Freedom at Midnight (64 page)

There was no holiday spirit in Gandhi's quarters, however. Each of his visitors was struck by the physical weakness of India's aging leader, and above all by the profound air of melancholy dampening his usually cheerful spirit. The man who had once vowed that he would live to be 125 years old, because that was "the time needed by a soldier of nonviolence to fulfill his mission," had decided

to mark the passage of another year in his life by praying, fasting, and spending most of his day at his beloved spinning wheel. He wanted his birthday celebration to be a celebration of that primitive device and the virtues it stood for, the virtues that an independent India was fast forgetting in savagery and violence.

Why was everyone showering congratulations on him? he asked his evening prayer meeting. It would have been more appropriate "to offer condolences."

"Pray," he told his followers, "that the present conflagration ends or He takes me away. I do not wish another birthday to overtake me in an India in flames."

"We had gone to him in elation," Vallabhbhai PateFs daughter noted in her diary that day; "we returned home with a heavy heart."

The radio of an independent India honored his birthday that evening with a special program. Gandhi did not even listen. He preferred, instead, solitude and his spinning wheel, hearing in its whir the murmuring of "the still, sad music of humanity."

The Punjab, October 1947

The tragedies of partition would not have been complete had they not been accompanied, as every conflict since the dawn of history, by an outpouring of sexual savagery. Nearly all of the atrocities cursing the unhappy province were embellished by their orgy of rape. Tens of thousands of girls and women were seized from refugee columns, from crowded trains, from isolated villages, in the most wide-scale kidnaping of modern times.

If the woman was Sikh or Hindu, her abduction was usually sanctified by a religious ceremony, a forced conversion to make a girl worthy of her Moslem captor's home or harem. Santash Nandlal, a sixteen-year-old Hindu, the daughter of a lawyer near the Pakistan city of Mianwalli, was taken after her kidnaping to the home of the village mayor.

"I was slapped a few times," she remembered, "then somebody arrived with a piece of beef that they forced me to eat. It was atrocious. I had never eaten meat in my life. Everyone laughed. I began to cry. A mullah arrived and

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recited a few verses of the Koran, which he forced me to repeat after him."

Then he gave her a new name. Santash became "Allah Rakhi" ("She whom God has saved"). The girl whom God had saved was offered at auction to the village males. Her purchaser was a woodcutter. "He was not a bad man," she would recall with gratitude a quarter of a century after her ordeal; "he didn't make me eat any more meat."

The Sikh's tenth guru had specifically enjoined his followers centuries earlier against sexual intercourse with Moslem women to prevent exactly what happened in the Punjab. The inevitable result was a legend among the Sikhs that Moslem women were endowed with particular sexual prowess. Under the impact of events in the Punjab, the Sikhs forgot the guru's admonishment and gave free rein to their fantasies. With morbid frenzy, they fell on Moslems everywhere until a trade in kidnaped Moslem girls flourished in their parts of the Punjab.

Boota Singh, a fifty-five-year-old Sikh veteran of Mount-batten's Burma campaign, was working his fields one September afternoon when he heard a terrified scream behind him. He turned to see a young girl, pursued by a fellow Sikh, rushing toward him. The girl threw herself at Boota Singh, begging, "Save me! Save me!"

He stepped between the girl and her captor. He understood instantly what had happened. The girl was a Moslem whom the Sikh had seized from a passing refugee column. This wholly unexpected intrusion of the province's miseries upon his plot of land offered Boota Singh a providential opportunity to resolve the problem most oppressing him, his own solitude. He was a shy man who had never married—first, because of his family's inability to purchase him a wife; then, because of his natural timidity.

"How much?" he asked the girl's captor.

"Fifteen hundred rupees," was the answer.

Boota Singh did not even bargain. He went into his hut and returned with a soiled pile of rupee notes. The girl whom those banknotes purchased was seventeen years old, thirty-eight years his junior. Her name was Zenib; she was the daughter of sharecroppers in Rajasthan. To the lonely old Sikh she became a kind of adorable plaything, half daughter, half mistress, a wondrous presence who com-

pletely disrupted his life. The affection he had never been able to bestow burst over Zenib in a flood tide. Every other day Boota Singh was off to the nearest bazaar to buy her some bauble: a sari, a bar of soap, a pair of embroidered slippers.

To Zenib, who had been beaten and raped before her flight, the compassion and tenderness poured out to her by the lonely old Sikh who had purchased her for 1,500 rupees was as overwhelming as it was unexpected. Inevitably, her response was a grateful affection to the man who had saved her, and she quickly became the pole around which Boota Singh's life turned. She was with him in his fields during the day, milked his water buffaloes at sunup and sundown, lay with him at night. Sixteen miles from their hut, the wretched tides of the refugees flowed up and down the Grand Trunk Highway.

One day that fall, well before the dawn, as Sikh tradition dictated, a strange melody of flutes advanced down the road to Boota Singh's house. Surrounded by singers and neighbors carrying sputtering torches, astride a horse harnessed in velvet and bangles, Boota Singh rode up to the doorstep of his own home to claim the little Moslem girl as his bride.

A guru bearing the Granth Sahib, the Sikh holy book, followed him into the house, where Zenib waited, trembling in the new sari he had bought her. Radiant with happiness, his head covered in a new scarlet turban, Boota Singh squatted beside Zenib on the floor of his house. The priest explained to them the obligations of married life. Then, with the gathering intoning his phrases after him, he read from the sacred text.

When he had finished, Boota Singh stood up and clutched one end of an embroidered sash; Zenib clutched the other. Four times, Zenib followed him in lawans, four mystic circumambulations of the holy book. At the instant the fourth circle was joined, they were married. Outside, the sun of another day rose over their fields.

A few weeks later, the season that had brought so much horror and hardship to his fellow Punjabis bestowed a last gift on Boota Singh. His wife announced that she was bearing the heir he had despaired of ever having. It was as though some special providence had singled out the elderly Sikh and the Moslem girl for its blessing. That was not the case. For that unlikely couple, a long and cruel ordeal,

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which would one day become for millions the symbol of the evils of partition, was soon to begin.

Slowly, the lines of red pins on the maps of Government House advanced toward their inevitable destinations, a refugee camp. For both the India and Pakistan governments, the deluge of homeless, wandering millions pouring across their borders posed problems such as few nations had ever been called on to face. Those suffering multitudes expected miracles from them. They had won the panacea of freedom, and they believed that somehow it would give their leaders the power to efface their ills.

D. F. Karaka, an Indian journalist, found a dazed, elderly Sikh wandering around a camp in Jullundur clutching in his hands a sheaf of paper torn from a schoolboy's notebook. On it, a public writer had inscribed a list of all the belongings the Sikh had lost in Pakistan: his cow, his house, his cot, pots and pans. To each item the Sikh had assigned a value. The total was 4,500 rupees. He was, he told Karaka, going to present his bill to the government, because the government would pay him.

"Which government?" Karaka asked.

"My government," replied the old Sikh. Then with touching ignorance he added, "Please, Sahib, can you tell me where I can find my government?"

The rich suffered as well as the poor. One Sikh officer in Amritsar turned his garage into a private refugee camp. It was filled with half a dozen of his friends. Two months before, they had been millionaires in Lahore. Now they were destitute. Another officer would recall a man weeping uncontrollably on the refugee train that he was escorting toward Delhi. The man, well-dressed, told him he had been wiped out, ruined.

"You really have nothing left?" asked the officer.

"Only 500,000 rupees," answered the man.

"But," protested the officer, "you're still rich!"

"No," was the reply. "I'm going to donate every pie [penny] of it to having Nehru and Gandhi killed."

Handling the influx of refugees was a task of unbelievable dimension. Millions of blankets, tents and vaccines, had to be found and distributed. Providing the food to keep them alive demanded a logistical effort of staggering size. As the camps overflowed, conditions became unbear-

able. The stench of death, decay and disease seemed to rise above each one like the morning mist off a lake.

"The stench of freedom," bitterly complained a Sikh colonel driving into such a camp near Amritsar. Inside another, an Indian journalist noted one young man keeping a vigil beside his dying mother—not to comfort her last hours, but to be sure that it was he who would snatch away the blanket covering her body when she died.

Gandhi excepted, none of Delhi's political leaders would be as familiar to the inmates of those camps, or as loved by them, as an auburn-haired Englishwoman in a crisply pressed St. John's uniform. As the weeks preceding partition had in a sense belonged to her husband, the weeks of India's trial would be Edwina Mountbatten's. She drove herself during that fall with a relentless fury, a self-discipline that not even her husband could surpass. It was as if, in the squalor of those camps, comforting the sick and the dying, she were somehow atoning for every extravagance of her self-indulgent youth. Her compassion backed by her innate sense of authority, her devotion enhanced by her knowledge and talent for organization made Edwina Mountbatten an unforgettable figure to thousands of Indians.

She was at her desk every morning at six o'clock with barely five hours' sleep behind her. All day she moved from camp to camp, from hospital to hospital, probing, studying, criticizing, correcting. Those were not perfunctory visits. She knew how m^ny water taps a camp should have per thousand inmates, how to make sure that no one missed an inoculation, how to organize hygiene and sanitation. ^

H. V. R. Iyengar, Nehru's chief secretary, remembered her arriving for an Emergency Committee meeting at six o'clock one evening after twelve hours' touring the camps under a beating sun. Her A.D.C.'s collapsed in sleep in the Committee anteroom, while, inside, Edwina, "cool, precise, pragmatic, perfectly groomed, set out her observations and recommendations on a whole range of problems."

She hated to fly and was violently ill every time she was in the air. Yet, to save time, she flew whenever she could, putting a fresh coat of lipstick on her vomit-stained mouth before each landing. She had no hesitation in ordering R.A.F. war heroes to take off against all safety regulations in total darkness when an urgent problem awaited her.

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'The one stupid thing to tell her was 'Your Excellency, I don't think it would be suitable for you to do this,'" Lieutenant Commander Howes, her husband's A.D.C., recalled. "If you did, she would immediately do it."

No sight was too gruesome, no hut too filthy, no task too demeaning, no Indian too ill for her consideration. Howes would always remember her squatting up to her ankles in mud beside men dying of cholera, one of the most frightful of deaths, and calmly stroking their fevered foreheads during the last moments of their existences.

Those tragic weeks in India and Pakistan were a time of horror, but they were a time of heroes as well, most of them unknown and unthanked heroes, their deeds forgotten as soon as they were accomplished. The sentiments of many were summed up by Ashwini Kumar, a Hindu police officer in Amritsar. "The only way to cling to one's sanity in that hell," he noted, "was to try to save one life a day." It was a task to which the young policeman consecrated himself with a notable and successful ardor. There were Sikhs who hid Moslem friends for months or saved them from lynch mobs; Hindus like an unknown traveling salesman who pulled Ahmed Anwar, a twenty-two-year-old Moslem railroad clerk, from the mob trying to kill him, shouting, "He's a Christian"; Moslems like the captain of the Frontier Force Rifles who died defending a column of Sikhs against his countrymen.

Gradually, a semblance of order began to emerge from the chaos. Discipline in both armies improved, effective tactics for protecting trains and refugee columns were devised. The Emergency Committee, which Nehru would call "the best lesson in administration a new government ever had," began to get its grip on the Punjab. The millions of refugees staggered on, but the violence that had provoked their flight began to diminish. Its waning was signaled in one laconic line in an intelligence report submitted to the Emergency Committee.

"The practice of throwing Moslems from train windows," it noted, "is on the decline."

One last malediction awaited those unfortunate multitudes. The monsoon arrived. The heavens from which the Punjab's miserable millions had begged succor in the searing heat of August and early September finally hurled down the rains they had been hoarding, with a fury such

as India had not seen in half a century. It was almost as though a pantheon of the Punjab's angry gods were flinging in a burst of biblical wrath a parting curse upon a people who had displeased them. Turned into torrents, the five rivers of the Punjab, the rivers which had given the province its name and sustained and nourished its uprooted children, were now to become the final instruments of their destruction.

Coursing off the great slopes of the Himalayas, swelling their tides with melted snow, the floods burst into the plains in walls of water the height of a house. River beds that had been dried to a trickle by the summer sun became foaming torrents. Partition and the Punjab's chaos had disrupted the flood-warning system installed under the British. Almost without notice, those walls of water swept into the heart of the Punjab on the evening of Sepetmber 24, surging past their riverbanks, drowning in an end-of-the-world rumble tens of thousands of refugees who had collapsed there for a night's sleep.