The morning of 9 September 1947 was humid and strained. Independence was three weeks old. Partition was already tearing the capital apart. Gandhi had left Calcutta two nights earlier. To avoid the crowds at Howrah he was driven to Belur, a wayside station. The party reached the platform around nine. West Bengal’s ministers came to see him off. At 9.30 p.m. sharp on 7 September the Delhi Express pulled out. Gandhi named the train himself in a letter that day to Manibehn Patel. He was still writing on board on the 8th. The train did not go on to Delhi Junction. The old-city station was no longer safe. It stopped at Shahdara on the morning of the 9th.
Sardar Patel and Rajkumari Amrit Kaur were on the platform, along with local freedom fighter B.D. Santoshi and his companions. Gandhi looked tired. Before he left the station he asked the people of Shahdara not to let rioters succeed in their neighbourhood. In that pocket of the city, his words held. Peace did not vanish from Shahdara as it did from so many other quarters.
This was his last train journey.
The next evening, at a prayer meeting, he said what he had seen on arrival: the usual smile had gone from Patel’s face. He asked whether “the city of Delhi which always appeared gay” had “turned into a city of the dead” (Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 89).
He had first stepped onto a Delhi platform on 12 April 1915, at Delhi Junction, with Kasturba. They stayed at St Stephen’s College in Kashmiri Gate, guests of Principal Sushil Kumar Rudra. Thirty-two years later the route into the capital itself had changed.
He could no longer return to Valmiki Basti on Mandir Marg. Refugees now occupied the ground. His new address would be Birla House, on Albuquerque Road- today’s Tees January Marg.
He had lived in a small room at the Valmiki temple from 1 April 1946 to 10 June 1947: 214 days. Krishna Vidyarthi, who looks after the place now, says that while Gandhi stayed there he was fully safe. The Valmiki community guarded him day and night. He taught the children Hindi and English, morning and evening, and kept waiting leaders until the class was over. Nehru came. So did Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, who stayed with him more than once. Louis Fischer came to interview him for The Life of Mahatma Gandhi, the book that later underpinned Richard Attenborough’s film.
From that room he had gone out to Noakhali, Bihar and Calcutta when the riots began. He had said he would return and teach the children again. Between his leaving and his coming back, India became free. Lakhs of Hindu and Sikh refugees poured in from across the border. Many Muslims left for Pakistan. In a few months the face of Delhi changed. On the road from Shahdara to Birla House, Gandhi would have seen parts of the city still burning.
At Birla House he began all-religion prayer meetings. “In the early days, only passages from Hindu, Muslim, Christian and Sikh scriptures were recited,”says Brother Solomon George, who is part of the All Faith prayer at Rajghat for the last three decades. After Noakhali, Bihar and Calcutta, he now turned to Delhi. The violence did not yield quickly. Those last 144 days were spent in a small ground-floor room of the mansion (Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: The Last Phase).
On 14 September he went to Idgah and Motia Khan. At both places Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims told him their losses. Refugee survivors were shocked when he said that Muslims had a right to live in India.
The riots still did not stop. On 13 January 1948 he began an indefinite fast. The last fast of his life to put moral pressure on the city. It worked. On 18 January he broke the fast after leaders of all communities signed a written pledge of peace.
Two days later, on 20 January, a bomb exploded at the prayer meeting. K.L. Madan, who recorded the meetings for All India Radio, remembered a crude blast that hurt no one. The papers named Madan Lal Pahwa. Gandhi asked that the man be forgiven.
On 30 January 1948 he was killed. After that, his ashes left the city from New Delhi and Delhi Junction, travelling to different parts of the country - a last railway journey he did not take himself.

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