My Mother — Page 121
Devotion and Sympathy 121 had been well thought out. He had watched his intended victim enter his compartment at the Lahore railway station and had noted no doubt with a chuckle how easy his task had been made by the arrangement adopted by him for sleeping. All he had to do was to open the door quietly at an intermediate stop and to plunge the dagger into the chest of the victim with the full strength of his arm. This he did and he must have imagined that his design had been accomplished as he had not perceived the slightest move- ment nor heard a groan. He did not know that Divine mercy had caused his victim to change his position some time before his attack and thus frustrated his design. The dagger was plunged not into the chest of the victim but into the empty space between his legs while he slept peacefully on. There can be no doubt that his mother’s alms and supplications had succeeded in winning Divine mercy for him. In the spring of 1936, Lord Linlithgow succeeded Lord Willingdon as Viceroy and Governor-General of India. The mischief of the Ahrar against the members of the Ahmadiyyah Movement was continuing unchecked. The attitude of Sir Herbert Emerson, Gov ernor of the Punjab, towards the Movement was unsympathetic. In the late summer of 1936, the Ahrar held a con- ference at Daska, the ancestral home of our family. My younger brother, Shukrullah Khan, was in residence at Daska. His house was close to our mosque. On the day of the conference a party of Ahrar appeared in the evening outside our mosque, bent on mis- chief. When the small congregation at the Prayer Service emerged from the mosque the Ahrar gangsters set upon them with sticks and beat them up. My brother received injuries from which he bled on the steps of the mosque. Perceiving that the assailants