Freedom at Midnight (17 page)

The Mahatma was delighted. He loved to talk about himself and in the Mountbattens he had found a chaipaing pair of people genuinely interested in what he had to say. He rambled on about South Africa, his days as a stretcher-bearer in the Boer War, civil disobedience, the Salt March. Once, he said, the West had received its inspiration from

* Almost six months later, in September 1947, when Gandhi was staying in Birla House, New Delhi, a stranger appeared one afternoon asking to see the Mahatma. At first, he refused to give his name or tell Gandhi's secretary why he wanted to see him. Finally he admitted that he had stolen Gandhi's watch. He had come to return it and ask his forgiveness. "Forgive you?" exclaimed the secretary. "He will embrace you." He took the man to Gandhi He squatted before the Mahatma exchanging a few words the secretary could not hear. Then Gandhi embraced him and, giggling like a child who has recovered a lost toy, he called his followers to see the watch and meet the prodigal son who had returned it

the East in the messages of Zoroaster, Buddha, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Raima. For centuries, however, the East had been conquered culturally by the West. Now the West, haunted by specters like the atomic bomb, had need to look eastward once again. There, he hoped, it might find the message of love and fraternal understanding that he sought to preach.

Their conversation went on for two hours. It was punctuated by a simple, yet extraordinary gesture, a gesture that provided a clue as to how successful Mountbatten's overtures had been, how responsive a chord they were striking in Gandhi.

Halfway through their talks, the trio strolled into the Mogul Gardens for photographs. When they finished, they turned to re-enter the house. The seventy-seven-year-old leader loved to walk with his hands resting upon the shoulders of two young girls, to whom he fondly referred as his "crutches." Now, the revolutionary who had spent a lifetime struggling with the British, instinctively laid his hand upon the shoulder of Britain's last vicereine, and as tranquilly as if he were strolling off to his evening prayer meeting, re-entered the Viceroy's study.

By the time Gandhi returned to the Viceroy's study for their second meeting, Delhi was already gasping in the first searing blasts of India's hot season. Under the sun's white glare the bright dhak trees in the Mogul Gardens seemed to emit sparks, and an orange rind shriveled into a crisp parchment minutes after it was peeled. The only fresh glade in the city was Louis Mountbatten's study. His reverence for detail, which had led him to paint the study, had also led him to make sure that it was equipped with the best air conditioner in Delhi, a machine that allowed him to work in a refreshing 75 degrees.

Its presence was nearly responsible for a catastrophe. Passing with brutal abruptness from Delhi's furnace heat into the chilly study, Gandhi, the implacable foe of technology, got an unhappy introduction to the blessings of air conditioning. Seeing his half-naked guest trembling, Mountbatten rang for his A.D.C., who arrived with his wife.

"My God," exclaimed Edwina Mountbatten, "you'll give the poor man pneumonia!"

She rushed to the machine, snapped it off, threw open the window, then hurried off to get one of her husband's old Royal Navy bridge sweaters to cover Gandhi's shaking shoulders.

When Gandhi was finally warm again, Mountbatten took his guest onto the terrace for tea. A brace of servants brought Mountbatten his in a bone-china service stamped with the viceregal crest. Manu, who had accompanied Gandhi, laid out the spare meal she had brought along for him: lemon soup, goat's curds and dates. Gandhi ate it with a spoon whose broken handle had been replaced by a piece of bamboo lashed to the stub with a string. The battered tin plates in which it was served, however, were as English as the Sheffield sterling of the viceregal service— they came from Yeravda prison.

Smiling, Gandhi proffered his goat's curds to Mountbatten. "It's rather good," he said. "Do try this."

Mountbatten looked at the yellow, porridgelike sludge with something less than unalloyed delight. "I don't think really I ever have," he murmured, hoping that those words might somehow discourage his guest's effort at generosity. Gandhi was not to be so easily dissuaded.

"Never mind," he replied, laughing. "There's always a first time for everything. Try it now."

Trapped, Mountbatten dutifully accepted a spoonful. It was, he thought, "ghastly."

The preliminaries of their conversations ended there on the lawn, and Mountbatten got down to a process that had invariably taxed his predecessors' patience and good temper, negotiating with Gandhi.

The Mahatma had, indeed, been a difficult person for the British to deal with. Truth, to Gandhi, was the ultimate reality. Gandhi's truth, however, had two facets, the absolute and the relative. Man, as long as he was in the flesh, had only fleeting intimations of Absolute Truth. He had to deal with relative truth in his daily existence, and Gandhi liked to employ a parable to illustrate the difference between his two truths. Put your left hand in a bowl of ice-cold water, then in a bowl of lukewarm water, he would say. The lukewarm water feels hot. Then put the right hand in a bowl of hot water and into the same bowl of lukewarm water. Now the lukewarm water feels cold; yet its temperature is constant. The absolute truth is the water's constant temperature, he would observe, but the

relative truth, perceived by the human hand, varied. As that parable indicated, Gandhi's relative truth was by no means rigid. It could vary as his perceptions of a problem changed. That made him a flexible man, but it also made him appear two-faced to his British interlocutors. Even one of his disciples once exclaimed to him in exasperation: "Gandhiji, I don't understand you. How can you say one thing last week, and something quite different this week?"

"Ah," Gandhi replied, "because I have learned something since last week."

India's new viceroy moved, therefore, into a serious exchange with Gandhi with trepidation. He was not persuaded that the little figure "chirping like a sparrow" at his side could help Ijim elaborate a solution to the Indian crisis, but he knew that he could defeat all efforts to find one. The hopes of many another English mediator had foundered on the turns of his unpredictable personality. It was Gandhi who had sent Cripps back to London empty-handed in 1942. His refusal to budge on a principle had helped thwart Wavell's efforts to untie the Indian knot. His tactics had done much to frustrate the most recent British attempt to solve the problem, that of the Cabinet Mission whose plan was supposed to serve as Mountbatten's point of departure. Only the evening before, Gandhi had reiterated to his prayer meeting that India would be divided "over my dead body. So long as I am alive, I will never agree to the partition of India."

If a reluctant Mountbatten was driven to the decision to partition India, he would find himself in the utterly distasteful position of having to impose his will on Gandhi. It was not the elderly Mahatma's body he would have to break, but his heart.

It had always been British policy not to yield to force, he told Gandhi, by way of opening their talks on the right note, but his nonviolent crusade had won, and come what may, Britain was going to leave India. Only one thing mattered in that coming departure, Gandhi replied. "Don't partition India," he begged. "Don't divide India," the prophet of nonviolence pleaded, "even if refusing to do so means shedding 'rivers of blood.' "

Dividing India, a shocked Mountbatten assured Gandhi, was the last solution he wished to adopt. But what alternatives were open to him?

Gandhi had one. So desperate was he to avoid partition that he was prepared to give the Moslems the baby instead of cutting it in half. Place three hundred million Hindus under Moslem rule, he told Mountbatten, by asking his rival Jinnah and his Moslem League to form a government. Then hand over power to that government. Give Jinnah all of India instead of just the part he wants, was his nonviolent proposal.

"Whatever makes you think your own Congress Party will accept?" Mountbatten asked.

Congress, Gandhi replied, "wants above all else to avoid partition. They will do anything to prevent it."

"What," Mountbatten asked, "would Jinnah's reaction be?"

"If you tell him I am its author his reply will be: 'Wily Gandhi,' " the Mahatma said, laughing.

Mountbatten was silent for a moment. There was much in Gandhi's proposal that seemed unworkable. But he was not going to dismiss lightly any idea that might hold India together, either.

"Look," he said, "if you can bring me the formal assurance that Congress will accept your scheme, that they'll try sincerely to make it work, then I'm prepared to entertain the idea."

Gandhi fairly flew out of his chair at his words. "I am entirely sincere," he assured Mountbatten. "I will tour the length and breadth of India to get the people to accept if that is your decision."

A few hours later, an Indian journalist spoke to Gandhi as he walked toward his evening prayer meeting. The Mahatma, he thought, seemed "to bubble with happiness." As they approached the prayer ground, he suddenly turned to the newsman. With a gleeful smile, he whispered: "I think I've turned the tide."

Why, this man is trying to bully me, an unbelieving Louis Mountbatten thought. His Operation Seduction had come to a sudden, wholly unexpected halt at the rocklike figure planted in the chair opposite his. With his khadi dhoti flung about his shoulders like a toga, his bald head glowing, his scowling demeanor, his visitor looked to the Viceroy more like a Roman senator than an Indian politician.

Vallabhbhai Patel, however, was India's quintessential politician. He was an Oriental Tammany Hall boss who ran the machinery of the Congress Party with a firm and ruthless hand. He should have been the easiest member of the Indian quartet for Mountbatten to deal with. Like the Viceroy, he was a practical, pragmatic man, a hard but realistic bargainer. Yet the tension between them was so real, so palpable, that it seemed to Mountbatten he could reach out and touch it.

Its cause was in no way related to the great issues facing India. It was a slip of paper, a routine government minute issued by Patel's Home Ministry dealing with an appointment. But Mountbatten had read it as a calculated challenge to his authority.

Patel had a well-earned reputation for toughness. He had an almost instinctive need to take the measure of a new interlocutor, to see how far he could push him. The piece of paper on his desk, Mountbatten was convinced, was a test, a little examination that he had to go through with Patel before he could get down to serious matters.

Vallabhbhai Patel was handed a cable announcing his wife's death as he was pacing the floor of a Bombay courtroom summing up his case for the jury. He glanced at it, thrust it into his pocket, and continued his peroration without breaking off his sentence.

That incident formed a part of the legend of Vallabhbhai Patel and was a measure of the man. Emotion, one of his associates once observed, formed no part of Patel's character. The remark was not wholly exact. Patel was an emotional man, but he never let those emotions break through the composed fa9ade he turned to the world. If he gave off one salient impression, it was that of a man wholly in control of himself.

In a land in which men talked constantly, threw their words around like sailors flinging away their money after three months at sea, Patel hoarded his phrases the way a miser hoarded coins. His daughter, who had been his constant companion since his wife's death, rarely exchanged ten sentences with him a day. When Patel did talk however, people listened.

Patel was Indian from the uppermost lump of his bald head to the calluses on the soles of his feet. His Delhi

home was filled with books, but every one of them was written by an Indian author about India. He was the only Indian leader who sprang from the soil of India. His father had been a peasant farmer in Gujarat province, near Bombay, and Patel still lived his life at a peasant's rhythm. He rose faithfully at four o'clock and was in bed just as regularly each night at nine-thirty. The first waking hours of each day Patel spent on his toilet, doing the bulk of his reading, thirty newspapers sent to him daily from every part of India. His life was watched over with jealous vigilance by his daughter and only child, Maniben. For two decades, she had been his secretary, his A.D.C., his confidante, the mistress of his household. So close was their relationship that they even shared the same bedroom.

Patel's vocation for Indian nationalism had come from his father, who had gone off to fight the British at the side of a local war lord in the 1857 mutiny. He had spent the winter nights of his boyhood around the dung fire of their peasant hut listening to his father's old-soldier tales of the Mutiny. His first action came in his village school against the village pandit, whom he accused of profiteering on the few scraps of paper the school possessed. Soon afterward" he left the land for good to work in the great textile mills of Ahmedabad, where Gandhi was to found his first ashram. He studied at night, saved almost every rupee he earned until, at thirty-three, he was able to send himself to London to study law.

He never saw the London of the Mayfair drawing rooms, where Nehru had been an admired guest. The only London he had known was the library of the Inns of Court. Twice a day he walked the ten miles separating the courts from his lodging to save carfare. The day he was called to the bar at that legal tabernacle, he took another walk, to the docks, to book a passage home. Once he returned, he never left India again.

He settled in Ahmedabad, practicing law with brilliant effect for the millowners, whose wage slave he had once been. Patel had not even looked up from his nightly bridge game the first time he had heard Gandhi speak in the Ahmedabad Club. Someone, however, brought him a text of the Mahatma's speech and as he read its lines a vision rose from its pages—the vision that his father had inspired around a dung fire in the winter nights of his boyhood.

He sought Gandhi out and offered him his services. In

1922, Gandhi, anxious to see what civil disobedience might achieve, asked Patel to organize an experimental campaign among 87,000 people in 137 villages in the county of Bardoli outside Bombay. His organization was so comprehensive, so thorough, that the campaign succeeded beyond even Gandhi's hopes. From that moment on, Patel had shared with Nehru the place just below Gandhi's in the independence movement. Employing his special genius he had assembled the Congress Party's political machine, reaching into the most remote corners of India.