Freedom at Midnight (62 page)

Lost in the faceless hordes pouring across the Sutlej at Suleimanki Head one September afternoon was a stocky twenty-year-old youth. He had wide, dark eyes, thick lips glazed by a sparse mustache, and a dense shock of jet-black hair. It was Madanlal Pahwa, the young man who had fled in his cousin's bus while his father stayed behind waiting for the auspicious date picked by his astrologer.

The Pakistani soldiers at the western end of the bridge had confiscated his bus and everything it contained: furniture, clothes, gold, currency, pictures of Shiva. As millions of others would do that fall, Madanlal was entering his new country without a coin in his pocket, with the clothes he wore as his only baggage. Stepping from the bridge into India, Madanlal felt "naked, as if I'd been totally looted, thrown on the road." Embittered, he vowed that the Mos-

lems of India should flee as he had, without a suitcase or a soiled rupee note to comfort them.

His angry face was just another in an indistinguishable flow of miserable faces, each etched to a common design by common suffering. Yet, Madanlal was a man picked by the stars that India worshipped to be set apart from those anonymous figures shuffling over the bridge with him. One day, shortly after his birth, the astrologers had predicted that his was "a name that would be known throughout all India."

His father remembers that "I did not notice the postman standing beside me that December day in 1928 until he shook me to give me the telegram. It was from my own father. A son had been born to me the previous night. I had become a father at the age of nineteen. I gave some tips to the postman, because he had brought me good news, and bought some ladhus sweets, for my office colleagues. Then I hurried home.

"When I reached home, I touched the feet of my father as a sign of respect. He put sugar in my mouth because it was a happy reunion. I took the child on my lap. I thought, I will give him the best education. Let him be an engineer or a doctor, so that he should bring a good name for the family.

"I called the learned pundits and astrologers to choose a name for him. They said it must begin with M. I chose 'Madanlal.' The astrologers studied their charts. They prophesied that Madanlal would grow up well. My son's was a name, they announced, that one day would be known throughout all India.

"Evil eyes fell on me, however. Forty days after Madanlal was born, my wife died of a chill. My son was bright and mischievous in his school days, but slowly he became a problem child and began to show rebellious tendencies. In 1945, he ran away from our house. I contacted all my kith and kin throughout the Punjab, but none knew his whereabouts. After some months, I received a letter. He had run away to Bombay to join the Navy. When he came home, he began his political activities with the R.S.S.S. attacking the Moslems. I was worried for him. So, in July 1947, I went to Delhi to see my friend Sardar Tarlok Singh, one of the secretaries of the great Pandit Nehru. I

asked him to help save my son from his evil companions. He agreed. He promised to send me a letter recommending my son for the finest position I could have asked for him, an appointment to the grade of Assistant Sub Inspector of Police."

Madanlal learned from relatives, shortly after reaching Indian soil, that his father had been severely wounded in a train ambush. He found him in Ferozepore Military Hospital. There in that enormous ward reeking of blood and antiseptic, the sufferings of India suddenly had a face for Madanlal, that of his father "all pale and trembling, covered over with bandages."

By some miracle, through the chaos and confusion of the Punjab, the letter that Kashmiri Lai had sought in Delhi reached him. He pressed it on his son. Go to Delhi, he begged. Start a new life and "join a good government service."

Madanlal took the letter, but he had no interest in joining a good government service. The astrologers had been right. It would not be his destiny to become an anonymous policeman lost in some provincial police station. His would indeed be a name that would one day be known throughout all India.

Stepping out of that hospital, the vision of his mutilated father still before him, Madanlal felt one emotion, an emotion felt by thousands in India that fall. It had nothing to do with joining the police. "I want revenge," Madanlal vowed.

The life of Vickie Noon, the beautiful English wife of one of Pakistan's most important men, Sir Feroz Khan Noon, depended on the contents of a small, round tin can. It contained Kiwi mahogany shoe polish. The respite Vickie had found in the palace of the Hindu Raja of Mandi had been short-lived. The whole countryside was after her. Sikh bands had threatened to kidnap the Raja's children if he did not turn her out.

The Raja and Gautam Sahgal, a young Hindu cement dealer whom her husband had sent to rescue her, had bathed her in permanganate of potassium to darken her

skin. Now they stained her face with the shoe polish that was going to have to convince any Sikh who encountered her in the hours ahead that she was an Indian. At sunset, the Raja's Rolls, its curtains drawn to give it a mysterious air, was sent racing out of the palace as a decoy. Vickie, wrapped in a sari, a red tilak mark on her forehead, a gold ring attached to her left nostril, followed a few minutes later in Gautam's 1947 Dodge.

That first maneuver was a success. As her tension eased, Vickie had to stop for a call of nature. It was pouring rain and in the darkness the can of shoe polish suddenly tumbled from the unfamiliar folds of her sari. Listening to it rolling away on the pebbles in her roadside ditch, Vickie groaned. The lashing mountain rain was washing away her disguise. She was becoming either a zebra or an easily identifiable white Englishwoman. That can was her only hope of retreating into the dark anonymity that could save her. Cursing, she groped in the darkness among the pebbles and brambles looking for it. Finally, with a shriek, she found it. Clutching the can as though it contained diamonds, she rushed to the car, where Sahgal smeared a new coat of polish on her face.

Just short of Gurdaspur, the car ran into a roadblock manned by a band of Sikhs. They surrounded the car. Sahgal spotted a cement merchant with whom he had done business.

"What's going on?" Sahgal asked.

"The English wife of Feroz Khan Noon escaped the Raja of Mandi," the man explained. Every Sikh in the countryside was looking for her.

Ah, said Sahgal, he had passed the Raja's Rolls twenty miles up the road. He was going to Amritsar with his pregnant wife. The man peered into the car. As he did, Vickie prayed for the efficacy of her shoe polish, and that the Sikh wouldn't address her in Hindi. He stared at her with curious eyes. Then he pulled back and waved them through the roadblock. As their car rolled off toward Indian Headquarters and safety, Vickie sank back onto her seat. Absentmindedly she began to tap the lid of her shoe-polish can with her fingernail. She turned to her companion.

"You know, Gautam," she said, with a smile, "my husband will never buy me a jewel I'll treasure as much as this tin can."

Vickie Noon's experience was unusual. The English were rarely molested in that tempestuous autumn. During the worst weeks of August and September, Falletti's Hotel in Lahore remained an oasis in the exploding Punjab, its orchestra playing for dancing every night, Englishmen and ladies in dinner jacket and evening dress sipping cocktails on its moonlit terrace only blocks away from the gutted ruins of a Hindu neighborhood.

And yet, of all the hundreds of refugee columns streaking the face of the Punjab that fall the most incongruous, the most totally unlikely was not Hindu or Sikh or Moslem, but British. Two buses guarded by a company of Gurkha soldiers carried dozens of elderly retired Britishers away from that isolated and secluded haven to which they had retired, Simla. In charming dark-beamed little cottages that were called "Trail's End," "Safe Haven" and "Mon Repos," and whose fa$ades were enlivened by rambler roses and violets, they had chosen to end their lives living out their pensions there along that aloof ridge that had symbolized so well the raj they had served. Many of them had been born in India and knew no other home. They were the retired Romans of the raj, former colonels of the best regiments in the Indian Army, former judges and senior officers of the I.C.S. who had once administered the lives of millions of Indians.

They and their wives had little more time in which to prepare their flight than the desperate Punjabis on the plains below. When Simla's situation had deteriorated sharply the buses were sent to bring them to Delhi and safety. They had been given an hour to pack a suitcase, close their bungalows and board their bus.

Fay Campbell-Johnson, the wife of Mountbatten's press attach6, rode down to Delhi with them. Inevitably, most of the Englishmen on the bus were over sixty-five. And, like most men their age, they suffered from weak bladders. Every two hours, the buses stopped and the men tottered out. Watching those old men who had once ruled India urinating there by the roadside under the impassive bronze stares of their Gurkha guards, a strange, yet hauntingly appropriate thought flashed across Fay Campbell-Johnson's mind.

"My God," she said to herself, "the white man really has laid down his burden!"

Peshawar, September 1947

For Captain Edward Behr, a twenty-two-year-old brigade intelligence officer in Peshawar, where the Mountbattens had faced 100,000 Pathan tribesmen, the perspectives offered by his Sunday morning were identical to those that young English officers had savored in India for years. After his bearer had finished serving him his breakfast of papaya, coffee and eggs on the lawn of his bungalow, Behr was going to his club, where he would play squash, have a swim, then enjoy a couple of gin-and-tonics before a leisurely lunch.

It was almost as though nothing had changed in the city, which had been the northern gateway to the Indian Empire. Like many another adventuresome young English officer in the Indian Army, Behr had volunteered to stay on after independence, serving, in his case, Pakistan. Peshawar, despite the turbulent Pathan tribesmen at its gates, had been quiet. The events of Behr's Sunday, however, were to have little resemblance to those he had planned for it. He had barely begun his papaya, when his telephone rang.

"Something terrible has happened," gasped a lieutenant at Army headquarters; "our battalions are fighting each other."

The stupidest of accidents had provoked the conflagration. At about the time Behr was sitting down to breakfast, a Sikh in a unit that had not yet been repatriated to India had accidentally discharged a round from his rifle while cleaning it. By an incredible misfortune, the bullet had pierced the canvas of a passing truckload of Moslem soldiers newly arrived in Peshawar from the horrors of the Punjab. Convinced that the Sikhs were assaulting them, the Moslems had leaped out of the truck and opened fire on their fellow soldiers.

Behr changed into uniform, took a jeep and rushed to the bungalow of his brigade commander, Brigadier J. R. Morris, a bemedaled veteran of Wingate's Chindits. Morris calmly dabbed the breakfast egg from his lips and finished his coffee. Then he planted his brigadier's cap with its bright-red band to his head, and, without even bothering

to get out of his white shirt and shorts, set off in Behr's jeep.

When the two British officers got to the cantonment, they found the Moslems in a long row of brick barracks lining one side of the parade field firing across the open ground at the Sikhs in an identical set of barracks on the opposite side. Morris studied the scene an instant. Then he grasped the jeep's windscreen and stood up.

"Drive right down the middle of the parade ground," he ordered a terrified Behr.

Erect, supremely confident, the unarmed English officer in his brigadier's cap, dressed like a cricketer on a Sunday morning, rode straight into the middle of his men's fire, bellowing as he did "Cease Fire." The magic of the Indian Army remained stronger than the hatred dividing Sikh and Moslem. The firing stopped.

Peshawar was not, however, to escape so easily. Rumor was probably responsible for more deaths in India that fall than firearms, and while Morris was restoring order, the rumor that Sikh soldiers were killing their Moslem comrades swept the tribal areas. As they had done for Mount-batten's visit, Pathan tribesmen swept into the city in trucks, buses, tonga carts, on horseback. This time, however, they came not to demonstrate, but to murder.

And murder they did. Ten thousand lives would be lost in barely a week, because of that one round of ammunition accidentally discharged by a Sikh soldier in Peshawar on a Sunday morning. Inevitably, in its wake similar outbursts swept the Frontier Province, hurling still another wave of refugees onto the highways of India. That so minor an incident could produce so terrible a result was indicative of the volatile emotions lurking just below the surface of the Indian subcontinent. Bombay, Karachi, Lucknow, Hyderabad, Kashmir—all Bengal needed only a spark similar to Peshawar's stray rifle bullet to explode in their turn with a savagery equal to Peshawar's.

New Delhi, September 1947

Still weak from the strain of his fast, Ma-hatma Gandhi arrived in Delhi from Calcutta on September 9, 1947, never to leave again. This time there would be no question of Gandhi's staying among the Untouch-

ables of the Bangi Sweepers' Colony. The area had been overrun with wretched, embittered refugees from the Punjab. A worried Vallabhbhai Patel insisted instead on taking Gandhi from the railroad station to another residence at 5 Albuquerque Road, a broad, handsome avenue in New Delhi's best residential area.

With its protective wall, its rose garden and beautiful lawns, its marble floors and teakwood doors, its army of bustling servants, Birla House stood at the opposite end of the Indian social spectrum from those miserable sweepers' huts which were Gandhi's usual Delhi residence. Yet, in still another paradox of his puzzling career, the man who rode in third-class railroad cars, had renounced possessions and could grieve at the loss of an eight-shilling watch, would, because of the pressures of Nehru and Patel, agree to move into the millionaire's mansion.