Freedom at Midnight (40 page)

Their marriage lasted ten years. Ruttie Jinnah grew into a spectacularly beautiful woman, a woman of legendary attractiveness in a city known around the world for its beautiful women. She loved to show her lean figure in diaphanous saris and tightly cut dresses that shocked staid Bombay society. She was both a gay, vivacious socialite and an ardent and quick-tongued Indian nationalists

Inevitably, the differences in their ages and temperaments produced their strain. Ruttie's flamboyance and outspokenness often embarrassed Jinnah and inhibited his

* Jinnah had, in fact, been married previously to a child bride he had never seen, picked out for him by his family before his departure to London for his studies. She had, according to Moslem custom, been represented at their wedding by a male relative and died of illness before his return from England.

t At a luncheon in New Delhi in 1921, she was seated next to the Viceroy Lord Reading, who was lamenting the fact that, in the atmosphere engendered by World War I, it was quite difficult for him to visit Germany. But why, asked Ruttie Jinnah, was it so difficult?

'Well," explained Reading, "the Germans don't really like us British. I can't go."

"Then," Ruttie quietly asked, "how is it that you British came to India?"

political career. For all his passionate love for her, the unbending Jinnah found it difficult to communicate with his mercurial, blithe-spirited wife. Jinnah's dream collapsed in 1928, when the beautiful wife he loved, but failed to understand, left him. A year later, in February 1929, she died of an overdose of morphine, which she had been taking to ease the pain of chronic colitis. Jinnah, already hurt by the public humiliation of her departure, was grief-stricken. As he threw the first fistful of dirt into the grave on which he now placed his bouquet, Jinnah had wept like a child. It was the last time anyone ever saw a public display of emotion from the Quaid-e-Azam. From that moment forward, lonely and embittered, he consecrated his life to the awakening of India's Moslems.

The only thing that remained of the perfect English gentleman was the monocle still clamped imperiously in his right eye. Gone were the immaculate linen suits and two-tone shoes. Mohammed Ali Jinnah was flying home to Karachi in clothes he had rarely worn since leaving the port city half a century before to study the law in London—a tight-fitting, knee-length sherwani, long coat, ankle-hugged churidars, trousers, and slippers.

His newly appointed naval A.D.C., a young officer named Syed Ahsan, who had been until the previous day the Viceroy's A.D.C., followed Jinnah up the steps to the silver DC-3 given him by the Viceroy for his historic flight to Karachi, the capital of the new nation coming into being because of his zealot's will. As he reached the top of the steps, he turned back for a last glimpse of the distant skyline of the city in which he had waeed his relentless struggle for his Islamic state. "I suppose," he murmured, "this is that last time I'll be looking at Delhi."

The house at 10 Aurangzeb Road from which he had carried out his fight under an enormous, silver map of India, the frontiers of his impossible dream traced upon it in green, had been sold. Ironically, its new owner was a wealthy Hindu industrialist named Seth Dalmia. In a few hours' time, he would hoist onto the flagstaff, which for years had flown the green-and-white banner of the Moslem League, the banner svmbolizins the house's new function as headquarters of the Anti-Cow Slaughter League, the Sacred Flag of the Cow.

Exhausted by the effort of climbing the few steps to the plane, Jinnah, Syed Ahsan noted, "practically collapsed" into his seat, gasping for breath. He sat there staring impassively ahead, while the plane's British pilot started his engines and taxied down the runway. As the DC-3 lifted off the ground, Jinnah murmured to no one in particular: "That's the end of that."

He spent the entire flight silently exercising that curious passion of his for newspapers. One by one, he picked a paper from a stack on the seat at his left, read it, then neatly refolded it and placed it in a second stack rising on the seat at his right. Not the faintest trace of emotion crossed his face as he read those laudatory accounts of his achievements. Not once during the entire trip did he speak or reveal even the slightest hint of his feelings, the meagerest indication of what this flight to a realized dream meant to him.

As the plane reached Karachi, Jinnah's naval aide suddenly saw below the aircraft "the huge desert with its little hills becoming a white lake of people," the white of their robes accentuated by the sun's reflected glare.

Jinnah's excited sister took his hand. "Jinn, Jinn, look!" she called. Jinnah's eyes flicked coldly to the window. His face remained immobile as he stared for an instant at the extraordinary spectacle of the masses in whose name he had laid claim to Pakistan. "Yes," he said, "a lot of people."

So exhausted was the Moslem leader by the trip that he seemed barely able to lift himself from his seat when the DC-3 rolled to a stop. One of the aides offered him his arm to guide him out of the aircraft. Jinnah spurned it. The Quaid-e-Azam was not coming home to Karachi on the arm of another man. With still another effort of his indomitable will, Jinnah, stiffly erect, walked unaided dowQ the steps and through the shrieking, almost hysterical mob to his waiting car.

All the way to Karachi the sea of people they had seen from the plane's window spread like a shimmering white blanket along the car's route. From the dense throng, like the shrieking gusts of a desert wind, came a constantly repeated chant: "Pakistan Zindabad." Only once did the crowds fall silent. A Hindu neighborhood, Jinnah observed; "After all, they have very little to be jubilant about." Later with the extraordinary impassivity that had marked

the entire trip, Jinnah rode without comment or expression through the lower-middle-class neighborhood in which he had been born in a two-story sandstone house on Christmas Day, 1876.

Only as he walked slowly up the steps to Government House, the somber mansion that was now his official residence as Pakistan's first governor general, did a faint hint of the emotions he must have felt emerge from behind Jinnah's cold fagade. Pausing at the top of the stairs to catch his breath, he turned and looked at his new naval aide. His eyes seemed to glow, and for just an instant something vaguely like a smile passed across his face.

"Do you know," he whispered hoarsely to Syed Ahsan, "I never expected to see Pakistan in my lifetime."

The great moment, the moment for which Louis Mount-batten had been sent to India, was almost at hand. In barely thirty-six hours, the three-century-old British experience in India would end and two nations, the second- and fifth-largest in the world, would spring from the loins of British India. That experience was ending far sooner than anyone, even the last viceroy himself, had foreseen when his York flew east out of the morning mists of Northolt Airport five months before.

Now as the end approached, Mountbatten's actions were dominated by one concern. He wanted the raj to go out in a final burst of glory, its recessional permeated with an air of good will and understanding so proud that it might create an atmosphere in which a new relation between Britain and the nations sprung from her Indian Empire could emerge.

There was, Mountbatten knew, one thing that could sour in an instant the atmosphere he was so carefully creating. It was the boundary award that Sir Cyril Rad-cliffe was completing in his green-shuttered bungalow. On no account did Mountbatten want it revealed before the independence ceremonies could be held.

He knew his decision would cause grave complications. India and Pakistan would come into existence without the leaders of either nation being aware of two of the vital components of their nationhood, the number of citizens whose allegiance they commanded and the location of their most important frontiers. Thousands of people in

hundreds of villages in the Punjab and Bengal would have to spend August 15 in fear and uncertainty, unable to celebrate because they would not know to which dominion they were going to belong.

There would be areas without the proper administrative and police arrangements. Knowing all that, Mountbatten was still determined to keep the boundary decision a secret until after August 15. Whatever award Radcliffe had decided on would, he realized, infuriate both parties. "Let the Indians have the joy of their Independence Day," he reasoned; "they can face the misery of the situation after."

"I decided," he advised London, "that somehow we must prevent the leaders from knowing the details of the award until after the fifteenth of August; all our work and the hope of good Indo-British relations on the day of the transfer of power would risk being destroyed if we did not do this."

Radcliffe's I.C.S. aide delivered the report to Viceroy's House in two sealed manila envelopes on the morning of August 13. On Mountbatten's orders they were locked inside one of his green leather viceregal dispatch boxes. The box was set on his desk just before his midday departure for Karachi and the ceremonies marking the birth of Pakistan. For the next seventy-two hours, while India danced, those envelopes would lie in the Viceroy's dispatch case like the evil spirits in Pandora's box, awaiting the turn of a key to deliver their sobering message to a celebrating continent.

In barracks, in cantonments, along military lines, Hindu, Sikh, and Moslem soldiers of the great army being sliced in two along with the subcontinent it had served paid final homage to one another. In Delhi, the troopers of the Sikh and Dogra squadrons of Probyn's Horse, one of the Army's legendary old cavalry regiments, offered a gigantic banquet to the men of the regiment's departing Moslem squadron. They savored together on an open parade field a final feast of mountains of steaming rice, chicken curry, lamb kebab and the regiment's traditional sweet, rice baked with caramel, cinnamon and almonds. When it was over, Sikh, Moslem and Hindu joined hands and danced a last bhanga, a wild, swirling farandole, cli-

maxing the most moving evening in their regiment's history.

The Moslem regiments in the areas which would fall to Pakistan offered similar banquets to their Sikh and Hindu comrades leaving for India. In Rawalpindi, the Second Cavalry gave an enormous barakana, a "good luck" banquet, to their former comrades. Every Sikh and Hindu officer spoke, often with tears in his eyes, to bid farewell to the Moslem Colonel Mohammed Idriss, who had led them through some of the bitterest fighting of World War II.

"Wherever you go," said Idriss in reply, "we shall always remain brothers, because we spilled our blood together."

Idriss then canceled the order he had received from the headquarters of the future Pakistan Army insisting that all departing Indian troops turn in their weapons before leaving. "These men are soldiers," he said; "they came here with their arms. They will leave with them."

The next morning those soldiers who had served under his command owed their lives to his last intervention on their behalf. An hour out of Rawalpindi, the train bearing the Sikhs and Hindus of the 2nd Cavalry was ambushed by Moslem League National Guardsmen. Without their arms they would have been massacred.

The most touching farewell of all took place on the lawns and in the grand ballroom of an institution that once had been one of the most privileged sanctuaries of India's British rulers, the Imperial Delhi Gymkhana Club. Invitation was by engraved cards sent by "The Officers of the Armed Forces of the Dominion of India" inviting guests to a "Farewell to Old Comrades Reception in honor of the officers of the Armed Forces of the Dominion of Pakistan."

An air of "overwhelming sadness and irreality" overlaid the evening, one Indian remembered. With their well-trimmed mustaches, their Sam Browne belts, their British uniforms and the rows of decorations they had won risking their lives in the service of India's British rulers, the men mingling under the lantern chains all seemed to have been pressed from the same mold. In the ballroom the flashing rainbow colors of their women's saris sparkled through the dim lights.

Above all, they talked and drank in the bar, telling the

old stories one last time; the stories of the mess, of the desert, of the jungles of Burma, of the raids against their own countrymen on the frontier, the ordeals and pleasures of entire careers spent together in that special fraternity of the uniform and shared danger.

None of those men could envision on that nostalgic evening the tragic role into which they would soon be cast. Instead, it was arms around one another's shoulders and boisterous cries of "We'll be down for pigsticking in September," and "Don't forget the polo in Lahore," and "We must go after that ibex we missed in Kashmir last year."

When the time came to end the evening, Brigadier Cari-appa, a Hindu of the lst-7th Rajputs, climbed to the raised dance platform and called for silence. "We are here to say l Au revoir' and only l Au revoir,' because we shall meet again in the same spirit of friendship that has always bound us together," he said. "We have shared a common destiny so long that our history is inseparable." He reviewed their experience together, then concluded, "We have been brothers. We will always remain brothers. And we shall never forget the great years we have lived together."

When he had finished, the Hindu brigadier stepped to the rear of the bandstand and picked up a heavy silver trophy draped with a cloth shroud. He offered it to the senior Moslem officer present, Brigadier Aga Raza, as a parting gift from the Hindu officers to their Moslem comrades in arms. Raza plucked the protective cloth from the trophy and held it up to the crowd. Fashioned by a silversmith in Old Delhi, it represented two sepoys, one Hindu, one Moslem, standing side by side, rifles at their shoulders trained upon some common foe.

After Raza on behalf of all the Moslems present had thanked Cariappa for the gift, the orchestra struck up "Auld Lang Syne." Instinctively, spontaneously, the officers reached for one another's hands. In seconds, arm in arm, they had formed a circle, Hindu and Moslem scattered indiscriminately along its rim, swaying in unison together, their booming voices filling the damp and sweltering Delhi night with the words of that old Scottish hymn.