Freedom at Midnight (73 page)

All the other examinations to which she and the three physicians who had joined her put him that morning produced equally dismaying results. The excess of acetic acid in his urine was now a grave problem. Even Gandhi's breath reeked of acid. His blood pressure was 184 over 104, his pulse fast and feeble, the beat of his heart irregular.

The four doctors had not, in fact, needed their instruments to determine Gandhi's condition. Their eyes alone had been enough to tell them that it was desperate. They quickly reached a common conclusion. Gandhi could not survive on his fast for more than seventy-two hours. Far worse, all the conditions that could lead to his death in less than twenty-four hours were now present. Their first bulletin that Saturday, January 17, was tense and straightforward.

"It is our duty," they wrote, "to tell the people to take immediate steps to produce the requisite conditions for ending the fast without delay."

Poona, January 17, 1948

A SHIVER OF NERVOUS EXCITEMENT fluttered

through the stocky woman as, in a cloud of hissing steam, the Bombay Express rolled to a halt in the Poona railroad station. "I am the only one," she thought, her eyes scanning the faces of the crowd pushing past her husband toward its third-class cars, "I am the only one who knows why my husband is going to Delhi."

Gopal Godse was going to Delhi on that morning of January 17 to kill Mahatma Gandhi. He had been true to the pledge that he had made to his brother Nathuram. In his bedding was a 32-caliber pistol he had purchased for 200 rupees from a fellow worker in Poona's military stores depot. He had even tested it in the woods near his home. His wife, who shared his passionate convictions, was the only person to whom he had revealed the use to which he intended to put that pistol. She blessed him for it.

Now she held their four-month-old daughter Asilata ("Sword's Blade") up for his final embrace. "We were in the bloom of our youth," she would remember twenty-five years late, recalling that parting in a crowded railroad station. "Romance and revolution were our dreams."

As Gopal reached the car door, she pulled him to her. "Whatever happens, don't worry," she whispered, "I shall find a way to take care of myself and the child." She pressed into his hands a pack of chapatis she had made for him to eat during the voyage. Then, she drew back and watched him settle into his seat. In a cacophony of banging couplings and shouted farewells, the train began to lurch forward. Waving their daughter's chubby arm and calling goodbye, she stood transfixed on the platform, watched his proud silhouette disappear, and silently wished him "the best of success" with all the ardor of her militant's heart.

Despite his critical condition, Gandhi's mind remained crystal clear that Saturday morning. He had entered the third and final phase of a fast. The first forty-eight hours were always characterized by intense stomach cramps and hunger pains. Then the need for food passed, to be followed by two or three days of nausea and dizziness. When they in turn had run their course, a strange tranquillity invaded him. Apart from a constant aching in his joints, which Manu and his other aide massaged with ghee, he no longer suffered. While Sushila and her three colleagues debated as to how many hours of life remained to him, he was tranquilly writing on the backs of his old envelopes a few words in the Bengali tongue celebrated by the verse of the poet who had first called him a Mahatma, Rabindranath Tagore.

When he had finished, he gestured to his secretary, Pyarelal Nayar. His unfailing sense of timing had not abandoned him. If his fast was on the verge of achieving its goal as his followers promised him it was, then the time had come to make sure that what it achieved would be permanent and not just the result of a compassionate desire to save his life. He dictated to Pyarelal a seven-point charter of conditions for the ending of his fast. The leadership of every political organization in Delhi, including his foes of the Hindu Mahasabha, would have to sign it before he would consider that his terms had been met. The conditions were a brilliant list, unobjectionable in principle, yet reaching out to touch almost every phase of the city's life. They ranged from returning to the Moslems the 117 mosques seized and converted into homes or

temples by refugees to ending the boycott of Moslem shopkeepers in the bazaars of Old Delhi and guaranteeing the safety of Moslem voyagers.

Nayar rushed off to present the conditions to the Peace Committee established to save Gandhi's life. Delhi was wrapped in a mood of tension and excitement such as it had not seen since Independence Day. A wave of popular fervor exploded from Connaught Circus to its most remote alleyways. Everywhere people marched about in chanting crowds. Delhi's commercial life had simply stopped. Offices, stores, factories, artisans' bazaars, cafes—all were closed. Almost a hundred thousand people of all castes and communities assembled in a mammoth rally before Old Delhi's Jammu Mosque shouting for their leaders to accept Gandhi's demands. The Hindu fruit peddlers of Sabzimandi, one of the capital's critical areas, rushed to Birla House to inform Gandhi that they were ending their boycott of their Moslem colleagues as he had demanded in his seven conditions.

Inside, Gandhi swung between bursts of lucidity and a comatose state. Someone suggested adding a few teaspoons of orange juice to his water. Alert, he opened his eyes and proclaimed that would be a sacrilege that would oblige him to fast for twenty-one days. Sushila Nayar begged to be allowed to "cup" his kidneys, to cover them with suction cups which might speed up their slowing rhythm. He refused.

"But, Bapu," she protested, "it's a part of the nature cure you accept."

"Today," he murmured weakly, "God is my only nature cure."

His most devoted disciple, Jawaharlal Nehru, abandoned his office to sit by his pallet. The spectacle of the old man's decline was too much for the leader who had been his favorite son over the long years of their crusade together. Unable to bear it, Nehru turned his face to a corner and wept.

Louis Mountbatten and his wife came in their turn. The former viceroy was astonished to discover that despite the torments he had endured, Gandhi still had a "chipmunkish glow"; he was still capable of little bursts of humor.

"Ah," Gandhi said, in greeting to the couple, "it takes a fast on my part to bring the mountain to Mohammed."

Edwina was profoundly saddened. As they left his

room, she burst into tears. "Don't be sad," her husband told her. He had been inspired by the sight. "He's doing what he wants to do," he said. "He's a most brave little

man."

No phenomenon was as deeply rooted in the Indian psyche as, or more defiant of precise definition than, the mystic rite of darshan. A peasant experienced darshan when, after walking barefoot for hundreds of miles, he first glimpsed the waters of the Holy Mother Ganges. He knew it again when the first rivulets of that sacred water coursed down his skin. A man might have it in Hinduism's most sacred shrines, at a cremation, at a political rally, in the crowd around a great leader, or above all, in the presence of a holy man. Darshan produced an indefinable current passing from giver to receiver, a blessing, a benediction, the emanation of some beneficent spiritual influence.

On the afternoon of Saturday, January 17, that ancient and imperious Indian need for darshan found expression in two men separated by seven hundred miles, by an almost unbridgeable gulf of sentiments, yet whose names were soon to be linked by the inexorable tides of history.

The voice that reached the faithful who were crowded onto the lawn of Birla House that afternoon for Gandhi's evening prayers was little more than a faint gasp. Gandhi barely had the force to speak for three minutes, and even those minutes were punctuated by long silences as he groped for the strength to go on. "It is not within anybody's power to save my life or end it," he said. "It is only in God's power."

Today, he told his audience, he saw "no reason" for ending his fast. A worried groan escaped the crowd. As soon as the prayer was concluded, all fell into a long column for their evening darshan. The sense of anguish filling those men and women was terrible. The news of how close Gandhi was to death had by now touched them all. Many a sorrowing Indian walking slowly across the lawn of Birla House in the fast-falling sunset wondered whether he was about to see India's Great Soul for the last time. For almost an hour, their touching darshan went on, the long and silent columns shuffling by, many faces wet with tears, while on the sun porch the frail and withered man who

was the center of their attention tossed in fitful sleep under his white shawl.

The last port of call of Nathuram Godse and Narayan Apte in Bombay was the decaying building in which Veer Savarkar, the messiah of militant Hinduism, resided. Before boarding their plane for Delhi, the men who had decided to murder Gandhi had come to take dar-shan from the man in whose name they sought to kill him.

Everything was ready now. Madanlal and Karkare were in Delhi with their hand grenades, time bombs and the homemade pistol that Badge had furnished them. Gopal Godse with a second pistol was en route to join them. Badge would leave in his turn that evening. And in barely an hour's time, Apte and Nathuram Godse would board the Air India DC-3 that would set them irrevocably on the road to Birla House.

The two men were welcomed to Savarkar Sadan with the same deference they had been shown Wednesday evening. This time, their stay was brief. Savarkar accompanied them back down the stairs to the grille of his sadan. His most ardent disciples were setting out to murder a man Veer Savarkar detested with all the fury of which his zealot's soul was capable. Despite that fact, there was nothing in his rigidly composed demeanor to indicate what the enormity of that moment might have meant to him. Hardly an emotion registered on his glacial regard, his taut pursed lips. He laid a hand on Godse and Apte's shoulders:

"Be successful," he whispered, "... and come back.'

»

In New Delhi an interminable flow of human beings converged on Birla House, its members beseeching Gandhi to end his fast. They poured down Alburquerque Road, a column 100,000 strong, three miles in length, waving a galaxy of colored flags and banners, the roar of their cry, "Live, Gandhi!" a thousand times stronger than the cries of "Let Gandhi Die" that had rung out on that same street five days earlier.

The Association of Tonga Drivers; the Railway Workers Union; Post and Telegraph Employees; the Harijans of the Bangi Sweepers Colony; Delhi Women's League—they

bore the signs of an entire people seized by the urgent need to rush toward the pallet where their Mahatma lay dying. They flooded through the gates of Birla House, trampling its flower beds and rose gardens, a bobbing tide of heads crying out their slogans of brotherhood, offering their lives to save Gandhi's.

Sensing their mood, sensing that perhaps the climax of Gandhi's efforts was at hand, Nehru moved to the microphone on the prayer ground from which the Mahatma addressed his followers.

"I saw the freedom of India as a vision," he said, "I had charted the future of Asia on my heart." It was Gandhi, he told the crowd, "an odd-looking man with no art of dressing and no polish in his way of speech," who had given him that vision.

"There is something great and vital in the soil of our country that can produce a Gandhi," he cried. No sacrifice was too great to save him, he said, because "only he can lead us to the true goal and not the false dawn of our hopes."

A sudden discordant note, the angry cry of protest of a refugee in the crowd milling in front of Birla House, greeted his words. It came from the lips of Madanlal Pahwa. Driven by a kind of morbid curiosity, Karkare and Madanlal had followed the crowds to Birla House, listening to them beseeching the man they had come to Delhi to kill to end his fast. Unable to control his emotions at Nehru's words, the twenty-year-old Madanlal had committed the incredibly stupid blunder of shrieking out his protest.

Karkare watched in despair as two policemen took Madanlal into custody. If the hated figure inside the house survived his fast, Karkare told himself, he might now, because of Madanlal's idiotic gesture, never have to face their attempt on his life.

Karkare's fears were groundless. A few minutes later, as the crowds drifted away, Madanlal was released. Disgruntled refugees were commonplace in Delhi. The police had not even bothered to question him or take his name.

Late in the eveniijg a man rushed into Birla House. In his hands Pyarelal Nayar bore the one message that could save Gandhi from the death his doctors feared was imminent. Gandhi's life hung on a thread that night. His pulse

was still weak and irregular. He had been delirious earlier in the evening. His continuing inability to pass urine seemed to foretell a general collapse of his system.

Gandhi was asleep when Pyarelal entered the room, but a funereal atmosphere pervaded his quarters. Pyarelal whispered to his beloved employer. He did not move. Finally, he shook his shoulder. Gandhi stirred, and his eyes opened. Pyarelal drew a paper from his pocket, unfolded it and held it up to the Mahatma's face. It was a charter the Peace Committee had just signed, he explained, a pledge to restore "peace, harmony and fraternity between the communities."

Gandhi gave a sigh of satisfaction. Then he asked if all the city's leaders had signed it. Pyarelal hesitated. It still lacked two signatures, he admitted, those of the leaders of the local branches of the organizations headed by his most implacable foes, the Hindu Mahasabha and the R.S.S.S.

They would sign tomorrow, Pyarelal said. The others guaranteed their signatures and their acceptance of the charter. Break his fast now, Pyarelal begged, take something to sustain him through the coming night.

Gandhi shook his head in an impatient little gesture. With difficulty he turned to his secretary.

"No," he murmured, "nothing must be done in haste. I will not break my fast until the stoniest heart has melted."

A telephone's jarring ring interrupted the meeting in the office of Dr. Rajendra Prasad, the President of the Congress Party. The call came from Birla House. Gandhi's condition had taken a sudden turn for the worse. If the resolution accepting his seven points, this time signed by all the leaders whose signatures he had requested, was not rushed to his bedside, it might well arrive too late. It was 11 a.m., Sunday, January 18. For almost an hour, Gandhi had been dangerously close to slipping into a coma.