Freedom at Midnight (78 page)

Since fleeing Delhi, Nathuram Godse and Narayan Apte had lived in constant dread of arrest, sure that they were the object of one of the most intensive manhunts in Indian history. They had summoned Gopal Godse and their innkeeper friend Karkare to the secret rendezvous to hear the decision Nathuram revealed in a hoarse whisper.

"We failed in Delhi," he declared, "because there were too many people involved." There was only one way to kill Gandhi, he said. "One man must do the job whatever the risks."

Gopal looked at the brother who had been a failure all his life, who had never been able to hold a job. His eccentric brother with his passion for coffee and his hysterical hatred of women seemed transformed. Nathuram, who had been pale and trembling in Delhi, almost unable to move because of his migraine headache, exuded an air of tranquillity such as Gopal had never seen in him before. Even the ebullient Apte, who usually ran things, seemed in awe of him.

Nathuram's voice was calm, composed. He who had read the portents in the soot had read the meaning of his own life. Nathuram Godse was going to fill the role to which his speeches had been unconsciously beckoning him since the troubled summer of partition. India vivisected, India raped called out for an avenging spirit. He was going to be that spirit.

"I am going to do it," he announced. No one had imposed that decision on him, he said. "The sacrifice of one's life is not a decision to be imposed."

He would kill Gandhi, he promised, as soon as possible. He wanted two aides. Apte would be with him. He invited Karkare to join them. Together they would form a new trimurti, a trinity of vengeance like those mystic trinities of earth, water and fire, of Vishnu, Brahma and Shiva, that dominated Hindu lore.

Karkare agreed. Godse told him to get to Delhi as fast as possible. Every day at noon he was to stand by the public water tap outside the Old Delhi railroad station. They would meet him by that tap on the afternoon of the day they arrived in the capital.

He and Apte in the meantime would concentrate all their energies on locating an absolutely reliable, easily concealed pistol. This time there could be no margin for error.

The most important thing, Nathuram told him in a strident whisper, the element that counted above everything else, was speed. "Now that the police have Madan-lal," he warned, "they are bound to get us sooner or later."

"We must get Gandhi," he said, "before the police get us."

In New Delhi a minor change was appended to the constantly repeated scenario that governed Gandhi's prayer meetings on the evening of January 25. D. W. Mehra, the Delhi police officer who had decided to walk by Gandhi's side each night, a cocked pistol on his hip, was back in bed with the flu. He had assigned his role to another Delhi police officer, A. N. Bhatia. If Bhatia was not as deadly a marksman as Mehra, he had the advantage of knowing Gandhi personally. That acquaintance assured him of being able to occupy the vital position by Gandhi's side each night.

January 26, 1948, was a particularly memorable day in the life of Mahatma Gandhi and his countrymen. Exactly eighteen years earlier, on January 26, 1930, in every town and city in India, in hundreds of thousands of her villages—almost everyplace where a Congress Party cell existed—millions of Congress men and women had sworn for the first time to win their nation unabridged independence. Gandhi himself had written the text of the vow they had sworn that day. Since then, January 26 had become known as Independence Day to India's patriots. Like his millions of fellow Indians the aged Gandhi now marked another anniversary of the swearing of that vow in an India in which its words had become at last a reality.

Appropriately enough, Gandhi's principal occupation in Birla House that winter day was preparing at Nehru's request a new constitution for the Congress Party, a manifesto to define its role and purpose in the independent India to which he had guided it.

The robust nature beneath the deceptively fragile exterior of the man designated to draft that declaration was evidencing itself once again. That morning the old man whom the doctors had pronounced twenty-four hours from death barely a week earlier began to take solid food and resumed a long and cherished habit, his morning walk. Those brisk strides across the lawn of Birla House constituted, in a sense, his first steps toward the great vision that

thrilled and preoccupied him, his march to Pakistan across the ravaged Punjab.

A Moslem visitor from Pakistan had the day before conjured up a vision that had become the last great dream of Gandhi's life. He looked forward, the visitor had said, "to witnessing a fifty-mile-long procession of Hindus and Sikhs returning to Pakistan with Gandhiji at its head."

What an exalting prospect: the slender figure that had shown India the way for so long, opening the path again; marching along, bamboo stave in hand, at the head of an endless chain of the dispossessed, taking them home again along the highway of their cruel exodus. And who could know? If he succeeded, what would prevent him from marching back the other way, leading a horde of homeless Moslems back to the lands and hearths from which they had been cast in India. What a victory for nonviolence, what a triumph for his doctrines of love and brotherhood. That would be the crowning achievement of his lifetime, a "miracle" to dwarf in significance and dimension all the "miracles" his enraptured followers attributed to him. Even Gandhi's humble soul thrilled at such a likelihood. He could formulate no prayer more ardent than that God might grant him the faith, the strength and the time to realize it.

Returning from his walk, he called for his doctor, Sushila Nayar. It was not for a medical consultation, however, that he beckoned her to his side, but to assign her a mission in Pakistan as part of the preparations for his trip. As he always did with himself and his entourage, the methodical Gandhi imposed on his attractive young doctor a precise time limit in which she was to carry out her assignment, three days. Sushila always walked directly in front of Gandhi on his way to evening prayers. God willing, she should be back in Delhi in time to occupy her regular post for the prayers on the evening of Friday, January 30.

For the second time in ten days, Nathuram Godse and Narayan Apte were flying to Delhi to murder Mahatma Gandhi. Seated side by side in the back row of their Air India Viking, they occupied themselves in pursuits perfectly illustrative of their divergent characters. Godse had his face plunged into a copy of the book that had inspired

his life, Veer Savarkar's Hindutva. Apte was engaged in a more temporal pursuit. He could not take his eyes off the attractive stewardess gliding up and down the aisle with her breakfast trays.

Their last day in Bombay had been a most inauspicious one for the two young men. The item whose procurement had given them so much trouble before their first assassination attempt was once again proving incredibly difficult to find. All day they had gone from one fanatic friend to another, begging for money and a gun. Apte had tucked into his pocket the result of their daylong efforts, the extravagant sum of 10,000 rupees ($3,200). He did not, however, have even the promise of a pistol.

Haunted by the conviction that the police, sure they had to strike fast, were closing in on them, they had decided to leave Bombay without the gun. They would get their pistol in Delhi in one of those depots of hatred and suffering ringing the capital, the refugee camps.

For the moment, Apte's mind was on other things. When the handsome stewardess had finished picking up her breakfast trays, he beckoned to her. He was a palm reader, he told her. She had a fascinating face which always reflected a fascinating palm. He suggested that he might read her hand for her. Delighted, the girl settled on the arm of his seat and extended her hand. As she did, she saw the man plunged in his reading next to him draw away, virtually thrusting himself against the aircraft's window in visible distaste for their activities.

The last seduction on which Narayan Apte would embark was off to a promising start. By the time their flight reached Delhi, his recital of the girl's future had secured the immediate future Apte sought. The stewardess had agreed to meet him at Delhi's Imperial Hotel at eight o'clock that evening.

No spectacle could better justify the suffering that Ma-hatma Gandhi endured during his fast than the one awaiting him around the Quwwat-ul-Islam ("Might of Islam") Mosque at Mehrauli, seven miles south of Delhi, at midmorning on January 27. That shrine, built from the ruins of twenty-seven Hindu and Jain temples, was the oldest mosque in India. Once a year, on the anniversary of the death of its builder, the Slave King, Quth-uddin,

Delhi's first Moslem Sultan, thousands of faithful streamed to its pastoral surroundings for a great religious festival.

One of the seven conditions Gandhi had laid down for ending his fast was that that festival could go on unimpeded, that the Moslems swarming to it could do so "without danger to their lives." Even he, however, could not have imagined a success as complete as the one that his fast had achieved.

Hindus and Sikhs who a fortnight before would have welcomed Moslems to Mehrauli with daggers and kirpans t stood at the entrance to the mosque decorating the arriving pilgrims with garlands of marigolds and rose petals. Inside, other Sikhs had set up little stalls, at which they offered pilgrims free cups of tea. Mingling with that enormous, fraternal crowd of Moslems, Sikhs and Hindus, his hands on Manu and Abha's shoulders, Gandhi was moved almost to tears.

As the ultimate expression of their gratitude the mosque's maulvis invited Gandhi to address the faithful from the heart of their shrine. They even waived, for Manu and Abha, the stern Islamic tradition banning women from a mosque's sanctuary, because, they declared, they were "Gandhiji's daughters."

Overwhelmed, Gandhi begged all—Hindus, Sikhs and Moslems alike—to "resolve in this holy place" to "live as friends and brothers." After all, he said, "we may live separately, but we are the leaves of the same tree."

He returned to Birla House exhausted by strain and emotion. Relaxing under his mud pack he lapsed into a curious, brooding mood. It was a mood that had come upon him in recent days whenever he pondered the meaning of his escape from Madanlal's bomb.

His escape, he noted "was God's mercy." But, he added, "I am quite prepared to obey his order when it does come. I talk of leaving Delhi on February 2, but I do not myself feel that I shall be able to go away from here. After all, who knows what is going to happen tomorrow?"

As Nathuram Godse had ordered him to, Karkare paced the circular garden around the water tap in front of the Old Delhi railroad station most of the afternoon of January 27. Suddenly he saw his two friends drifting toward him through the horde of refugees sleeping, defe-

eating, begging, and occasionally dying on that trampled patch of ground.

The two friends seemed completely discouraged. Their hours combing the refugee camps of Delhi had produced nothing. Those storehouses of misery in which they had counted on finding a revolver contained only suffering and hatred. Another day had been wasted in their vain pursuit of a weapon, another day in which the police were gaining on them, another day in which the measures protecting Gandhi were being perfected. Their time had just about run out.

One last place remained where they might find the pistol, a final hope of carrying out the assassination. It was 194 miles away, in Gwalior. If even that failed to yield a weapon they would have to abandon their efforts and accept the humiliation of their failure before Savarkar and their supporters in Bombay.

They told Karkare to meet them there again in twenty-four hours. Then, discouraged, they disappeared into the station to catch the last train to Gwalior. Narayan Apte would miss his rendezvous with his beautiful Air India stewardess at the Imperial Hotel at eight o'clock that evening. He was renouncing the last seduction in his amatory career to journey to Gwalior in search of a pistol with which to kill Mahatma Gandhi. That journey would cost him his life.

It was just before midnight, January 27, when the urgent call of his night bell woke the Gwalior homeopath Dattatraya Parchure. He stumbled sleepily to the door of his dispensary, expecting to find a distraught mother clutching a child with pneumonia on his doorstep. He found, instead, a pair of old friends and zealots whose devotion to extreme Hinduism surpassed even his own. The doctor who four and a half months earlier had set Madan-lal on the road that had ended in a Delhi jail cell was Nathuram Godse's last hope in his desperate quest for a pistol.

All the next day Apte and Gt>dse sat on the spare wooden benches of Parchure's waiting room under the primitive oil painting of the doctor's guru, a Hindu ascetic who had spent his life in contemplation in the tiger-infested forests of Gwalior. The two downcast young men appeared as much in need of the doctor's care as any of his

unhappy patients around them coughing from lungs inflamed by bronchitis or pneumonia. While his medical aides scoured the markets of Gwalior for the cardamom seed, onions, bamboo sprouts, the gum of guggal mukul and other plants that he mixed daily into his beneficent compounds, his political aides combed the city for his prescription for Godse and Apte.

The two finally left Gwalior aboard the evening express just after 10 p.m. on the evening of January 28. Their long and complex odyssey was over. The desperate search that had taken them twice across half the surface of the subcontinent and had led them into refugee camps, Hindu temples, the slums of Bombay, to laundries, printing presses and Savarkar Sadan, had ended in the reek of herbs and spices in the Gwalior homeopath's office. Wrapped in an old rag in a paper bag under Godse's arm was a blunt, black Beretta automatic pistol, number 606824-P, and twenty rounds of ammunition. The weapon they had sought so long was theirs at last. All Nathuram Godse needed now was the skill and determination to use it. '

At about the same time Apte and Godse were boarding their train in Gwalior station, another man, over six hundred miles away, was completing a journey. The long, slow voyage home of U. H. Rana, the Deputy Inspector General of the C.I.D. in Poona, was over at last. The officer whose files contained the information that could identify Godse and Apte, and bar their entry to Birla House, was back in his jurisdiction. No inspired urgency, however, drove the policeman stepping off his train in the Poona railroad station. He did not bother to go to his office that evening. He was tired after his long journey. He went home to bed instead.