Freedom at Midnight (38 page)

The slowly revolving wooden blades of a fan suspended from the ceiling provided the only air in the bungalow. Occasionally, charged by some mysterious surge of electricity, it went berserk, filling the bungalow with great, gusty bursts of air. Like leaves in an autumn wind, dozens of Radcliffe's papers would go swirling around the room, the villages,of the ill-fated Punjab driven before the storm.

From a very early hour, Radcliffe knew that no matter what he did, there would be terrible bloodshed and slaughter when his report was published. Almost every day as he labored over his boundary, he received reports from Punjabi villages, sometimes the very communities whose fate he was deciding, in which people who had lived side

by side for generations had suddenly gone mad and turned on each other in a frenzy of killing.

He saw virtually no one. Every time he tried to venture out for a cocktail party or dinner, Radcliffe found himself surrounded by people pressing their claims upon him. His only recreation was walking. In the afternoon, he would stroll along the ridge on which the British had gathered their forces in 1857 to crush the mutineers in Delhi.

At midnight, weary with fatigue, he would walk in the stifling heat among the groves of eucalyptus trees in his garden. Occasionally his young I.C.S. aide would walk with him. Usually, a prisoner of the anguish he could not share, Radcliffe paced the garden in melancholy silence. Occasionally, they talked. Radcliffe's sense of propriety could not allow him to share his terrible burdens with anybody, and his young aide was too circumspect to question him about them. And so, two old Oxonians, they talked of Oxford in the hot Indian night.

Slowly, working in bits and pieces, taking the easiest and most evident things first, Radcliffe stretched his boundary down the map of India. As he did, one thought haunted him: I'm going through this terrible job as fast, as well as I can, he told himself, and it makes no difference, because in the end, when I finish, they are all going to start killing each other anyway.

In the Punjab they already had started. The roads and railroads of what had been the best-administered province in India were unsafe. Sikh hordes roamed the countryside like bands of Apaches falling on Moslem villages or Moslem neighborhoods. A particular savagery characterized their killings. The circumcised penises of their Moslem male victims were hacked off and stuffed into their mouths or into the mouths of murdered Moslem women. In Lahore one evening a bicyclist raced out of an alleyway past the crowded coffee shop where the city's most renowned Moslem criminal held court. He hurled an enormous, bell-bottomed brass pot onto its packed terrace. The pot went clanging through the coffee house, sending its occupants diving for cover. When it failed to explode, a waiter opened it. The pot contained a gift to the Moslem criminal from his Sikh rivals in crime in Amritsar. Stuffed inside,

instantly recognizable, was a supreme provocation: scores of circumcised penises.

Murder and arson were so senseless, so chaotic in nature that to one British police officer in Lahore it seemed "like a city committing suicide." The Central Post Office was flooded with thousands of postcards addressed to Hindus and Sikhs. They depicted men and women being raped and slaughtered. On the back was the message: "This is what has been happening to our Sikh and Hindu brothers and sisters at the hands of the Moslems when they take over. Flee before those savages do this to you." They were part of a campaign of psychological warfare being conducted by the Moslem League to create panic among Sikhs and Hindus.

Moslem residents of Lahore's good residential neighborhoods, once the most tolerant in India, had begun to paint green Islamic crescents on their gateposts to protect their villas from Moslem mobs. On Lawrence Road, a Parsi businessman, member of a small religious sect unaffected by the communal frenzy, painted a message on his gatepost. Its words were an epitaph for Lahore's lost dream of brotherhood. "Moslems, Sikhs and Hindus are all brothers," it read, "but, O my Brothers, this house belongs to a Parsi."

As the police, largely Moslem in Lahore as elsewhere in the Punjab, began to collapse, the responsibility of stemming the tide of violence fell increasingly on a handful of British officers. "You grew calluses on.your emotions," remarked Patrick Farmer, a policeman who had previously fired a weapon only once in fifteen years of Punjab service; "you learned to use your Tommy gun first and ask questions later."

Another British police officer remembered riding through Lahore's darkened bazaars, the horizon rose from the glow of distant fires, while Moslems on the rooftops above called softly to each other in the darkness. Like jackals' cries their whispered warnings flitted through the night: "Beware, beware, beware."

On an arms search in a wretched mahalla, an Old City slum, the officer who had warned of the plot to kill Jin-nah, Gerald Savage, banged open a flimsy door of a hut. Below him in a squalid, unlighted room, he could see an old man dying of smallpox stretched out on a charpoy, his body withered, his face a mass of pus and sores. A terrible

smell like a musty rag pervaded the room. Sickened by that unexpected glimpse of India's other, timeless miseries, Savage groaned and closed the door.

Devoted to India, proud of their service, imbued with a paternalistic belief in their unique capacities to police the Punjab, those men were embittered by the violence sweeping their province. They blamed their superiors, the Sikhs and the Moslem League, but above all, they blamed the proud admiral in Delhi's Viceroy's House and what was, to their eyes, his damnable haste in bringing British rule in India to an end.

Even nature seemed determined to thwart them in their last hours in the Punjab, failing to provide the succor of a meteorological phenomenon that might have saved them. Day after day, their despairing eyes scanned the sky looking for the clouds of a monsoon that refused to come. The monsoon with its lashing sheets of rain could have quelled the fires ravaging the Punjab's cities, its cool air could have ended the maddening heat driving men to violent rage. It was, the police always had said, the most effective riot-control weapon in India, but it was the one weapon that was not theirs to command.

In Amritsar, the situation was even worse. Murder was as routine an occurrence in its bazaars and alleyways as public defecation. The city's Hindus devised the cruel tactic of walking up to an unsuspecting Moslem and splashing his face with a vial of nitric or sulphuric acid. Arsonists were in action everywhere.

The British Army was finally called in and a forty-eight-hour curfew proclaimed. Even the respite those measures brought was temporary. One day, after a particularly savage outburst of arson had swept the city, its despairing Superintendent of Police Rule Dean employed as a last resort a tactic not enunciated in his riot-control manual. He ordered his police band to the central square. There, in the heart of that city dissolving in flames, struggling to force the sound of their music over the crackle of a dozen major fires, they gave a concert of Gilbert and Sullivan favorites as if the kindly strains of H.M.S. Pinafore might restore reason to a city going mad.

To keep order in the Punjab after August 15, Mount-batten had decided to set up a special force of 55,000

men. Its members would be culled from units of the Indian Army like the Gurkhas, whose discipline or racial origins made them relatively immune to communal passions. Called the Punjab Boundary Force, the unit was placed under a Britisher, Major General G. R. "Pete" Reese Whose brilliant handling of the 19th Indian Division in Burma had impressed the Viceroy. The force represented double the number of men the province's governor had estimated would be required to maintain order in the Punjab in the event of partition. When the storm broke, however, it would be swept aside like coastal huts splintered by an onrolling tidal wave.

The blunt fact was that no one—Nehru, Jinnah, the Punjab's knowledgeable Governor Sir Evan Jenkins, the Viceroy himself—foresaw the magnitude and form of the disaster about to strike. Their failure to do so would baffle historians and focus a wave of criticism on India's last viceroy.

Tolerant, unbigoted themselves, Nehru and Jinnah each made the grave error of underestimating the degree to which communal passions they did not share or feel could inflame the masses of their subcontinent. Each man genuinely believed that partition would cool, not provoke violence. Reasonable and rational men, they assumed that their people would react to events with the same reasonableness that they would. They were both grievously wrong. Swept up in the euphoria of their coming independence, however, they took their desires for reality and communicated them to the relative newcomer in their midst, the Viceroy.

Their failure to foresee events would have been mitigated had any of the vaunted administrative or intelligence services with which the British had governed India for a century been able to predict their course. None of them was. As a result, India, apprehensive but not genuinely alarmed, headed for disaster.

Ironically, the one Indian leader who foresaw the awful dimensions of the tragedy ahead was the man who had tried so hard to prevent partition. Gandhi had so immersed himself in the lives of India's masses, sharing their sorrows and sufferings, their daily existence, that he had a unique ability to perceive the mood of his nation. He was, his followers would sometimes say, like the prophet in an

ancient Indian legend sitting by a warm fire on a cold winter's night. Suddenly the prophet begins to tremble.

"Look outside," he tells a disciple, "somewhere, in the darkness a poor man is freezing."

The disciple looks and indeed a man is there. Such, they maintained, was Gandhi's intuitive feel for the soul of India. x

One day, while the Viceroy was constructing his Punjab Boundary Force, a Moslem woman attacked Gandhi for his opposition to partition. "If two brothers were living together in the same house and wanted to separate and live in two different houses, would you object?" she asked.

"Ah," said Gandhi, "if only we could separate as two brothers. But we will not. It will be an orgy of blood. We shall tear outselves asunder in the womb of the mother who bears us."

Mountbatten's real nightmare in those last days was not the Punjab. It was Calcutta. Sending troops to Calcutta, he knew, would be an academic exercise. If ever trouble broke out in its fetid, pullulating slums and congested bazaars, no number of troops would be able to control it. In any event, the creation of his force for the Punjab had taken almost all the Indian Army units regarded as wholly reliable in case of a religious conflict.

"If troublp had ever started in Calcutta," Mountbatten would one day recall, "the blood that would have flowed there would have made anything that happened in the Punjab look like a bed of roses."

He would need another tactic to maintain calm in the city. The one he finally chose was a wild gamble, but the dangers in Calcutta were so great, the resources available to meet them so limited, that only a miracle could save the situation anyway. To forestall communal frenzy in the world's meanest city, he hoped to employ his dejected sparrow, Mahatma Gandhi.

He put his idea to Gandhi in late July. With his Boundary Force, he explained, he could hold the Punjab, but if trouble broke out in Calcutta, he said, "we're sunk. I can do nothing. There's a brigade down there, but I don't even propose to reinforce it; if Calcutta goes up in flames, well it just goes up in flames."

"Yes, my friend," Gandhi told him, "this is the fruit of your partition plan."

It might be, Mountbatten admitted, but neither he nor anyone else had been able to propose an alternative solution. There was, however, something he could do now. Perhaps Gandhi through the force of his personality and his nonviolent ideal could achieve something in Calcutta that troops could not promise to achieve. Perhaps his presence could guarantee what no amount of military force was ever going to guarantee—the peace of Calcutta. He, Gandhi, would be the sum total of the reinforcements he would send to his beleaguered brigades. Go to Calcutta, Mountbatten urged. "You'll be my one-man boundary force."

Despite Mountbatten's plea, Gandhi had no intention of going to Calcutta. He had already decided to spend India's independence day praying, spinning and fasting beside the terrified Hindu minority of Noakhali, to whose safety and protection he had pledged his life on his New Year's Day Pilgrimage of Penitence. Mountbatten's, however, was not to be the only voice urging him to the terror-ridden slums of Calcutta.

The second voice was that of a most unlikely political ally. The forty-seven-year-old Shaheed Suhrawardy was the very prototype of the corrupt, venal politician that Gandhi meant to condemn by his description of the ministers whom he hoped would rule a new India. His political philosophy was simple: once a man had been elected to office there was never any reason to leave. Suhrawardy had assured his continued presence in power by using public funds to maintain a private army of hoodlums who quite literally clubbed his political rivals into silence.

During the 1942 famine that had devastated Bengal, Suhrawardy had intercepted and sold on the black market tons of relief grains destined for the starving of Calcutta, an operation that had earned him millions of rupees. He dressed in tailor-made silk suits and two-tone alligator shoes. His jet-black hair, dressed each morning by his personal barber, sparkled with brilliantine. Where Gandhi had spent the past four decades of his life trying to uproot the last vestiges of sexual desire in his psyche, Suhrawardy had given his free run, setting himself, it seemed, the prodigious task of bedding every cabaret dancer and high-

class whore in Calcutta. The fizzing glass in Gandhi's hand invariably contained water with a dash of bicarbonate of soda. Suhrawardy's usually held champagne. While the Mahatma had been nourishing himself on soya mash and curds, Suhrawardy's diet ran to filet mignon, exotic curries and pastries, leaving him enveloped by swelling rings of fat that sloped from his breasts to his groin.