Freedom at Midnight (51 page)

Those rites were symbolic of the ancient passion joining the Hindus and their sacred river. Their mystic union was Hinduism's expression of that instinctive human need to propitiate the inexplicable forces governing man's destiny. From an ice cave at the foot of a Himalayan snowbed 10,-300 feet high, the Ganges ran 1,500 miles to the gray waters of the Bay of Bengal, traversing on its way one of the most torrid, overpopulated areas on the globe. It was a fickle stream, regularly savaging the lands of the peasants who adored it, with floods of appalling intensity and duration. Its route was sprinkled with the ruins of deserted towns and villages, evidence of the abrupt shifts its course had taken over the centuries.

Yet, despite its tempestous nature, every foot of the watercourse was considered propitious, and none more so than those along the gentle four-mile curve it made as it

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swung past Benares. Since the dawn of history, since the time of its contemporaries Babylon, Nineveh and Tyre, Hindus had come there to bathe in the Ganges, to drink its water, to beseech the favor of some capricious god.

Now the silent throngs flowed across the ghats, the stone terraces scaling down Benares' steep river banks to the water's edge. Each pilgrim bore a bouquet of flowers and a little lamp of camphor oil, its flame the symbol of light dispersing the shadows of ignorance. In the river, thousands more, a division of the devout, were already standing waist deep in the slow-moving water, all regards turned east, each rigid, silent figure clutching his flickering lamp, so that from a distance their vacillating lights seemed to skip over the surface of the water like a horde of fireflies.

Every eye fixed on the eastern horizon, they waited for the daily renewal of the heavens' most wondrous miracle, the appearance of a reddish disc sliding up from the entrails of the earth, the God Vishnu in his incarnation as the sun. As its edge slipped into the morning sky, a prayer burst from those thousands of throats. Then in gratitude for one further renewal of God's greatest miracle, they cast their lamps and flowers upon the waters of the Ganges.

In the city this morning, as it did every morning, the honor of being the first person to step across the threshold of the Temple of Gold, Benares' foremost shrine, belonged to Pandit Brawani Shankar. Few men in Benares felt more intensely the joy of this independence dawn than that aging man of God. For years, Pandit Shankar had offered Indian nationalists fleeing the British C.I.D. the sanctuary of his shrine.

A flask of Ganges water and a vial of sandalwood paste in his hands, Pandit Shankar marched through his temple's gloom toward a stumpy granite outcropping. That heavy column rising in the darkness was the most precious Hindu relic in Benares. Shankar's forebears, by hiding it from the Mogul hordes of the Emperor Aurangzeb, had earned for their descendants the right to be its perpetual custodians. That he should bow before it this August morning, humbly thanking the gods for the birth of modern India, was a uniquely appropriate gesture. The cult that that piece of stone represented was the oldest form of worship known to man.

It was the lingam, a stone phallus symbolizing the sex-

ual organ of the god Shiva, the symbol of force and the regenerative power of nature. Benares was the center of the cult that worshiped it. Phalluses studded the city, rising from almost every one of its temples and ghats. At the sun's first rays, thousands of Hindus joined Shankar, expressing their gratitude at the reincarnation of their ancient nation by lovingly caressing those bulbous stone stumps with sandalwood paste, Ganges water and cow dung, garlanding them with marigolds, offering them rose petals and the bitter leaves of Shiva's favorite tree, the bilva*

As the colors of dawn brightened the city, a parade of Untouchables, backs bent under bunches of faggots and logs, descended the steps of the most hallowed spot in Benares, the Manikarnika ghat. A few minutes later, four men carrying a bamboo stretcher on their shoulders appeared at the head of the steps. In front of them marched a fifth man gently stroking a gong, chanting "Ram is Truth." His words were a reminder to all those watching the procession that they too would one day come to the same end as the figure wrapped in a cotton winding sheet on the stretcher.

For centuries, to die in Benares had been the highest blessing to which a devout Hindu could aspire. Death inside a circle thirty-six miles in circumference around the city liberated a soul from the ceaseless cycle of its reincarnations, and entitled it to join for eternitv the wholly enlightened in the paradise of Brahma. That privilege had made Benares a city to which pilgrims came in search, not of life, but of death.

* The origins of the lingam and the cult of its worship are explained by a colorful Hindu legend. Shiva and his wife, Durga, both drunk at the time, were surprised in the act of copulation by the visit of a delegation of their fellow gods led by Vishnu. Absorbed by alcohol and their amatory athletics, the divine couple ignored their visitors. Shocked by such behavior, their fellow gods cursed them both and left.

When Shiva and Durga were informed of what had happened, their shame was so intense that they died in the position in which they had been surprised. "My shame," Shiva proclaimed, "has killed me, but it has also given me new life and a new shape, that of the lingam." Henceforth, he proclaimed, his priests were to teach men to "embrace the worship of my lingam. It is white. It has three eyes and five faces. It is arrayed in a tiger's skin. It existed before the world and it is the origin and the beginning of all beings. It disperses our terrors and our fears, and grants us the object of all our desires."

The bearers brought the remains of the first of this morning's claimants to Benares' boon to the river's edge for a last immersion in the Ganges. One of them pried open the jaws of the anonymous face on the stretcher, and sprinkled a few drops of water down the dead man's throat. Then they placed his body in a waiting pyre. The Untouchables serving the ghat covered the corpse with a pyramid of sandalwood logs and poured a pail of ghee over it.

Skull shaven, his body purified by ritual ablutions, the defunct's eldest son circled the pyre five times. Then an acolyte from the nearby temple to Ganesh, the elephant god, handed him a torch fired at the temple's eternal flame. He thrust it onto the pyre. A rush of flame burst through the log pyramid.

The mourners squatted silently around the pyre as it burned, sending an oily black column of smoke into the sky. Suddenly a dull "pop" came over the crackling of the flames. At the sound, a grateful prayer rose from the mourners. The skull had burst. The soul had escaped from the body. On this morning of August 15, 1947, when India was being released from imperial bondage, Benares, as it did every day, had begun to offer its dead the supreme deliverance.

The first uncertain sputtering of a candle had appeared in the windows of the house on Beliaghata Road just after 2 a.m., an hour ahead of Gandhi's usual rising time. The glorious day when his people would savor at last their freedom should have been an apotheosis for Gandhi, the culmination of a life of struggle, the final triumph of a movement that had stirred the admiration of the world and changed the course of history. But there was no joy in the heart of the man in Hydari House. The victory for which Gandhi had sacrificed so much had the taste of ashes, and his triumph was indelibly tainted by the prospect of a coming tragedy.

As he had been while crossing into the turbulent marshlands of Noakhali that New Year's Day just seven months before, the gentle apostle of nonviolence was assailed this morning by questionings and self-doubt. "I am groping," he had written to a friend the evening before. "Have I led the country astray?"

As he always had done in moments of doubt and pain, Gandhi turned to the book that had so long been his infallible guide, the celestial song of the Bhagavad Gita. How often had its verses consoled him, permitting him to smile in those dark hours when no other ray of light appeared to soften the dark horizons.

Squatting bare-chested on his pallet, Gandhi had begun his personal day of mourning, the first day of India's independence, reading the Gita. His disciples around him, the Mahatma's high, lisping voice had welcomed the dawn with the first of the Gita's eighteen dialogues, the despairing plea of the warrior Arjuna to the gods. They were eerily appropriate to this promising and pathetic moment in Indian history.

"On the field of Dharma, on the holy field of Kuru, my men and the sons of Pandu are arrayed, burning with desire to fight. What must they do, O Sanjaya?"

It was a sound as old as man, the anguished rasp of stone on stone. In a courtyard of the village of Chathar-pur, near New Delhi, the figure sprawled on the ropes stretched taut between the wooden frame of a charpoy opened his eyes. Before him, etched in the amber glow of a twist of cord burning in a saucer of camphor oil, was the image that had marked all the dawns of his adult existence; his wife, bent over the two slabs of a millstone. Her face obscured by the folds of the shawl draping her head, she dumbly churned to powder the grains to sustain another day in the life of an Indian peasant.

That peasant, a fifty-two-year-old Brahman named Ranjit Lai, murmured a brief prayer to Vishnu. Then he stepped past his wife, out of his mud hut, to join the silhouettes of his fellow villagers slipping through the half-light to the nearby field that was the communal toilet for the three thousand inhabitants of Chatharpur.

The foreign rule ending in this August dawn had barely disturbed those peasants trudging dumbly through the shadows. Never in his life had Ranjit Lai addressed so much as a single word to a representative of the alien race that ruled his country. He and his fellow villagers looked upon an Englishman only once a year, when a District Collector visited Chatharpur to verify the exactitude of its paltry contribution to the revenues of the Indian state. The

only phrase Lai could articulate in the tongue of India's old rulers was the one that he and his fellows employed to describe the act they were about to perform: "call of nature."

If the words used to describe it were foreign, however, it was ordered for Lai, a Brahman, by a code of twenty-three strict laws uniquely Hindu in their detail and complexity. Lai carried in his left hand a brass vessel filled with water. The dhoti he wore was neither new nor freshly washed. The field toward which he and his fellows marched had been selected because of its distance from a river bank, a well, a crossroad, a pond, the nearest sacred banyan tree and the village temple.

Reaching the field, Lai hung the triple cord of his Brahman's sacred thread over his left ear, covered his head with his loincloth, and squatted as close to the ground as was physically possible. Anything less was a grave offense, as performing his act from a wall or the branch of a tree would have been. Thus ensconced, he was enjoined from looking at the sun, the moon, stars, fire, another Brahman, the village temple or a banyan tree. When he had finished, he washed his hands and feet with the water in his brass vessel before heading for the village tank for his ritual ablution. Once there, he selected a handful of dirt to aid his wash. Its nature too was rigorously prescribed. The dirt could not come from a white ants' nest, salt earth, a potter's field, a cow pasture, a temple enclosure, or ground touched by the shade of a banyan tree. Mixing his water with the mud, he washed his soiled parts with his left hand.*

That rite accomplished, Ranjit Lai headed back to his hut past the fields from whose reluctant soil he scratched the bare ingredients of survival for himself, his wife and his seven children. Beyond the fields, at the crest of an almost imperceptible rise, Lai could see in the first glimmer of dawn the sweeping branches of a trio of bulbul trees. Like umbrellas, their branches opened over a flat piece of earth. It was the village cremation ground, where for five centuries the dead of Chatharpur had been laid upon their funeral pyres. If there was one inescapable certainty in the circle of certainties that circumscribed that Indian

* To the orthodox Hindu, the navel is the body's frontier. For acts performed below it, the left hand is used; for those above, the right is generally employed.

peasant's life, it was that it would end on a bed of sticks there on the cremation ground.

Beyond, a purplish stone tower pierced the blue-gray horizon like some gigantic phallic symbol. At its left was a pair of graceful domes, ruins of the thirteenth-century metropolis of the Sultan Alauddin, founder of one of the seven cities of ancient Delhi. Barely twenty miles north, in the broad avenues of New Delhi, Ranjit Lai and his fellow villagers had an historic rendezvous this morning. For most of them, it would be the first time they had made that brief journey. Ranjit Lai had been there only once in fifty-two years, to buy a gold bangle in the bazaar for the marriage of his eldest daughter.

This morning, however, for the villagers of Chatharpur as for the inhabitants of all the villages around New Delhi, distance no longer existed. Tributaries of an immense and triumphant stream, they flowed with the dawn toward the center of their rejoicing capital to celebrate in its streets the end of a colonization most of them had not even known.

View Delhi, August 15,1947

"O lovely dawn of freedom that breaks in gold and purple over an ancient capital," proclaimed India's poet laureate in benediction over the crowds swarming into New Delhi. They came from all sides. There were caravans of tongas, their bells jingling gaily. There were bullocks, harnesses and hoofs painted with orange, green and white stripes, tugging wooden-wheeled platforms crowded with people. There were trucks overflowing with people, their roofs and flanks galleries of primitive paintings of snakes, eagles, falcons, sacred cows and cool mountain landscapes. People came on donkeys, on horseback and on bicycles, walking and running, country people with turbans of every shape and color imaginable, their women in bright, festive saris, all the baubles they owned glittering on their arms and from their ears, fingers and noses.

For a brief moment in that fraternal cohort, rank, religion and caste disappeared. Brahmans, Untouchables, Hindus, Sikhs, Moslems, Parsis, Anglo-Indians laughed, cheered, and occasionally wept with emotion. Ranjit Lai