January 30, 1948

India had been independent for five months and cut in two for five months, and something like a million people had been killed in the crossing.

He was seventy-eight and had been fasting. He had eaten again on the eighteenth of January when the leaders of Delhi came to him and promised the killing would stop. A bomb had been thrown at him at a prayer meeting two days after that and had missed. He would not have the police search the people who came to hear him.

On the thirtieth he was late for evening prayers. He came out into the garden at Birla House at about ten past five, leaning on the shoulders of two of his great-nieces, and a man came out of the crowd and bowed to him. Somebody moved to push him back, thinking he meant to touch the old man's feet. He had a Beretta in his hand and fired three times into the chest.

Gandhi died within minutes. His last word, by most accounts of the people standing there, was Rāma.

His body was carried to the Raj Ghat on a gun carriage the next day, drawn by ropes rather than horses so that people could pull it. The route was five and a half miles and something like a million people lined it. Nehru broadcast to the nation that night and said the light had gone out of their lives.