Freedom at Midnight (79 page)

"We've got it! Oh, Karkare, this time we've really got it!" The jubilant Nathuram Godse drew the owner of the Deccan Guest House out of the crowds ringing the water tap opposite the Old Delhi railroad station. Then, like a smuggler offering a fleeting glimpse of his forbidden goods, he flashed open the folds of his shabby brown coat

There, tucked into his waist band, was the pistol they had despaired of ever finding.

Their murder weapon in hand at last, events were now to carry the three men forward to their inevitable conclusion with compelling swiftness, each impaling itself upon their memories with indelible vividness. The only member of the trio to survive, Vishnu Karkare, would recall them:

"As we stood there by the water tap, Apte told us, 'This time we do not want to make a mistake. We want to be sure of the pistol's aim, that the pistol works. We have enough bullets, just see!'

"At those words, he pulled open the pocket of his coat. He was right. Inside I saw many bullets. So all three of us decided to go in search of a place where we could have a trial of the shooting. But everywhere we went, we found the places full of people. The refugees were spread all over Delhi.

"Finally we decided to go to the place where we had previously gone for shooting, and that place was just behind Birla Mandir, or Birla Temple. We went there. We had to imagine whether Gandhiji would be sitting when the time for the shooting came, or whether he would be in a standing position. We could not know which it would be. It was a matter of chance, so we had to try things both ways.

"Accordingly, Apte picked out a tree which was a bul-bul tree set apart from the others. He sat down beside it to imagine the height Gandhiji would have while he was sitting. Where his head was, he made some marks on the tree with a knife. 'Well, 9 he said to Nathuram, 'take this to be Gandhiji's head; this to be his body. Now find the target. 9

"Nathuram drew away to a range of about 20 to 25 feet. From there, he fired at the target. One after another he goes on firing, four times. He finds his target; he finds it O.K. Apte went up to the tree. He looked at the place where he had made the marks for Gandhiji's head. The bullets were all there.

" 'Well, Nathuram, 9 he said, 'ifs perfect! 9 "

Gandhi's great work in Delhi was almost done. He had arrived four months before in a city of the dead, its grand boulevards edged with corpses, panic and fear rampant in its neighborhoods, its government frightened and in disarray.

Now, the capital was calm. Order had been restored. The agony of his fast had dramatically altered its moral climate. It was time for him to leave.

While, in a nearby glade, a man fired four bullets at a mark on a tree trunk, representing his head, Gandhi on that Thursday, January 29, set a tentative date for his departure from New Delhi. He chose February 3. He would return first to his ashram outside Wardha. Then, ten days later, he would start his aged feet down the highways where so many had been massacred, hoping with the force of his love to reverse the currents of the greatest migration in human history, seeking in his pilgrimage to Pakistan the last great miracle beckoning to him like a mirage on a desert horizon.

As always, every moment of Gandhi's day that Thursday was carefully planned and used. He spun. He had his mudpack and his enema. He studied Bengali. He wrote a dozen letters. He labored on a draft of his new constitution for the Congress Party. He received a stream of visitors. He joked with Indira Gandhi and her cousin Tara Pandit, and he autographed a picture for Margaret Bourke-White. As he did, he told her that America should abandon the atomic bomb. Nonviolence, he said, was the only force the bomb could not destroy. In an atomic attack, he would urge his followers to stand firm, "looking up, watching without fear, praying for the pilot."

Suddenly, with the swiftness or a monsoon downpour, a discordant note intruded upon that busy, happy day. A group of Hindus and Sikhs from the Frontier Province, victims of a terrible massacre on the day he had announced his fast, came to call. Before Gandhi could offer them an expression of his grief, one of their embittered number snarled at him, "You have done us enough harm. You have ruined us utterly. Leave us alone. Go retire to the Himalayas."

His words stunned Gandhi. The little body seemed to crumple as though some terrible weight was crushing down on him. On his way to the prayer meeting his pace was labored. The hands that usually rested on Manu and Abha as lightly as wisps of cotton khadi gripped their shoulders for support.

His voice soft and weak, a terrible sadness underlining each of his syllables, India's Mahatma began to address his countrymen for the last time. The winter twilight was al-

ready beginning to thrust its shadows across the lawn as he spoke. Inevitably, he turned to the exchange with the angry refugee who had so upset him.

"Whom shall I listen to?" he asked the silent gathering before him. "Some ask me to stay here, while others ask me to go away. Some reprove and revile me, whereas others extol me. What am I to do then?" he asked rhetorically, his voice soft and full of hurt. "I do what God commands me to do," he said. "I seek peace amidst disorder."

After a long and thoughtful silence, Gandhi concluded. "My Himalayas," he said, "are here."

Shortly after the conclusion of Gandhi's prayer meeting, a long-distance telephone call reached the police officer in charge of investigating the attempt on his life. Since Ma-danlal had broken down and given his detailed confession, Sanjevi's inquiry had made little progress. Still governed by his unshakable conviction that the killers would not return, he had moved it forward at the same leisurely pace that had characterized it since he had taken it under his command.

His caller too had scant progress to report. "Jimmy" Nagarvalla's Bombay Watcher's Branch continued its vigilance at the gates of Savarkar Sadan, but the Machiavellian leader inside was too clever to reveal his hand. And yet, some malignant radiation seemed to emanate from that house. Something in the constant flow of Savarkar's followers in and out of its premises spoke to Nagarvalla's policeman's instincts.

"Don't ask me why," he told Sanjevi, "but I just know another attempt is coming. It's something I can feel in the atmosphere here."

"What do you want me to do?" Sanjevi exploded. Nehru and Patel had both urged Gandhi to allow the police to search the public coming to his prayers. Gandhi's answer, Sanjevi explained angrily, was that "if he sees a policeman in uniform at his prayers, he'll go on a fast to death. What can we do?"

The answer to Sanjevi's question lay on the desk of another Indian policeman seven hundred miles from Delhi. U. H. Rana, the Deputy Inspector General in charge of the C.I.D., Poona, had finally obtained, that Thursday,

January 29, the information he could have gotten four days earlier by the simple expedient of a telephone call. Nine days after Madanlal's first statement, five days after his full confession, a police officer was finally in possession of the identities of the vengeful trinity sworn to penetrate the precincts of Birla House.

Yet Rana did not call or cable a description of Apte and Godse to Delhi. He made no effort to rush their photos to the guards at Birla House gate. Badge spent the day knitting up his bulletproof vests in his Poona arms shop unmolested by Rana's men. The same determined belief that motivated Sanjevi's actions in Delhi apparently governed Rana's in the capital of Hindu extremism. He seemed thoroughly confident that the authors of the bungled fiasco of January 20 would never dare strike again. The most important information the Indian police possessed on that Thursday, January 29, never left his desk.

The three men who were not supposed to come back stood in the sparsely furnished confines of Retiring Room Number Six, one of a series of hotel rooms in the Old Delhi railroad station watching the bustle of tongas, horse carts, creaking buses swarming by in the street below. The police of India no longer had days in which to save the life of Mahatma Gandhi. They had only hours. Godse, Apte and Karkare had just fixed in that dim railroad-station room their rendezvous with history. They had chosen the hour when they would kill Mohandas Gandhi. They would assassinate him at five o'clock the following day, Friday, January 30, in the same Birla House garden in which their first attempt on his life had failed.

"Nathuram was in a good mood" Karkare recalled. "He was very cheerful. He was relaxed. At about eight-thirty in a moody way he said, 'Come. We must all have our last meal together. We must have a good meal, a feast. We may never be able to have another.'

"We went down and started to walk through the station until we got to a restaurant named Brandon's, run by a contractor who had a chain of such restaurants in all the stations. 'We can't go there,' Apte said, 'Karkare is a vegetarian.'

"Nathuram threw his arm around my shoulder and said,

'You are right. Tonight we must all be together' So we went in search of another place.

"We asked for a sumptuous meal: rice, vegetable curries, chapatis. The waiter said there were no sour goat curds to drink, a festive drink for a vegetarian meal. Na-thuram called the headwaiter and gave him five rupees. 'Look, 9 he said, 'this is a party meal. We want curds brought. You go anywhere you have to go, you buy at any price, but you bring us back curds'

"Satisfied with our meal, we walked back to the Retiring Room. We were prepared to stay and chat, but Nathuram said, 'No. Now you must let me relax. I want to be alone. 9 "

As Apte and Karkare started to leave the room, Karkare turned back for a last glance at Godse. The man who was going to kill Gandhi was already stretched out on his bed reading one of the two books he had brought with him to Delhi. It was one of Erie Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason detective stories.

Mahatma Gandhi spent the final evening of his life struggling to finish what would become his last will and testament to the Indian nation, his draft of a new constitution for the Congress Party. At nine-fifteen, the task finally completed, he rose.

"My head is reeling," he said, with a sigh.

He stretched out on his pallet and rested his bald head on Manu's lap while she slowly massaged it with oil. For the handful of devoted disciples who shared his existence, those few moments before sleep always constituted a restful island in their crowded days, a brief quarter hour when their bapu belonged to them and not to the world. Relaxed, chatting gaily, Gandhi would review the day's events, making the little jokes he loved.

This evening, however, there was no joy on his face. He could not erase from his memory the hate-constricted mouth of the refugee uttering his curse. He was silent for two or three minutes while Manu's probing fingers stretched and contracted the skin of his scalp. Then, he began to discourse on a subject his draft constitution had brought to his mind, the growing signs of corruption among the men whose undisputed leader he had been.

"How can we look the world in the face if this goes

on?" he asked. "The honor of the whole nation hinges on those who have participated in the freedom struggle. If they too abuse their power, we are sure to lose our footing."

He lapsed into another of his melancholy silences. Then, in a forlorn voice, he half-whispered a verse of an Urdu poet of the city of Allahabad.

"Short-lived is the spring in the garden of the world," he said. "Watch the brave show while it lasts."

After leaving Godse, Apte and Karkare were nervous. They decided to go to a movie. "We walked around and went into the first one we saw/' Karkare remembered. "// was a film based on a story of Rabindranath Tagore, the great poet. At the intermission we were standing and talk-ing in the lobby. I was concerned because at our farewell dinner, Nathuram had said, 'It'll be all over tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. 9

" 'Do you remember Nathuram's words?' I asked Apte.

" 'Yes,' he said.

" 'Well, why did he say so?' I asked. 'Will he really be able to do it? Because it's a heavy task.'

"Apte drew up close to me. Listen, Karkare,' he said. 7 know Nathuram better than you do. I'll tell you what happened and you draw your conclusion. When we left Delhi on January 20, we went down to Cawnpore in the first-class compartment. We were chatting for a long time and not having a good sleep. At about six in the morning, as we were nearing Cawnpore, Nathuram jumped down from his upper berth. He shook me. 'Apte, are you awake?' he asked. 'Listen,' he said, 'it's 1 who am going to do it, and no one else. This must be done by one man who is ready to sacrifice himself. I will be that man. I will do it alone.'

"Apte looked at me. Very fiercely, but very low so no one around us might hear, he said, 'Listen, Karkare, when I heard Nathuram utter those words, I saw before my eyes, lying on the floor of that railroad car, the dead body of Mahatma Gandhi. That is how much faith I have in Nathuram.'"

A terrible fit of coughing engulfed the slender figure on his pallet in Birla House. The devoted girl who had shared

so many of Gandhi's painful hours during the last year felt tears fill her eyes as she watched his little body quivering beside her.

Manu knew that Sushila Nayar had left behind a package of penicillin lozenges for Gandhi's use on just such occasions as this. Life in the service of India's Mahatma, however, was not easy. Manu was afraid to suggest he take one, sure that her gesture would offend him. Finally, unable to bear her bapu's anguish any longer, she offered to bring him one.

Gandhi's reply to her solicitude was exactly what Manu had feared it would be, a reproach. It revealed, he said, her lack of faith in his sole protector, Rama.

"If I die of disease or even a pimple," he gasped between bursts of coughing, "it will be your duty to shout to the world from the rooftops that I was a false mahatma. Then my soul, wherever it may be, will rest in peace."

His sad eyes were fixed on the girl to whom he had tried to be a mother, who had been his "partner and helper" in so many of the struggles of the past months. "But," he said, "if an explosion took place as it did last week, or somebody shot at me and I received his bullet on my bare chest without a sigh and with Rama's name on my lips, only then should you say I was a true mahatma. This will benefit the Indian people."