Five Past Midnight in Bhopal (32 page)

The ritual for an Adivasi marriage is as strict as any that unites high-caste Hindus. Nine days before the ceremony, Padmini
and Dilip had to submit themselves to all kinds of ablutions in the homes of neighborhood families, before a meal and the
presentation of gifts to equip their household. Four days later, the married women took charge of the young couple for a purification
ceremony, in which they were rubbed down with castor oil and other ointments that smelled strongly of saffron and musk. Once
this oiling had been completed, they proceeded to the interminable trying on of the wedding outfits made by the tailor Bassi.
The cost of these outfits had been subject to keen negotiation. For a humble coolie working at the train station, marrying
his daughter off meant substantial sacrifices.

Three days before the wedding, Ratna Nadar and several of his neighbors built the
mandap
, the platform on which the union would be celebrated. This was a dais about ten yards wide, raised about twenty inches from
the ground and made out of mud coated with a smooth, dry mixture of cow dung and clay. Branches from two of India’s seven
sacred trees covered the sides of the platform and in the middle, on an altar decorated with flowers, stood the image of the
god Jagannath. Strings of lightbulbs provided the finishing touch to the decorations. On the evening of the ceremony, they
would be lit by a generator hired for the occasion. Belram Mukkadam had chosen a prime position for the celebration. Padmini
and Dilip would be married where all the community’s great events took place—on the teahouse esplanade—looking out at the
tanks and pipework of the plant that represented the hope of a better life.

T
he dawn prayer. Every morning Bhopal awoke to the call of the muezzins from high up in the minarets. Sunday December 2, 1984,
however, was no ordinary day. In a few hours time the City of the Begums was due to celebrate Ishtema, the great prayer gathering
that, once a year, brought thousands of pilgrims from all over the country, as well as Pakistan and Afghanistan, to the heartland
of India. Ratna Nadar had been obliged to temporarily abandon preparations for his daughter’s wedding and go with the other
station porters to meet the special trains overflowing with the faithful. There would never be more people in Bhopal than
on that Sunday. The excitement had already come to a head in the Taj ul-Masajid, the great mosque where teams of electricians
were installing the floodlighting that would illuminate the splendid building for a week. Volunteers were unrolling hundreds
of prayer mats and hooking up loudspeakers that, for three days and three nights, would broadcast the celebration of the greatness
of Allah.

All around the city’s mosques and outside the hotels on Hamidia Road, the bus station and the railway station, hundreds of
street vendors were taking up their positions. Ishtema was a lucrative time for any business in Bhopal. Jolly and rubicund,
his lip accentuated by a thin mustache and his forehead decorated with Vishnu’s trident, Shyam Babu, a forty-five-year-old
Hindu, was the proprietor of the city’s largest restaurant. Muslim, Hindu or secular, the many festivals in the Indian calendar
made his fortune. Situated in the old part of the city, his establishment, the Agarwal Poori Bhandar, could serve up to eight
hundred patrons a day and never closed. “Our meals are the best and the cheapest in town,” he assured people. And it was true;
for ten rupees, the equivalent of less than fifty cents, one could eat one’s fill of vegetables, chicken or fish curry and
samosas. But Shyam Babu was not just a businessman; he was also a kind man. The lepers and beggars who hauled themselves up
the steps of the great mosque, and the penniless pilgrims who camped out in the ruins of the palace of Begum Shah Jahan knew
that they would always find a bowl of rice and vegetables if they went to him.

Shyam had started that Sunday as he began every day, with a morning prayer in the small temple to Lakshmi, goddess of wealth.
He had brought her baskets of fruit and flowers, for he was going to have particular need of her support that day. For him,
the eve of any festival was always difficult. The massive arrival of visitors meant that many police reinforcements had to
be brought in. The municipal government counted on Shyam to feed these men. It had become a tradition. The restaurateur had
ordered up an extra 650 pounds of potatoes, the same quantity of flour, and doubled the stocks of fuel to supply his fifteen
ovens. “Don’t you worry, I could feed the whole city,” he informed the police chief who had come to make sure that his men
would be adequately nourished.

Not far from Shyam Babu’s restaurant, a notice board drew attention to another, rather quaint business, which had sprung into
action for this Sunday unlike any other. For three generations the Bhopal Tent and Glass Store had been renting out equipment
and accessories for the city’s weddings and public celebrations. The grandson of its founder, fifty-two-year-old Mahmoud Parvez,
a Muslim who looked like a mullah with his little goatee and his embroidered skullcap, ran his business by telephone from
a worktable set up in the street. The warehouse behind him was a veritable Ali Baba’s cave whose secrets he alone knew. In
it were piles of plates, crates of glassware, drawers full of cutlery, candlesticks of all sizes, old gramophones, antique
generators, elephant bells, flintlock guns and harquebuses. Parvez’s pride and joy was a gleaming Italian percolator. “I’m
the only one in town, in the whole of Madhya Pradesh even, who can serve espresso coffee!” he boasted. What had earned him
the most renown, however, was his impressive collection of carpets and shamianas, the multicolored tents used for public and
private ceremonies. He had them to suit all tastes and all budgets; some could even hold up to two thousand guests. Others,
by virtue of the refinement of their patterns, were real museum pieces. Parvez only hired them out on very special occasions
and then only to friends or people of prominence. That Sunday, his staff was preparing the most beautiful shamiana for the
wedding of the daughter of the controller-in-chief of the Bhopal railway, the Hindu Ashwini Diwedi, whose brother Sharda was
managing director of the city’s power station, two people of standing whom Mahmoud was eager to please. The remaining rugs
and shamianas would be used in the day’s numerous other weddings, the Ishtema festival on the following day, as well as the
mushaira, the poetry recital arranged for ten o’clock that night in Spices Square. For this event, Parvez would also be providing
small cushions so that the poets could relax between recitations, accessories all the more necessary because a number of these
men of letters were members of the celebrated Lazy Poets’ Circle.

Mahmoud Parvez rubbed his hands as he watched his storehouse empty. That Sunday was going to be an auspicious one for the
Bhopal Tent and Glass Store.

The feverish preparations had spread as far as the workshops of Kali Grounds’ two main artisans. The shoemaker Mohammed Iqbal
had been working since dawn to finish the shoes made of Agra leather and sandals encrusted with precious stones that several
of the wedding guests had ordered. With the help of his young apprentice Sunil Kumar, the son of poor peasants newly arrived
in the bustee, he cut, trimmed and sewed away, surrounded by the suffocating smell of glue and varnish that filled the hut
where his wife and three children were still sleeping. Across the way, in hut No. 240, his friend Ahmed Bassi had also been
up since dawn, finishing embroidering the saris and veils ordered by the wealthy families of Arera Colony for their daughters’
weddings. Bassi had such fine silk fabrics brought from Benares that his shop attracted Bhopal’s smart set, despite its location
in the poor quarter. Five times a day, he thanked Allah for all the benefits He had bestowed upon him. His order book was
overflowing. In two weeks’ time, it would be Eid, the most important festival in the Muslim year. The treadle of his sewing
machine would not stop, as he made kurtas out of satin and sherwanis in Lucknow brocade.

At the other end of town, in a church with a slate-covered steeple in the Jehangirabad district, on that same December 2,
Bhopal’s Christian minority gathered to celebrate Advent. The first Sunday in Advent was the beginning of a time of prayer
and recollection leading up to the year’s most important Christian festival: Christmas. A life-size crèche commemorated the
birth of the Messiah in a Bethlehem stable. A noisy and colorful congregation of women in superb saris with the embroidered
ends covering their heads, and sumptuously dressed men and children filled the nave, cooled by a battery of fans. Majestic
in his immaculate alb and red silk vestments, Eugene de Souza, the Roman Catholic archbishop, originally from Goa, read the
first psalm with fervor. “Awake thy glory, O Lord, and deliver us, for our transgressions have led us into imminent danger.”

That morning one pew remained unoccupied. Sister Felicity had called the prelate to ask him to excuse her, and to request
that his vicar, Father Lulu, come to Ashanitekan, the House of Hope, to give mass for the handicapped children in the building’s
small chapel. There, to the right of the altar stood a large picture of Jesus, under which were inscribed the simple words:
I AM WITH YOU ALWAYS
.

A dozen children were kneeling on jute sacks sewn end to end. Among them was Raina, the little girl with spina bifida, whom
the nun had put in her own bedroom in order to better care for her. For much of the time, especially at night, her illness
plunged her into a comalike state, almost as if she were dead. The previous night, however, Raina had suddenly woken up, screaming.

“People with this kind of illness have a very special sensitivity,” Sister Felicity explained. “Raina never woke up in the
night unless something unusual was going to happen, like a storm, or the beginning of the monsoon. But the weather was so
beautiful in Bhopal that second day of December that I couldn’t understand why all at once she started to yell.”

The nun was to find her answer in the gospel that Father Lulu read that day. “The sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall
not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken …”