Freedom at Midnight (58 page)

As in so many other areas that fall, the Sikh jatthas distinguished themselves by the organization and savagery of their attacks. Once, having ambushed a train in Amritsar, they sent a party disguised as relief workers back through the train killing any victims they had missed in their original slaughter. Margaret Bourke-White, Life magazine's great photographer, remembered seeing a group of those Sikhs in Amritsar station "venerable in their long beards and wearing the bright-blue turbans of the Akali sect, sitting cross-legged along the platform." Each "held a long curved saber across his knee—waiting quietly for the next train."

Military guards were placed on the trains, but all too often they failed to fire on their attackers if they were from the same community. There were heroes too. Puzzled by the unexpected slackening of the speed of his train sixty miles short of the Pakistan border, Ahmed Zahur, a railroad worker, scrambled his way to the locomotive. There he spotted a pair of Sikhs handing the train's Hindu engineer a wad of rupee notes as a bribe to stop the train in Amritsar station.

The terrified Zahur slipped back to warn the British lieutenant commanding their escort of what he had seen. Leaping along the roofs of the train's cars like mail-train robbers in a Western, the young officer and two of his men raced to the locomotive. Revolver in hand, the Britisher ordered the engineer to speed up. His reply was to slam on the brakes. The Britisher knocked him out with

his pistol butt. While his soldiers tied up the engineer, he took over the train's control.

Minutes later, Zahur and his three thousand fellow Moslem passengers were treated to an extraordinary spectacle. Whistle shrieking, the young Britisher on the footplate, their train rocketed through Amritsar station at sixty miles an hour past a stunned army of Sikhs, swords glinting, waiting there to massacre them. Safely delivered to Pakistan, the train's grateful Moslem passengers hung a garland around the Englishman's neck. It was made not of the traditional marigold blooms, but of currency notes.

No trains were immune. The train bearing hundreds of Moslem servants of the old viceregal establishment in Simla down to Delhi was stopped at the sound of an exploding firecraker in Sonipat station. Hundreds of Sikhs rushed the train. On board, Hindus turned on the Moslems at whose sides they had served the Empire, to join the slaughter. In their compartment, Sarah Ismay, daughter of Lord Ismay, and her fiance, Flight Lieutanant Wenty Beaumont, one of Lord Mountbatten's A.D.C.'s, took out a pair of pistols. Concealed under a pile of suitcases at their feet was a third occupant of the compartment, invited there because of the special circumstances. It was their Moslem bearer, Abdul Hamid.

A pair of well-dressed, well-spoken Hindus opened the door of the compartment and demanded the right to look for the Moslem traveling with them. At their words, the suitcases hiding the bearer shook from the frightened man's trembling.

"One step forward and you're dead," Sarah told the Hindus, pointing her Smith and Wesson at them. Abdul Hamid would be the only Moslem on the train to reach Delhi alive.

Those "trains of death," as they would become known, would form a part of the grisly Punjab legend in the years to come, a compendium of ghastly tales each more chilling in horror than the previous one. Richard Fisher, a representative of the Caterpillar Tractor Company, would be haunted for the rest of his life by the one through which he lived. Halfway between Quetta and Lahore, a group of Moslems stopped his train. While one band of Moslems raced through the train throwing any Sikh they found out the window, another waited on the platform to beat each victim to death with strange clubs three feet

long curving at one end into a half moon. The horrified Midwesterner watched as thirteen Sikhs were thrown to their grisly mill to die in a sickening cacophony of screams and shattering bones. Between victims, the Moslems waved their bloody clubs, shouting for more. As the train pulled out, leaving the thirteen battered Sikh corpses behind, Fisher finally learned what the instruments of their terrible destruction had been. They were field hockey sticks.

His surprises were not quite over. Another startling image awaited the American in the Lahore station. Above the corpses scattered along the station's platform was a sign similar to those posted in all the railway stations of the Punjab, a reminder of those happier days when the province of the Five Rivers had been a model of order and prosperity. "A complaint book is held at the disposition of travellers in the stationmaster's office," it read. "Any traveller wishing to lodge a complaint about the services encountered during his journey is invited to make use of it."

Calcutta, August 1947

This time, there were almost a million waiting for him. Day after day, during that terrible fortnight when the Punjab had gone berserk, the size of the crowds attending Gandhi's regular evening prayer meeting grew, transforming in their steady, spectacular growth the savage metropolis into an oasis of peace and fraternity. The most miserable city dwellers in the world had heard the message of the frail messenger of love and mastered their ancestral urge for violence and hate. The miracle of Calcutta had held; the city, as The New York Times noted, "was the wonder of India."

Gandhi, with characteristic humility, refysed to take credit for it. "We are toys in the hands of God," he wrote in his paper, the Harijan. "He makes us dance to His tune." A letter from New Delhi, however, rendered to that humble Caesar the honor he was due. "In the Punjab we have 55,000 soldiers and large-scale rioting on our hands," Louis Mountbatten wrote to his "dejected sparrow." "In Bengal, our force consists of one man and there is no rioting." As a military leader and an administrator, the last

viceroy humbly asked "to be allowed to pay tribute to my One Man Boundary Force."

The Punjab, September 1947

The two men rode side by side in an open car. Three decades of struggle against British rule should have earned the prime ministers of the new nations of Pakistan and India the right to ride in triumph through jubilant crowds of their admiring countrymen. Jawaharlal Nehru and Liaquat Ali Khan rode, instead, in depressed silence through scenes of horror and misery, the faces of their countrymen turned toward them alight with every emotion but gratitude at the blessings that freedom had brought them. For the second time, the two men toured the Punjab, struggling to find some formula to restore order to its chaotic landscapes.

Everything had escaped their control. Their police had collapsed. Their armies remained loyal—but only just. The civil administrations were paralyzed. Now, as their car sped past devastated village after devastated village, past unharvested fields, past wretched columns of refugees, Hindus and Sikhs trudging dumbly eastward, Moslems dumbly westward, the two leaders, an aide noticed, seemed to shrink into the back seat of the car, collapsing, almost, under the burden of the misery surrounding them.

At last, Nehru broke the oppressive silence. "What hell this partition had brought us," he said to Liaquat in a half whisper. "We never foresaw anything like this when we agreed to it. We've been brothers. How could this have happened?"

"Our people have gone mad," Liaquat replied.

Suddenly a figure broke from a line of refugees and bolted for their car. It was a man, a Hindu, his face almost disfigured with anguish, his body convulsed with sobs. He had recognized Nehru. Nehru was a big man, a sahib from Delhi, from the government, who could do something. Tears pouring down his face to mix with the mucus flowing from his nose, his contorted fingers clawing the air in a beseeching ballet, the unknown Hindu begged Nehru to help him. Three miles up the road a band of Moslems had sprung at his refugee column from the sugar cane and snatched away his only child, a ten-year-old

daughter. He loved his little girl, he cried to Nehru, he loved her very much. "Get her back for me, please, get her back," begged the poor man.

Nehru tumbled back on the car seat, almost, as he would tell an aide, physically ill at this stark, direct confrontation with the miseries overwhelming so many of his countrymen. He was prime minister of three hundred million people, yet he was helpless to aid this one frantically weeping man, begging him to perform a miracle and get his little daughter back. Overcome with anguish, Nehru slumped forward clutching his head in his hands, while his escort gently removed the grief-stricken father from the running board of his car.

That night, still shaken by his experience, Nehru could not sleep. For hours he paced the corridor of the house in which he was staying in Lahore, worrying and thinking. The communal cruelty of which his people had suddenly shown themselves capable was a shocking revelation to Nehru. Patel, his friendly foe, could, as he had done in an earlier meeting, dismiss it with a shrug of his shoulders and the words, "Ah, this had to happen." Nehru could not. Every fiber of his being was repelled by the hatreds sweeping the Punjab. He was not afraid to oppose it, even at the risk of losing the support of his Hindu countrymen.

The trouble was that he didn't know how. The cataclysm shaking the Punjab had thrust upon him a burden for which nothing in his life had prepared him. He reacted by lashing out with his quick, impetuous temper at specific situations. That afternoon, near Amritsar, informed that the Sikhs of a village were planning a massacre of their Moslem neighbors, he ordered the Sikhs' leaders brought to him under an enormous banyan tree.

"I hear you are planning to massacre your Moslem neighbors tonight," he told them. "If a hair on their heads is touched, I will have you reassembled here at dawn tomorrow and personally give my bodyguards the orders to shoot the lot of you."

Nehru's dilemma was how to translate an effective, isolated action like that one under a banyan to the scale of the second-largest nation in the world, a nation beset by problems no new nation had ever faced. Worried and exhausted, he woke his A.D.C. at two-thirty and asked him to raise Delhi on the radio for the latest report. In that litany of bad news, there was one item that might console

him. The aging leader he had forsaken on the issue of partition was still performing his miracle. Calcutta was quiet

The signal was one sharp blast of a whistle. At its note, six Hindus glided up behind the two middle-aged men walking peacefully down the middle of the avenue. The pair started to run, but there was no escape. Shrieking "Moslem, Moslem," the teen-age Hindus pummeled them to the ground. The two terrified men swore they were Hindus, calling out Hindu names, claiming addresses in Hindu neighborhoods. Their assailants' seventeen-year-old leader, a student named Sunil Roy, wanted better proof than that. He ripped open the folds of their dhotis. Both bore the stigmata of the faith of Mohammed: they were circumcised.

One of their teen-age captors threw a towel over their heads; another knotted their arms with a rope. Followed by a growing crowd waving clubs, knives and iron bars, the two wretched men were herded down the street toward the riverbank, the youths, young enough to have been their sons, shouting for their blood.

"In normal times," their seventeen-year-old captor later declared, "we would not have polluted the sacred water with Moslem blood. There were many religious Hindus doing puja on the banks of the river. Some women were taking a bath."

They pushed their victims into water up to their waists. An iron crowbar flashed into the sky and landed with a thump on the head of the first whimpering Moslem. His skull fractured, the poor man crumpled into the river, a carmino halo forming a circle on its surface where his head had slipped beneath the waters.

The other man fought for his life. "The same boy hit him on his head," the chief assassin recalled. "Children threw bricks in his face. Another stabbed him in the neck to be very sure he was dead."

Around the site, the Hindu worshippers continued their prayers, their devotions undisturbed by the murder being committed a few yards away. Roy kicked the two bodies out toward midstream, where the river's current could carry them away. As they disappeared and the wake left by their blood blended with the Hooghly River's muddy

water, a cry, repeated three times, rose from their killers: "Kali Mayi Ki Jai!" ("Long live the Goddess Kali!").

It was early morning, August 31, 1947. After sixteen miraculous days, the virus had finally affected the City of the Dreadful Night. The Peace of Calcutta had been shattered. As elsewhere, the infection had been spread by trainloads of refugees arriving with their tales of horror from the Punjab. It began with a rumor, never substantiated, that a Hindu boy had been beaten to death by Moslems on a trolley car.

At ten o'clock that night, a parade of young Hindu fanatics burst into the courtyard of Hydari House demanding to see the Mahatma. Stretched on his straw pallet between his faithful Manu and another great-niece, Abha, Gandhi was asleep. Thrusting forward a dazed and bandaged youth who, they claimed, had been beaten by Moslems, the mob began to shriek slogans and hurl rocks at the house. Manti and Abha woke up and rushed to the veranda, trying to calm the crowd. It was no use. Pushing aside Gandhi's supporters, the crowd spilled into the interior of the house. Gandhi, aroused by the fracas, got up to face them. "What madness is this?" he asked. "I offer myself for attack."

This time his words were lost in the crowd's din. Two Moslems, one beaten and bloody, escaped its ranks and rushed to crouch behind the protecting outline of Gandhi's frame. From the crowd a blackjack zipped toward them, missing the Mahatma's head, by inches, to crash into the wall behind him.

At that moment, the police, summoned by one of Gandhi's worried followers, reached the house. A shaken Gandhi lay back down on his straw pallet unable to sleep. "The Miracle of Calcutta," he noted, "has proved to be a nine-day wonder."

What few illusions the Mahatma may have had left about Calcutta's peace were shattered the next day. Shortly after noon a concerted burst of attacks was launched on those Moslem slums whose inhabitants, inspired by Gandhi's miracle, had returned to their homes. In most cases, the attackers were led by fanatics of the R.S.S.S., the Hindu extremist organization whose followers had saluted their orange swastika-emblazoned flag in Poona on Independence Day. On Beliaghata Road, a few hundred yards from Gandhi's residence, a pair of hand grenades were