Old Delhi — 16 August 1947
Dawn did not arrive with celebration.
It came pale and hesitant, as if even the sun was unsure whether it was welcome.
From the car window, Delhi looked exhausted. Torn posters still clung to walls—Jai Hind, Azadi—their edges curling, their ink bleeding in the early heat. Firework debris lay mixed with broken glass. Somewhere, a dog nosed at the remains of last night's joy.
I had not slept.
Nehru's body was accustomed to long nights, but the mind inside it was not. Every time I closed my eyes, dates surfaced uninvited.
16 August 1947.The day after independence.The day history usually skipped.
The refugee camp rose from the dust like a wound hastily bandaged.
Rows of canvas tents stretched farther than I could see, stitched together by desperation rather than planning. Smoke drifted low, carrying the smell of burnt grain, sweat, sickness, and fear. People moved slowly, as if speed itself had become a luxury.
When the car stopped, silence followed.
Not respectful silence.
Suspicious silence.
They knew who I was.
That knowledge felt obscene.
A camp officer approached, saluting too sharply.
"Panditji," he said, voice hoarse. "We weren't told you were coming."
"I know," I replied.
This visit was not on any schedule.History had not recorded it.
Inside the camp, reality shed its abstractions.
A woman sat on the ground, staring at nothing, her hands wrapped around a child who did not move. No wailing. No tears. Grief had passed beyond expression.
Nearby, an old man argued weakly with a volunteer over a metal cup of water. His voice cracked halfway through the sentence and never recovered.
I had read about refugee numbers.
I had never smelled them.
The historian in me began categorizing automatically—Punjab refugees.Likely from Rawalpindi district.Signs of dehydration.Malnutrition evident.
Then a boy looked up at me.
He couldn't have been more than ten.
His shirt was torn. His feet were bare. There was dried blood in his hair that had not come from him.
He did not ask who I was.
He asked, "Is this India?"
The question landed harder than any accusation.
"Yes," I said.
The word tasted unfamiliar.
As we walked deeper into the camp, the scale revealed itself.
Families without names.Names without families.Children carrying siblings they were too young to understand had become burdens.
A doctor murmured statistics beside me—cholera risk, lack of medicine, not enough hands.
Statistics again.
But here, they screamed.
A man broke from the crowd.
He should not have been able to walk—one arm hung uselessly, wrapped in cloth dark with old blood. But rage carried him forward.
"You promised us safety," he shouted.
The guards stiffened.
I raised a hand.
He was not shouting at me.
He was shouting at the idea of India.
"My wife died on the road," he continued. "My brother was cut down in front of me. You people talk of freedom—tell me, whose freedom is this?"
I had no prepared answer.
The speech had not included this footnote.
"I don't know," I said quietly.
The honesty surprised him.
It surprised me too.
The man stared for a moment longer, then turned away.
No forgiveness.No condemnation.
Just exhaustion.
I found myself kneeling beside a group of women sorting through donated clothes. One of them looked up, recognition flickering across her face.
"You are Nehru," she said.
I nodded.
She held up a torn shawl. "This was my daughter's."
The sentence ended there.
History would later reduce moments like this to rehabilitation challenges.
Standing here, I understood the lie.
This was not a challenge.
It was a reckoning.
As the sun climbed, the camp grew louder. Crying children. Barked orders. Coughing. A rumor of more trains arriving by evening.
Trains.
I knew what some of them carried.
And what some of them no longer did.
For the first time since waking in Nehru's body, the historian in me broke.
Not intellectually.
Morally.
I had known all of this.
And yet, knowing had not prepared me to stand inside it.
Back near the entrance, Patel was waiting.
He must have arrived quietly.
He always did.
"Now you've seen it," he said.
Not unkindly.
Not accusingly.
Simply factual.
"Yes," I replied.
"We don't have time for mourning," he continued. "We need transport, rationing authority, camps expanded. Military coordination."
His voice was steady.
Too steady.
"This will get worse before it gets better," he added.
I looked back at the camp.
At the boy.At the woman with the shawl.At the man who had shouted until his voice gave out.
"I know," I said.
The difference was—he knew it as a statesman.
I knew it as someone who had once judged these decisions from safety.
As we walked back toward the car, a thought struck me with terrible clarity.
History would ask:
Why didn't Nehru do more?
It would never ask:
What would 'more' have destroyed?
Democracy was fragile.The army was stretched.The nation was seconds old.
Every decisive act carried the risk of becoming the very tyranny freedom had escaped.
And yet—inaction had its own body count.
Inside the car, I wrote a single line in my notebook.
Not a policy.Not a plan.
A reminder.
"Never let the future become an excuse."
I did not know yet what that meant.
Only that this day—this uncelebrated, bloodstained dawn—would haunt every decision I made.
The car pulled away.
Behind us, the camp remained.
So did the question.