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

reply immediately, then with a chuckle, told an aide, ‘wait a couple of days before putting it in the mail. I don’t want that young man to think I’m dying for his invitation.’

      That ‘young man’ had accompanied his invitation with one of those gestures for which he was becoming noted and which sometimes infuriated his fellow Englishmen. He had offered to send his personal aircraft to Bihar to fly Gandhi to Delhi. Gandhi, however, had declined the offer. He had insisted on travelling, as he always did, in a third-class railway carriage.

      To underline the importance he attached to their first contact and to give their meeting a special cordiality, Mountbatten had asked his wife to be present. Now, contemplating the famous figure opposite them, worry and concern swept over the viceregal couple. The Mahatma, they both immediately sensed, was profoundly unhappy, trapped in the grip of some mysterious remorse. Had they done something wrong? Neglected some arcane law of protocol?

      Mountbatten gave his wife an anxious glance. ‘God,’ he thought, ‘what a terrible way to start things off!’ As politely as he could, he asked Gandhi if something was troubling him.

      A slow, sorrowful sigh escaped the Indian leader. ‘You know,’ he replied, ‘all my life, since I was in South Africa, I’ve renounced physical possessions.’ He owned virtually nothing, he explained: his Gita, the tin utensils from which he ate, mementoes of his stay in Yeravda prison, his three ‘gurus’. And his watch, his old eight-shilling Ingersoll he hung from a string around his waist because, if he was going to devote every minute of his day to God’s work, he had to know what time it was.

      ‘Do you know what?’ he asked sadly. ‘They stole it. Someone in my railway compartment coming down to Delhi stole the watch.’ As the frail figure lost in his armchair spoke those words, Mountbatten saw tears shining in his eyes. In an instant, the Viceroy understood. It was not the loss of his watch that so pained Gandhi. What hurt was that they had not understood. It was not an eight-shilling watch an unknown hand had plucked from him in that congested railway car, but a particle of his faith.^*

      Finally, after a long silence, Gandhi began to talk of India’s current dilemma. Mountbatten interrupted with a friendly wave of his hand. ‘Mr Gandhi,’ he said, ‘first, I want to know who you are.’

      The Viceroy’s words reflected a deliberate tactic. He was determined to get to know those Indian leaders before allowing them to begin assailing him with their minimum demands and final conditions. By putting them at ease, by getting them to confide in him, he hoped to create an atmosphere of mutual confidence and sympathy in which his own dynamic personality could have greater impact.

      The Mahatma was delighted by the ploy. He loved to talk about himself and in the Mountbattens he had a 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 the East in the messages of Zoroaster, Buddha, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Rama. For centuries, however, the East had been conquered culturally by the West. Now the West, haunted by spectres like the atomic bomb, had need to look eastwards once again. There, he hoped, it might find the message of love and fraternal understanding he sought to preach.

      Their conversation went on for two hours. It was punctuated by a simple, yet extraordinary gesture, a gesture which 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 Moghul Gardens for photographs. When they finished, they turned to re-enter the house. The 77-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’d 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 blast of India’s hot season. Under the sun’s white glare the bright dhak trees in the Moghul Gardens seemed to emit sparks, and an orange rind shrivelled into a crisp parchment minutes after it was peeled. The only fresh glade in the city was Louis Mountbatten’s study. The reverence for detail which had led him to paint the study had also led him to make sure 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 ADC 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 sweaters to cover Gandhi’s shaking shoulders.

      When Gandhi was finally warm again, Mountbatten took his guest on to the terrace for tea. A brace of servants brought Mountbatten his in a bone white china service stamped with the viceregal crest. Manu, who had accompanied Gandhi, laid out the spare meal she’d brought along for him: lemon soup, goat’s curds and dates. Gandhi ate it with a spoon whose handle had been broken above the ladle and replaced by a piece of bamboo lashed to its 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, porridge-like 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, however, 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 faces, 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. 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 not a rigid thing. It could vary as his perceptions of a problem changed. That made him flexible but it also, to his British interlocutors, sometimes made him appear a two-faced, cunning Asiatic. 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 serious talk with Gandhi with trepidation. He was not persuaded that the little figure ‘chirping like a sparrow’ at his side could help him elaborate a solution to the Indian crisis, but he knew he could destroy his efforts to find one. The hopes of many another English mediator had foundered on the turns of his unpredictable personality.