CHENNAI: He sat there with his eyes wide, seemingly peering into the ceiling lit by the murky light of the January morning. It was usually that time of the day when he would be going through the day’s newspapers or doing his morning chores. I asked him what the matter was. “It’s 63 years,” he said. “Sixty three years since I heard those shots fired by Nathuram Vinayak Godse.”I was shocked. I had known all along that my maternal grandfather, 86-year-old E K Hariharan, had been one of the 100 military men who had carried Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s open coffin on its way to the funeral. But till the morning of Martyr’s Day 2012, I had never known that my grandfather was actually at Birla House that evening, when Gandhi was assassinated.At the time of Independence, my grandfather had been in the Air Force. He had been stationed at the capital of the new nation, and was among those who were regularly placed on security duty at Birla House, where Gandhi was staying.“Gandhi never liked it. He always used to ask us why there was a need for security at prayer meetings. Still, we were on security detail. There used to be some from the Air Force, Army and Navy for security. I had been on duty at Birla House only the day before,” says Hariharan.“I remember, I was not on duty the evening Gandhi was shot. I had gone to attend the prayer meetings with some of my friends from our camp. We were just about to sit on the floor, when the shots tore through the air. I heard Gandhiji’s voice saying ‘Hare Ram’. Then there was chaos,” Hariharan recalls.“Godse did not try to run. He was captured immediately. I stayed back throughout the evening. I saw Nehru and Sardar Valabhbhai Patel come in. I was witness to all the activity and preparation for Gandhi’s funeral,” he says.Hariharan says he was among the 24 Air Force men picked to carry Gandhi’s coffin the next day. “It was extremely heavy. We did not carry it all the way. A hundred of us, from all the services, shifted the coffin to a wagon and marched next to it all the way to the cremation site at Raj Ghat. Mountbatten sat there throughout, with folded legs,” says my grandfather, in his relation of a dear memory that I had heard many times before.That my grandfather left the armed forces to take up a job in the Railways, and how he waved red and green flags for prestigious trains as Station Master of Madurai Station for years on end is all a part of everyday family lore. But somehow, this entanglement of his in the history of Independent India had never come up so far. Well, not to my knowledge anyhow.It was a sweet, if the usage of that word may be permitted, Martyr’s Day indeed for me. I learnt another pearl of history from the mouths of those who had lived it, instead of labouring through it in our rotting history textbooks. It has made me realise the power of first hand recollections of the smallest details of important events that somehow get left behind from the first draft of history and also from all subsequent drafts. Martyr’s Day 2012 has indeed been an eye opener, for I will be asking my grandparents, parents and other relatives for their memories of our joint history.
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