Freedom at Midnight (53 page)

The babbling multitudes packing the platform were petrified, frozen into an eerie silence by the sight before them. Singh stared down the line of eight cars. All the windows of the train compartments were wide open; but there was not a single human being standing at any of them. Not a single door had opened. Not a single person was getting off the train. They had brought him a trainful of phantoms.

The stationmaster strode to the first car, snatched open the door and stepped inside. In one horrible instant he understood why no one was getting off the Ten Down Express in Amritsar that night. It was not a trainful of phantoms they had brought him, but a trainful of corpses. The floor of the compartment before him was a mass of human bodies, throats cut, skulls smashed, bodies eviscerated. Arms, legs, trunks of bodies were strewn along the corridors of compartments. From somewhere in that ghastly human junk heap at his feet, Singh heard a strangled sound. Realizing that there might be a few survivors, Singh called

out, "You are in Amritsar. We are Hindus and Sikhs here. The police are present. Do not be afraid."

At his words a few of the dead began to stir. The stark horror of the scenes that followed would be forever a nightmare engraved upon the little stationmaster's mind. One woman picked her husband's severed head from the coagulating pool of blood by her side. She clutched it in her arms shrieking her grief. He saw weeping children clinging to the bodies of their slaughtered mothers, men in shock as they pulled the body of a mutilated child from a pile of corpses. As the crowd along the platform realized what had happened, hysteria swept their ranks.

Numb, the stationmaster made his way down the line of bodies. In every compartment of every car the sight was the same. By the time he reached the last or^e he was ill. Reeling back onto the platform, his nostrils impregnated with the stench of death, Singh thought, how could God permit such a thing?

He turned to look back at the train. As he did, he saw in great white-washed letters on the flank of the last car the Moslem assassins' calling card. "This train is our Independence gift to Nehru and Patel," it read.

In Calcutta, the unfathomable alchemy of that strange old man with his prayers and his spinning wheel was somehow casting its spell over the slums in which everyone had expected an explosion to dwarf in dimension and horror the worst of the happenings in the Punjab. The promise inherent in the procession that had marched to Hydari House the evening before had been realized. All across Calcutta, on the avenues and thoroughfares which just a year before had been littered with the corpses of Direct Action Day, Moslems and Hindus had paraded and celebrated together. It was, wrote Gandhi's secretary Pyarelal Nayar, "as if, after the black clouds of a year of madness, the sunshine of sanity and good will had suddenly broken through."

The almost incredible change in Calcutta's climate had been signaled at dawn with the arrival at Hydari House of another procession, this one composed of young girls. Hindus and Moslems, they had been walking since midnight to take darshan from Gandhi, a kind of mystic communion engendered by being in the presence of a great spirit.

Theirs had been the first in an uninterrupted flow of pilgrims that had converged all day long on Hydari House.

Every half hour, Gandhi had had to interrupt his meditation and spinning to appear on the porch before the crowds. Because he considered this a day of mourning, he had not prepared a formal message of congratulation for the people he had led to freedom. That message came spontaneously, and it was addressed not to India's masses but to their new rulers.

"Beware of power," he warned a group of politicians come to seek his blessing, "power corrupts. Do not let yourselves be entrapped by its pomp and pageantry. Remember, you are in office to serve the poor in India's villages."

That afternoon, in a bleating of conch shells, thirty thousand people, three times the number that had gathered the day before, poured down Beliaghata Road for Gandhiji's prayer meeting. Gandhi addressed them from a wooden platform hastily erected in the yard outside the house. He congratulated them on what they had accomplished in Calcutta. Their noble example, he hoped, might inspire their countrymen in the Punjab.

Shaheed Suhrawardy, his features taut from the unaccustomed strain of a twenty-four-hour fast, addressed the multitude when Gandhi had finished. The man who had been the unchallenged leader of Calcutta's Moslems asked the mixed assembly to set a seal upon their reconciliation by joining him in crying "Jai Hind —Victory to India." At his shout, an answering roar burst like a clap of monsoon thunder from thirty thousand throats.

After the meeting, the two men set out together on a tour of the city in Gandhi's old Chevrolet. This time it was not with stones and curses that the crowds of Calcutta greeted the Mahatma's car. At every street corner they showered it with rosewater and a grateful cry: "Gandhiji, you have saved us I"

Poona, August 15, 1947

The ceremony being held on a vacant lot in the inland city of Poona, 119 miles southeast of Bombay, was similar to thousands taking place August 15, 1947, all

across the new dominion of India. It was a flag-raising. One thing, however, set the little ritual in Poona apart from most of the others. The flag slowly moving up a makeshift staff in the center of a group of five hundred men was not the flag of an independent India. It was an orange triangle, and emblazoned upon it was the symbol that, in a slightly modified form, had terrorized Europe for a decade, the swastika.

That ancient emblem was on the orange pennant in Poona for the same reason it had been on the banners of Hitler's Third Reich. It was an Aryan symbol. It had been brought to India at some juncture lost in the mists of time by the first waves of Aryan conquerors to subdue the subcontinent. The men gathered about it in Poona all belonged to the R.S.S.S., the quasifascist movement, some of whose members had been assigned the task of assassinating Jinnah along with Mountbatten in Karachi forty-eight hours earlier. Hindu zealots, they saw themselves as the heirs to those ancient Aryans.

They shared on this Independence Day an emotion with the bespectacled prophet on the opposite flank of the subcontinent. They too were desperately pained by the division of India. But their identification with Mahatma Gandhi and the things he stood for ended there.

The group to which they belonged cherished a historic dream, to reconstitute a great Hindu empire from the headwaters of the Indus river to eastern Burma, from Tibet to Cape Comorin. They despised Gandhi and all his works. To them, India's national hero was the archenemy of Hinduism. The doctrine of nonviolence with which he had led India to independence was in their eyes a coward's philosophy that had vitiated the force and character of the Hindu peoples. There was no place in their dreams for the brotherhood and tolerance of India's Moslem minority preached by Gandhi. They considered themselves, as Hindus, the sole heirs to India's Aryan conquerors and therefore the rightful proprietors of the subcontinent. The Moslems, they held, were descendants of an usurping clan, that of the Moguls.

But, above all, there was one sin for which they could never pardon India's elderly leader. That they should even have accused him of it was the final cruel irony in the crudest year in Mohandas Gandhi's life. They held that

Gandhi, the only Indian politician who had opposed it until the very end, was solely responsible for India's partition.

The man standing in front of their gathering in Poona that August afternoon was a journalist. Nathuram Godse had just turned thirty-seven, yet slight pads of baby fat still clung to his cheeks, giving him a deceptively young and innocent look. He had exceptional eyes, large, sad and compelling in their slightly crossed gaze. In repose, there was always about his regard a faint air of disapproval, a slight strain about the mouth and nostrils.

Now those features were not in repose. Earlier, Nathuram Godse had made clear his sentiments at India's Independence Day on the front page of the daily paper he edited, the Hindu Rashtra (Hindu Nation). The spot usually filled by his daily editorial had been left blank, its white columns surrounded by a black band of mourning.

The ceremonies all around India celebrating independence were, he told his followers, a "deliberate camouflage to conceal from the people the fact that hundreds of Hindu men were being massacred and hundreds of Hindu women were being kidnaped and raped.

"The vivisection of India," he shouted, was "a calamity condemning millions of Indians to horrible sufferings." It was, he said, "the work of the Congress Party and, above all, its leader Gandhi."

When he had finished, Nathuram Godse led his five hundred followers in the salute to their flag. Thumbs pressed against their hearts, their hands palms down, at right angles to their chest, they vowed "to the Motherland which gave me birth and in which I have grown that my body is ready to die for her cause."

As he always did, Nathuram Godse felt a tremor of pride flutter across his being as he recited those words. All his life, from his school examinations to half a dozen trades, Nathuram Godse had been a failure at everything he had undertaken until he had embraced the extremist doctrines of the R.S.S.S. Steeping himself in its lore and literature, teaching himself to write and to speak, he had made himself one of the movement's foremost polemicists. Now, in the troubled summer of 1947, he saw for himself a new, a mystic role. He would become a kind of vengeful spirit, purifying India of the foes of a militant Hindu res-

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urrection. In that role, for the first time in his life, Na-thuram Godse would not be a failure.

For years to come, the one great memory left by August 15, 1947, in India would be crowds, the multitudinous hordes inundating the event that had been designed as the high point of the new nation's independence celebrations. It was the official raising of the Indian flag at five o'clock in the afternoon in an open space near New Delhi's India Gate, a sandstone arch dedicated to the ninety thousand Indians who had died for the British Empire in World War I.

Drawing on the wisdom in those manuals that had ordered all the grandiose manifestations of the raj, Mount-batten and his advisers had estimated that thirty thousand people would attend. His figure was wrong, not by a few thousand people, but by half a million. Never before had anyone seen anything even remotely like it in India's capital city.

Stretching out in every direction, the masses that had converged on the site engulfed the little official tribune erected next to the flagpole. To one spectator, it looked like "a raft bobbing on a stormy sea." Everything—every vestige of the barriers, the bandstands, the carefully prepared visitors' gallery and guide ropes—was swept away in a dense torrent of human beings. Helpless, the police looked on as barriers were trampled, chairs snapped like twigs under a man's foot. Lost in those masses, Ranjit Lai, the peasant who had left his village of Chatharpur at dawn, thought the only crowds in India like it must be for the melas, the holy bathing festivals in the Ganges. So tightly did the throng press around him that Lai and his wife couldn't even eat the chapatis they brought with them from their village. They were unable to move their hands from their sides to their mouths.

Elizabeth Collins and Muriel Watson, Lady Mountbat-ten's secretaries, arrived just after five. They had come dressed for the occasion, in fresh white gloves, their best cocktail dresses and bright little feathered hats. Suddenly they found themselves caught up in the surge of that happy, sweaty, half-naked crowd. They were literally swept off their feet and thrust forward by the crowd's remorseless drive. Clutching each other for support, their

hats askew, their dresses disheveled, they struggled desperately to remain upright. For the first time in her life, Elizabeth, who had accompanied Lady Mountbatten on all her wartime trips, was frightened. Tightening her grip on Muriel's arm, she gasped, "We're going to be trampled to death!"

Muriel scanned the thin, half-dressed hordes hemming them in on all sides. "At least, thank God," she murmured, with a sigh of relief, "they're not wearing shoes."

Pamela Mountbatten, the seventeen-year-old younger daughter of the governor general, arrived with two of her father's staff. With enormous difficulty they worked their way toward the wooden tribune. A hundred yards away they came on an impassable barrier of people, all seated, squeezed so tightly together that there was barely a breath of air between them.

Spotting her from his place on the tribune, Nehru shouted at her to cross over the people to get up to the platform.

"How can I?" she shouted back. "I've got high heels on."

"Take them off," replied Nehru.

Pamela couldn't dream of doing something as undignified on such an historic occasion as taking off her shoes. "Oh," she gasped, "I couldn't do that."

"Then leave them on," said Nehru, "just walk over the people. They won't mind."

"Oh," replied Pamela, "the heels will hurt them."

"Don't be silly, girl," snapped Nehru. "Take them off and come across."

With a sigh, the daughter of India's last viceroy kicked off her shoes, picked them up, and set off across the carpet of human beings separating her from the platform. Laughing gleefully, the Indians over whom she was trodding helped her along, steadying her shaking legs, guiding her by the elbow, pointing with delight to the shiny high heels of the shoes in her hands.

At the instant when the bright turbans of the bodyguard escorting the Mountbattens' black-and-gold state carriage appeared on the horizon, the crowd thrust forward with a wavelike heave. Following her parents' slow progress from the tribune, Pamela suddenly witnessed an incredible spectacle. In that human sea surrounding the tribune were thousands of women clutching nursing babies at their

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breasts. Terrified that their infants would be crushed by the mob's surge, they reacted with a desperate gesture. They hurled them up into the air like rubber balls, tossing them back up again each time they tumbled down. In an instant, the air was filled with hundreds of infants. My God, thought the young girl, her eyes wide with wonder, it's raining babies!