Freedom at Midnight (72 page)

Narayan Apte looked at him and smiled. No, he said, he and his associate had no plans for their return. They wanted only one-way tickets.

Despite his sharply weakened condition, Gandhi insisted, as he would every day of his fast, on that ritual that constituted a regular part of his hygienic code, an enema. Its purging liquid purified the body, he maintained, as prayer purified the soul. The person responsible for that delicate and intimate operation was the self-effacing Manu.

Hers was not an easy role. It exposed the slender girl to a surprising number of petty demands and petulant outbursts from a man whose external image was one of serenity and detachment. A few moments' delay in bringing the warm water for his enema provoked a surge of annoyance in Gandhi. Then, regretting his impatience, he fell back on his bed exhausted. "One becomes aware of one's faults," he whispered contritely to Manu, "only when one faces a trial such as a fast."

The enema left him, Manu noted, limp with exhaustion and "white as a roll of cotton." Seeing him crumpled up in his bed, the frightened girl, afraid that he was dying, started to go for help. Sensing what she was doing, he beckoned her with a weak movement of his wrist.

"No," he told her. "God will keep me alive if he needs my presence here."

Now into its third day, his fast began at last to affect the mood of India's capital. Ten thousand people came to Red Fort to hear Nehru plead that "the loss of Mahatma Gandhi's life would mean the loss of India's soul." It was an important gathering; yet, half a million people had rallied to the same site August 15. At Government House, Louis Mountbatten had ordered all receptions and official meals canceled out of respect for the suffering of the frail man he so admired. A few processions calling for communal peace and an effort to save Gandhi's life began to make their timid appearance in Delhi's streets. That was, however, hardly comparable to Calcutta, where from the very first day Gandhi's fast had provoked a dramatic shift in the city's mood. As he sensed the capital's indifferent mood an uneasy feeling invaded Manu, the fear that Delhi might, after all, "let Gandhi die."

It was in Pakistan that emotions seemed strongest. A telegram from Lahore informed Gandhi that "here everyone asks only one thing: How can we help save Gandhi's life?" All across their new nation, leaders of the Moslem League suddenly began to praise their old adversary as "the archangel of fraternity." In the country's mosques sheikhs offered prayers for him. From the seclusion of their purdahs, thousands of Moslem women called for Allah's mercy on the seventy-eight-year-old Hindu holding out the hand of brotherhood to India's Moslems.

No piece of news from Delhi would move Pakistan as dramatically, however, as that flashed across the subcontinent by the teletypes of its news agencies late Thursday afternoon. Gandhi had won his first victory. The pain and hunger to which he was submitting his body had saved Mohammed Ali Jinnah's state from bankruptcy. As a gesture to restore the subcontinent's peace and above all "to end the physical suffering of the nation's soul," the Indian government announced that it had ordered the immediate payment of Pakistan's 550 million rupees.

Bombay, January 15,1948

The men who had decided to kill Gandhi because of those rupees knelt in a circle on the floor of the

Hindu temple in which Badge had hidden his tabla full of arms the evening before. The false sadhu opened his drum and set its contents before them. Patiently, like a salesman demonstrating a new kitchen knife at a country fair, he showed them how to insert fuses into the slabs of high explosives, how to arm their hand grenades.

While Badge talked, Apte contemplated with dismay the last weapon he had drawn from his tabla, the weapon they needed most of all, a pistol. It was a crude, homemade arm as likely, Apte murmured to Godse, to blow up in their hands as it was to kill Gandhi. A pistol, the simple indispensable element of the murder they planned to commit, was proving maddeningly difficult to find. They had been able to locate enough high explosives to blow up a three-story building, but they still lacked the arm that was essential to their success. Even money had been easier to find than a pistol. A day of importuning his extremist friends for money and a revolver had produced the wad of 1,000-rupee notes in Apte's pocket but no gun.

Watching Badge's agile fingers dance over his explosives, Apte suddenly realized that his knowledge might be indispensable in Delhi. Badge was not a part of their conspiracy. Neither Apte nor Godse entirely trusted him. His aid now seemed so essential, however, that Apte called him into the courtyard. Draping his arm over Badge's shoulder, he whispered, "Come to Delhi with us." Savarkar wanted Gandhi, Nehru and Suhrawardy "finished off," he said. He and Godse had been entrusted with the job. Then he added the phrase that convinced the avaricious Badge: "We'll pay expenses."

The enlistment of an arms expert completed the conspirators' circle. The time had come to start the trek across half the subcontinent to India's capital and their rendezvous with the architect of Indian independence. The arms Badge had furnished were carefully concealed in Madan-lal's bedding roll. He and Karkare would begin their two-day journey that night, catching the Frontier Mail at the Victoria Terminus, the station in which so many young Englishmen had had their first introduction to the land they had come to rule. Badge and Gopal Godse, Na-thuram's younger brother, would follow by separate trains forty-eight hours later. Apte and Godse would travel in a more suitable manner, flying with the tickets that Apte had purchased that morning. Their rendezvous would be the

Hindu Mahasabha Bhavan (Hindu Mahasabha Lodge). It was attached to Birla Temple, the rococo Hindu shrine that had been offered to Delhi by the family in whose residence the man they planned to kill was living.

Hundreds of the faithful crowded the lawns behind Birla House at vespertide, Thursday evening, January 15, hoping that some miracle might allow the legendary silhouette to attend his prayer meeting. It was a doomed hope. Gandhi no longer had the strength to walk or even sit up unsupported. He offered his audience the only piece of himself he could, a few words whispered into a microphone by his bedside and delivered over a loudspeaker to the gathering on the prayer grounds. The familiar voice that had galvanized India's masses for three decades was so faint that it seemed to some on the lawn that evening that he was already addressing them from beyond the grave.

Contemplate their nation and its need for brotherhood, he urged, not his suffering. "Do not be worried on my account," he said. "He who is born in this world cannot escape death. . . . Death is a great friend to all. It is always worthy of our gratitude, because it relieves us of all sorts of miseries once and for all."

When the prayers had finished, a clamor rose from the gathering for darshan, for a glimpse at least of their beloved leader. Women first, then men, the audience assembled into a long column. In a poignant silence, palms pressed together in the ritual gesture of namaste, they began to flow past the glassed-in veranda where Gandhi slept, exhausted by the few words that he had addressed to them. He was curled up in a fetal position, a white shawl drawn over his emaciated frame, his eyes closed, his face lined yet somehow radiating an almost supernatural glow. His hands were clasped in the position of namaste, returning even in sleep the greeting of his sorrowing admirers.

Manu could not believe her eyes. The unpredictable old man who the evening before did not have the strength to raise his torso from his bed was now standing up, shuffling painfully across the room to take his place at morning prayers. After the prayer, Gandhi sat down to an activity as remarkable as it was curious in a man who had gone without nourishment for four days and was menaced by

death. He began his daily study of Bengali, a language he had striven to master since his tour of Noakhali. Then with a voice that was surprisingly firm, he began to dictate the message he wished read out at his evening prayer meeting.

His apparent vigor was an illusion, however, like the periods of remission accorded a patient with terminal cancer during his descent to the abyss. A few minutes later, trying to get to the bathroom on his own, his head began to reel, and he collapsed unconscious on the floor.

Sushila Nayar rushed to his side and helped to carry him back to his bed. She knew what had happened. Gandhi's lean brown frame was becoming waterlogged, because his damaged kidneys were unable to pass the water that he was absorbing, and the strain was now affecting his heart. She had foreseen it a few minutes earlier when she had put him on her scale. Its needle had remained set on the figure it had registered for forty-eight hours: 107 pounds. A check of his blood pressure and pulse confirmed the young girl's diagnosis. The cardiogram of a heart specialist rushed to Birla House provided the final corroborative evidence of the deterioration in the seventy-eight-year-old Gandhi's vital organ. A sudden, fatal end to Gandhi's fast had now become a distinct possibility. Almost worse was the danger that if the fast continued much longer, the result, even if it ended successfully, would be permanent and irreparable damage to Gandhi's vital organs.

Her own heart aching, Sushila took a pencil in hand and wrote the first of her twice-daily bulletins on the state of Gandhi's health. It was a grief-stricken cry of alarm. Unless a rapid term was set to his sufferings, she wrote, the strains that his system was undergoing would leave India's beloved Mahatma an invalid for the rest of his days.

Once again, that extraordinary current that somehow linked India's millions to their Great Soul emanated from Birla House. Instinctively, even without the warning of Sushila Nayar's bulletin, India had sensed on that Friday morning, January 16, that Gandhi's life was in danger. As had happened so often before during his fasts, the mood of India changed with puzzling speed, and the second-most-populous nation in the world began to hang attend-

ant on the struggle between a man and his conscience in Birla House.

The All India Radio started to broadcast hourly bulletins on Gandhi's condition direct from Albuquerque Road. Dozens of Indian and foreign newsmen gathered in a death watch at its gates. Hundreds of maidans in every city and town of India suddenly swarmed with shouting crowds waving banners, crying "Brotherhood"; "Hindu-Moslem Unity"; "Spare Gandhi." Everywhere in India "Save Gandhi's Life" committees sprang up, their membership carefully selected to reflect a full spectrum of political views and religious communities. Post-office employees all across India canceled millions of letters that day by writing "Save Gandhi's Life—Keep Communal Peace" across their stamps. Thousands gathered in public prayer meetings begging for his delivery. There was not a mosque in India that did not pray for him at Friday prayers. The Untouchables of Bombay sent a moving cable telling Gandhi, "Your life belongs to us."

But it was above all in Delhi, Delhi the heretofore indifferent, that the change was most startling. From every neighborhood, every bazaar, every mahalla, the chanting crowds now rushed forth. Shops and stores closed in acknowledgment of Gandhi's agony. Hindus, Sikhs and Moslems formed "Peace Brigades" marching through the capital with linked arms, thrusting at passers-by petitions begging Gandhi to give up his fast. Convoys of trucks rolled through the city jammed with clapping, cheering youths crying, "Gandhiji's life is more precious than ours." Schools and universities closed. Most moving of all, two hundred women and children widowed and orphaned by the slaughters of the Punjab paraded to Birla House declaring that they were going to renounce their miserable refugees' rations to join a fast of sympathy with Gandhi.

It was an extraordinary, overwhelming outburst of emotion, and it left the man on his cot in Birla House quite unmoved. It had taken more time than anyone had expected for his fast to stir his countrymen, but now that it had, he was determined not to let go, to drive himself as close to the darkness as he could, to force the deep and meaningful change that he wanted in his countrymen's hearts.

"I am in no hurry," he told the worried crowd at his prayer meeting in a voice that, even magnified by loudspeakers, was barely a whisper. "I do not wish things half-

done." Gasping for breath with each word he uttered, he said, "I would cease to have any interest in life if peace were not established all around us over the whole of India, the whole of Pakistan. That is the meaning of this sacrifice."

Nehru brought a delegation of leaders to his bedside to assure him that there had been a radical change in Delhi's atmosphere. Almost cheerfully he told them, "Don't worry, I won't pop off suddenly. Whatever you do should ring true. I want solid work."

As they talked, a telegram arrived from Karachi, asking whether Moslems who had been chased from their homes in Delhi could now return and reoccupy them.

"That is a test," Gandhi murmured as soon as the text was read out to him.

Taking the telegram, Gandhi's faithful Pyarelal Nayar rushed off on a tour of the capital's refugee camps explaining to their embittered Hindu and Sikh inmates that Gandhi's life was now in their hands. More than one thousand of them signed a declaration that night promising to welcome returning Moslems to their homes, even if it meant that they and their families would have to endure the winter cold in a tent or in the streets. A group of their leaders returned to Birla House to convince the Mahatma that something had really changed.

"Your fast has moved hearts all over the world," they told the shriveled little figure on his cot. "We shall work to make India as much a home for Moslems as it is for Hindus and Sikhs. Pray break your fast to save India from misery."

Sushila Nayar watched the needle's fluctuations with anguished eyes. It might seem a paradox; yet, on this fifth day of Mahatma Gandhi's fast, she desperately wanted the scales to indicate that her weakening patient was losing weight. They did not. The needle came to rest an almost immeasurably small distance below the figure on which it had remained fixed for the past three days, 107 pounds. Gandhi's kidneys simply refused to discharge the 70 ounces of water he was absorbing regularly each day. To the strain that five days without food was placing on his heart was being added the steadily increasing burden of the superfluous body fluid that his faltering kidneys could not evacuate.