Freedom at Midnight (68 page)

Poona's Hindu fanatics had a new hero now, a man they worshipped as the authentic continuation of the line of Shivaji, the peshwas and Tilak. He was not physically present in the parking lot of the Hindu Rashtra, but as his image, cast by a 16-mm movie projector, flickered onto a concrete wall an unexpectant hush stilled the gathering. Even with his voice distorted by the crackle of an inefficient sound system, there was something spellbinding about Vinayak Damodar Veer "the Brave" Savarkar.

There was a hint of the ancient Hindu sadhu in his burning regard, in the almost hypnotic glint of his half-lidded eyes staring out from behind round, steel-rimmed spectacles. His drawn and sunken cheeks radiated a mystic intensity and an intimation of cruelty seemed to caress hia sensual lips. He was not addicted to it, but he had been a consumer of opium for years. He was also, although few of his followers were aware of it, a homosexual.

Above all, he was a fiery, brilliant speaker, revered by his followers as the Churchill of Maharashtra. In his fiefs in Poona and Bombay, Savarkar could outdraw even Nehru. Like Nehru, Jinnah and Gandhi, Savarkar had completed his education in London's Inns of Court. The lessons he had drawn from his stay in that sanctuary of the law were not theirs, however. His credo was violent revolution, the art he practiced was that of political assassination.

Arrested in London in 1910 for having commanded from a distance the assassination of a British bureaucrat, he was ordered back to India for trial. He wriggled out of the porthole of the ship he was on when it stopped at Marseilles. Eventually deported from France, he was given a double-life sentence to the penal colony of the Andaman Islands, only to be released in a postwar political amnesty. He subsequently organized the assassination of the governor of the Punjab and an unsuccessful attempt on the life of the governor of Bombay. The Andaman Islands, however, had taught Savarkar a lesson. He screened his connection with the killers so carefully that the police were never able to build a case against him.

Savarkar detested the Congress with its pleas for Hindu-Moslem unity and its Gandhian nonviolence. His

doctrine was Hindutva, Hindu racial supremacy, and his dream was that of rebuilding a great Hindu empire from the sources of the Indus to those of the Brahmaputra, from Cape Comorin to the Himalayas. He hated the Moslems. There was no place for them in the Hindu society he invisioned.

Twice he had presided over the Hindu Mahasabha ("Great Hindu Society"), the right-wing, nationwide Hindu political party. His real interest, however, was its quasi-fascist military arm, the R.S.S.S. Its central core was a secret society, the Hindu Rashtra Dal, which Savarkar had founded in Poona on May 15, 1942. Each of its members swore an oath of personal allegiance to Savarkar, who was referred to as the movement's "dictator." Besides their almost blind allegiance to their dictator, another mystic, even more binding tie linked the Dai's leader and its charter members. They shared that most restrictive and meaningful of Indian bonds—caste. All came from Poona's highly intelligent elite of Chitpawan Brahmans, the heirs of the peshwas. Among them were the editor and the administrator of the Hindu Rashtra.

An almost worshipful silence followed the end of Savarkar's film. That brief celluloid appearance of the Hindu messiah had been the high point of the evening. Arm in arm, Apte and Godse walked to their press. Fifteen thousand rupees advanced by Savarkar had launched their journal, and no one doubted it was his Master's voice in this citadel of militant Hinduism. While their guests clapped, the two young men posed for a picture. Then, with a jubilant shout they thrust their fingers at the red button which set their flat-bed press in motion for the first time.

With the clanking press spewing forth the latest episode in the Hindu Rashtra's continuing assault on the evils of Gandhi and the Congress Party, the little gathering began to break up. At his window the policeman who had watched the proceedings was about to close his notebook when he started. In the shadows in one corner of the lot, he had spotted Apte in animated conversation. His interlocutor too was known to the police. His dossier bore the same notation as Apte's: "Potentially dangerous." The policeman scribbled a hasty note. Apte's name would henceforth be linked in the files of the Poona police with this visitor who had journeyed sixty miles to attend the inaugu-

ration of a printing press. It was Vishnu Karkare, the owner of the Deccan Guest House in Ahmednagar. He was the innkeeper into whose embrace Madanlal Pahwa, the man whose name would be known throughout India, had fallen after throwing his bomb at a Moslem procession.

The two young men whose fingers had jointly pushed the button of the Hindu Rashtra press had only two things in common, their ardently held political convictions, and the membership their birth conferred upon them in the elect of Indian society, the Brahman caste.

Held by legend to have sprung from the brain of Brahma, the Brahmans in Hindu mythology descended from the Seven Penitents, the rishis, whose spirits shone in the heavens from the seven stars of the Great Bear. Originally penitents and philosophers living apart from the world and its temptations, they had been transformed through the centuries into a priestly and social elite. They were, in Hindu tradition, "twice born" like the birds. As a bird was held to enjoy two births, when his egg is dropped and when his beak breaks his shell, so, too, was a Brahman, at delivery, and at the age of six when the double-stranded gut of the Sacred Thread officially making him a Brahman was looped around his neck.

Nathuram Godse's life truly began when his father and a group of mantra-chanting Brahman priests passed over his left shoulder those two coils of gut marking his entry into one of the most esoteric bodies in the world, a fraternity into which only two percent of India's vast population might claim membership. They thrust young Godse to the apex of India's social pyramid and confronted him with a bewilderingly complex network of privileges and restraints that henceforth were supposed to govern his life.

The privileges the Brahman caste carried were not necessarily economic. Godse's father was a mailman earning fifteen rupees a month. But that humble civil servant brought up his sons in the strictest Hindu orthodox tradition. Once he had taken his thread, Godse was forced to learn and recite daily in Sanskrit verses of the Hindu's sacred texts, the Rig Veda and the Gita.

Like most strict Brahmans, his father was a vegetarian. He never ate with anyone who was not a Brahman,

Godse's mother was present only to serve his father. Before eating, he bathed and donned clean clothes, which had been washed and dried where no impure being, a donkey, a pig or a menstruating woman could touch them. As a good Brahman, he always ate with the fingers of his right hand, first sprinkling water clockwise around his plate, then pushing aside a portion for the birds or the needy. He never read while he ate; ink was impure.

Young Godse reveled in that strict Hindu upbringing and developed a taste for mysticism. To the astonishment of his household, he displayed a capacity for a rare form of worship, the kapalik puja. Nathuram applied fresh cow dung to one wall of the family house. Then he mixed soot with oil and spread the resulting paste over a circular platter which in turn was leaned against the wall before a sputtering lamp. The twelve-year-old Godse would squat in front of that platter in a kind of trance, seeing figures, idols, letters or scraps of verse he had never read, in the moving patterns of oil and soot. When the spell was broken, he would have no recollection of what he had said or seen. Only he could read the signs in the soot and that, the family believed, destined him for a life of great achievement.

There was nothing in Godse's young manhood, however, to justify any such hope. He failed on his high-school English examination and was not graduated. Out of school, he drifted from one job to another, nailing up packing crates for a shipper in a freight depot, peddling fruit, retreading tires. A group of American missionaries taught him the gestures of the only profession he really mastered, one he continued to exercise in 1947, the tailor's trade.

His real passion was politics. He became a rabid follower of Gandhi, and the first visit Nathuram Godse ever made to a jail was for following the Mahatma's call to civil disobedience. In 1937, however, Godse had abandoned Gandhi's movement to follow another political master, a man who was, as he was, a Chitpawan Brahman, Veer Savarkar.

No leader ever had a more devoted acolyte. Godse followed Savarkar across India, a faithful and indefatigable shadow ministering to his most modest needs. Under the master's tutelage, Godse blossomed to realize, at last, the promise of the youth who had read the portents in the soot He read and studied constantly, relating everything

he absorbed to Savarkar's doctrine of Hindutva. He turned himself into an accomplished writer and orator. Although limited by his fanatic devotion to Savarkar and his doctrines, he became an astute political thinker. By 1942, the gods of the youth brought up in the most religious of households were no longer Brahma, Shiva and Vishnu, but a gallery of mortals, the martial leaders who had led the Hindu uprisings against the Moguls and the British. He abandoned forever the god-infested temples of his boyhood for a new kind of secular shrine, the headquarters of the R.S.S.S.

It was in one of those temples that Godse met Narayan Apte for the first time. Their paper, founded at Savarkar's request in January 1944, was the most strident journal in Poona. Called at first The Agrani, it was closed by the Bombay provincial government for its virulent support of a "Black Day" protesting partition proclaimed by Savarkar and the Hindu Mahasabha on July 3, 1947. Clearly benefiting from the complicity of someone in authority, Godse and Apte had reopened the paper in ten days under its new name, Hindu Rashtra.

Their roles on the paper were typical of their relationship: Apte the fast-dealing businessman, Godse the outraged editorialist; Apte the chairman of the meeting, controlling its flow, Godse the fiery orator; Apte the for-mulator of their political schemes, Godse their vocal proponent.

Godse was as rigid, as unbending in his fussy morality as Apte was supple and accommodating in his. Apte's eyes were always on the main chance. He was always ready to deal, to acquire discreetly a few rupees, to arrange and accommodate. Godse was a determined ascetic. Apart from his irrepressible fondness for coffee, he was indifferent to food. He lived in a monk's cell opposite his tailor's shop. The only piece of furniture in it was his charpoy, his rope bed. He rose at five-thirty every morning to his special alarm clock: his water faucet left open so the first gush of the municipality's morning ration would waken him.

Apte was a high liver. He was off to Bombay to see his tailor whenever he had accumulated a few rupees. He loved rich food, a good glass of whiskey, as well as most of the other pleasures life offered. Unlike Godse, who had lost interest in Hinduism as a religion since falling under Savarkar's sway, Apte, the man of the world, was forever

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running into some temple to jiggle a bell and cast a few rose petals at the feet of a capricious god. He was fascinated by astrology and palmistry.

Despite his advocacy of violence to reawaken the Hindu people, Godse couldn't stand the sight of blood. One day driving Apte's Model-A Ford, he was hailed by a crowd to take a badly injured boy to a hospital. "Put him in the back where I can't see him," Godse gasped, "I'll faint if I see all that blood."

Yet, Godse had a curious fondness for Perry Mason detective stories and films of violence and adventure. Many an evening he would spend alone on a two-rupee seat in Poona's Capitol Theater savoring films like Scarf ace and The Charge of the Light Brigade.

While the gregarious Apte never missed a meeting or a gathering, Godse, who was painfully ill at ease socially, avoided all he could. He had few friends. "I do not wish to meet society, because I wish to remain aloof with my work," he maintained.

It was, above all, in their attitude to women that the two men differed most radically. No task, no matter how urgent, ever deterred Apte from a possible seduction. His first child had been born deformed, which had convinced him an "evil eye" had cast its spell on his wife. He had ceased to have sexual relations with her, but he more than made up for that elsewhere. For years, he had taught mathematics at an American mission high school in Ahmed-nagar. His real interest there had been introducing his female students to the erotic message of the kama sutra rather than the principles of algebra. The dark eyes with which Apte spoke talked as often to women as to his political associates, and with results at least as effective.

Godse hated women. With the exception of his mother, he quite literally could not bear their physical presence. He had waived his right as the eldest son to be married, and had moved out of his family's home so he would not have to have any contact with his brothers' wives. He suffered from excruciating migraine headaches, which racked the left side of his skull. One day, he was so grievously affected by an attack that Apte had to deliver him half-conscious to the Poona hospital. Waking to find himself in a ward serviced by nurses, Godse leaped from his bed and, pulling a sheet around him, ran from the hospital rather than allow a female's hands to touch him. Yet, despite his

personal revulsion for women—or perhaps because of it—the words that time and again had flowed from his pen that fall to describe the horrors of the Punjab were "rape," "violation," "chastity," "castration."

At the age of twenty-eight, Godse had finally taken that ancient Hindu vow whose observance had so concerned and troubled Gandhi, that of the Brahmacharya, the voluntary renunciation of sex in all its forms. He apparently remained faithful to it for the rest of his life. Before taking it, he had only one known sexual relationship. It was homosexual. His partner was his political mentor, Veer Savarkar.

Three times in its turbulent history the little town of Panipat, fifty-five miles north of Delhi, had been the site of a battle that secured the road to India's capital against Mogul hordes. Now, on the orders of Mountbatten's Emergency Committee, it had become a terminus welcoming a new wave of invaders, the miserable refugees still pouring into India from Pakistan.