Freedom at Midnight (71 page)

Before leaving the city in which he had been born and in which he had absorbed his zealot's philosophy, Godse had a final act to perform. Like the leader he wanted to murder, Nathuram Godse was a man of few possessions. His were represented by the two slips of paper he set before a clerk in the Poona office of the Oriental Life Insurance Company. They were a pair of life-insurance policies to which Godse had never stipulated a beneficiary. He made over the first, number 1166101 for 3,000 rupees, to the wife of his younger brother Gopal, who had agreed to join him in Delhi with a pistol. The second, number 1166102 for 2,000, he assigned to the wife of his partner Apte. Like a condemned man who had drawn up his last

will and testament, Godse was now ready to die in his effort to murder the man whom half the world held to be a saint.

As long as his strength permitted, Gandhi insisted on carrying on with his normal routine during a fast. And so, in the cold dawn of Wednesday, January 14, he was up as usual reciting his Gita at three-thirty. A few minutes later while he massaged his gums and the few teeth left in his mouth with his "toothbrush," a carefully shredded stick, Manu heard him exclaim: "Ah, I really don't feel like fasting today!"

At those words the young girl who twice during the night had awakened to make sure her Mahatma was properly shielded from the cold, handed Gandhi his first "meal" of the day, a glass of lukewarm water and bicarbonate of soda. Gandhi looked at it with a grimace, then gulped it down.

When he had finished, he turned to a task he had been brooding over since the day before, answering a moving appeal from his youngest son, Devadas, to renounce his fast. "What you can achieve while living, you cannot achieve by dying," his son had written. Calling Manu to his side, he dictated his reply.

"Only God who has ordained this fast can make me give it up," he wrote. "You and all the others should bear in mind that it is equally unimportant whether God ends my life or allows me to survive. I have only one prayer to offer: 'O God, keep me firm during the fast lest I should hastily break it in the temptation to live.' "

Gandhi's chances of survival were already a concern to the young girl who was his doctor. His physical resources had diminished notably since his return to Delhi. His kidneys had still not recovered from the strain that his fast in Calcutta had placed on them. His anguish at events in the Punjab had destroyed his appetite and subjected him to fits of labile blood pressure whose precipitous rises could induce spasms in the blood vessels. The only medicine Dr. Sushila Nayar could get him to take for it was a potion made from the bark of the Sarpagandha tree, and even that was now proscribed by the rigorous rules he had laid down for his fast. Above all, there was the fact that no medicine could mitigate: his age. Guiding him to what

would be an agonizing daily ritual, his weighing, Sushila Nayar admitted to herself that she did not know how much strain the system of the great man beside her could stand.

The needle of her scale gave a tentative and disconcerting answer to her question. The first twenty-four hours of the fast had cost Gandhi two precious pounds. His weight that morning of Wednesday, January 14, was 109 pounds (49.5 kilos). There was little fat to spare on his slender frame, and Sushila knew that before long, what little there was would be burnt up. For Gandhi, as for anyone on a fast, the moment would come, then, when he had consumed those reserves of fat and his system began to devour its protein. That began a process which, if not stopped, would be fatal. It was the critical phase. In Gandhi's weakened condition, it could arrive, Sushila Nayar knew, with brutal swiftness.

That in those crucial hours of his fast Gandhi should have confided the task of caring for him medically to a young woman instead of one of the eminent physicians in India's capital reflected a little-known but essential part of his philosophy. From the moment when he launched his first civil-disobedience campaign in South Africa, women had always been in the forefront of his movement.

There could be no hope for the emancipation of India, he had never ceased to maintain, as long as India's women were not emancipated. Women were "the suppressed half of humanity"; and the roots of their servitude lay, he believed, in the narrow circle of domestic chores to which a male-dominated society condemned them. With the establishment of his first ashram in South Africa he had decreed that men and women would share equally in domestic tasks. He abolished separate family kitchens in favor of a common mess. The women, thus unburdened of their household drudgery, would be free to participate equally with men in the community's social and political activities.

And participate they did. At every stage of India's freedom struggle they had stood equally with men before the charges of the British police. They had filled the jails and led the mass movements of a society which, to Gandhi's horror, still denied widows the right to remarry and made a cult of child marriages.

Gandhi would not have been Gandhi, however, had not

his efforts on behalf of India's women been accompanied by their piquant contradictions. His advice to girls menaced with rape in the Punjab had been to bite their tongues and hold their breath until they died. He had always rejected modern birth control as a solution to India's soaring population rate, because he felt the devices it required were incompatible with his ideas on natural medicine. The only form of birth control he accepted was the one he himself practiced—sexual abstinence.

Nonetheless, a society which centuries earlier had condemned its widows to leap into the blazing funeral pyres of their deceased husbands, had so evolved under Gandhi's prompting that a member of the first Cabinet of an independent India was a woman.

Just before midday, the members of that Cabinet gathered around the man who was becoming again the conscience of India. Headed by Nehru and Patel, they had abandoned their sumptuous office buildings to hold a cabinet meeting around the charpoy of the man who had opened the doors of those edifices for them. The subject that brought them to Gandhi's bedside was his demand for the payment of Pakistan's 550 million rupees.

That demand had shocked and angered most of the Cabinet, and particularly Vallabhbhai Patel. Nehru, then Patel, tried to justify the decision to withhold the money. Gandhi, weak and dizzy, lay on his pallet staring silently up at the ceiling as they pressed their arguments. He said nothing. Patel pressed on. Slowly, painfully, tears in his eyes, Gandhi raised himself on his elbows and looked at the man who had stood by his side during so many bitter struggles.

"You are not the Sardar I once knew," he said in a hoarse whisper, and he tumbled back onto his mattress.

All that day, a stream of Moslem, Hindu and Sikh leaders filed past his bed begging Ghandhi to abandon his fast. Their concern sprang from an awareness of a phenomenon that Gandhi's entourage, wrapped in the protective shelter of Birla House, ignored. For the first time, a fast by India's leader was stirring the active resentment of a number of his countrymen. In New Delhi's commercial heart, Connaught Circus, in the crowded alleys of Old Delhi's Chandi Chowk, every conversation turned on the fast. But as a shocked Congress Party official, G. N. Sinha, discovered, mingling with these crowds, no ardent desire to save

Gandhi's life animated them. To many, the sufferings of the man on his charpoy in Birla House seemed a maneuver designed to aid the Moslems they disliked and mistrusted. The question Sinha heard most frequently that January afternoon in Delhi's bazaar was not "How can Gandhi's life be saved?" but "When will that old man stop bothering us?" In the center of the city, an angry gang of refugees even broke up a demonstration calling for communal peace to save Gandhi's life.

Early in the evening, a faint, yet familiar, sound drifted toward Birla House. Hopeful and eager, Gandhi's entourage listened. They had heard that sound in Calcutta, the chanted slogans of a distressed population beseeching their Mahatma to abandon his fast. One of Gandhi's secretaries raced to the gate. In the indistinct glare of the street lights he could see the procession moving toward him down Albuquerque Road, a forest of waving banners and blurred figures.

Inside, in the darkened room where Gandhi lay, the sound drew closer. Weak and dizzy, Gandhi was stretched out in the shadows on his charpoy half asleep. Finally, as the demonstrators reached the gate, the rumble of their chanted slogans vibrated through the room. Gandhi beckoned his secretary, Pyarelal.

"What's going on?" he asked.

"It's a crowd of refugees demonstrating," Pyarelal replied.

"Are there many?" Gandhi asked.

"No, not many," said Pyarelal.

"What are they doing?" Gandhi asked.

"Chanting slogans," his secretary answered.

For a moment, Gandhi listened, trying to understand the rumbling echo of their chant.

"What are they saying?" he asked.

Pyarelal paused, pondering his answer. Then he swallowed.

"They are chanting 'Let Gandhi die/ " he said.

Bombay, January 14,1948

Three men who wanted Gandhi to die stood in the darkness before an iron grille barring the entrance to a tawdry two-story building of weather-beaten

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concrete in the northernmost suburb of Bombay. The only trace of elegance on its facade was a marble plaque sealed into one wall. It denoted in Mahratti the building's function: Savarkar Sadan (Savarkar's House).

Few men in India loathed the man lying on his charpoy in Birla House with an intensity comparable to that animating the self-styled dictator of a militant Hinduism who lived in that residence. Veer "the Brave" Savarkar detested almost all the principles for which Gandhi stood. If Birla House and every other place Gandhi had lived in were temples of nonviolence, Savarkar Sadan, set innocently among the palms and medlar trees of Bombay's Keluksar Road, was a shrine to violence. Nothing was more natural than that the first gesture, on arriving in Bombay, of the men who wanted to murder Gandhi had been to make their way to its gate.

One of the three bore under his arm a tabla, an Indian drum. This evening Digamber Badge had chosen to dress not as a sadhu, but as a musician, a disguise that came naturally to a man born into the caste of wandering minstrels who had gone about early India singing and dancing. The drum under his arm concealed the selection of arms the conspirators had made at his shop in Poona.

A guard showed the trio into Savarkar's cluttered reception room. Very few people had the right to move immediately past that room up a flight of stairs to the personal quarters of the dictator of the Hindu Rashtra Dal. Na-thuram Godse and Narayan Apte were among them. Digamber Badge was not, and so, taking Badge's tabla, they went upstairs without him.

As always, their first gesture toward Savarkar was to reaffirm the blind allegiance they had sworn to his person with a servile gesture. They kissed his feet. The man whose unseen hands had controlled two of India's major political assassinations in the past forty years embraced them in return. Then Savarkar eagerly examined the contents of their drum.

Godse, Apte and Badge were not the first of their little group to penetrate the headquarters of Veer Savarkar that January day. Earlier, Karkare had ushered Madanlal into the master's presence. Karkare had described the young Punjabi as "a very daring worker." Savarkar's reward was to bestow one of his glacial smiles on Madanlal. Then he

had caressed his bare forearm as a man might stroke a kitten's back. "Keep up the good work," he had urged.

Their meeting with Savarkar finished, the trio split up for the night. Badge went to the common dormitory of the Hindu Mahasabha. Apte and Godse, the two Chitpawan Brahmans, left for a more becoming destination, the Sea Green Hotel.

As soon as they had reached the hotel the irrepressible Apte made a telephone call. The number he requested of the hotel operator was the last number in the world for which one would have expected the man vowed to commit India's crime of the century to ask. It was the central switchboard of the Bombay Police Department. When the switchboard answered, Apte requested extension 305. There at the other end of the line was the welcoming voice of the girl who would share Apte's bed that evening, the daughter of the Chief Surgeon of the Bombay Police.

The critical moment that Gandhi's young doctor had been watching for since he began his fast arrived with a swiftness so shocking that even she had not foreseen it. Analyzing his urine on the morning of Thursday, January 15, Sushila Nayar found in it the dread presence of acetone and acetic acid. The fatal process had begun. Gandhi's reserves of carbohydrates were gone. His body was starting to gnaw at its own entrails, to consume its life-sustaining protein. Barely forty-eight hours after he launched his fast, the exhausted old man was already sinking toward death.

Nor was that the only sign worrying the girl who had given up a United Nations fellowship in the United States to care for Gandhi. In the preceding twenty-four hours he had absorbed 68 ounces of the lukewarm water and bicarbonate of soda he so detested. Her careful tabulations showed that he had eliminated only 28. Gandhi's kidneys, damaged by his Calcutta fast, were not functioning properly. Deeply concerned, Sushila tried to explain to Gandhi the seriousness of his condition, why this time he might never recover from his ordeal. He would not listen.

"If I have acetone in my urine, it is because my faith in Rama is incomplete," he murmured.

"Rama has nothing to do with it," Sushila replied. Patiently she explained the scientific process beginning with

the appearance of those foreign bodies in his discharge. He listened in silence. When she had finished, he fixed his eyes on her face.

"And does your science really know everything?" he asked. "Have you forgotten the Lord Krishna's words in the tenth chapter of the Gita—T bear this whole world in an infinitely small part of my being'?"

At seven-twenty on the morning of January 15, while Gandhi was reminding his young doctor of the limitations of her science, Narayan Apte walked into the office of Air India in Bombay. He asked for two tickets on the Bombay-Delhi DC-3 service on the afternoon of Saturday, January 17, for Mr. D. N. Karmarkar, and Mr. S. Marathe. While he began to count out the fare, 308 rupees, the clerk politely inquired if he would be requiring return passages as well.