by Anita Anand
Back in London, Una, Jack’s mother, was broken by her grief, and it was left to his sister to articulate the family’s feelings. Editorials linking his violent end with his turbulent time in office triggered outrage. No account had been settled here, she said, and nobody in India was happy about her father’s murder: ‘My father always stood for the people of India. Now these people are sorrowing with us.’3
The police, IPI and MI5 put all their efforts into securing a swift trial. Drawn-out proceedings would only encourage copycat killings, and Udham had dangerous admirers, as the threat to Jack O’Dwyer proved. Udham’s demonstrable links to Russia, Germany and the Ghadars would never make it into the public arena. Nor would they be shared with Udham’s dysfunctional defence team. Vickery’s aim remained simple and clear: Udham was to be painted as a criminal, a maverick murderer, and nothing more. He set about surgically removing any political motive.
Udham had once toyed with the idea that he might just survive his Caxton Hall shootings. All he had to do, he figured, was stay alive long enough for Britain to lose the war. If Germany emerged victorious, he might be freed as a political prisoner. It was almost certainly this notion that led him to make blatantly contradictory statements to the police and courts after his arrest. Where first he had proudly claimed ownership of the murder, he now denied it on numerous occasions. He had not known who Sir Michael was; he was just going to protest about his passport difficulties; he had meant to shoot at the ceiling. It had all been a terrible accident.
The deadly accuracy of his shots and the entries in his diary showed those statements to be lies, but Udham persisted. His hope was built on precedent. In his hidden diary, discovered by police at his London flat, were two faded newspaper cuttings.4 These have never been examined before, but give a compelling explanation for his oft-misunderstood denials, which others have used to argue that he might have been insane. Udham was perfectly sound of mind and his contradictions and confusing statements were in fact the last Hail Mary of a man who knew he was going to die, but would have preferred to live.
The first article was about a woman named Hannah Ainsworth,5 an Anglo-Indian who had married a British soldier and was abandoned by him when they came to live in Britain. The desertion, coupled with the racism she had faced, appeared to have driven poor Hannah mad. The press had covered her case with a great deal of sympathy. It did not hurt that she was beautiful:
Judge and jury were faced with unusual facts when Mrs Hannah Ainsworth, a handsome Indian woman, appeared today at Manchester Assizes, where she was sentenced to twelve months in the second division. She had been committed on a charge of assaulting a police officer. A highly educated woman, she had, it was disclosed, married a private soldier in the British army in India, came with him to live at Bury, and, after a separation had taken place, became obsessed with the idea that certain people were keeping her apart from her husband.
Hannah, during a raving fit, had taken to the streets and fired a pistol at police officers. It was never made clear if she knew they contained blank rounds or not. Despite the seriousness of the act, the judge gave Hannah the most lenient sentence he could. Ainsworth’s defence was one that Udham would parrot almost word for word. She had meant to protest, she said. She was a woman with a grievance. Britain had treated her and her fellow Indians badly: ‘[She] said since she came to this country three years ago she had tolerated great insults about her country and people. I have been slighted, she declared. These people do it, only out of prejudice.’6 Perhaps Udham hoped that if he sounded like Hannah, he might be treated like her.
The second cutting told the story of two Indians who got away with murder, quite literally. In December 1931, Santi Ghosh and her friend Suniti Choudhury were just fifteen-year-old schoolgirls when they walked into the office of Charles Geoffrey Buckland Stevens, a British bureaucrat and district magistrate in Calcutta. Producing guns from their school uniforms, they shot him dead at point-blank range.
At the trial, the pair used the dock to make incendiary political statements, claiming they would rather receive the death penalty than imprisonment. They had killed Buckland, they said, in retribution for the hanging of Udham’s hero, Bhagat Singh. Defying the authorities to hang her too, Suniti Choudhury said: ‘It is better to die than live in a horse’s stable.’7
Because the girls were minors, they were spared execution and instead transported for life. Both were released early, in 1938, as part of an amnesty agreement with Gandhi. Perhaps Udham hoped for similar intervention. He could spend time in a British jail, stringing out months between investigation, trial and appeal, he thought.
His plan was wrong on two fundamental levels: there was no desire to string out proceedings, just to string him up; and Gandhi had already washed his hands of him. When he reconciled himself to his reality, Udham decided to take his life on his own terms. In a series of extraordinary letters, written from Brixton Prison, he planned his suicide.
The content of the letters must have sounded bizarre to prison censors. Among the first was a letter to the Sikh Temple in Stockton, California. Though addressed to the gurdwara, it was clearly meant for someone else; the intended recipient was ‘Kumari’.
Everything Udham wrote in prison was vetted, censored and copied, with complete facsimiles being sent to Vickery and Silver at the IPI. It was not the first time both had seen that particular recipient’s name.
A letter to ‘Kumari’ had also been discovered at Udham’s Mornington Terrace flat. At first glance, it appeared to be a love letter. Most of it was written in English:
Sat Sri Akal [the traditional Sikh salutation]
I am kept of your letter with you have written me from New York. My love this is my last letter to you as I hope to be going back to India soon. You will understand what I meen [sic]. Please write to my friends in India . . .’8
The next few lines were written in Urdu: ‘Darling, I used to tell you that our next meeting will be impossible . . . and what I had determined to do made my heart a stone. These things have plunged me into a kind of trance.’9
The separation of these few lines in Urdu suggested they were private and meant for an intimate acquaintance. The fact that two languages were used suggests Udham meant the letter for multiple sets of eyes. Switching to English again, he wrote:
I want you to forgive me not to see you any more you will know reason very soon you always have been in my thoughts and best friend have had in my life. Its only thing I am taking with me one ambition I had to see India free so if I don’t see freedom of India but peoples of my country will see soon. I have no desire of living I think I had seen enough that nobody had the opportunity of seeing so much and the money in the same bank you sent cash from if you will show this letter written by me I should think you will get about 2,600 dollars and send to my sister.10
He had signed the letter ‘Yours ever, M. S. Azad’ – a cool sign-off compared to the passion of his Urdu lines, again suggesting that the letter had messages for more than one person.
That letter, like the entries in his diary, had all the hallmarks of code. The ‘$2,600’ he said would be released upon the production of his badly written and non-legally attested letter was a colossal amount of money in 1940, more than Udham could ever have laid his hands on. There were other things that made no sense. He talked of sending money to a sister, but Udham’s only sibling, a brother, had died in the orphanage.
Was he referring to Lupe? Was he attempting to make arrangements to look after her if the worst came to pass? The name ‘Kumari’ gave nothing away of the identity of the recipient. In Hindi, the word simply means ‘princess’.
Though he knew all his prison correspondence was being vetted, he could not help but try to contact ‘Kumari’ again. Sending his letter once more via the Stockton Gurdwara in California:
Dear Friend,
Few week before [word illegible] had letter from you as you said about my friend Kumari is going back home and should meet her in India. I ha
ve written her many letters that I am unable to see her . . . I said I might be back end of 1940, anyhow if she left America please write to her to my peoples and my sister specifically they should forget all about me. I am not a free man any more to write what I like and go wheresoever I like. The time has changed altogether. And life I am having is short one.11
He then brought up the matter of a ‘car’ which ‘Kumari’ had to find and sell as a matter of urgency. It was a strange thing for a man charged with a capital crime to worry about. Unless the ‘car’ was something else. Something important to the struggle:
The car she left in Continent is still there and I am unable to bring with me as we left the car in Milan thought to go back to India by land so please tell if she can do anything. Write to the firm to sell car for her and it is worth to do, and she will get very easy money then of £200 for doing so. So that is all only one more thing to say to remember what I have told her when I first met her in Riga in 1937.12
There was no record of Udham travelling to Riga in 1937, and if he had met ‘Kumari’ where and when he said, then it would have been on a passport the IPI did not know about. Riga was a well-known stopping-off point for people who wished to travel unseen to the Soviet Union. If ‘Kumari’ was there too, it suggests ‘she’ also had a familiarity with the illicit Moscow corridor. Udham, in his letter, thought ‘Kumari’ might be surprised at the recent turn of events, and he held her partly responsible for it: ‘She bought me to this hell otherwise I would be somewhere else,’ and ‘She could not change my mind and whensoever I talk about [it] she call me some big shot.’13
Had ‘Kumari’ sent him to London to do something else? Had she failed to understand his commitment to his revenge? Had she refused to give him approval? Failed to give him the back-up he might need? The letters raise far more questions than answers, but they do confirm Udham’s frequent trips to Eastern Europe.
Four days later, Udham wrote to ‘Kumari’ again, once more directing the letter through the Stockton Temple in California:
Dear Kumari
Sorry not to write to you before. I have lost your address. But last letter I have written to Dr Roy. Hope you will get and write to my sister about me and try to transfer the money I had in Long Beach to her name, and I like you to go personally to see her when you go back and [get] the car. you must write to the firm they will sell for you. It is not good to me any more.14
Long Beach was one of the places Udham had lived with Lupe, giving more credence to the notion that when he spoke of his ‘sister’, he was talking about her. His desertion of Lupe had been cruel. Perhaps he was trying to do right by her now:
I have murder case against me – do believe me. You can see by the paper I am writing on. It is you who brought me to this country. Still I don’t blame nobody – it is I myself.
But I know one thing, you will not forget me for a few days’ time. It might the time we were together in Continent and the day we nearly drown ourselves in the boat in Warsaw. That time is all over now. I have seen all I could, I think more than anybody else has seen. Remember me some time, you will simply laugh when you have my letter – you will not believe me at all.15
The letter then lurched to the present and flushed with passion:
My dear, I am only waiting for trail [sic]. It might be 22nd or 25th April and soon you will be free girl again. Hope you enjoy your best of life and sincerely I am telling you, you must believe me this time, I thought I could see you once again in my life but how we can – you are thousands of miles away.
I might be dead before you get this letter. I know I am getting married very soon with a thick rope and engagement could not be happy one for both of us.
Dear, you will remain in my heart till my end comes. I love you and shall go on loving you for eternity. I now I shall meet you in the next world if the worst happens.16
The fact that ‘Kumari’ might have been a political contact does not preclude the notion that she also had a sexual relationship with Udham. Police had found condoms with the roubles in Udham’s room. His pedlar friends knew he liked a pretty girl on his arm. It is entirely possible that he had even grown to love this mysterious ‘Kumari’. Having declared passion, Udham returned to business again:
So don’t forget what I have told you, write to my peoples, and to Milan, Italy for the motor car, and go to the bank for me so they can transfer the money. I think it is between $2,500 and $5,000. That is all I want you to do for me because they know you. But unless you go there and tell them the manager will not believe you . . . you must go yourself. So cheerio, my love.17
Apart from the letters he wrote to ‘Kumari’, Udham also wrote several times to his friend Shiv Singh Johal at the Shepherd’s Bush Gurdwara. At first he pretended the two of them were strangers, perhaps trying to save him from being dragged into the IPI’s orbit. He asked for ‘books’, never giving specific titles or places where these ‘books’ might be found. The urgency of his requests led the security services to believe that ‘books’ represented something else. Udham was clear about the books he did not want: ‘I don’t want your Religious Books as I do not beleve [sic] them nor Mohamedenis . . . I am a Prisoner and writing from Brixton Jail. I have to stay here. I am having many body guards and I am well looked after, I hope and wish soon I will be born again when all of you will be old. Because the case against me is case I waited for many years.’18
The IPI was working hard at deciphering Udham’s true meaning, but Shiv Singh Johal took it at face value. He sent a variety of uplifting and poetic texts. Udham wrote again, attempting to make his message clearer. He had no interest in religion, he stressed, yet seemed desperate for one particular copy of the Quran: ‘I have given Quran Sherif in English to some one in the East. If you go that side please ask I think there is one Library in Poplar where they keep Indian books. Thank you.’19
He assumed Johal would know where in ‘the East’ he meant without having to be more specific. To ensure Johal did not take him literally again, Udham added a postscript which sounded insane. Nobody asking for the Quran would follow with: ‘I have left my God in India But I hear there is a English God I do not understand him. And I eat cows and pigs because they are European.’20
Pork is forbidden in Islam, beef is forbidden in Hinduism and Sikhism. Udham was again trying to make clear that when he asked for religious books, he did not really want religious books. Johal failed to understand yet again. He sent him a copy of the Quran along with some Sikh religious poetry.
It was becoming too much for Udham to bear. Addressing his next letter to ‘Mr Jahal Singh’, he deliberately misspelled his friend’s name. ‘Jahal’ is the Hindi word for ‘idiot’. ‘Dear Mr Jahal Singh, I am sending your books back.’21 Udham also instructed his friend to stop fussing over his legal defence: ‘I never care much about dying I am born to die and I must.’22 ‘I do not know who is doing this all lot for me about Soliciter [sic] and Counsel . . . I never afraid of dying so soon I will be getting married with execution.’23
Udham wanted to be remembered like his idol Bhagat Singh, hanged in Lahore on 23 March 1931: ‘I am not sorry as I am a soldier of my country and it is since 10 years when my best friend has left me behind. And I am sure after my death I will see him as he is waiting for me. It was 23rd and I hope they will hang me on the same date as he was.’
Udham signed off again asking for ‘Books’: ‘Plase [sic] do remember to sent the Books soon you have the time. That all I do here. also one (Prayer Book).’24
Udham would ask for his ‘books’ on six separate occasions over the space of three months, and with ever increasing desperation. Shiv Singh never understood what he wanted. Vickery, however, had cracked the code.
In a letter Udham managed to smuggle out under the noses of the censors, thanks to a corrupt warden, he was able to be far more explicit about his needs. Addressing the letter to ‘Mr Singh c/o R. Sharman, 20 Cotton Street, Poplar’, he gave away more than he could possibly have imagined.
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The address had been under surveillance for some time. Udham’s post confirmed Vickery’s suspicions that the house was a dead-letter drop, an address where communications could be collected and forwarded to other eyes. On his envelope Udham had written: ‘This letter is for you, read it.’ He had signed it using the nickname only his closest friends knew: ‘Bawa’.25
The first sixteen lines were in broken English, and clearly meant for the warden who had smuggled his letter out. There were instructions to a friend to pay him for his trouble and to provide a sum of money for luxuries Udham may want in prison.26 The rest of the letter was in Urdu, a language the prison guard could not understand:
That which is written above is all bunkum! Greetings to all. I am not afraid to die. Still I am duty bound to make an effort. I have excited the cupidity of the man who sent this letter by saying that I am sending for money from outside. If there is to be any fuss, you can say that I don’t know this Bawa.
I have no friend but you to whom I can write. You know that now it is a question of life or death. If you have the courage, this is what I want you to do. Get hold of a thick book and in its binding place a saw suitable for cutting iron [a hacksaw blade] about ten inches in length, half an inch in breadth. Can be bought in Woolworth’s [a British general store] for 3d or 6d. It should be made into two pieces and very carefully inserted into the binding of the book so as not to be visible. The book should be Hindustani and should appear old. Send it to me in a parcel and do not write the name of the sender. Do not fail in this. Write the name of somebody else. I shall be sincerely grateful to you. If this succeeds my life is saved and I can hope to do other work which remains. But my life is in your hands, it is up to you to save it or destroy it.