Freedom at Midnight (83 page)

As the sublime instant approached, a chorus of Vedic chants and tinkling bells, mingled with the dissonant wail of the Indian flute, rose above the crowd. Hundreds of thousands of mourners, foreheads streaked with ashes and sandalwood paste, strode into the river to join in a gigantic and mystic communion. They thrust coconut shells filled with offerings of flowers, fruit, sweets, milk, bits of hair onto the current. Then, thrusting their cupped palms into the waters, they gulped three ritual mouthfuls of the river's sacred broth.

When the vehicle reached the legendary junction of the rivers, Ramdas Gandhi filled the urn containing his father's ashes with the milk of a Sacred Cow. He gently swirled the urn's contents while the passengers on the vehicle chanted a last hymn: "Holy Soul, may sun, air and fire be auspicious unto thee; may the waters of all the rivers and the oceans be helpful unto thee, and serve thee forever in thy good deeds."

Then, as their chant concluded, Ramdas leaned over the vehicle's gunwales and slowly let the mixture in the urn flow onto the waters below. Caught by the river's current, the milk-gray slick, speckled with dark fleets of ash, slid down the vessel's hull. Lovingly, each of its passengers bent over and sprinkled a fistful of rose petals on the stain that once had been a man.

Borne on by the river's remorseless currents, the gray

film with its crown of rose petals glided from sight down to a distant horizon. The ashes of Mohandas Gandhi were off on the last pilgrimage of a devout Hindu, their long voyage to the sea and the mystic instant when the Eternal Mother the Ganges would deposit them in the eternity of the oceans and Gandhi's soul, "outsoaring the shadows of the night," would become one with the Mahat, the Supreme, the God of his celestial Gita.

EPILOGUE

Mahatma Gandhi achieved in death what he had striven to achieve in his last months of life. His murder ended forever the insensate communal killing of neighbor by neighbor in India's villages and cities. The antagonisms of the subcontinent would remain, but they would henceforth be transformed to the conventional plane of a conflict between nation states waged between regular armies on the battlefield. The sacrifice in the gardens of Birla House would stand as the climactic act of the triumph and tragedy which embraced the Indian subcontinent in 1947-48.

Its author, Nathuram Godse, was taken into custody with his pistol in his hand. He made no effort to resist arrest. The arrest of the remaining members of the conspiracy followed quickly. Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were betrayed to the police by Apte's amorous appetites. On, appropriately enough, February 14, St. Valentine's day, Apte answered a knock on the door of the Bombay hotel in which he had been hiding for forty-eight hours. He expected to find his mistress on the doorstep. He found instead three Bombay policemen. The police had discovered his liaison with the daughter of their chief surgeon and had been listening to the telephone conversation in which he had asked her a few minutes earlier to come to his hotel room.

Eight men, Apte, Nathuram and Gopal Godse, Madan-lal, Karkare, Savarkar, Parchure and Digamber Badge's servant were sent to trial on May 27, 1948, for conspiracy

to murder Mahatma Gandhi. From the outset, Nathuram Godse claimed sole responsibility for the murder for political purposes, and denied that the others had participated with him in a conspiracy. He never requested the one procedure that might have saved him, a psychiatric examination.

Digamber Badge's astonishing record of thirty-seven arrests and only one conviction was not to be tarnished by his participation in the murder. The false sadhu turned state's witness and never had to stand trial for the crime. Largely on his testimony, seven of the eight accused were convicted. Veer Savarkar was acquitted for lack of evidence.

Nathuram Godse and Narayan Apte were condemned to death for the crime. Apte would pay on the gallows for the rendezvous he had missed with an Air India stewardess in New Delhi on the evening of January 27, 1948. He was sentenced to die because he had been present in Gwalior at the moment the murder weapon was procured. The judge sentenced the five remaining men to life imprisonment. Parchure and Badge's servant, however, succeeded in reversing their convictions in Appeals Court.

Their own appeals denied, the date of the execution of Nathuram Godse and Narayan Apte was set for November 15, 1949. Two of Gandhi's sons, his close friends and associates joined in a petition for clemency to the man who had been the most devoted follower of the prophet of nonviolence, Jawaharlal Nehru. The petition was denied. At dawn, November 15, 1949, as provided for by the Indian Code of Criminal Procedures, Narayan Apte and Nathuram Godse were taken from their cells to the courtyard of Ambala prison, where they were "hanged by the neck until dead."

Apte had the unshakable conviction that he would never die for the murder of Mahatma Gandhi until a hangman's assistant opened his cell door that morning. He "knew" that a last-minute reprieve would save him from the gallows, because he had read it in the lines of his hand. Standing at the foot of the gallows, confronted by the terrible evidence of how fallible a science palmistry was, Narayan Apte collapsed. He had to be carried to the waiting rope.

Nathuram Godse declared in his last will and testament that the only possession he had to leave his family was his

ashes. He chose to postpone his entrance into immortality until the dream for which he had committed murder had been realized. Defying the canons of Hindu custom, he asked that his ashes should not be immersed in a body of water flowing to the sea but be handed down, instead, from generation to generation until they could be sprinkled into an Indus river flowing through a subcontinent reunited under Hindu rule.

Veer "the Brave" Savarkar, the zealot whose unseen hands had controlled the flow of at least three political assassinations, lived to die in bed of old age at eighty-three at Savarkar Sadan in 1966.

Dattatraya Parchure returned after his conviction was reversed to the office where he still sits under the oil painting of his guru, prescribing his concoctions of cardamom seeds, bamboo sprouts, onions and honey for the congested lungs of the citizens of Gwalior.

Digamber Badge, fearing for his life in Poona, moved after the trial to quarters provided him by the police in Bombay. There, he reestablished himself in the profession for which he was esteemed throughout Bombay province: knitting up his chain-mail, bulletproof vests. Badge has prospered. His vests now sell for 1,000 rupees ($130), and his order book contains a six-month backlog. He sells them throughout India, most frequently to politicians, who have reason to fear attempts on their lives.

Karkare, Madanlal, and Gopal Godse, having served their sentences under the provisions of Indian law, were released from jail in the late 1960's. Karkare returned to Ahmednagar, where he resumed direction of the Deccan Guest House, offering travelers the questionable comfort of one of his charpoys, set seven to a room, for 1.25 rupees (20 cents) a night. He died of a heart attack in April 1974. Madanlal Pahwa settled in Bombay. He manufactures toys in a loft behind his dwelling, seeking to compete in his small way with the Japanese industrial barons whose products flood the markets of India and the Far East. The proudest creation today of the man who tried to destroy Gandhi with a bomb at Birla House is a rocket powered by compressed air, which shoots the rocket one hundred yards into the sky, then returns to earth with its own parachute.

Gopal Godse resides on the third floor of a modest dwelling in Poona. On one wall of his terrace, outlined in

wrought iron, is an enormous map of the entire Indian subcontinent. Once a year, on November 15, the anniversary of Nathuram's execution, Gopal sets his brother's ashes before that map in a silver urn. The map is outlined in glowing light bulbs. Before it, Gopal Godse assembles the most zealous of the old disciples of Veer Savarkar.

No twinge of remorse, no hint of contrition animates their gathering. They are there to celebrate the memory of the "martyr" Nathuram Godse and to justify his crime to posterity. Aligned before Gopal's wrought-iron map, stirred by the strumming of a sitar, those unrepentant zealots thrust the open palms of their right hands into the air and swear before the ashes of Nathuram Godse to reconquer "the vivisected portion of our motherland, all Pakistan, to reunite India under Hindu rule from the banks of the Indus, where the sacred verses of the Vedas were composed, to the forests beyond the Brahmaputra."

As he had maintained he would, from the moment he accepted the appointment, Louis Mountbatten laid down his charge as independent India's first Governor General in June 1948. His final weeks in India were absorbed with ^n unsuccessful effort to induce the one Indian prince who still sat upon his throne, the Nizam of Hyderabad, to abandon peacefully his pretensions of independence and accede to the Dominion of India.

The last official gesture of his wife, Edwina, was to visit two of the great refugee camps to whose inmates she had devoted so much of her time and energy. By the thousands, the wretched inhabitants of those camps rushed to bid her farewell, honoring her departure with the only gift their poor existence permitted, the tears of genuine sorrow filling their eyes.

On the evening before they left, Jawaharlal Nehru honored the couple at a farewell banquet in the formal dining hall of their old viceregal palace. Raising his glass to the couple to whom he was linked by so many bonds of friendship and affection, forged during the most memorable year of his life, he called for toasts to them both.

"Wherever you have gone," he told Edwina Mountbatten, "you have brought solace, you have brought hope and encouragement. Is it surprising therefore that the people of

India should love you and look up to you as one of themselves?

"You came here, sir,** he said to her husband, "with a high reputation, but many a reputation has foundered in India. You have lived through a period of great difficulty and crisis, and yet your reputation has not foundered. That is a remarkable feat."

His rival Patel added his words to Nehru's. "What you have achieved in the way of friendship and good will," he told the Mountbattens, "emphasizes what your predecessors missed as a result of their aloofness and their failure to take into their confidence the leaders of public opinion."

The following morning, as the Mountbattens rode away from Lutyens's Palace in the same gilded carriage that had delivered them to its ceremonial grand staircase fifteen months before, one of their six-horse team jibbed. At the sight of that balking animal refusing to advance, a voice called from the crowd the final accolade of their historic and tumultuous months in New Delhi: "It is a sign from God. You must remain in India."

The terrible disease a Bombay doctor had discovered on Mohammed Ali Jinnah's lungs ended his life in September 1948, just eight months after the murder of his old political foe, barely three months after the expiration of the death sentence that his friend and physician had pronounced on him.

With the personal courage that had characterized all his actions, Jinnah labored to secure the future of his cherished Pakistan as long as his resources allowed him to do so. He died in Karachi, his birthplace, the provisional capital of the great Islamic nation born because of his iron will, on September 11, 1948. Even in death, Jinnah remained faithful to his uncompromising, contradictory self. At ten minutes to ten that evening, his doctor bent close to the dying Quaid and whispered, "Sir, I have given you an injection. God willing, you are going to live."

Jinnah fixed his unwavering glare on the last sight his eyes would ever see, his doctor's face.

"No, I am not," he firmly replied. Half an hour later he was dead.

His nation survived the difficult period that followed its

birth, but the democratic institutions with which it had been endowed did not. A military coup d'etat, led by Field Marshal Ayub Khan, ended a series of corruption-plagued civilian regimes in 1958. After a decade of authoritarian but effective rule, Khan's regime was overthrown by another military coup.

The traumatic experience of the 1971 Bangladesh war, which realized Louis Mountbatten's prophecy that the union of the two halves of Pakistan would not last a quarter of a century, brought civilian rule back to Pakistan under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Dissident tribal factions in Baluchistan and along the Frontier which the British had found so difficult to control remain a constant concern to Pakistan's leaders. Nonetheless, with the more homogeneous nation that emerged from the Bangladesh war and the perspectives of economic assistance from their oil rich Moslem neighbors, Pakistanis could contemplate their nation's future in 1975 with greater serenity than at any other time since its conception.

On a Karachi hilltop a superbly proud mausoleum shelters the burial site of Pakistan's founder, a strangely appropriate tribute from his people to the last of their Moguls.

As Mahatma Gandhi had predicted, the terrible legacy of partition would trouble the subcontinent for years to come. Twice, in 1965 and 1971, the two nations that had sprung from a common womb would face each other on the battlefield. Their continuing conflict imposed a staggering burden of expenditure on them both, diverting their limited resources from the development of their hungry people to the sterile instruments of war.

Both nations accomplished in barely a decade the prodigious feat of resettling and integrating into a new existence their millions of refugees. The fertile fields of the Punjab, soaked with the blood of so many innocent victims in the fall of 1947, found again the tints of happier days, the gold of wheat and mustard fields, the white of thick stands of cotton, the green of sugar-cane plantations. In India, the province, animated largely by its Sikh population, made a major contribution to the Green Revolution which, before the searing droughts of the middle seventies and the world petroleum crisis, had brought India to the threshold

of the dream of generations: self-sufficiency in the production of food grains.