Freedom at Midnight: Inspiration for the major motion picture Viceroy’s House. Dominique Lapierre

stowed on board the Mountbattens’ personal luggage, 66 pieces, a collection so complete it included a set of silver ashtrays with the new Viceroy’s family crest. His wife had casually placed in the overhead rack an old shoe-box. Finding it would cause a moment of panic on the flight out. Packed inside was a family heirloom, a diamond tiara Lady Mountbatten would wear when she was proclaimed Vicereine.

      Stowed away also were all the documents, the briefs, the position papers 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 Mountbatten’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 30 June 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 out of India’s warring politicians. If by 1 October, 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 with two of his old wartime comrades who were going off to India with him. Capt. Ronald Brockman, head of his personal staff, and Lt-Commander Peter Howes, his senior ADC. On how many trips, Brockman thought, had that converted Lancaster bomber carried Mountbatten 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. The crewman announced the flight was ready.

      ‘Well,’ sighed Mountbatten, ‘we’re off to India. 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 mounted the aircraft. The engines came to life. The York fled down the runway, cut across the sun and pointed east to India to close the great adventure Capt. Hawkins had begun by sailing east in his galleon the Hector, three and a half centuries earlier.

^* The third was Leo Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You. He admired Tolstoy’s insistence on applying his moral principles in his daily life. The two men held remarkably similar views on non-violence, education, diet, industrialization, and corresponded briefly before Tolstoy’s death.

^* Dyer was reprimanded for his actions and asked to resign from the army. He was, however, allowed to retain full pension benefits and other rights due him. His demonstration was applauded by most of the British in India. In clubs all across the country, his admiring countrymen took up a collection on his behalf, amassing the then prodigious sum of £26,000 to ease the rigours of his premature retirement.

^* There would be no more immediate beneficiary of the pact than a young Sikh student named Gurcharan Singh. Arms bound behind his back, Gurcharan Singh was walking that morning down a long corridor in Lahore prison towards a courtyard where a hangman waited to put an end to his life.

      As Gurcharan Singh came within sight of the gallows tree, he heard footsteps running down the corridor behind him. He glanced back and saw his English jailer, a major named Martin, running after his party waving a blue piece of paper.

      ‘Congratulations!’ Martin shouted.

      Gurcharan Singh almost fainted. ‘You British are impossible,’ he gasped, ‘you’re hanging me and you want to congratulate me on it.’

      No, the flustered Martin explained, all executions had been suspended because of the pact just signed in Delhi. Several weeks later, Gurcharan Singh was freed. His first, grateful gesture was a pilgrimage to Gandhi’s ashram. There the ardent student revolutionary fell under the Mahatma’s spell and vowed to follow in Gandhi’s footsteps. Ironically it was he who one day would hold in his arms the dying figure of the leader who had saved his life.

^* Cripps did not leave immediately. He nearly succeeded in getting the Congress leadership to break with the Mahatma. The issue was the degree to which they would be allowed to supervise India’s war efforts. Once again, it was Churchill who prevented an agreement being reached.

^* Mountbatten was particularly attached to the converted Lancaster bomber. It had flown him on countless missions during his days as Supreme Commander South-East Asia. He had fitted it out with bunks for a relief crew which would shorten the time required for the London-Delhi journey by eliminating crews’ 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 RAF Group Captain called his ADC, Lt-Col. 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 ADC’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 that I should be allowed to take the York 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.

FOUR

       A Last Tattoo for the Dying Raj

       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 suffering, however. A private drama had accompanied him on his march along those hate-filled footpaths, a drama whose 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 facets of Mohandas Gandhi’s complex character. It would also produce one of the gravest personal crises in the life of the 77-year-old man who was the conscience of India.

      Yet its roots were in no way sunk in the great political struggle of which he’d been the principal figure for a quarter of a century. They lay in that force which Gandhi had struggled to sublimate and control for forty years, sex. Its locus was a nineteen-year-old girl, Gandhi’s great-niece, Manu. 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 which arose in Noakhali had begun 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