Five Past Midnight in Bhopal (33 page)

In the northern part of the immense city, in the Railway Colony, the Anglican incumbent of the small white church of the Holy
Redeemer was also meditating with his flock upon the somber predictions of the holy scriptures. Short and stocky with a round
smiling face, the thirty-one-year-old vicar Timothy Wankhede had come originally from Maharashtra. Together with his wife
and ten-month-old baby named Anuradh, the Hindi word meaning “joy,” he lived in a modest red-brick vicarage next to the church.
Like Archbishop de Souza, he poured endless energy into keeping the flame of Christian faith alight in a city inhabited by
an overwhelming majority of Muslims and Hindus. Timothy had become a Christian one day while listening to the radio. He was
twenty years old when an announcement in Marathi, his mother tongue, suddenly came over the airwaves. “He who chooses and
believes in Jesus Christ will be saved and all his kinfolk with him,” said the voice on the radio. “I was overwhelmed,” Timothy
would recount. “I rushed to the only public telephone in the village and called the radio station, wanting to know more about
Jesus Christ.” After being baptized, on what he described as “the most wonderful day” of his life, he had traveled India for
three years, preaching the Gospel. Then he had spent four years at theological college studying for the ordination that would
throw open the doors of the Bhopal parish.

The Reverend Wankhede’s ministry was not confined to leading worship. That first Sunday of Advent, he was preparing to take
his parishioners to visit the city’s various hospitals. “It’s our duty to comfort our suffering brethren,” he said, “and tell
them that Jesus’ hands can heal, if only we believe in him.” In his shoulder bag he carried editions of the Bible in a dozen
different languages. For that Advent Sunday, he had chosen to read a verse from St. Paul to the sick, which in a few hours’
time would prove to be tragically relevant. “O God, forgive your children who were missed by those who had lured them with
the promise of wealth.”

The two men were practitioners of a medical specialty of which crime writers are particularly fond. Sixty-two-year-old Prof.
Heeresh Chandra and his young assistant, thirty-four-year-old Ashu Satpathy, performed autopsies on the corpses that sundry
incidents throughout the year—accidents, crimes or suicide—dispatched to the examination tables of the Department of Forensic
Medicine at the Gandhi Medical College. In a city with six hundred thousand inhabitants, there were plenty of violent deaths,
even on Sundays and holidays. In the absence of a suitably refrigerated morgue, the two pathologists had to be constantly
available to perform autopsies as soon as the corpses came in.

With his dignified air and imposing white mustache, Professor Chandra looked like a maharajah from a Rajput kingdom. Despite
his unusual profession, he was best known for his hobbies: dogs and vintage cars. He owned three sand-colored Labradors and
a 1930 National, known throughout the city for the way it backfired. On December 2, the eccentric professor was getting ready
to take his venerable vehicle and his Labradors out for a drive, as he did every Sunday, to Delawari National Park, a favorite
resort of the Bhopalis.

Meanwhile, his young colleague Ashu Satpathy spent his leisure time indulging his passion for roses. Because the garden of
his Idgah Hills cottage was not big enough, he had transformed the corridors and terraces of the Department of Forensic Medicine
into a rose garden. Dozens of jardinières and pots of flowers stood alongside the rows of jars containing the livers, kidneys,
hearts, spleens and brains that enabled him to extract information from the bodies brought in by the police. Satpathy spent
any free time he had watering, pruning and feeding his dwarf bushes and climbing roses. The same fingers that immersed themselves
in human entrails carried out delicate grafts to produce new varieties, the secrets of which he alone knew. He had given them
such lyrical names as “Black Diamond,” “Moschata,” “Chinensis,” “Odorata” and “Golden Chrysler.” In two days’ time the doctor
was going to exhibit these wonders in the greenhouses at the monumental floral show that, for one week, would turn Bhopal
into India’s rose capital.

Alas the events of that Sunday were to thwart the two doctors’ plans. Toward midday a telephone call from police headquarters
informed them that two bodies, those of a man and a woman, were on their way to the morgue. It was a matter of urgency that
the doctors establish the cause of death.

Before starting work, the two medical examiners enlisted the help of the accomplice who was party to all their dissections.
With his beige cap eternally crammed down over his long hair, the twenty-eight-year-old photographer Subashe Godane looked
more like an artist than an accessory to a postmortem examination. He dreamed of making his mark on the world of fashion and
advertising photography and had assembled an impressive portfolio of women’s portraits that he was preparing to show at the
New Delhi biennial exhibition. In the meantime, he and his Pentax K-1000 supported his wife and three children by photographing
corpses riddled with stab wounds, decapitated children and women who had been slashed to ribbons. Godane was absolutely convinced
that his films had registered every conceivable horror humanity could inflict. He was wrong.

The autopsies on the two bodies took three hours. The absence of any signs of violence on the couple, who were both in their
forties, suggested a double suicide by poisoning. Analysis of the internal organs confirmed Doctors Chandra and Satpathy’s
hypothesis. In the victims’ stomachs they found copious quantities of a whitish powder that had caused extensive damage to
the digestive and respiratory organs. Although the two practitioners were unable to determine the precise nature of the substance,
they were probably dealing with a strong pesticide in the DDT family. Returning to the village where the bodies had been found,
the police discovered that the victims were peasants whom the latest drought had reduced to ruin. Unable to pay back the loans
they had taken out to buy seed, fertilizer and insecticides for their next crop, they had decided to end their lives. Such
cases were by no means unusual in India, nor was the method used. That Sunday, December 2, Carbide’s beautiful factory had
started to sow its seeds of death. In the peasants’ hut, the police found an empty package of Sevin.

A Sunday of prayer and mourning but a Sunday of folly, too. Around a circle of dust in an old hangar attached to the Lakshmi
Talkies, the city’s oldest and largest cinema, clustered three hundred overexcited gamblers. The building shook with all the
shouting and heckling and the din from the loudspeakers. Men in shirts and lunghis, their fingers clutching bundles of rupees,
pushed their way through the onlookers to pick up the bets. In the front row of the arena a light complexioned man, whose
elegant kurta was out of keeping with the general scruffiness, was silently massaging the claws of a cock. Omar Pasha, the
godfather of the bustees, never talked before a fight.

Pressed around him like a bodyguard were his friends from the Kali Grounds led by Belram Mukkadam, Ganga Ram and Rahul. All
had bet on Yagu, Omar Pasha’s champion, the creature with the murderous spurs that the old man was holding on his belly. A
victory that afternoon would open the way to the championships in Ahmadabad in January, then Bangalore in March and finally
New Delhi in April. The creature relaxed, clucking with pleasure as his master gently massaged its thighs, joints and claws.
Then, with the help of a file, Omar Pasha sharpened its spurs and beak into deadly daggers.

The sound of a gong announced the beginning of the fight. The godfather stood up and carefully placed Yagu in front of his
opponent. The two cocks immediately hurled themselves at one another with a fury that roused the fever of their audience.
Beaks and spurs spun in the light like steel-tipped arrows. The blood spurting in all directions did nothing to diminish the
fury of the two combatants. The crowd yelled their names, clapped and stamped their feet. When one of the birds rolled over
in the dust, the audience was nearly delirious. Omar Pasha followed the ferocious battle with the detachment of a Buddha.
Yagu bled, staggered and fell but each time he got up to strike again. With a final blow of his spurs he managed to put out
an eye of his adversary, who collapsed, mortally wounded. Another sound of the gong signaled the end of the fight. The godfather
stood up and retrieved his bloody but victorious cockerel. Parading the creature above his head like a trophy, he greeted
the crowd.

A Sunday of frivolity and freedom from care. Usually closed on Sundays, the stores in the Chowk Bazaar, scattered around the
minarets and golden-spired cupolas of the Jama Masjid, were doing a record trade. That December 2 was, above all else, a day
for marriages blessed by the stars. Elegant ladies from the smart neighborhoods came rushing in to make last-minute purchases.
Necklaces, earrings, bracelets, all kinds of jewelry that were a specialty of Bhopal, were snatched up. Perfumers sold out
their inventories of sandalwood, essence of roses and patchouli. Vendors were plundered of their silks, ribbons and sandals.
It was as if the end of the world were at hand.

On the other side of town, the Arera Club, a splendid institution inherited from the British, was doing the sort of business
it did on all festival Sundays. Its members thronged around an abundantly laden buffet table, the tennis courts, and immaculately
manicured lawns, and the Olympic-size swimming pool and the reading rooms.

Executives from Carbide and other Bhopal companies were entitled to membership in this club that nestled in an oasis of mauve,
bloodred, orange and white bougainvilleas, palm, frangipani and neem trees. With its gala evenings, balls, tennis and bridge
tournaments, and games of bingo, the Arera Club had at one time given the South Charleston expatriates and their young Indian
colleagues a glimpse of the life led by its British administrators in the great days of the empire. Recently things had changed
somewhat. On that Sunday December 2, 1984, there were no longer any American Carbiders sampling the pots of chicken curry
and other Indian delicacies on the buffet. There were hardly even any Indian engineers left; the factory had been deserted
by so many of its local senior staff. One of their few remaining representatives, Works Manager Jagannathan Mukund, had brought
his wife and son, who was on break from university, to lunch there. That evening, Mukund and his wife planned to take their
son to several marriage celebrations. And next day, they were going to show him some of the picturesque sites surrounding
the City of the Begums. The plant had ceased operations, so there was no reason its captain could not be gone for a day or
two.

Not far from the Mukunds’ table, a heated game of bridge was going on. One of the players was a young doctor in white trousers
and a sports shirt. Both a swimming and a bridge champion, the athletic, thirty-two-year-old doctor L.S. Loya had been recruited
in March by classified advertisement to take over the running of Carbide’s on-site clinic. For the son of a Rajasthani corn
chandler who had struggled hard to get his degree in toxicology, landing a job for an international company making chemical
products was an achievement. In eight months, Loya had not had to deal with a single serious medical emergency, which was
just as well because the management had not provided him with any detailed information about the composition of the principal
and most dangerous gas produced by the plant, and even less about how to treat the effects of it in case of accident.