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Then, with his arms round the shoulders of his grandnieces Ava and Manu, the knobby brown man shuffled weakly down the red sandstone pathway leading from Birla House to the vine-covered pergola which served as his prayer-meeting place. Slowly he climbed the three steps leading to the pavilion. A stocky young man in grey slacks, a blue pullover and khaki bush jacket stepped forward and knelt at Gandhi's feet. He was Nathu Ram Vinayak Godse, editor of the extremist newspaper Hindu Rashtra, which had denounced Gandhi as an appeaser of Moslems. "You are late today for the prayer," said the murderer. "Yes, I am," said Gandhi.
Godse suddenly pulled out a tiny Beretta automatic pistol. He fired three times. One bullet ripped into Gandhi's chest, two into his belly. With hands folded, as if welcoming the blow, in the gesture that is both the Hindu greeting and the Christian attitude of prayer, Gandhi fell backward. He murmured, "Ai Ram, Ai Ram" (0 Rama, 0 Rama), in invocation to the gentle hero of the Hindu pantheon, Gandhi's favorite.
"Neither Welcoming. . . nor Shrinking." A sergeant of the Indian Air Force knocked the gun out of Godse's hands and the yelling crowd bloodied the assassin with blows. The police wrestled him loose and bore him off to jail, where he said: "I am not at all sorry for what I have done. . . " His two male secretaries carried the bleeding Gandhi into Birla House. He never spoke again. As his soul seeped out, his grandniece Ava chanted Gandhi's favorite verses from the Hindu holy book Bhagavad-Gita:
"Arjuna asked: 'My Lord, how can we recognize the saint who has attained pure intellect, who has reached this state of bliss, and whose mind is steady? How does he talk, how does he live, and how does he act?' ". . . The sage whose mind is unruffled in suffering, whose desire is not to rouse by enjoyment, who is without attachment to anger or fear—take him to be one who stands at that lofty level. "He, who wherever he goes, is attached to no person and to no place by ties of flesh; who accepts good and evil alike, neither welcoming the one nor shrinking from the other—take him to be one who is merged in the infinite."
Soon one of Gandhi's disciples appeared at the door to Birla House, to speak to the crowd. "Bapuji [little father] is finished," he said. Just 28 minutes after he was shot, Gandhi had died.
"Have Your Bath." A moan went up from the crowd. By the thousands, his followers began to file by the dead man, who was draped in white khadi (homespun cotton) and sprinkled with rose petals. The crush became so great that the body was finally put on a tilted slab on an outside balcony, and bathed in floodlights so that all might see. At the head burned five lamp wicks representing the five elements—air, light, water, earth and fire.
The good friend, disciple and political heir of Gandhi, India's Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, spoke to the nation on the radio, in quivering voice: "Friends and comrades, the light has gone out of our lives and there is darkness everywhere."