Freedom at Midnight (81 page)

heard behind him a soft, murmuring ripple from the crowd: "Bapuji, Bapuji."

"/ turned. Nathuram, too, made a half turn to the right. Suddenly, we saw a parting in the people and coming straight toward us through that little voluntary path in the crowd was Gandhiji. Nathuram's hands were in his pockets, tie took out one hand, his free hand. He kept the hand in which he had hidden his weapon in his pocket. He flicked off the safety catch of the automatic.

"In a flash he had made the calculation: Now is the time to kill him. He knew he had been given a providential opportunity far greater than the chance he would have had if Gandhiji had been seated on the prayer platform. He knew he needed to take only two steps to the edge of the little human corridor. Two steps. Three seconds. Then the killing would be easy, a mechanical thing. What was difficult was driving himself to the act of will to start the action, to take the one step that made the killing inevitable."

Manu saw him, "a stout young man in khaki dress," taking that step. It brought him through the last ranks of people to the edge of the parting in the crowd through which their cortege was moving.

Karkare's eyes were on Nathuram. "He took the pistol from his pocket and passed it between his palms. He had decided to make obeisance to Gandhi for whatever useful service he had rendered his country. When Gandhi was only three strides from us, Nathuram stepped into the corridor. He had the pistol concealed between his hands. He bowed slowly from the waist, and he said to him: "Namaste, Gandhiji."

Manu thought he wanted to kiss Gandhi's feet. Gently, she extended an arm to motion him away. "Brother," she murmured, "Bapu is already ten minutes late."

At that instant, Nathuram's left arm shot out, thrusting her brutally aside. The black Beretta pistol lay exposed in his right hand. Nathuram pulled the trigger three times. Three sharp reports shattered the stillness of the prayer ground. Nathuram Godse had not failed. All three rounds tore into the chest of the slender figure advancing toward him.

Manu, groping to recover the spittoon and notebook

Nathuram had knocked from her hands, heard the shots. She looked up. Hands clasped in greeting, her beloved Bapu seemed to be still moving forward, chest bare, trying to take one last step toward the prayer platform ahead. She saw the red stains spreading over the gleaming white khadi. Gandhi gasped, "He Rami" ("O God!") Then, a lifeless little bundle, he slowly sank to the ground beside her, his hands still frozen in the final gesture to which his spirit had commanded them, a greeting to his assassin. In the folds of the blood-soaked dhoti, Manu saw the eight-shilling Ingersoll watch whose loss had so pained Gandhi ten months before. It was exactly seventeen minutes past five.

Louis Mountbatten received the news as he trotted up to Government House from a horseback ride. His first wordsf formed a question millions would ask in the next hours: "Who did it?"

"We don't know, sir," the A.D.C. who had given him the news answered. Mountbatten rushed to change. Minutes later, as he dashed out of Government House, he spotted his press attache, Alan Campbell-Johnson. He ordered him into his waiting car.

By the time the two men reached Birla House, an enormous crowd had already engulfed its grounds. As they pushed their way through the throng to Gandhi's quarters, a man, his face contorted with frenzy and hysteria, shrieked, "It was a Moslem who did it."

A sudden silence froze the crowd. Mountbatten turned to the man.

"You fool," he shouted as loudly as he could, "don't you know it was a Hindu?"

Seconds later, as they passed into the house, Campbell-Johnson turned to him. "How can you possibly know it's a Hindu?" he asked.

"I don't," answered Mountbatten. "But if it really was a Moslem, India is going to have one of the most ghastly massacres the world has ever seen."

Mountbatten's concern was shared by thousands. The certainty that an apocalypse would engulf India if Gandhi's assassin turned out to be a Moslem prompted the director of All India Radio to make an extraordinary and responsible decision: instead of interrupting the radio's na-

tionwide circuits with India's scoop of the century, he ordered programs to continue as normal. While they did, the headquarters of the police and army, employing their emergency telephone circuits, put every major army and police command in India on emergency footing. From Birla House, the police relayed to the radio the most vital news of all: Nathuram Godse was a Hindu of the Brahman caste. Precisely at six o'clock, through an announcement every word of which had been carefully studied, the Indian people learned of the death of the gentle man who had brought them freedom.

"Mahatma Gandhi," the radio announced, "was assassinated in New Delhi at twenty minutes past five this afternoon. His assassin was a Hindu."

The slaughter had been avoided; it now remained to India to mourn.

Mahatma Gandhi's corpse was taken back into Birla House from the garden in which he had been" shot and placed on the straw pallet on which he slept next to the spinning wheel that he had turned for the last time a few minutes earlier. Abha laid a woolen wrapper over his blood-soaked dhoti. Someone set beside his pallet his handful of belongings: his wooden shower clogs, the sandals he had been wearing when he was shot, his three monkeys, his Gita, the Ingersoll watch, his carefully polished spittoon, the tin bowl that was his souvenir of Yeravda prison.

By the time Louis Mountbatten stepped into the room, it was already crowded with mourners. Nehru, his face ashen, was squatting on the floor, his head against the wall, tears inundating his handsome features. A few feet away, a thunderstruck Patel sat like a stone Buddha, his eyes riveted on the body of the man to whom he had been speaking less than an hour before.

A soft flutter of sound floated through the room—the women around Gandhi's improvised bier chanting the Gita. The orange glow of a dozen oil lamps wrapped the Mahatma's body in their sad and gentle aura. The aroma of incense hung on the air. Manu, soundlessly weeping, held her beloved Bapu's head in her lap. With the fingers that had massaged it with oil the evening before, she

gently caressed the lifeless skull from which so many original ideas had flowed out to mankind.

Lying there on his pallet, his "dejected sparrow" seemed to Mountbatten to be already diminished in size, a child's body barely filling his little piece of floor. Someone had removed the steel-rimmed spectacles that had become so much a part of Gandhi's features, and for an instant, looking down in the candlelight, Mountbatten did not quite recognize him. An astonishing look of repose covered his face. Never, Mountbatten thought, had he seen his features as peaceful and composed in life as they now were in death. Someone pressed a clump of rose petals in a cup into Mountbatten's hands. Sadly, he let the pink leaves tumble to the body below, the final tribute of India's last viceroy to the man who had put an end to his great-grandmother's empire. As he watched them fall, a thought struck Louis Mountbatten, a thought he would repeat in a few hours' time to a close friend: "Mahatma Gandhi will go down in history on a par with Buddha and Jesus Christ."

Slipping through the throng in the mourning chamber, Mountbatten went up to Nehru and Patel. He put an arm around each man. "You both know how much I loved Gandhiji," he said. "Well, let me tell you something. The last time we talked, he told me how worried he was that you, his two greatest friends, his greatest supporters, the people he loved and admired most in the world, were drifting apart.

"He told me: *They listen to you now more than they do to me. Do your best to bring them together.*

"That was his dying wish," Mountbatten told the leaders. "If his memory means as much to you as your grief implies it does, youll embrace and forget your differences." Visibly moved by the words, the two grieving leaders fell into an embrace.

Mountbatten soon realized that the most useful service he could offer the nation which had asked him to be her first Governor General would be to turn his energies to the ceremony that no one in the first shock of grief and loss had yet considered, Gandhi's funeral.

With Nehru and Patel's endorsement, Mountbatten proposed embalming Gandhi's body so a special funeral train might carry his remains across India, giving the millions he had loved and served a chance for a last darshan with

their Mahatma. Gandhi's timid secretary, Pyarelal Nayar, ended that idea. Gandhi, he said, had made it absolutely clear he wished his remains to be cremated within twenty-four hours of his death in strict accordance with Hindu custom.

"You realize," Mountbatten told Nehru and Patel, "that in that case we will have crowds such as India has never seen in Delhi tomorrow. There is only one organization in the country capable of organizing and conducting a funeral procession in those conditions: the military."

The two Indian leaders looked aghast at his words. The thought that Gandhi, of all men, should be conducted to his funeral pyre by those whose profession was war appalled them.

Gandhi admired the discipline of the services, Mount-batten assured the two leaders. He would have had no objection, he promised them, to their filling the role. Nehru and Patel finally nodded their reluctant agreement. The last voyage of India's prophet of nonviolence through his people would be conducted as a military operation.

After Mountbatten had set the machinery to organize the funeral in motion, he turned to Nehru. "You know," he said, "you must make an address to the nation. The people will be looking to you for a lead now."

"I can't," Nehru gasped, "I'm too upset. I am not prepared. I don't know what to say."

"Don't worry," Mountbatten replied, "God will tell you what to say."

Spontaneously, intuitively, India reacted to the news of Gandhi's death with the most appropriate of gestures. As Gandhi had set his people on the march to independence with a hartal, a nationwide day of mourning, so India now marked his passing in the sorrowing silence of a real hartal.

Above the vast plains, the fields, the cluttered slums and writhing jungles, the air was crystal clear. The mantle of India's night, the fine haze of the cow-dung fires burning in a hundred million hearths, had disappeared. To mourn the Mahatma, those hearths were cold.

Bombay was a ghost city. From the beautiful mansions of Malabar Hill to the slums of Parlal, the people wept. Calcutta's great Maidan was almost empty. Through its

streets a barefoot sadhu, his face smeared with ashes, walked crying: "The Mahatma is dead. When comes another such as he?"

In Pakistan, millions of women shattered their baubles and trinkets in a traditional gesture of grief. In Lahore, now almost entirely Moslem, newspaper offices were swarmed with people clamoring for news. There were trouble spots too. Police had to protect the whitewashed shed in Poona that sheltered the press of the Hindu Rashtra. A thousand people tried to storm Savarkar Sadan in Bombay. Mobs attacked the headquarters of the Hindu Mahasabha and the R.S.S.S. in cities across the nation.

Ranjit Lai, the peasant from Chatharpur, a village outside Delhi, who had walked home from the independence celebrations because tongas had become too expensive, heard the news on a gift freedom had brought him and his fellow villagers, a radio, provided by the Ministry of Agriculture. Instinctively, at the word of Gandhi's death, Lai and the entire village rose. Black silhouettes in the night, Chatharpur's inhabitants as well as those of scores of other villages started to march across the hills to Delhi, returning to the avenues where they had celebrated their freedom, to mourn its architect—harbingers of the flood of humanity that Mountbatten had predicted would pour into the capital at dawn.

Buried in rose petals and jasmine blooms, Gandhi's body was carried to an open balcony on the second floor of Birla House. Five oil lamps for the four elements, fire, water, air, earth and the light which unites them, were aligned at his head. Then, set on a wooden board, his remains were exposed to the visitors below clamoring for a parting glimpse of their lost Mahatma.

They had been there for hours. As they had once braved the lathis of the British police in Gandhi's name, they had braved them all evening to win one swift look through the glass doors of Birla House into the room in which his body lay. Thousands of others had swarmed the garden where Gandhi had been shot, plucking blades of grass as their personal memorials of India's liberator. Now, they flowed past the balcony in the thousands, white khadi dhotis and dresses shining in the glare of the searchlights, the veterans of an army of ghosts come to mourn their fallen general.

On the other side of Delhi, a heartbroken man found in the depths of his sorrow the words that he had despaired of finding. Jawaharlal Nehru's eyes were filled with tears as he stepped before the microphone of All India Radio. As they had been on Independence Eve, the words he was about to utter were spontaneous, but they glowed with unforgettable beauty.

"The light has gone out of our lives and there is darkness everywhere," he said. "Our beloved leader, Bapu, as we called him, the father of the nation, is no more.

'The light has gone out, I said, and yet I was wrong. For the light that shone in this country was no ordinary light." In a thousand years, he predicted "that light will still be seen . . . the world will see it and it will give solace to innumerable hearts. For that light represented something more than the immediate present; it represented the living, the eternal truths, reminding us of the right path, drawing us from error, taking this ancient country to freedom."

The light whose disappearance Nehru mourned belonged to the rest of the world as well as to India. From every corner of a shocked globe, messages of condolence poured into New Delhi.

The news of Gandhi's death moved London as no event had done since the end of the war. Londoners passed each other copies of the sold-out editions of the evening newspapers announcing the murder of the perplexing figure who had come to their city fifteen years earlier in a sheet, a goat by his side, to ask for the return of the crown jewel of their empire. King George VI, Prime Minister Clement Attlee, Gandhi's old foe Sir Winston Churchill, Sir Stafford Cripps, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and thousands of others sent their condolences. None was as memorable as the taut tribute from the Irish playwright whom Gandhi had met in London in 1931, George Bernard Shaw. His murder, Shaw said, "shows how dangerous it is to be good."