The only departure it heralded, however, was that of the engine. As it disappeared, a howling horde of Moslems swept down on the station brandishing clubs, homemade spears and hatchets. Screaming "Allah Akhbar" ("God is great"), they charged into the train, lashing at every Hindu in sight. Some threw the helpless passengers out of their compartment windows to the platform, where their colleagues waited like butchers to slaughter them. A few Hindus tried to run, but the green-shirted Moslems pursued them, killed them and hurled them, the dead and the dying, into a well in front of the station. The schoolteacher, his wife and six children clung to each other in terror in their compartment. The Moslems battered their way inside and began to shoot.

"The bullets hit my husband and my only son," Nihal's wife would always remember. "My son was crying, 'Water! Water!' I had none to give him. I cried for help. None came near me. Slowly my son stopped crying and his eyes closed. My husband was speechless. Blood was oozing out of his head. Suddenly he kicked his legs about. Then he was silent. I tried to wake them up by shaking their bodies. There was no response.

"My daughters were clinging to me and holding my sari tight. The Moslems threw us outside. They carried away my three eldest daughters. The eldest was beaten on the head. She stretched her hands to me and cried, 'Ma! Ma!' I could not move.

"Some time later the Moslems took my husband and son from the train and threw them into the well. It was the end of them. I turned hysterical. I shouted like a madwoman. I lost all feelings even for the two living children. I was like a dead person."

Only one hundred of the two thousand people in her train would, like the schoolteacher's wife, survive to

complete their terrible journey to the other end of the Punjab.

Kashmiri Lai, the Hindu who had waited to begin his flight on a date that his astrologer had proclaimed propitious, discovered on one of those ill-fated trains that astrology is an inexact science. Fourteen miles short of the safety of the Indian frontier, a band of Moslems climbed onto his slow-moving train. They leaped on the women in the neighboring compartment, ripping the gold bangles and rings from their ankles, wrists, arms and noses. Half a dozen men threw the youngest women out the window, then leaped after them.

The rest turned on Lai's compartment. One of them all but beheaded the woman opposite Lai with a sword stroke. For a grotesque instant, her head, still attached to her neck by a few tendons, hung over her shoulders like a broken doll's head, while in her lap the baby she had been nursing grinned at her. A pair of daggers stabbed Lai. He slumped to the floor, to be covered almost immediately by the bodies of his fellow passengers. Just before losing consciousness, he felt an extraordinary sensation: a Moslem looter stealing the shoes off his feet.

A few cars away, spice seller Dhani Ram threw his wife and four children onto the floor as the first volleys struck the train. A pile of wounded fell on top of them, too. As their blood flowed over him, Ram had an idea to which he would owe, perhaps, his and his children's lives. He dipped his hands in the wounds of his dying neighbors and smeared their blood over his own and his children's faces so the attackers might leave them for dead.

As the pace of the flight in both directions grew, those trainloads of wretched refugees became the prime targets of assaults on both sides of the border. They were ambushed while they stood in stations, in the open country. Tracks were torn up to derail them in front of waiting hordes of assailants. Accomplices smuggled into their compartments forced them to stop at pre-chosen sites by yanking the emergency cord. Engineers were bribed or cowed into delivering their passengers into an ambush. On both sides of the border a man's sexual organ became in the truest sense his staff of life. In India, Sikhs and Hindus prowled the cars of ambushed trains slaughtering every circumcised male they found. In Pakistan, Moslems raced

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along the trains they had stopped, murdering every male who was not circumcised.

There were periods of four and five days at a stretch during which not a single train reached Lahore or Amritsar without its complement of dead and wounded. Ashwini Dubey, the Indian Army colonel who had been overwhelmed with joy on Independence Day at the sight of his country's flag flying over the mess where he had been humbled by his British superiors, had a stark demonstration of the price of that freedom in Lahore, where he was an Indian liaison officer. A trainload of dead and wounded rolled into the railroad station. As it stopped, blood seeped out from under the doors of each of its silent compartments, dripping onto the rails "like water flowing out of a refrigerator car on a hot day."