Freedom at Midnight (75 page)

For the moment, however, the feet that Gandhi wanted to carry him to Pakistan could not carry him across the lawn of Birla House. Despite the pleading of his entourage that he was still too weak to attend the evening prayer meeting in person, Gandhi insisted on being carried to the meeting in a chair. Borne aloft on the shoulders of a pair of his followers, he rode like some Oriental potentate through the waiting crowd, his hands joined, his head bowing in the "namaste" greeting to the scores of people who waited for a new darshan with India's resuscitated prophet.

Every eye in the crowd followed his progress along Birla's long trellis, billowing with its orange and scarlet bougainvillea blossoms, up the little flight of sandstone steps, across the lawn to the platform from which a week earlier he had announced his fast. Not all the eyes scrutinizing his movements as he settled on to his straw pallet studied them with awe and reverence. At widely scattered intervals on the lawn, three assassins waited.

It was the first time in his life that Gopal Godse, twenty-three, had seen Gandhi. He wasn't impressed by the wan silhouette squatting on his prayer platform. To Gopal he was "just a shrunken little old man." He did not feel any surge of hatred looking at him. "Killing him," he would one day declare, "was an impersonal thing to me.

He was a bad influence on the people." What the wary Gopal Godse did sense was the presence in the crowd of a number of plainclothes policemen. Leaving the prayer grounds, he noticed a submachine gun on the camp table of the police tent at the gate.

"We have very little chance of getting away," he thought to himself.

Forty-five minutes later, taking precautions to see that they were not being followed, the principal conspirators slipped one by one into Room 40 of the Marina Hotel in New Delhi's Connaught Circus, where Apte and Godse had registered as S. and N. Deshpande. Karkare ordered whiskeys for himself and Apte.

Apte announced that the time had come to make a decision. His observations at Birla House had convinced him that there was only one moment when they could be certain Gandhi would be exposed and vulnerable. That was when they would strike. They would kill Gandhi, he said, at five o'clock the next afternoon, Tuesday, January 20, during the ritual which had constituted the Mahatma's most faithfully kept appointment with his people during India's long march, his prayer meeting.

Shortly after 9 o'clock on the morning of January 20, a taxicab rolled along the red-brick wall screening the rear of the Birla estate up to the white-washed wooden gate that was its service entrance. Absolutely unmolested, its two passengers walked through the gate into a little courtyard on one side of which was a one-story concrete shed divided into cell-like rooms. It housed the estate's servants. The rear of that shed constituted the red-sandstone wall of the pavilion in front of which Gandhi held his evening prayers.

The two men continued their stroll to the garden. It was silent and empty in the morning sunlight. A slick of dew still glistened on the green lawn and clung to the roses in the trench running along the little sandstone balcony ringing the lawn's outer limit. Narayan Apte and his false sadhu, Digamber Badge, were reassured. There would be no one to trouble them as they accomplished their critical task, deciding exactly how they would execute the crime they planned to commit in the garden that afternoon. As he contemplated the sandstone pavilion in front of which

Gandhi's prayer platform lay, Apte suddenly froze. A series of little grilles looking out onto the prayer ground were cut into its wall. Clearly, they were windows giving onto the servants' quarters behind the pavilion. One of them was directly behind the microphone from which Gandhi addressed his nightly gathering.

Apte walked over to it and made a quick calculation. The distance between that open window and the base of Gandhi's skull as he delivered his address would be barely ten feet. It was a shot so simple even Badge's defective pistol could not miss.

That was the revelation for which he had come to Birla House. All he had to do was place Badge in the room behind that window with a pistol. To provide the coup de grace, Apte would send Gopal Godse into the room with him. He would, at the instant when Badge opened fire, roll a hand grenade through the cross-hatched iron grille screening the window. Apte measured the opening in the grille with a string. It was five inches square, more than enough to allow the grenade to pass through it into the midst of Gandhi and his entourage.

One last calculation remained and Apte made it as they left the prayer ground by the route through which they had entered it. The cell of the servant whose window lay behind the microphone was the third from the end, on the left. Satisfied, the two visitors returned to their waiting taxi. In barely eight hours, Apte assured Badge, Gandhi would be a corpse lying on his prayer platform under the window they had just discovered.

Five pairs of anxious eyes followed every movement of Badge's dextrous fingers. Squatting on the bathroom floor of Room 40 of the Hotel Marina, he slowly inserted detonators into the hand grenades. White-faced and unsteady, Nathuram watched in the doorway. "Badge," he whispered hoarsely, "this is our only chance. Make sure they work properly.'*

When Badge had finished, he cut a length of fuse cord with a knife, and told Apte to take a watch. They had to calculate the speed at which it would burn. Badge lit the cord. It flamed up in a cloud of smoke that left the seven conspirators coughing and choking. As the acrid fumes billowed through the bathroom, they all began to puff

frantically on cigarettes to cover the smoke that seemed certain to betray them.

When calm was restored, Apte assembled them in the bedroom to assign each man his task. The man whose sudden determination to kill Gandhi had brought them to Delhi took no part in the discussions; Nathuram Godse lay groaning on his bed, incapacitated by a migraine headache. Madanlal, Apte explained, would hide a time bomb against the outside edge of the brick wall behind Birla House near the prayer gathering. Its explosion would launch their action and set off a wave of panic to facilitate the assassination.

In the meantime, Badge and Gopal Godse would enter the cell that he and Badge had reconnoitered that morning. If someone stopped them, they would explain that they were going in to photograph Gandhiji from the rear as he addressed his prayer meeting. At the instant Madan-laFs bomb went off Badge would open fire on Gandhi from almost point-blank range. Gopal beside him would push a hand grenade through the aperture.

To be absolutely certain that their victim did not escape, Karkare, armed with a grenade, would be in front of Gandhi, mingling with the faithful. He too would hurl his grenade at Gandhi at the moment when Madanlal's bomb went off. Nathuram and Apte would control the operation. Nathuram would signal Apte when Karkare was in place in front of Gandhi, and Apte would give Madanlal the signal to detonate his bomb.

In their ruthless determination to exterminate Gandhi, innocent lives, Apte admitted, would be lost. That could not be helped. A few more innocent lives was the price that India would have to pay for the death of the man he held responsible for the slaughter of so many hundreds of thousands of Hindus in the Punjab.

An excruciating tension settled over the room. Nathuram Godse lay sprawled on his bed moaning softly under the torture of his migraine headache. So that there would be no visible link between them they dressed themselves as differently as possible. To accomplish the supreme gesture of his existence, Apte, who usually wore well-cut tweeds, put on a dhoti. Karkare darkened his eyebrows and pressed a red tilaka dot to his forehead. Madanlal put on a new blue suit he had bought in Bombay. The refugee from the Punjab was going to the rendezvous

the astrologers had predicted at his birth dressed as a gentleman; for the first time in his life, Madanlal Pahwa was wearing a coat and tie.

As the hours slowly passed, the tension in Room 40 became almost unbearable. Silent, not looking at one another, the conspirators squatted on the hotel-room floor counting the minutes. Nathuram Godse proposed that they share a last, ritual libation. He asked the room servant to bring coffee for them all. When they had finished, it was time to go; Madanlal, Karkare and Nathuram Godse first They left one by one at five-minute intervals to go to Birla House in separate tongas. Ten minutes later, Apte and the others left to follow them by cab. Instead of getting into the first taxi he found, Apte decided at that vital instant to bargain over the fare to Birla House and back. For fifteen minutes he marched around Connaught Circus, going from cab to cab haggling. Finally he settled on a green Chevrolet, PBF 671, which he found in front of the Regal Cinema. It was four-fifteen. His tractations had succeeded in reducing the fare for their trip to the Calvary he had chosen for India's prophet from 16 to 12 rupees.

At Birla House, Gandhi, still too weak to walk to the prayer meeting, was placed on a chair and carried across the lawn to his prayer platform. Caught in the crowd pressing their hands together, respectfully bending forward as his tiny figure drew near, was Madanlal Pahwa. He too clasped his hands and reverently bowed his head to the man he intended to kill. His time bomb was in place, hidden under leaves and grass at the base of the wall behind him. As Gandhi passed, he raised his eyes to look at him. Hatred rushed through him as he contemplated Gandhi for the first time. He is my enemy, he thought. Indeed, it was not Gandhi's diminutive image he saw bobbing along toward the prayer platform, but the image of another man, his father, on the hospital bed in Ferozepore.

Almost before Gandhi had settled into position, a figure rushed from the audience to prostrate himself at Gandhi's feet and urge him to proclaim himself the incarnation of God. Gandhi detested such suggestions. Still, he smiled tolerantly at the man. "Sit down and be quiet," he said. "I am a mortal just like you."

At the rear of Birla House, Apte's green Chevrolet was

just drawing up at the service entrance. Apte was late for the most important rendezvous of his life because of his desire to save four rupees. Karkare told him that Madan-lal's bomb was primed and planted. There would be no problem getting into the cell whose window looked onto the back of Gandhi's head. Karkare had given the man who lived in it ten rupees to let them use it. He pointed to him. Then, the owner of the Deccan Guest House left to take up his own position in the crowd before Gandhi.

Apte beckoned Badge, indicated the man Karkare had paid, and told him to go into his room. Badge took half a dozen steps toward the door and froze. Nothing would ever make Digamber Badge go into that room. No hatred, no passion, no menace would be strong enough to drive him across its threshold. A voice had spoken to Badge. It was the voice of an India as old as its rishis and its rain forests, the India of signs and portents. The room's tenant had one eye. There was no omen as inauspicious as that. Trembling, Badge returned to Apte. "He has one eye," he whispered; "I'm not going into his room."

Apte hesitated. On the prayer ground, the hymns had finished and Gandhi was beginning to speak. His voice was so weak that even the microphone could not pick up his words. Sushila Nayar had to repeat each phrase he uttered to the crowd. Clearly, Gandhi's speech was not going to last long. Apte realized that he did not have time to argue. He told Gopal Godse to go into the room as planned and push his grenade through the window when he heard the explosion of Madanlal's bomb. He assigned the reluctant Badge a new mission: to mix with the crowd in front of Gandhi. "Get in as close as possible and fire at him head-on when the time comes," he said.

Gopal Godse walked to the servant's room, nodded to its one-eyed owner and closed the door behind him. In the darkness he started to move toward the light pouring through the window from which he would thrust his grenade toward the Mahatma's back.

On the prayer ground, Gandhi continued his address. "He who is an enemy of Muslims is an enemy of India," he declared. Gopal Godse could hear Sushila repeating his words as he moved through the darkness toward the grille. When he reached it, he discovered to his horror the first grave flaw in Apte's scheme. Apte had not bothered to enter the cell on his morning inspection. The grille through

which Godse was supposed to push his grenade was eight feet above the ground. In making his careful calculations, Apte had not understood that the level of the prayer-ground lawn was considerably higher than the level of the courtyard in which the servants' quarters were located. Even with his arms extended full length, Gopal's fingertips barely reached the base of the grille. Desperately, he groped in the darkness for the one-eyed man's charpoy. Finally locating it, he frantically began to pull it toward the window so that it could serve as a base on which he could climb to push his grenade through the grille.

Outside everything was ready. Nathuram Godse saw Karkare in position, clearly ready to throw his grenade on the man who at that instant was discussing the "cruel treatment" of blacks in America. The time had come. Nathuram put his hand to his chin and scratched. Apte saw him. He in turn raised his arm to Madanlal. The Punjabi was ready. The moment for which he had been waiting since he walked across the bridge at Suleimanki Head that August afternoon had arrived. He was going to get his revenge. It was a chance he was not going to miss. Calmly, deliberately, he drew on his cigarette. Then he bent over and pressed its glowing tip to the fuse of the bomb at his feet.

"If we cling to the excellent decisions taken," Sushila was repeating to the assembly, "with God as our witness, we shall rise to a much higher moral plane—"

At that precise moment the roar of Madanlal's exploding time bomb burst over the prayer ground with frightening fury. A column of smoke spewed up from the bomb site. "Oh Mother!" Sushila gasped.

"What better death could you ask," Gandhi asked her, reproach in his faint voice, "than to die in the act of prayer?"

In the cell just behind them, Gopal Godse was climbing onto a charpoy to reach the grille above him. The ropes of the charpoy he had counted on as a platform were so slack they sagged almost to the dirt floor. His efforts had added barely three inches to his height. Balancing on its wooden frame, Gopal pulled himself up as far as he could. His eyes still did not quite reach the base of the opening. The only thing he could do was push the grenade blindly through the grille and let it fall on whoever was sitting there. He reached for the grenade. As he did, he realized