The Platform at Lahore
Durgawati Devi Vohra, who carried the party and asked for her full share
On 20 December 1928 a twenty-one-year-old woman walked Bhagat Singh past the police at Lahore station by carrying her own three-year-old son and calling the fugitive her husband. Durgawati Devi Vohra held the HSRA's money, its lawyers and its guns, lost her husband Bhagwati Charan Vohra to a bomb on the Ravi, and fired at Lamington Road in Bombay the night after Bhagat Singh was sentenced. She spent the second half of her life running a school for five children on Cantt Road in Lucknow.
The 8:30 Mail Out of Lahore
It is the morning of Thursday, 20 December 1928. Lahore station smells of coal smoke and tea. Police constables are checking faces at the barrier. Three days ago an officer was shot dead outside DAV College, and the whole city is being searched.
A young woman walks up the platform towards a first-class compartment. She is twenty-one. She is dressed as the wife of a well-off gentleman, and on her hip she is carrying her son Sachin, who is three. Beside her walks a clean-shaven man in a European hat and a good coat. Behind them a thin young man carries the luggage, dressed as their servant.
The police are looking for a Sikh with a beard and a turban. They are not looking for a married couple with a small child. The man in the hat is Bhagat Singh, who cut his hair the day before. The servant with the luggage is Rajguru. The woman is Durgawati Devi Vohra, and in the party everybody calls her Durga Bhabhi.
If the child cries the wrong way, or if one constable looks twice, three people hang. She was asked to do this the previous evening and she said yes the same night. What she was not asked, and what she spent the next two years insisting on, was the rest of the work.
The Woman Who Was Asked at the Last Minute
Durgawati Devi was born on 7 October 1907 in Allahabad, into a Gujarati Brahmin family with roots at Shahjadpur in the United Provinces. She was married at eleven, which was ordinary for a girl of her time and place. Her husband was Bhagwati Charan Vohra, a National College man in Lahore with money behind him, and the marriage turned into something the Raj never planned for.
Vohra wrote for the movement. He drafted the manifesto of the Naujawan Bharat Sabha, the youth body the Lahore students ran, and he kept a house that the party used. Durgawati taught at a girls' school in Lahore. The couple's home became a safe address: a place where a man on the run could sleep, and where a message could be left.