Margaret Bourke-White was invited to dinner by Nehru on 17 January 1948. Expecting a prime minister’s dinner to be a formal affair, she managed, after a long day at work, to change into an evening dress and get to the prime minister’s house on time. The atmosphere – totally informal – was stark, almost, and the menu was plain macaroni. But it was a most relaxing evening with a surprise reserved for the end. Rising from the table, Nehru said this was going to be his last meal for a while since he, too, had decided with several others, he said, to fast along with Gandhi.
But the next day, Day Six, brought relief. Over 100 representatives of different communities called on Gandhi greatly weakened by his fast. They included a representative each of the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS. “We shall protect the life, property and faith of the Moslems and (undertake to see) that the incidents that have taken place in Delhi will not happen again,” they pledged. After prayers were recited, Gandhi accepted a glass of orange juice from Maulana Azad. The relief was palpable, with Nehru’s being the greatest. On learning, after Nehru had left his side, that the prime minister had also fasted with him, a deeply moved Gandhi sent him a note saying, “Now end your fast… Live for many long years as Hind’s Jawahar.” The note was in Hindi, with “many long years” written as bahut with the u in it elongated – most probably a writing error, but the bahut spoken as it was written by him – bahuut – gave the benediction a voltage of its own.
The funds due to Pakistan, it need hardly be said, were released.
Taru, then all of thirteen, was in Birla House one day that January, when a slight drizzle prevented Bapuji from stepping out for his walk. He decided to pace inside one of the larger rooms of Birla House, instead. She joined her grandfather and, as he walked, summoned up the courage to ask him something that had long been her wish to ask (in Hindi, of course): “Bapuji, what do you think the future holds for me?” This was in its soul, very similar to the questions in the famous “Que sera sera” song Doris Day was to make famous in the 1956 film The Man Who Knew Too Much:
When I was just a little girl
I asked my mother, what will I be
Will I be pretty? Will I be rich?
Here’s what she said to me....
Bapuji was at that time besieged by issues of existential import for him and for the country, and getting a query like this one was not designed to help him. But no. He fell silent for a while and then, with great seriousness, without vague platitudes or irritated brevity, said, precisely, purposefully in Hindi (some original expressions in Hindustani italicised with meanings given in brackets), “Your father has very high armaan (aspirations) for you. He would like you to study diligently and put your studying to good account. Your father will help you go around and see the desh, videsh (country and the world). You will go around the world. And after you have done that, come back and take up a calling that seems you to be sahi (right). And make your mother Lakshmi your adarsh (ideal).” There was no sanctimonious talk about marriage or raising a family. Nothing about “being a good girl”. Only a carefully wrought, carefully thought-out sketch of optimism and responsibility about her future. Somewhere hidden in that was, of course, a “the future’s not ours to see” idea, but overlaying that, there was a clear aspiration for the granddaughter but – and this is what made it so special – pointedly expressed as her father’s not her grandfather’s vision for her.
Right at this moment of catharsis, a group of people was silently, diligently, and methodically planning to kill Gandhi. The men fumbled on details along the way, but finally put together a plan to carry out their intent, with chilling efficiency. A non-lethal bomb was planted at the venue of the prayer meeting on 20 January to be set off at an appointed moment by Madanlal Pahwa (1927–2000), a young refugee from West Punjab. The scheme was that as the bomb went off, there would be some panic, during which two of his associates from Maharashtra, would fire at Gandhi from behind a trellis. But the scheme misfired as Gandhi controlled the crowd’s nerves at once with simple, direct words, asking for composure. And by asking Manu to start singing the Ramdhun, which she did. While the bomb-planter was apprehended, the would-be assassins fled.
All India Radio, which was now recording all of Gandhi’s prayer meeting speeches, recorded this one too. We used to have a gramophone record player with its snakelike needle-hold that had a spring which needed to be cranked into playing each time the record gave over. Many years later, I would play the 78-rpm gramophone record of this over and over again, to hear Bapuji speaking to the congregation in his soft, coaxing voice, interrupted by the sudden dull but clear thud of the bomb leading to an immediate cawing of agitated crows, and sounds of human voices in the melee and then Bapuji saying, with a pained laugh, “Kuchh nahin hua hai…shant ho jayiye… (Nothing has happened…please…observe silence…)”
That “kuchh nahin” (nothing) was to happen as “something else” ten days later.
“Hai bahar-e-bagh duniya chand roz
Dekh lo iska tamasha chand roz”
The 79-year-old repeated Nazeer’s Urdu lines in what his secretary Pyarelal describes as “a tone of infinite sadness”. This was on 29 January 1948.
It is appalling that no one, not Mountbatten, not Nehru, not Patel, not Rajaji, thought of telling each other that it is a good thing the “bomb” was not serious, an even better thing that the bomber has been caught, but now that he has been, they must get to the bottom of the murky business. Was the man acting alone? Did he have fellow conspirators? Maybe there was a deep conspiracy; maybe this was a dry-run (as it indeed was). Now let us, they should have said, leave nothing to chance. But no. No one thought on these lines. They were great and astute administrators. But in the matter of Gandhi’s personal security, they were totally naive.
30 January 1948 was just another wintry day in Delhi. Our household stirred slowly to life that morning, with Taru going to her “Girls Only” school, St Thomas in her white and green uniform but custom-made by permission of the school for the Gandhi family, in khadi, not the “mill” yardage that other girls got theirs tailored in. She was driven to school by our driver, Pan Singh, a distinct advantage, for that enabled her to have a few extra minutes at home to get groomed, the combing down and plaiting of long tresses being no small chore. Likewise, Mohan and Ramu got into their uniform, stitched by Modern School’s special leave, in blue khadi, and ambled off to their school, a 15-minute walk away, on the leafy Barakhamba Road. They just had enough time to reach school in time for the morning assembly held in the gymnasium, with all students taking off their shoes outside, squatting four-legged on rugs, their stockinged feet stinking to the roof. The teachers, led by the dashing Principal MN Kapur (1910–94) and the reflective Awadh Kishoreji, were on the stage.
While Pan Singh drove Taru home as usual in the afternoon, Mohan and Ramu tarried in school because of a sporting event.
In Birla House, moving to the prayer ground faster than he usually did, for he had been delayed by a conversation with Sardar Patel, “I hate being late,” Gandhi said to Manu and Abha in Gujarati as they reached the prayer ground. That was his last full spoken sentence.
A jostle and the rosary and prayer book Manu was carrying had fallen as a man who pushed his way into their path gave the girl a heave.
Without a doubt, Gandhi observed this. He was hypertensive, and at that moment, his blood pressure must have spiked. Anyone’s would have, seeing a girl from the family being rough-handled by some random man. And I can imagine him saying to the intruder, had he been allowed the chance, “Kya kar rahe ho…? Yah bhi koyi tariqa hai? (What are you doing? Is this the way to behave…?)”
But he was not given that chance. For the next second, he was absorbed in the Ram that he longed to be one with. Abha, his grand-niece-in-law, a daughter of Bengal, cradled the sinking head in her lap, with Ram’s name on his lips.
He had become, as Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay was to write, an icchhamarani, one who meets the end he has wished for.
Taru was minding her two-and-a-half-year-old brother, me, when a scurry of activity, more scurried than the usual, saw her parents rush out, leaving her, bewildered, to continue minding me. A few minutes later, someone ran into the house saying, “Come, come, you have to go to Birla House…There is a car waiting for you…Bapuji has been…” Grabbing me, in a few seconds of incoherent reflex actions later, she was down the flight of stairs and into the car, which sped like lightning to where her parents had gone. The gates of Birla House had been shut tight to keep out a large crowd that had already gathered there. Sentries stood on duty. “Hame andar jaane dijiye (allow us to go in)”, she told them, clutching me to her chest. The men, at first, refused. “Mein Bapuji ki poti hun (I am Bapuji’s granddaughter)”, she remonstrated. This had to and did work. Our parents were there, already, in the room where Bapuji had been laid on the floor. Puzzled and completely uncomprehending, I was deposited by Tara on my mother’s lap.
Henri Cartier-Bresson, who had managed to access the room with his magical camera, has captured the scene in a hazy photograph snatched from the moment of shock, grief, and stunned prayer, for no one knew what. India, perhaps.
Seeing the stir and hum of words floating in the air, I said, in a repeat of my old mimicry of Bapuji: “Sab shant ho jayiye…adding, for good measure, Bapuji so rahe hein… (Bapuji is sleeping…)” precipitating a renewed bout of muffled sobbing by those around me.
I, of course, remember nothing of all this. Family lore’s stock of remembered “footage” tells me this is what I said.
Devadas, crying like the child that he was to the man slain, kept saying, “Wake up, wake up, please, Bapu, wake up.” Patel, in disbelief, thought he could feel a pulse on the lifeless arm until doctors told him with a grave shaking of their heads that he was wrong. It was all over. He sat, wordless, crushed. And looking, as Manu was to say later, suddenly, very, very old. Jawaharlal, the political heir to the assassinated Father of the Nation, broke down. But he was not going to forget his duties as prime minister. He went to the gates of the house and, standing on top of them, announced, for the first time, to the throng outside, including the press, that Bapu was no more.
Excerpted with permission from The Undying Light: A Personal History of Independent India, Gopalkrishna Gandhi, Aleph Book Company.
