Freedom at Midnight (74 page)

A shattered expression on his face, Prasad passed the news to the men crowding his office. They were there to put the last signatures on that critical document, the paper his secretary had shown Gandhi the evening before. Taking a few key leaders with him and telling the others to follow as fast as they could, Prasad rushed to Birla House. Gandhi was lying unconscious on his bed, the members of his entourage hovering around him like nurses around a

dying patient. As he had done the evening before, Pyarelal called him, then tried to wake him by gently caressing his forehead. He did not respond. Someone brought a damp compress, which was applied to his head. As its chill penetrated his being, Gandhi stirred, then opened his eyes. As he saw the gathering around him, a faint smile creased his face. He had accomplished a miracle of which only he was capable.

The men standing by his bedside were divided by rivers of blood and antagonisms centuries old. There were Sikhs in the blue turbans of the militant Akali sect next to Moslems in fezzes and flowing robes; Congressmen in dhotis; Parsis and Christians in London-made lounge suits; Hindu Untouchables from the Bangi Sweepers Colony; orange-robed sadhus; the leader of the extremists of the Hindu Mahasabha and even the seldom seen representative of that brotherhood of zealots, the R.S.S.S.—all standing tranquilly alongside the High Commissioner of Pakistan.

Rajendra Prasad knelt down beside the figure crumpled up on his charpoy. His seven-point charter, he told Gandhi, now bore all the signatures he had requested. It was their unanimous, deeply felt wish that he break his fast. One by one the men around the bed confirmed Prasad's words with their own. At their recital, an air of serenity flowed across the Mahatma's countenance. He indicated that he wanted to speak.

Manu pressed her ear against his lips. She noted down each phrase in a notebook, then passed it to Pyarelal, who read it to the gathering.

They had given him everything he had asked for, but he was still not quite ready to pronounce the words they so desperately wanted to hear. What they had achieved in Delhi they must now seek to achieve throughout all India, he warned. If they were pledging peace in Delhi, but were going to be indifferent to violence elsewhere, their pledge was worthless, and he would be making a mistake to break his fast.

Even in his feeble condition, the cunning despot of brotherhood knew that he had the men around him where he wanted them, and he intended to extract the last measure of accord from them. Panting, he paused for two minutes to gather his strength before beginning again. Pyarelal, overcome by emotion, could no longer read out

the scraps of paper Manu passed up from Gandhi's char-poy. He handed the task over to his sister, Sushila.

"Nothing could be more foolish than to think India must be for Hindus alone and Pakistan for Moslems alone. It is difficult to reform the whole of India and Pakistan, but if we set our hearts on something, it must become a reality.

"If after listening to all this, you still want me to give up my fast, I shall do so. But if India does not change for the better, what you say is a mere farce. There will be nothing left for me but to die."

A tremor of relief rippled through the room. One by one, the men present came to Gandhi's bedside to assure him that they understood the full import of their covenant with him. The leader of the R.S.S.S., the organization that claimed the allegiance of the commando in Delhi to murder Gandhi, added his pledge to the others. "Yes," he vowed, "we swear to fully carry out your commands."

When the last of their protestations of good faith had been uttered, Gandhi beckoned Manu back to his side. "I will break my fast. God's will be done," she wrote on her pad. A shriek of purest joy burst from her lips as she read those words to the gathering.

An extraordinary air of relief and triumph swept the room, a burst of enthusiasm almost as exuberant as that greeting the news of a popular candidate's electoral triumph. When it had stilled, Gandhi insisted that all join in prayer, a Buddhist mantra, readings from the Gita, the Koran, the Bible, the Mazdaist, or Zoroastrianist, prayer, and finally a hymn to the Sikh's great guru Gobind Singh, whose feast day it was. Gandhi's eyes remained closed. A radiant air of joy illuminated his pinched little face as he listened, his lips moving at each prayer.

Forcing her way through the crowd of newsmen and photographers who had swarmed into the room at the news that Gandhi was breaking his fast, Abha brought a glass of orange juice reinforced with glucose to Gandhi's bedside. Maulana Azad, a Moslem and former president of Congress, and Jawaharlal Nehru, both trembling with emotion, took the glass in their hands and raised it to Gandhi's lips. The glare of exploding flash bulbs filled the room with dazzling white light as Gandhi took his first sip. It was twelve forty-five. At the age of seventy-eight, Mohandas Gandhi accepted his first nourishment after exist-

ing for 121 hours and 30 minutes on lukewarm water and bicarbonate of soda.

A roar of cheering broke out in the crowded gardens and alleyways outside as the news that Gandhi had at last broken his fast came from the house. Inside, all the women of Gandhi's entourage moved up to his bed carrying trays of orange sections. It was prasad, the gift of God. A feeble wave of the Mahatma's hand gave the gift his blessing. Tears of joy streaming from their eyes, the girls pushed their way through the crowds, offering all their mounds of orange sections, the hosts of a gigantic and mystic communion binding those disparate and divided men.

By the time it was finished, emotion and the energy that he had expended in addressing the gathering had left Gandhi in such an exhausted state that his doctors cleared the room. Only one man remained behind. His face transfigured by happiness, Jawaharlal Nehru squatted cross-legged by his old guru's charpoy. When the others had gone, he bent to place his lips close to the Mahatma's ear and whispered to him a secret he had shared with no one, not even his own daughter. Since the day before, he too had been fasting in a symbolic gesture of sympathy with his spiritual father.

His body reinvigorated by glucose as his triumph had revived his spirit, the voice that had been a whisper for the past thirty-six hours found again some of its old strength as Gandhi addressed his faithful on the lawn that evening.

"I can never forget all my life the kindness shown to me by all of you," he said. "Do not differentiate between Delhi and other places," he begged them. Let peace return to all India and Pakistan as well. "If we remember that all life is one, there is no reason why we should treat one another as enemies." Let every Hindu study the Koran, he said, and let Moslems ponder the meaning of the Gita and the holy book of the Sikhs, the Granth Sahib.

"As we respect our own religion so must we respect other people's," he declared. "What is just and right is just and right whether it be inscribed in Sanskrit, Urdu, Persian or any other language.

"May God bestow sanity on us and the whole world," he concluded, "may He make us wiser and draw us closer to Him, so that India and the whole world may be happy."

His darshan that evening was an extraordinary, moving

spectacle. Placed on a chair, wrapped in a warm blanket, like a newborn baby, the diminutive figure was carried out to the terraces of his quarters in full view of the crowd. Then his supporters hoisted him to their shoulders, and like a triumphant boxer who'd just knocked out his foe to become heavyweight champion of the world, the little man waved happily to his jubilant admirers.

Three hours later, while a festive Delhi celebrated the end of his fast, Gandhi absorbed his first meal, eight ounces of goat's milk and four oranges. When he had finished, he called for that primitive device which had embodied his message to his people, his spinning wheel. The pleading of his doctors and his entourage could not deter him. With the first strength returning to his body, his trembling fingers set the wheel in motion.

"Bread obtained without labor is stolen bread," he whispered. "I have now started to take food, therefore I must labor."

THE VENGEANCE OF MADANLAL PAHWA

New Delhi, January 19-20,1948

It had been years, Pyarelal Nayar thought, since he had seen Gandhi as cheerful, as radiant with fervor and enthusiasm as he was in the aftermath of his fast. The successful conclusion of the fast, Nayar noted, had opened before Gandhi "boundless dreams and soaring hopes." Not since the 1930 Salt March had one of his actions so galvanized the world and stirred sympathies for the little man.

A deluge of congratulatory cables and telegrams poured into Birla House. Newspapers around the world hailed Gandhi's exploit 'The mystery and power of a frail 78-year-old man shakes the world and inspires it with new hope," said the London News Chronicle. Gandhi, the paper said, "has demonstrated a power which may prove greater then the atom bomb and which the West should watch with envy and hope." The Times of London, not always among his admirers, noted that "Mr. Gandhi's courageous idealism has never been more plainly vindicated"; and the Manchester Guardian commented that Gandhi "may be a politician among saints, but he is no less a saint among politicians." In the United States, the Washington Post remarked that the "wave of relief sweeping the world because his life had been spared was "a measure of the sainthood with which he has been invested." Egypt hailed "a noble son of the East dedicating his life to peace,

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tolerance and brotherhood," and Indonesia saw in his achievements, "the dawn of freedom for all Asia."

The little man in Birla House was hardly indifferent to that avalanche of accolades. Monday, January 19, as all his Mondays, was his day of silence, but the mischievous gaiety bubbling through his spirit infected everybody in his entourage. The bleak despair that had shrouded Birla House during the last days of his fast was replaced by a kind of mystic euphoria, a conviction that grand new horizons were about to open before Gandhi and his doctrine of nonviolence.

The Mahatma remained weak and was restricted to a liquid diet of fruit juices, barley water and glucose, yet even his health seemed infected by the new spirit pervading his quarters. For his followers, the most reassuring moment came at the daily ceremony that had stirred such deepening anxiety during his fast, his weighing. On the morning of January 19, his weight fell one pound, to 106. It was the best news the faithful in Birla House could have had. Gandhi's waterlogged kidneys were beginning to function again. Once more, India's resilient, indomitable Great Soul was emerging from the shadows.

At about the time when Gandhi was mounting his scales, six men emerged into a little clearing in the dense undergrowth stretching out behind New Delhi's Birla Temple. There, well out of earshot of any curious visitors to the temple, they paused. Before deciding when and how to make their attempt on Gandhi's life, Nathuram Godse and Narayan Apte wanted to test the weapons with which they planned to kill him.

Gopal Godse took out from under his jacket the 32-cali-ber pistol he had bought in Poona for 200 rupees. He loaded it, picked out a tree, backed off twenty-five feet and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. He shook it and pulled the trigger again. Again, nothing happened.

Apte motioned to Badge to take out his pistol. While his fellow conspirators looked on tensely, Badge pointed the gun at the tree at which Gopal had been aiming. He pulled the trigger. This time there was a sharp report. The conspirators rushed to the tree to check the mark the bullet had made. There was none. It had fallen to the ground halfway to the tree. Badge fired again. This time the round

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fled well to the right of the tree. He fired four more times. Not a single round hit the target. As Apte had feared in Bombay, his pistol was as likely to kill them as it was to kill Gandhi.

A dismal silence settled over the conspirators. Nathuram Godse watched with silent fury as his brother began to pick at his pistol with his inexpert fingers. They were all committed to the deed, but now, unless his brother could repair his firearm, they would have to kill Gandhi with one pistol that didn't work and a second that couldn't hit anything.

The most important visitor to enter Birla House that day, Monday, January 19, was the Bombay cotton broker Gandhi had sent to Karachi to arrange his visit to Pakistan. As Gandhi had been living his ordeal, Jehangir Patel had been conducting secret negotiations with Jinnah for a trip that, with each passing day, appeared less and less likely ever to take place. Jinnah's first reaction had been wary and hostile. His deep, ingrained mistrust of the man whose tactics had driven him years before from the ranks of the Congress Party remained unshaken. In addition, his almost paranoiac suspicion of India's intentions prompted him to look for some ulterior motive in the proposal of the man he had once labeled a "cunning Hindu fox."

India's decision to pay him the rupees he so desperately needed and the growing realization among his own countrymen that it was, after all, for their fellow Moslems in India that Gandhi was suffering, softened Jinnah's stand. If Gandhi's fast had not opened to him the door to his heart, it had at least opened the doors of his new nation. On the day it ended, Jinnah finally agreed to welcome his old political foe to the soil of Pakistan.

The decision aroused a soaring sense of purpose and vigor in the Mahatma. A great turning point in his life had been reached. At last he could take his doctrine of nonviolence beyond India. He had always refused to do so before, because Indian independence was his first task. Now independence was achieved, and his fast had set his countrymen back on the course he had charted for them. Where better to begin his new mission than in Pakistan? The Indian subcontinent had lost its physical unity, but he, at least, would strive to restore its spiritual unity.

Not only would he go to Pakistan, but he had a vision of how he would go. It was a dream that had been stirring within him for weeks. Jinnah wanted him to go by boat from Bombay to Karachi, but that was too banal a means of locomotion for a man with Gandhi's genius for the dramatic gesture. As he had marched across the borders of the Transvaal, as he had gone down to the sea for his fistful of salt, as he had gone to a thousand villages to preach brotherhood, nonviolence and proper hygiene, so would he go to Pakistan—on foot. He would walk to Jinnah's new nation across the sore and bleeding Punjab, along the roads of the exodus on which so many of his fellows had suffered and died. Just a year before, he had been walking through the marshes of Noakhali delivering with each step of his Penitent's Pilgrimage his healing messages. Now he would set out again on a new pilgrimage, a pilgrimage of hope, to bind up his nation's wounds and substitute a spiritual bond of brotherhood and justice for the physical bonds that partition had cast away.