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

The damage was already so extensive that the human being whose lungs were on that film could have barely two or three years to live.

      Sealed in an unmarked envelope, those X-rays were locked in the office safe of Dr J. A. L. Patel, a Bombay physician. The lungs depicted on them belonged to the rigid and inflexible man who had frustrated Louis Mountbatten’s efforts to preserve India’s unity. Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the one unmovable obstacle between the Viceroy and Indian unity, was living under a sentence of death.

      In June 1946, nine months before Mountbatten’s arrival, Dr Patel had lifted those X-rays from their developing bath and discovered the terrible disease that threatened to put a rapid end to Jinnah’s life. Tuberculosis, the cruel scourge which annually took the lives of millions of undernourished Indians, had invaded the lungs of the prophet of Pakistan at the age of seventy.

      All his life, Jinnah had suffered from delicate health due to his weak pulmonary system. Long before the war, he’d been treated in Berlin for complications arising out of an attack of pleurisy. Frequent bronchitis since then had diminished his strength and weakened his respiratory system to the point at which the effort demanded by a major speech would leave him panting for hours.

      In Simla in late May 1946, bronchitis had again struck the Moslem League leader. Jinnah’s devoted sister Fatima got him on a train to Bombay, but en route his condition worsened. So alarming did his state become that she sent an urgent call to Dr Patel. Patel boarded his train outside Bombay. His distinguished patient’s condition, he quickly discovered, was ‘desperately bad’. Warning Jinnah he would collapse if he tried to get through the reception waiting for him at Bombay’s Grand Railroad Station, Patel bundled him off the train at a suburban station and into a hospital. It was while he was there, slowly regaining his strength, that Patel discovered what would become the most closely guarded secret in India.

      If Jinnah had been just any unfortunate victim of tuberculosis, he would have been confined in a sanatorium for the rest of his life. Jinnah, however, was not a normal patient. When he was discharged from hospital, Patel brought him to his office. Sadly, he revealed to his friend and patient the fatal illness which was stalking him. He was, he told Jinnah, reaching the end of his physical resources. Unless he severely reduced his work load, rested much more frequently, gave up cigarettes and alcohol, and eased the pressures on his system, he did not have more than one or two years to live.

      Jinnah received that harsh news impassively. Not the slightest expression crossed his pale face. There was no question, he told Dr Patel, of abandoning his life’s crusade for a sanatorium bed. Nothing except the grave was going to turn him from the task to which he’d appointed himself of leading India’s Moslems at this critical juncture in their history. He would follow the doctor’s advice and reduce his work load only in so far as it was compatible with that great duty. Jinnah knew that if his Hindu enemies learned he was dying, their whole political outlook could change. They might wait until he was in his grave, then unravel his dream with the more malleable men underneath him in the hierarchy of the Moslem League.^*

      Fortified every two weeks by injections given him in secret by Dr Patel, Jinnah returned to work. He made no effort whatsoever to follow his doctor’s advice. He was not going to let his rendezvous with death cheat him of his other rendezvous with history. With extraordinary courage, with an intense and consuming zeal that sent his life’s candle guttering out in a last harsh burst of flame, Jinnah lunged for his lifetime’s goal. ‘Speed,’ Jinnah had told Mountbatten in their first discussions of India’s future, was ‘the essence of the contract’. And so, too, had it become the essence of Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s own contract with destiny.

      The eleven men seated around the oval table in the conference chamber solemnly waited for Lord Mountbatten to begin their proceedings. They were, in a sense, the descendants of the 24 founding fathers of the East India Company, the men whose mercantile appetites had sent Britain along the sea-lanes to India three and a half centuries earlier. They were the pillars of the empire born of their avarice, the governors of the eleven provinces of British India. They stood at the pinnacle of careers of service to the Indian Empire, savouring that high authority of which they might have dreamed as young men in the remote and lonely postings of their youth. Only two of them were Indians.

      Capable and dedicated men, they offered India the responsible exercise of authority acquired by a lifetime of service. India, in its turn, offered them an opportunity to live in a splendour almost regal in its dimension. The official residences in which they dwelled were palaces staffed by scores of retainers. Their writ ran over territories as vast and as populous as the largest nations of Europe. They crossed their territories in the comfort of their private railway cars, their cities in Rolls-Royces with turbaned escorts, their jungles on elephant back.