Freedom at Midnight (82 page)

In Paris, Premier Georges Bidault remarked that "all those who believe in the brotherhood of men will mourn Gandhi's death." From South Africa, Gandhi's first political rival, Field Marshal Jan Smuts, sent a simple tribute: "A prince among us has passed," he said. At the Vatican,

Pius XII paid tribute to "an apostle of peace and a friend of Christianity." The Chinese, the Indonesians were shocked at the disappearance of the man who was the precursor of Asian independence. In Washington, D.C., President Harry Truman declared that "the entire world mourns with India."

Jawaharlal Nehru's sister, Mrs. V. L. Pandit, set out a register for condolences in her newly opened embassy in Moscow. Not a single member of Josef Stalin's Foreign Office entered his name in it.

"There can be no controversy in the face of death," Gandhi's principal political rival, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, wrote in his message of condolence. "He was one of the greatest men produced by the Hindu community." When one of Jinnah's assistants, reviewing the text with him, suggested that Gandhi's dimensions were greater than his own community, Jinnah demurred. Gandhi had risked his life a fortnight before for India's Moslems and to save Jinnah's Islamic state from bankruptcy, but the Quaid-e-Azam was as inflexible as ever.

"No," he said. "That's what he was—a great Hindu."

Appropriately, in that vast outpouring of tributes, it was the Indians themselves who produced the most memorable testimonial of all. It came on the editorial page of the Hindustan Standard, The page was left blank, ringed by a black border. At its center was a single paragraph set in a boldface type. It read:

"Gandhiji has been killed by his own people for whose redemption he lived. This second crucifixion in the history of the world has been enacted on a Friday—the same day Jesus was done to death one thousand nine hundred and fifteen years ago. Father, forgive us."

Just after midnight, Gandhi's body was brought down from the balcony of Birla House. For a few brief hours, he belonged again to the little company that had shared his austere existence: Manu and Abha, Pyarelal, his secretary, two of his sons, Devadas and Ramdas, the handful of others who had been at his side in the triumphs and heartbreak of the last year of his life.

Following the strict dictates of Hindu custom, Manu and Abha smeared fresh cow dung over the marble floor

of Birla House to prepare it to receive Gandhi's corpse. When Gandhi's sons and secretaries had given him a final bath, his little body was wrapped in a winding-sheet of homespun cotton and set on the floor on a wooden plank. A Brahman priest anointed his chest with sandalwood paste and saffron. Manu pressed a vermilion dot upon his forehead. Then she and Abha lovingly wrote "He Rama!" ("Oh God!") in laurel leaves at his head and "Om" in rose petals at his feet. It was 3:30 a.m., the hour at which Gandhi usually awoke for prayer. Weeping softly, his companions sat down by his bier and filled the little room with a farewell hymn to the man before them.

"Cover yourself with dust," they sang, "because ultimately you shall be at one with the dust. Have your bath and dress in fresh garments. There shall be no return from there where you are going."

Then, before giving the body of their beloved Bapu back to a waiting world, they performed a final gesture. They all knew how Gandhi hated the Hindu custom of garlanding the defunct with wreaths of flowers. And so Devadas knotted around his father's neck the only ornament Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi would take on his voyage to eternity, a loop of homespun cotton yarn cut from the threads he had turned that afternoon with the last revolutions of his cherished spinning wheel.

Frozen in the still serenity of death, Mahatma Gandhi offered his visage to his people for an ultimate and pathetic darshan. Once again, on its raised wooden plank heavy with rose petals and jasmine, his body was exposed at sunrise to the public from the balcony of Birla House. Driven by an irresistible desire for a last vision of their Mahatma, the waves of mourners had engulfed the house with the first rays of breaking day, beating up against its whitewashed walls in a constantly renewed sea of love and despair.

Just after eleven in the morning, his disciples carried the wooden slab down from the balcony and gently set it upon the vehicle which would take Gandhi across his mourning capital to his final destination on earth, the funeral pyre waiting to receive him at the Raj Ghat, the cremation ground of the kings on the banks of the Jumna river. It was a Dodge weapons carrier. In deference to the memory

of the man who had been so determined a foe of the abuses of the machine age, the vehicle's engine would remain silent during Gandhi's last trek. It would be drawn by the force of 250 of his countrymen, sailors of the Royal Indian Navy, towing four ropes attached to its bumper.

Jawaharlal Nehru, his eyelids reddened from weeping, and Vallabhbhai Patel, a grief-stricken regard fixed to his features, joined Manu and Abha in performing a final ritual gesture. They placed across Gandhi's corpse twin strips of red and white linen, the indication that the defunct had lived to the fullness of his life and his death was a joyous departure toward eternity. Then they covered his tiny figure in the most appropriate of shrouds the prophet of poverty could wear to his cremation, the saffron-white-and-green folds of the flag of an independent India.

The man who had been responsible for organizing the funeral, Lieutenant General Sir Roy Bucher, the British Commander of the Indian Army, gave a last look at the waiting column. By an extraordinary irony of history, this was the second funeral Roy Bucher had prepared for Mohandas Gandhi. He had also organized the funeral that the resistant little man had declined to attend during his famous twenty-one-day fast in Yeravda prison in 1942.

At a signal from Bucher, the procession slow-marched into the human sea outside the gates of Birla House. Four armored cars and a squadron of the Governer General's Bodyguard opened the march. Their presence in Gandhi's funeral cortege was the Mountbattens' last gesture to the "dejected sparrow" whom the former viceroy should have scorned but had come to love. It was the first time these troops of the old viceroy's bodyguard had honored an Indian.

Ministers and coolies, maharajas, Untouchable sweepers, governors, veiled Moslem women, representatives of every caste, class, creed, race and color in India, united by their common burden of grief, followed the procession in a fittingly unstructured flow of humanity.

The cortege's five-mile route to the Jumna was already littered with a carpet of rose petals and marigolds. Every foot of the way was dense with people in trees, hanging from windows, lining the rooftops, perched on the tops of lampposts, clinging to telephone poles, ensconced in the

arms of statues. Lost in the multitude along Kingsway, clinging to a lamppost, was Ranjit Lai, the peasant, who had set out from his village the evening before at the news of Gandhi's assassination. As the cortege slowly slipped below his perch, Ranjit Lai saw, for the first time in his life, that famous face resting on its cushion of flowers. He felt the sting of tears in his eyes. One simple thought animated his grateful being as he watched Gandhi pass: "He gave me my freedom."

From the dome of Durbar Hall, Louis Mountbatten's press attache, Alan Campbell-Johnson, watched the cortege advance with almost imperceptible movement along the imperial avenue, the vehicle at its heart locked in the embrace of vast swarms of people. There, on that boulevard designed to celebrate the triumphs of empire, Gandhi, he realized, "was receiving in death an homage beyond the dreams of any viceroy."

For five hours that procession continued its interminable march through the mourning throngs to the banks of the Jumna and Gandhi's funeral pyre. There at least another million people stretched out over the broad meadows beyond the waiting pyramid of logs. Contemplating that unbelievable throng, Margaret Bourke-White suddenly felt that she was about to record with her Leica lens "the largest crowd ever to gather on the face of the earth."

In a small clearing at the heart of that mass of humanity, protected only by a thin screen of Indian airmen, were a hundred dignitaries awaiting the funeral cortege. The lean silhouette of Louis Mountbatten, his head covered by his white naval-officer's cap, rose above them at the foot of the funeral pyre itself.

When at last, passed from hand to hand above the heads of the crowd, Gandhi's body began to move toward the pyre, a wave of uncontrollable hysteria thrust the multitude forward. "There'll be quite a stir in London when they learn that Mountbatten, his wife, his daughters, and his staff have been cremated along with Gandhi," Major Martin Gilliat, a member of that staff, thought.

Sensing that menace, Mountbatten patiently drove the crowd of diplomats, dignitaries and ministers back twenty yards from the enormous pile of logs. Then he motioned all of them to sit down on the ground that their feet had already churned to mud. He himself, despite his immacu-

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lately clean blue naval uniform, gave the example along with his wife and daughters.

Finally, the plank bearing Gandhi's corpse reached the enclosure. His sons laid it upon the great round logs of sandalwood, his head pointed north, feet pointing south according to the prescriptions of Hindu rite. It was four o'clock and it was time to hurry if, as custom demanded, the rays of the sun were to offer their final blessing to the face of the man being cremated at the instant the flames consumed his body.

Ramdas, Gandhi's second son, responsible according to Hindu tradition for conducting the ceremony in the absence of his eldest brother, Harilal, climbed onto the pyramid. With Devadas, his youngest brother, he soaked the pile in ghee, mixed with coconut oil, camphor and incense.

Looking at the silhouette of the man he had come to know so well in the brief span of a year, Louis Mountbat-ten was deeply moved. "He looked as though he was sleeping peacefully there before our eyes," he remembered, "and yet in a few seconds while we looked on he was going to disappear in a flash of flames."

Ramdas Gandhi made five mystic trips around the pyre while saffron-robed priests chanted their mantras. Then someone passed him a torch ignited by a glowing charcoal brought from the eternal fire of the Temple of the Dead. Ramdas raised it above his head and plunged it into his father's funeral pyre. As the first uncertain flames began to lick their way over the sandalwood logs, a quivering voice chanted the ancient Vedic prayer whose words the consuming pyre fulfilled:

Lead me from the Unreal to the Real From Darkness to Light From Death to Immortality.

At the sight of the curls of smoke twisting up from the pyre, that vast assembly stretching down the fields to the river's edge heaved forward in a gigantic crush. Behind her, Pamela Mountbatten saw dozens of women, weeping hysterically, tear their hair and their saris, then try to thrust their way past the overwhelmed police hoping to accomplish the ancient Indian rite of suttee, the traditional suicide of a widow throwing herself into her husband's fu-

neral pyre. Only her father's foresight in forcing them all to sit on the muddy ground saved the dignitaries from being driven by the crowd's uncontrollable surge into the flames in a massive and involuntary suttee.

The flames, finding the volatile fuel of the gjiee, suddenly exploded over the funeral pyre. A furious geyser of sparks boiled into the sky as the crackling wreath of flame enveloped the pyramid of sandalwood logs. The still brown figure at its heart disappeared forever behind an orange curtain of fire. The cold winter wind sweeping down the Jumna whipped the flames higher pulling the dense, oily smoke from the pyre. As that black pillar mounted a sky incarnadined by the rays of the setting sun, a mournful cry rising from a million chests shook the plains of the Jumna: "Mahatma Gandhi amar ho gay el" ("Mahatma Gandhi has become immortal!")

All night, while the funeral pyre cooled, the mourners filed silently past the smoking remains of what had once been a great man. Lost among them, unrecognized and unremarked, was the man who should have lighted those flames, a derelict ravaged by alcohol and tuberculosis, Mahatma Gandhi's eldest son, Harilal.

Another man too, his face distorted by grief, kept an all-night vigil over the glowing embers of the fire that had consumed the man he had so loved and admired. An epoch in Jawaharlal Nehru's life had ended in the blaze that had made him an orphan. At first light he laid a little bouquet of roses on the still smoldering ashes.

"Bapuji," he said, "here are flowers. Today at least I can offer them to your bones and ashes. Where will I offer them tomorrow and to whom?"

As Hindu practice dictated, the ashes of Mahatma Gandhi were immersed in a body of water flowing to the sea on the twelfth day after his cremation. The site chosen to receive the remains of the father of a free India was one of the most sacred in Hindudom, the sangam at Allahabad, the spot where the muddy waters of the Eternal Mother Ganges join the clear running Jumna and the mystic Sarasvati. There, at the confluence of those great rivers whose names had coursed down through the trackless centuries of India's history, in the majestic tides that had car-

ried away the ashes of so many of those faceless millions whose joys and sufferings he had made his own, Gandhi would blend with the collective soul of his people as a drop of water in an endless sea.

The copper urn containing his ashes was borne over the 368-mile journey from New Delhi to Allahabad in a train composed solely of third-class cars, passing along its route through a human corridor of millions of Indians come to offer a final homage to India's Great Soul. At the Allahabad station the urn was carried to a waiting truck, which drove it through the mammoth crowds to the water's edge. There, a white, flower-banked Indian Army amphibious vehicle waited to bear it to midstream.

Nehru, Patel, Gandhi's sons Devadas and Ramdas, Manu, Abha, and his other close associates took their places beside the urn on the amphibious vehicle. From the river bank, three million people followed its progress" across the waters.