Five Past Midnight in Bhopal (43 page)

“You are joking! My hospital’s overrun with people dying like flies.” Gandhe was running out of patience.

“Breathing in a strong dose may eventually cause pulmonary edema,” Dr. Loya finally conceded.

“What antidote should we administer?” pressed Gandhe. “There is no known antidote for this gas,” replied the factory’s spokesperson,
without any apparent embarrassment. “In any case, there’s no need for an antidote,” he added. “Get your patients to drink
a lot and rinse their eyes with compresses steeped in water. Methyl isocyanate has the advantage of being soluble in water.”

Gandhe made an effort to stay calm. “Water? Is that all you suggest I use to save people coughing their lungs out!” he protested
before hanging up.

He and Sheikh decided nonetheless to follow Dr. Loya’s advice. Water, they found, did ease the irritation to the eyes and
the coughing fits temporarily.

The situation in which the two doctors found themselves was more horrific than any war story or tragedy they might have read
about. “What I liked more than anything else about my profession was being able to relieve suffering,” Gandhe would say, “and
there I was unable to do that. It was unbearable.”

Unbearable was the fetid, foul breath from mouths oozing blood-streaked froth. Unbearable was the stupor in people’s expressions,
their inflamed eyes about to burst, their drawn features, their quivering nostrils, the cyanosis in their lips, ears and cheeks.
Many of their faces were livid. Their discolored lips already heralded death. Through their stethoscopes the two doctors picked
up only the faintest, irregular sounds of hearts and lungs, or sputtering, grating, gurgling rattles. What struck them most
was the state of torpor, bewilderment, exhaustion and amnesia in which they found most of the victims, which suggested that
the nervous system had been profoundly affected.

The doctors would never forget the scenes of terror. A man and a woman broke through the crowd and laid their two children,
aged two and four, on the examination table. Their heartbeats were scarcely perceptible and both were frothing at the mouth.
Gandhe at once injected them with Derryfilin, a powerful bronchodilator, bathed their eyes with salve and gave each an oxygen
mask. The children stirred. Their parents were overjoyed, convinced their children were reviving. Then the little bodies went
rigid. Gandhe listened with his stethoscope and shook his head. “Heart failure,” he mumbled angrily.

This was only the beginning of his night of horror. Quite apart from hemorrhaging of the lungs and cataclysmic suffocation,
he found himself confronted with symptoms that were unfamiliar to him: cyanosis of the fingers and toes, spasms in the esophagus
and intestines, attacks of blindness, muscular convulsions, fevers and sweating so intense that victims wanted to tear off
their clothes. Worst of all was the incalculable number of living dead making for the hospital as if it were a lifeboat in
a shipwreck. This onslaught gave rise to particularly distressing scenes. Going out briefly into the street to assess the
situation, Gandhe saw screaming youngsters clinging to their mothers’ burkahs, men who had gone mad tearing about in all directions,
rolling on the ground, dragging themselves along on their hands and knees in the hope of getting to the hospital. He saw women
abandon some of their children, those they could no longer carry, in order to save just one—a choice that would haunt them
for the rest of their lives. In desperation, the young doctor decided to appeal to his old mentor, the man whom, a few minutes
earlier, Mukund had awakened and informed that an accident was likely to give rise to “some emergency admissions” at the hospital.

“Professor Mishra,” he begged after describing the situation, “come quickly! All hell has broken loose here!”

His appeal mobilized a chain of events marked by remarkable efficiency and extraordinary self-sacrifice. Two of the principal
people involved would remain unknown. Santosh Vinobad and Jamil Ishaq were the operators on duty at the city’s central switchboard,
located on the second floor of the main post office, just opposite the Taj ul-Masajid. Decaying and antiquated, it reflected
India’s backwardness when it came to telecommunications. Madhya Pradesh had only two circuits that could carry international
calls, and only a dozen lines to handle all domestic communications. Those Bhopalis fortunate enough to have a telephone had
to go through the switchboard operators to make any intercity calls. The bell jangled and Jamil Ishaq plugged in his connection.
As soon as he heard the person on the other end of the line say “Hello” he exclaimed, “Professor Mishra! I can hear you.”

The doctor, who had just set up his command post in his office opposite the Hamidia emergency room, was too disconcerted to
speak.

“I recognized your voice, professor. Allah be with you! I’ll give all your calls priority.”

Mishra thought to himself that the whole city must know about the catastrophe. He expressed his gratitude.

“Whatever you do, don’t thank me, professor. This is the very least I owe you. You operated on my gall bladder a few weeks
ago!”

Resisting the temptation to laugh, Mishra blessed his former patient’s gall bladder and at once gave him a series of numbers
in Europe and the United States. Since the Carbide representatives had proven so uninformative, he would ask the World Health
Organization in Geneva and Medilas in Washington for any information they might have on treating MIC poisoning. But it was
still Sunday in Europe and America. It would be another ten hours before offices opened and Mishra could obtain his information.
In the meantime he decided to alert the local pharmacists and have them immediately bring all their stocks of bronchodilators,
antispasmodics, eye salves, heart medication and cough syrup and drops. After that he set to work getting his colleagues,
the deans of the medical schools in Indore and Gwalior, out of bed. He asked them to gather up all available medicines in
their sectors and dispatch them by plane to Bhopal. Finally, he called those in charge of the various firms in Bhopal that
used oxygen bottles. “Bring us all your stocks,” he told them. “The lives of twenty, thirty, possibly even fifty thousand
people are at stake.”

Once he had finished this telephone offensive, Mishra decided to rally all the medical students. Most were asleep in their
hostel behind the medical college, in the wake of their celebration in Shyam Babu’s restaurant. Mishra would wake them himself.
He climbed the stairs, and went along the corridors, banging on their doors.

“On your feet, kids!” he cried. “Don’t waste time getting dressed! Come just as you are, but come quickly! Thousands of people
are going to die if you don’t get there in time.”

Mishra would never forget the sight of those boys and girls scrambling wordlessly out of bed and running almost in their sleep
across the street to the hospital. Some demonstrated their heroism almost immediately. One of them bent over a child suffocating
from the gaseous vapors. Without any hesitation, he began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. This shock treatment revived the little
boy. But when the medical student stood up, Deepak Gandhe saw him turn suddenly livid and stagger. In snatching the child
from death, he had inhaled the toxic gas from his lungs. It was he who was to die.

It was not enough that the dreadful fog had burned people’s bronchia, eyes and throats. It had also impregnated their clothes,
hair, beards and mustaches with toxic emissions so persistent that the medics themselves ended up experiencing symptoms of
suffocation. A swift injection with Derryfilin mixed with ten cubic centimeters of Decadron was usually enough to prevent
any complications. The courage generally displayed, however, did not mean that there were not moments of weakness: one panic-stricken
young doctor tore the oxygen mask off a dying man, clamped it to his own face and greedily took a few gasps before fleeing.
Yet he came back at daybreak and for three days and three nights was one of the mainstays of the emergency wards.

Suddenly, in the midst of all the chaos, Sister Felicity appeared. She had left little Nadia momentarily to rush to the carnage
of the wards and corridors. There were so many bodies all over the place that she could not move without bumping into an arm
or a leg. It was almost impossible to distinguish between the living and the dead. People’s faces were so swollen that their
eyes had disappeared. She volunteered her help and Deepak Gandhe put her in charge of one of the rooms where an attempt was
being made to regroup the scattered victims’ families. Felicity bent over an old man who lay unconscious beside the body of
a woman in a mauve sweater. Gently she stroked his forehead. “Wake up, Granddad! Tell me whether your wife was wearing a mauve
sweater,” she insisted. The poor man did not answer and Sister Felicity turned to another woman stretched out between two
young children. Were they hers? Or did they belong to the third woman a little farther on, the one with cotton pads on her
eyes?

In that terrible place of death, the living had lost the power of speech.

Professor Mishra knew that the invasion was only just beginning. The toxic cloud would continue to wreak havoc. Thousands,
possibly even tens of thousands of fresh victims would keep on coming. It was urgent that the campus between the medical college
and Hamidia be turned into a gigantic field hospital. How were they going to achieve so mammoth a task in the middle of the
night? Mishra had an idea. Once again, he picked up the telephone and woke Mahmoud Parvez, the man who rented out shamianas,
who was fast asleep in his recently built house in New Bhopal, safe from the toxic gases.

Mishra told him about the tragedy that had struck the city, then added, “I need your help. You must go and get all the shamianas,
all the carpets, covers, furniture and crockery you hired out for yesterday evening’s weddings and bring them outside Hamidia
Hospital as fast as possible.”

Parvez showed no trace of surprise. “You can count on me, professor! Tonight, those in need can have anything I own.”

The little man then woke his three sons, called all his employees to arms, sent his trucks out to every site where he had
delivered the accessories and trappings for wedding celebrations. He had the two enormous shamianas set up in the courtyard
of the great mosque taken down. Never mind Ishtema! That night Bhopal was suffering and his duty as a good Muslim was to help
relieve it. He directed one of his sons to empty his warehouses of any armchairs, settees, chairs and beds, not forgetting
the famous percolator because “a good Italian coffee, can do a fellow a power of good.”

Marvelous Mahmoud Parvez! As his staff and sons brought his wares to the afflicted, he kept one mission for himself. It was
he, and he alone, who would dismantle the jewel of his collection, the magnificent, venerable shamiana embroidered with gold
thread that he had rented to his friend, the director of Bhopal’s electric power station, for his niece’s wedding. The task
came very close to killing him. Asphyxiated by a pocket of gas floating along the ground, Mahmoud collapsed, unable to breathe.
By some miracle, a rescue team picked him up. He was among the first to receive emergency treatment under one of his own tents.