Five Past Midnight in Bhopal (42 page)

With a wet towel over his mouth, Sherma left his post to run to the head of the train and order the engine driver to leave.
He knew that this order was illegal. All trains stopping in Bhopal were required to undergo routine mechanical checks. Curtailing
a stop meant preventing these checks. That night, however, there were no maintenance teams or parts supervisors left. There
were only hundreds of people who might yet be saved. Terrified that the vapors might already have reached the engineer, that
he might have passed out or be dead at the controls of his locomotive, Sherma hurried as fast as he could. Recognizing his
uniform, dying people clung to him in a last desperate effort. Others threatened him and tried to block his way, demanding
help. Stepping over bodies and slipping in vomit, he at last reached the front of the train. There, his railway worker’s reflexes
came back to him. He took his little flag out of his pocket and banged on the window of the locomotive’s cab.

“All clear. Depart immediately!” he announced.

That was the ritual formula. The engine driver responded with a nod of his head, took the brakes off and leaned hard on the
regulator of his diesel engine. To the accompaniment of grinding noises and whistle blasts, the Gorakhpur Express extricated
itself from the dreadful necropolis. Drenched in sweat, breathing painfully and with a pounding heart, but proud of his achievement,
the deputy stationmaster picked his way back through the carnage to his office at the other end of the platform. But Bhopal’s
stationmaster’s office was no longer recognizable.

The small notice “
A/C OFFICE
” displayed over the door had attracted some of the passengers driven frantic by the toxic cloud. In the conviction that the
gases would be unable to get into an air-conditioned room, they had rushed in, destroying everything in their path, breaking
up the train indicator board, tearing out the telephones. Disaster reigned. Even the appearance of the tall figure of Dr.
Sarkar failed to calm the plunderers’ fury. The railway doctor had managed to get to the station on foot. He was carrying
a bag with a red cross on it, a derisory symbol in this setting of agony and death. He had filled his bag with bottles of
eye lotion, cough lozenges, bronchodilators, cardiac stimulants and anything else he could find in his medicine cabinet. But
what use were such remedies? The doctor bent over the first body. Then, on the platform, he came across a scene that would
haunt him for the rest of his life: a baby suckling at the breast of its dead mother.

Like many other passengers on the Gorakhpur Express, Sajda Bano had not heard the deputy stationmaster’s announcement. She
got out with her two children and her suitcases. In the yellowish mist enveloping the platform, she tried to look for the
figure of the good Mr. Khan, her husband’s friend. But with her eyes smarting from the vapors, she could only make out a confusion
of corpses in a deathly silence. “It was as if the train had stopped in a cemetery,” she was to say. Three-year-old Soeb and
five-year-old Arshad were immediately assailed by the gases and racked with coughing. Sajda herself felt her throat and trachea
become inflamed. She could not breathe. Stepping over the corpses, she dragged her sons toward the waiting room in the middle
of the platform. The room was filled to overflowing with people on the verge of death, coughing, vomiting, urinating, defecating
and delirious. Sajda stretched the two boys out in a corner of a seat, put a teddy bear, a gift from their grandmother, in
the youngest’s arms, and placed two wet handkerchiefs over their little livid faces. “Don’t worry,” she told them, “I’m going
to get help and I’ll be back straightaway.” As she went out, she passed the window to the ticket sales and reservations office.
With his lifeless head propped on a pile of registers, the portly Mr. Gautam looked as if he was sleeping.

All night long Sajda Bano wandered about among thousands of Bhopalis, looking for a vehicle to come and take her children
to a hospital. The panic in the station and surrounding area was such that she did not get back to them until the early hours
of the morning. She found her two boys where she had left them. Little Soeb was still clutching his teddy bear to his chest
and breathing weakly, but clotted blood had formed a red ring around the motionless lips of his brother Arshad. Sajda knelt
down and put her ear to the frail, lifeless chest. Carbide’s gas had taken her husband. Now it had stolen one of her children,
too.

I
t was a silent, insidious, and almost discreet massacre. No explosion had shaken the city, no fire had set its sky ablaze.
Most Bhopalis were sleeping peacefully. Those still reveling in the reception rooms of the Arera Club, under the wedding shamianas
of the rich villas in New Bhopal, or in the smoke-hung rooms of Shyam Babu’s restaurant, overrun that night, as every Sunday
night, with the medical college students—all those people suspected nothing. In Spices Square in the old city, an exultant
crowd went on acclaiming the mushaira’s poets. Salvos of ecstatic “Vah! Vahs!” shook nearby window panes. Even the eunuchs
had turned out in force, a rare occurrence, because it was one of their rules to be home by sunset. The presence of the legendary
Jigar Akbar Khan, however, and of several other masters of poetry from all four corners of the country, had persuaded the
gurus of the various eunuch “families” to give their protégés free reign. There was just one condition: they must travel in
groups of four. The audience contained some of the more famous members of their unusual community: the plump Nagma, for example,
the ravishing Baby and the disconcerting Shakuntual with his large, dark, kohl-encircled eyes.

In keeping with tradition, the mushaira also gave a few unknown amateurs the opportunity to recite their poetry. The Muslim
workman who, until twenty-three hundred hours, had been busy flushing out the pipes in the Carbide factory, was among those
privileged few. When his turn arrived, however, Rehman Khan froze with fright. His young son Salem took his hand and led him
onto the stage. The crowd held its breath. The hands that had just set off an inevitable tragic sequence gripped the microphone.

Oh my friend, I cannot tell you

Whether she was near or far
,

Real or a dream …

The worker-poet spoke fervently, his eyes half-closed.

It was like a river flowing through my heart.

Like a moon lit up, I devoured her face

And felt the stars dance about my head …

Jagannathan Mukund would not go picnicking with his son beside the Narmada’s sacred waters the next day. The sound of his
telephone ringing had just rudely awoken the works manager of the factory where Rehman Khan worked. S.P. Chowdhary, his production
manager, informed him that a gas leak had occurred in the MIC storage zone. Mukund refused to believe it. He simply could
not let go of the idea an accident could happen in a dormant factory.

“Come and get me,” he ordered Chowdhary. “I want to go and look at the site.”

While he was getting dressed, the telephone rang again. It was Swaraj Puri, the city’s police chief, to inform him that panic-stricken
residents were fleeing from the Kali Grounds. Many of them showed signs of poisoning. Mukund decided to call his friend, Professor
N.P. Mishra, dean of the Gandhi Medical College and chief of internal medicine at Hamidia Hospital. The doctor had just come
back from a wedding.

“N.P.!” he warned. “Get ready for some emergency admissions at the hospital. It seems there’s been an accident at the plant.”

“Is it serious?” asked Mishra anxiously.

“I’m sure not, the factory’s out of production. A few inconsequential poisonings, I imagine.”

“A gas leak?”

“So they tell me. I’ll know more when I’ve visited the scene.”

The doctor pressed his friend. “Phosgene?” he asked, remembering the death of Mohammed Ashraf.

“No, methyl isocyanate.”

This answer left the professor at a loss. Carbide had never supplied Bhopal’s medical teams with any detailed information
about the substance.

“What are the symptoms?”

“Oh, nausea, sometimes vomiting and difficulty in breathing. But with damp compresses and a little oxygen everything should
be all right. Nothing really serious …”

Was this reputable engineer, chosen by Carbide to succeed the plant’s last American manager, acting a part? Or was he simply
ignorant? Did he really not know that MIC was a deadly substance? When, a few minutes later, he reached Hamidia Road, his
white Ambassador was suddenly swamped by a throng of people coughing their lungs out, vomiting, groping their way about. Fists
banged on the body of his car.

“Where are you going?” shouted a man who was frothing at the mouth.

“To the factory!” answered Mukund through the closed window.

“To the factory! You’re mad! Turn back or you’re dead!”

At these words, the engineer wound down his window. A powerful smell of chemicals overwhelmed the interior. Mukund’s driver
immediately started to choke. Crumpled over his steering wheel, he began to turn the car around.

“We’ve had it, sir,” he wailed.

Mukund grabbed him by the arm. “Carry straight on,” he ordered, pointing to the avenue leading up to Carbide’s site. “That’s
where we’re going.”

Fortunately, Mukund had taken the precaution of bringing some handkerchiefs and a bottle of water. He handed out compresses
to the production manager and the driver while the car carved its way through the middle of the fleeing crowd.

In a matter of minutes the emergency rooms of Hamidia Hospital looked like a morgue. The two doctors on duty, Deepak Gandhe
and Mohammed Sheikh, had thought they were going to have a quiet night after Sister Felicity’s visit. All at once the department
was invaded. People were dropping like flies. Their bodies lay strewn about the wards, corridors, offices, verandas and the
approaches to the building. The admissions nurse closed her register. How could she begin to record the names of so many people?
The spasms and convulsions that racked most of the victims, the way they gasped for breath like fish out of water, reminded
Dr. Gandhe of Mohammed Ashraf’s death two years earlier. The little information he could glean confirmed that the refugees
came from areas close to the Carbide factory. So all of them had been poisoned by some toxic agent. But which one? While Sheikh
and a nurse tried to revive the weakest with oxygen masks, Gandhe picked up the telephone. He wanted to speak to his colleague
Loya, Carbide’s official doctor in Bhopal. He was the only one who would be able to suggest an effective antidote to the gas
these dying people had inhaled. It was nearing two in the morning when he finally got hold of Loya. “That was the first time
I heard the cruel name of methyl isocyanate,” Dr. Gandhe was to say later. But just as Mukund had been earlier, Dr. Loya turned
out to be most reassuring.

“It’s not a
deadly
gas,” he claimed, “just irritating, a sort of tear gas.”