Freedom at Midnight (12 page)

Midway through the fast, Gandhi began to sink. Unyielding, the British started discreet preparations for his death. Two Brahman priests were brought to the prison and held in readiness to officiate at the cremation. Under the cover of darkness the sandalwood for his funeral pyre was secretly trucked into the palace. Everyone was ready for his death except the seventy-four-year-old Gandhi. Yet twenty-one days on a diet of water mixed with salt and an occasional drop of lemon-and-moosambi juice couldn't kill his towering spirit. He survived his self-imposed ordeal.

Another one awaited him, however. The sandalwood that had been destined for his cremation would feed the flames of another funeral pyre, his wife's. On February 22, 1944, the woman he had married as an illiterate, thirteen-year-old child died with her head resting in Gandhi's lap. Gandhi had not been prepared to disavow a principle to save her life. He believed in nature cures and he also believed administering medicine by hypodermic needle contravened his dogma of nonviolence, because it performed violence upon the human body. Aware that his wife was dying from acute bronchitis, the British flew a supply of rare and precious penicillin to the prison. But at the last minute, when Gandhi learned that the drug which could have saved his dying wife would have to be administered intravenously, he had refused her doctors permission to give it to her.

After her death, Gandhi's own health failed rapidly. He contracted malaria, hookworm and amoebic dysentery. Since it was clear that in his weakened and depressed state

he would not survive long, a reluctant Churchill was finally prevailed on to release him, so he would not die in a British jail.

He was not going to die in a British India, either. Ensconced in a hut on the beach-front estate of a wealthy supporter near Bombay, Gandhi slowly recovered his health. As he did, Churchill, who had not bothered to reply to his viceroy's urgent cables on India's growing famine, sent New Delhi a petulant cable. Why, he asked, hadn't Gandhi died yet?

A few days later, Gandhi's host entered his hut to find one of the Mahatma's followers standing on his head, another in transcendental meditation, a third asleep on the floor and the Mahatma himself ensconced on his open toilet staring raptly into space.

He burst into gales of laughter. Why, Gandhi asked as he emerged from his toilet, was he laughing?

"Ah, Bapu [Father]," said his host, "look at this room: one man standing on his head, another meditating, a third sleeping, you on your toilet—and these are the people who are going to make India free!"

Northolt Airport, England, March 20,1947

The aircraft waited in the early morning light on the runway of the airport, where, two and a half months earlier, Louis Mountbatten had landed on New Year's Day. Charles Smith, his valet, had already stowed on board the Mountbattens' personal luggage, sixty-six pieces, a collection so complete that it included a set of silver ash trays with the new viceroy's family crest. His wife had casually placed an old shoebox in the overhead rack. Relocating it would cause a moment of panic on the flight out. Packed inside was a family heirloom, a diamond tiara that Lady Mountbatten would wear when she was proclaimed vicereine.

Stowed away also were all the documents, the briefs, the position papers, that the new viceroy and his staff would have to guide them in the months ahead. The most important among them covered only two pages and was signed by Clement Attlee. It set out the terms of Mount-batten's mission. No viceroy had ever received a mandate like it. Mountbatten had, for all practical purposes, written

it himself. Its terms were clear and simple. He was to make every effort to arrange for the transfer of British sovereignty in India to a single, independent nation within the Commonwealth by June 30, 1948. As a guide he was to follow as far as possible a plan formulated eight months earlier by a cabinet mission sent to New Delhi under the chairmanship of Sir Stafford Cripps. It proposed, as a compromise with the Moslem demand for Pakistan, a federated India with a weak central government. There was, however, no question of forcing an agreement on it out of India's warring politicians. If by October 1, six months after taking power, Mountbatten saw no way of getting them to agree on a plan for a united India, then he was to recommend his alternative solution to India's dilemma.

As his York MW-102* went through its final checks, Mountbatten paced the tarmac alongside it with two of his old wartime comrades going off to India with him, Captain Ronald Brockman, head of his personal staff, and Lieutenant Commander Peter Howes, his senior A.D.C. On how many trips, Brockman thought, had that converted Lancaster bomber carried Mountbattan to front-line posts in the jungles of Burma, to the great conferences of the war. Beside him, the usually ebullient admiral was moody and introspective. A crewman announced that the flight was ready.

"Well," said Mountbatten, with a sigh, "we're off to In-

* Mountbatten was particularly attached to the converted Lancaster bomber. It had flown him on countless missions during his days as Supreme Commander Southeast Asia. He had fitted it out with bunks for a relief crew to shorten the time required for the London-Delhi journey by eliminating crew rest stops on the ground.

The plane, in fact, very nearly kept him from going to India at all. One day, Mountbatten happened to be in his London office when an. R.A.F. group captain called his A.D.C, Lieutenant Commander Peter Howes, to advise him that the York MW-102 would not be available for use by the new viceroy. Mountbatten took the phone from his AD.C.'s hands.

"Group Captain," he said, "I wish to thank you."

"Thank me?" said the perplexed officer.

"Yes," continued Mountbatten. "You see, when I accepted this appointment, I stipulated as one of my conditions for accepting it that I should be allowed to take the York MW-102 to Delhi with me. You tell me I cannot have this aircraft and I am most grateful to you. I did not want to be viceroy of India and now you've saved me from the job."

A stunned silence settled over the room as he hung up. Within minutes he had his plane.

dia. I don't want to go. They don't want me out there. We'll probably come home with bullets in our backs."

The three men boarded the aircraft. The engines came to life. The York MW-102 fled down the runway, cut across the sun and pointed eastward toward India to close the great adventure that Captain Hawkins had begun by sailing eastward in his galleon the Hector three and a half centuries earlier.

A LAST TATTOO FOR A DYING RAJ

Haimchar, Noakhali — Penitent's Progress III

Nothing could stop him. Fired by his unquenchable spirit, the old man drove his bare and aching feet from village to village, applying the balm of his love to India's sores. Slowly, the wounds began to heal. In the wake of Gandhi's wan and bent silhouette, the passions cooled. Timidly, uncertainly, peace spread its mantle over the blood-drenched marshes of Noakhali.

Its return did not end Gandhi's sufferings, however. A private drama had accompanied him on his march along those hate-filled footpaths, a drama whose unique dimensions would eventually scandalize some of his oldest associates, alarm millions of Indians, and baffle the historians who would one day attempt to comprehend all the complex facts of Mohandas Gandhi's complex character. It would also produce one of the gravest personal crises in the life of the seventy-seven-year-old man who was the conscience of India.

Yet the roots of that crisis were in no way related to the great political struggle in which he had been the principal figure for a quarter of a century. They lay in that primeval force which Gandhi had for forty years struggled to sublimate and control—sex. Its locus was a nineteen-year-old girl, Gandhi's grandniece, Manu. Orphaned as a child, Manu had been raised by Gandhi and his wife as their own granddaughter. She had nursed Kasturbai

Gandhi on her deathbed, and before dying, Kasturbai had confided her to her husband's care.

"I've been a father to many," Gandhi promised the girl; "to you I am a mother." He fussed over her like a mother, supervising her dress, her diet, her education, her religious training. The problem had begun in Noakhali, in a conversation between them just before Gandhi set out on his pilgrimage. With the shyness of a young girl confessing something to her mother, Manu had admitted to Gandhi that she had never felt the sexual arousings normal in a girl her age.

To Gandhi, with his convoluted philosophy of sex, her words had special importance. Since he had sworn his own vow of chastity, Gandhi had maintained that sexual continence was the most important discipline his truly nonviolent followers, male and female, had to master. His ideal nonviolent army would be composed of sexless soldiers, because otherwise, Gandhi feared, their moral strength would desert them at a critical moment.

Gandhi saw in Manu's words the chance to make of her the perfect female votary. "If out of India's millions of daughters, I can train even one into an ideal woman by becoming an ideal mother to you," he told her, "I shall have rendered a unique service to womankind." But first, he felt he had to be sure she was telling the truth. Only his closest collaborators were accompanying him in Noakhali, he informed her, but she would be welcome, provided that she submitted to his discipline and went through the test to which he meant to subject her.

They would, he decreed, share each night the crude straw pallet which passed for his bed. He regarded himself as her mother; she had said that she found nothing but a mother's love in him. If they were both truthful, if he remained firm in his ancient vow of chastity and she had never known sexual arousal, then they would be able to lie together in the innocence of a mother and daughter. If one of them was not being truthful, they would soon discover it.

If, however, Manu was being truthful, Gandhi believed, she would flourish under his close and constant supervision. His own sexless state would stifle any residual desire still lurking in her. Galatealike, she would experience a transformation. She would develop a clarity of thought and firmness of speech that she lacked. A new spirit would

suffuse the girl, giving her a pure, crystalline devotion to the great task that awaited her.

Manu had accepted, and her lithe figure had followed Gandhi's traces across the swamplands of Noakhali. As Gandhi had known it would, his-decision had immediately provoked the consternation of his little party.

"They think all this is a sign of infatuation on my part," he told Manu after a few nights together. "I laugh at their ignorance. They do not understand."

Very few people would. Only the purest of Gandhi's followers would be able to follow the complex reasoning behind this latest manifestation of a great spiritual struggle, which, for Gandhi, went all the way back to that evening in South Africa in 1906, when he had announced to his wife his decision to take the vow of Brahmacharya. In swearing that pledge, Gandhi was setting out on a path almost as old as Hinduism itself. For countless centuries, a Hindu's route to self-realization had passed by the sublimation of that vital force responsible for the creation of life. Only by forcing his sexual energy inward to fuel the furnace of his spiritual force, the Hindu ancients maintained, could a man achieve the spiritual intensity necessary to self-realization.

For the guidance of Brahmacharis, men sworn to lead the chaste life, the Hindu sages had laid down a code called the "ninefold wall of protection." A true Brah-machari was not supposed to live among women, animals or eunuchs. He was not allowed to sit on the same mat with a woman or even gaze upon any part of a woman's body. He was counseled to avoid the sensual blandishments of a hot bath, an oily massage or the alleged aphrodisiac properties of milk, curds, ghee and fatty foods.

Gandhi had not become chaste to live in a Himalayan cave, however. That kind of chastity involved little self-discipline or moral merit, he maintained. He had taken his vow because he firmly believed that the sublimation of his sexual energies would give him the moral and spiritual power to accomplish his mission in life. His kind of Brah-machari was a man who had so suppressed his sexual urge that he could move about normally in the society of women without feeling any sexual desire in himself or arousing it in them. A Brahmachari, he wrote, "does not flee the company of women," because for him "the distinction between man and woman almost disappears."

The real Brahmacharis "sexual organs will begin to look different," Gandhi declared. 'They remain as mere symbols of his sex and his sexual secretions are sublimated into a vital force pervading his whole being." The perfect Brahmachari in Gandhi's mind was a man who could "lie by the side even of a Venus in all her naked beauty, without being physically or mentally disturbed."

It was an extraordinary ideal, and Gandhi's fight to attain it was extraordinarily difficult, because the sex drive he was struggling to suppress had been strong and deeply rooted. For years after taking his vow Gandhi experimented with different diets, looking for one that would have the slightest possible impact on his sexual organs. While thousands of Indians sought out exotic foods like bird's brains to stimulate their desires, Gandhi spurned, in turn, spices, green vegetables and certain fruits, in his efforts to stifle his.

Thirty years of discipline, prayer and spiritual exercise were needed before Gandhi reached the point at which he felt that he had rooted out all sexual desire from his mind and body. His confidence in his achievement was shattered one night in Bombay in 1936, by what he referred to as "my darkest hour." That night, at the age of sixtv-seven, thirty years after he had sworn his vow of Brahmacharya, Gandhi awoke after an arousing dream with what would have been to most men of that age a source of some satisfaction, but was to Gandhi a calamity, an erection. There, quivering between his loins was proof that he had still not reached the ideal toward which he had been striving for three decades. The body that he thought he had controlled had thrown up its manifest evidence of his own imperfections. Gandhi was so overwhelmed by anguish at "this frightful experience" that he swore a vow of total silence for six weeks.