Freedom at Midnight (84 page)

A return to prosperity, however, did not efface the bitter memories left by the nightmare of exodus. On both sides of the frontier created by Cyril Radcliffe's pencil, a legacy of hatred, deep and malignant, remained. One unfortunate man, Boota Singh, the Sikh farmer who had purchased a Moslem girl fleeing her abductor, came to symbolize for millions of Punjabis the tragic aftermath of their conflict as well as the hope that ultimately man's enduring aptitude for happiness might overcome the hatreds separating them.

Eleven months after their marriage, a daughter was born to Boota Singh and Zenib, the wife he had purchased for 1,500 rupees. Following Sikh custom, Boota Singh opened the Sikh holy book, the Granth Sahib, at random and gave his daughter a name beginning with the first letter of the word he found at the top of the page. The letter was a "T" and he chose Tanveer ("Miracle of the Sky").

Several years later, a pair of Boota Singh's nephews, furious at the thought of losing a chance to inherit his property, reported Zenib's presence to the authorities trying to locate women abducted during the exodus. Zenib was wrenched from Boota Singh and placed in a camp, while efforts were made to locate her family in Pakistan.

Desperate, Boota Singh rushed to New Delhi and accomplished at the Grand Mosque the most difficult act a Sikh could perform. He cut his hair and became a Moslem. Renamed Jamil Ahmed, Boota Singh presented himself at the office of Pakistan's High Commissioner and demanded the return of his wife. It was a useless gesture. The two nations had agreed that an inflexible set of rules would govern the exchange of abducted women: married or not, they would be returned to the families from which they had been forcibly separated.

For six months Boota Singh visited his wife daily in the detention camp. He would sit beside her in silence, weeping for their lost dream of happiness. Finally, he learned that her family had been located. The couple embraced in a tearful farewell, Zenib vowing never to forget him and to return to him and their daughter as soon as she could.

The desperate Boota Singh applied for the right as a Moslem to immigrate to Pakistan. His application was refused. He applied for a visa. That, too, was refused. Fi-

nally, taking his daughter, renamed Sultana, with him, he crossed the frontier illegally. Leaving the girl in Lahore, he made his way to the village where Zenib's family had settled. There he received a cruel shock. His wife had been remarried, to a cousin, within hours after the truck bringing her back from India had deposited her in the village. The poor man, weeping and begging the authorities to "give me back my wife," was brutally beaten by Zenib's brothers and cousins, then handed over to the police as an illegal border crosser.

Brought to trial, Boota Singh pleaded that he was a Moslem and begged the judge to return his wife to him. If only, he said, he could be granted the right to see his wife, to ask her if she would return to India with him and their daughter, he would be satisfied.

Moved by his plea, the judge agreed. The confrontation took place a week later, in a courtroom overflowing with spectators alerted by newspaper reports of the case. A terrified Zenib, escorted by an angry and possessive horde of her relatives, was brought into the chamber. The judge indicated Boota Singh.

"Do you know this man?" he asked.

"Yes," replied the trembling girl, "he's Boota Singh, my first husband." Then Zenib identified her daughter standing by the elderly Sikh.

"Do you wish to return with them to India?" the judge asked. Boota Singh turned his pleading eyes on the young girl who had brought so much happiness to his life. Behind Zenib, other eyes were fixed on her quivering figure, a battery of them glaring at her from the audience, the male members of her clan warning her against trying to renounce the call of her blood. An atrocious tension gripped the courtroom. His lined face alive with a desperate hope, Boota Singh watched Zenib's lips, waiting for the favorable reply he was sure would come. For an unbearably long moment the room was silent.

Zenib shook her head. "No," she whispered.

A gasp of anguish escaped Boota Singh. He staggered back against the railing behind him. When he had regained his poise, he took his daughter by the hand and crossed the room.

"I cannot deprive you of your daughter, Zenib," he said. "I leave her to you." He took a clump of bills from his

pocket and offered them to his wife, along with their daughter. "My life is finished now," he said simply.

The judge asked Zenib if she wished to accept his offer of the custody of their daughter. Again, an agonizing silence filled the courtroom. From their seats, Zenib's male relatives furiously shook their heads. They wanted no Sikh blood defiling their little community.

Zenib looked at her daughter with eyes of despair. To accept her would be to condemn her to a life of misery. An awful sob shook her frame. "No," she gasped.

Boota Singh, his eyes overflowing with tears, stood for a long moment looking at his weeping wife, trying perhaps to fix forever in his mind the blurred image of her face. Then he tenderly picked up his daughter and, without turning back, left the courtroom.

The despairing man spent the night weeping and praying in the mausoleum of the Moslem saint Data Gang Baksh, while his daughter slept against a nearby pillar. With the dawn, he took the girl to a nearby bazaar. There, using the rupees he had offered to his wife the afternoon before, he bought her a new robe and a pair of sandals embroidered in gold brocade. Then, hand in hand, the old Sikh and his daughter walked to the nearby railroad station of Shahdarah. Waiting on the platform for the train to arrive, the weeping Boota Singh explained to his daughter that she would not see her mother again.

In the distance, a locomotive's whistle shrieked. Boota Singh tenderly picked up his daughter and kissed her. He walked to the edge of the platform. As the locomotive burst into the station, the little girl felt her father's arms tighten around her. Then suddenly, she was plunging forward. Boota Singh had leaped into the path of the on-rushing locomotive. The girl heard again the roar of the whistle mingled this time with her own screams. Then she was in the blackness beneath the engine.

Boota Singh was killed instantly, but by a remarkable miracle his daughter survived unscathed. On the old Sikh's mutilated corpse, the police found a blood-soaked farewell note to the young wife who had rejected him.

"My dear Zenib," it said, "you listened to the voice of the multitude, but that voice is never sincere. Still my last wish is to be with you. Please bury me in your village and come from time to time to put a flower on my grave."

Boota Singh's suicide stirred a wave of emotion in Pakistan, and his funeral became an event of national importance. Even in death, however, the elderly Sikh remained a symbol of those terrible days when the Punjab was in flames and he had thought he was blessed among the suffering because he had bought happiness for 1,500 rupees. Zenib's family and the inhabitants of their village refused to permit Boota Singh's burial in the village cemetery. The village males, led by Zenib's second husband, on February 22, 1957, barred its entrance to his coffin.

Rather than provoke a riot, the authorities ordered the coffin and the thousands of Pakistanis touched by Boota Singh's drama who had followed it, to return to Lahore. There, under a mountain of flowers, Boota Singh's remains were interred.

Zenib's family, however, enraged by the honor extended to Boota Singh, sent a commando to Lahore to uproot and profane his tomb. Their savage action provoked a remarkable outburst from the city's population. Boota Singh was reinterred under another mountain of flowers. This time hundreds of Moslems volunteered to guard the grave of the Sikh convert, illustrating with their generous gesture the hope that time might eventually efface in the Punjab the bitter heritage of 1947.*

India's memorial to her lost Mahatma was a simple black stone platform set upon the site at which his funeral pyre rested at the Raj Ghat, on January 31, 1948. A few words in Hindi and in English on a plaque beside it bear Mohandas Gandhi's prescription for a free India.

"I would like to see India free and strong so that she may offer herself as a willing and pure sacrifice for the betterment of the world. The individual, being pure, sacrifices himself for the family, the latter for the village, the village for the district, the district for the province, the province for the nation, the nation for all. I want Kludai Raj, the kingdom of God on earth."

Gandhi's vision, however, was to remain the impossible

* Boota Singh's daughter, Sultana, was adopted and raised by foster parents in Lahore. Today the mother of three children, she lives in Libya with her engineer husband.

531

i

dream. His countrymen proved as susceptible to the lures of technology and industrial progress as any other people. As he had feared they would in the last year of his life, his heirs turned their backs on his message. India chose to pursue the twentieth century's accepted criteria of power and success, the development of a strong industrial society instead of following the course Gandhi had tried to indicate with his spinning wheel. Central planning, growth rate, basic industry, infrastructure, the take-off point, the revolution of rising expectations, the common language of a world yearning for material progress, became the vocabulary of an independent India's first generation of leaders. The interests of her half million villages, in which Gandhi proclaimed her salvation lay, were subordinated to those of her towns and cities slowly filling with the great industrial complexes for which Gandhi's successors yearned. The Congress Party that Gandhi had hoped would become a People's Service League continued in its more conventional and comfortable role, remaining India's dominant political force, increasingly prey to the malady that it had demonstrated in the first months of independence, corruption.

The most paradoxical gesture of all occurred in the springtime of 1974 in the Rajasthan Desert. The government of the land whose most famous citizen had, the day before he died, urged America to abandon the atomic bomb, employing the resources of a country barely able to feed its population, exploded a nuclear device. That explosion marked the final rejection of the doctrine of ahimsa, the accession of the land of the prophet of nonviolence to the select circle of nations possessing the ultimate weapon in the arsenal of violence, the atomic bomb.

And yet, if India had not chosen to follow in the path of Gandhi's impossible dream, she had not forsaken all his ideals either. The simple cotton khadi he urged upon his countrymen is still the uniform of many Indian ministers and bureaucrats, evidence that the man under it reveres at least the memory if not the message of the man who espoused it. That most elegant of men, Jawaharlal Nehru, continued until his death to wear the simple clothes in which Gandhi had dressed him. Sensitive to Gandhi's admonishment to government leaders to employ simplicity in style and restraint in example, he crossed the capital of his country, not in a Rolls-Royce, a Mercedes-Benz or a Cad-

iliac, but in a small Indian car with, as his only escort, the driver at its wheel.

Despite the destructive pressures of its multiplicity of languages, cultures and people, despite the cynical suggestion of many an Englishman that those forces would shatter its unity once the bonds of British rule were removed, Gandhi's India has remained what it became on August 15, 1947, a strong united nation. The enormous area and disparate peoples of her old princely states were integrated into India's administrative structures in relatively painless fashion.

Not a few of Gandhi's ideas which once appeared an old man's quirks have become, almost three decades after his death, strangely relevant in a world of dwindling resources and expanding populations. Cutting up old envelopes to make notepads rather than wasting paper, consuming only the food necessary to nourish one's frame, eschewing the heedless production of unneeded goods, began to appear by the seventies not so much a set of charming eccentricities as perhaps a prescription for man's uncertain future on his exhausted planet.

In one domain, above all, however, India strove to keep faith with the memory of the lean brown figure who led her famished millions to liberty. India was born a free nation; she sought to remain a free nation. She, almost alone of the scores of nations who in their turn broke the chains binding them to their old colonial rulers, tried to remain a free society respectful of the rights and dignity of its inhabitants, one in which the citizens would have the right to dissent, to protest, to express themselves freely and openly in a free press, to select their government in free, secret, honest elections. She resisted all the temptations to follow the examples of her Chinese neighbor, buying progress by regimenting its millions, or the more numerous examples of dozens of cheapjack military dictatorships with their carefully coached crowds of cheering citizens and their equally carefully concealed torture chambers.

India's achievement is one of unsurpassed magnitude, worthy of the world's respect, worthy, above all, of the great leader who led her to the liberty that she has refused to cast away. The durability of that achievement was unfortunately called into question by the tumultuous events of June 1975 and the precipitate actions of Prime Minister

Indira Gandhi, daughter of the man who had consolidated Indian democracy.

Fifteen days after the immersion of Mahatma Gandhi's ashes, a brief ceremony in the shadows of the Gateway of India ended the era that he began in January 1915, when, with a copy of Hind Swaraj under his arm, he passed through that same archway on his return from South Africa. Saluted by an honor guard of Sikhs and Gurkhas, played off by an Indian Navy band, the last British soldiers left on the soil of an independent India, the men of the Somerset Light Infantry, passed under the gateway's soaring span and slow-marched down to its concrete landing.

As their figures disappeared through that triumphant archway, an incongruous sound rose above the crowd of Indians along the Bombay waterfront watching them go. It came first from a few scattered throats, then from others until finally it burst from a thousand faces. Sadly moving, it was the strains of "Auld Lang Syne." Congress veterans, some of whose skulls still bore the scars of British lathis, weeping women in saris, teenage students, toothless old beggars, even the men of the Indian honor guard fixed at attention in their rigid ranks, all suddenly and intensely aware of the significance of the moment, joined the chorus. While the last of the Somersets stepped into their waiting barges, the sound of that spontaneous song rang across the esplanade of the Gateway of India, a strange and poignant processional for the Englishmen setting out to sea.