Five Past Midnight in Bhopal (45 page)

The tailor Ahmed Bassi, the bicycle repairman Salar and the worker-poet Rehman Khan all availed themselves of the healing
waters. Then they set off together in search of their families who had been scattered by the disaster. In Spices Square, strewn
with the bodies of poetry lovers and hundred of pigeons and parrots, they met Ganga Ram carrying Dalima in her festival sari.
After escaping the gunfire from the owner of the house in which they had sought refuge, they had miraculously avoided the
gases. They had headed directly south toward the great mosque rather than toward the station. Such reunions lightened an otherwise
devastating night.

In all this turmoil of suffering, fear and death, Sister Felicity did her best to save abandoned children in the corridors
and wards of the hospital. There were dozens of them wandering about, almost blind, or lying groaning in their own vomit on
the bare floor. The first thing the nun did was regroup them at the far end of the ground floor of the hospital where she
had set up her help center. Word traveled quickly, and other children were brought to her. Most of them had got lost during
the night when their panic-stricken parents entrusted them to passengers in some truck or car.

With the help of two medical students, the nun carefully cleaned their eyes. Sometimes the effect was instantaneous. Her own
eyes filled with tears when one of her protégés cried, “I can see!” Then she would guide those who had been miraculously cured
to the aid center and give her attention to other young victims, whom she bombarded with questions.

“Do you know this little girl?”

“Yes, she’s my sister,” answered one child. “And this boy?”

“He goes to my school,” answered another. “What’s his name?”

“Arvind,” a third told her.

Thus, little by little, the links between these suffering people were reestablished, and sometimes a distressed father or
mother was reunited with a much loved child.

A tall young man dressed in a festive sherwani, his feet shod in spangled mules, paced ceaselessly through the corridors and
wards of that same hospital. He was looking for someone. Sometimes he would stop and gently turn a body over to look at a
face. Dilip was sure that he would find Padmini somewhere in this charnel house. He did not know that his young wife had just
been carried away to the morgue on a stretcher.

The potbellied little man, who had promised the police chief that he was prepared “to feed the whole city” if necessary, never
imagined that he would have to keep his promise so soon. Shyam Babu, the proprietor of the Agarwal Poori Bhandar, the most
famous restaurant in Bhopal, had just gone to bed, when two men rang his doorbell. He recognized the president and the secretary
of the Vishram Ghat Trust, a Hindu charitable organization of which he was a founding member.

“There’s been an accident at Carbide,” announced the president before being overtaken by a coughing fit that sent him reeling.

His companion continued. “Thousands of people have been killed,” he said. “But, more important, there are thousands of injured
who have nothing to drink or eat at Hamidia Hospital and under Parvez shamianas. You, and you alone, can come to their aid.”

Shyam Babu stroked his mustache. His blue eyes lit up. May the goddess Lakshmi be blessed. At last he was going to fulfill
his lifelong dream of feeding the whole city.

“How many are there of them?” he asked.

The president tried to overcome his bout of coughing. “Twenty thousand, thirty thousand, fifty thousand, maybe more …”

Shyam stood at attention. “You can count on me, no matter how many there are.”

As soon as his visitors had gone, he mobilized all his employees and enlisted the support of the staff of several other restaurants.
Even before daybreak, some fifty cooks, assistants and bakers were at work making rations of potatoes, rice, dhal, curry and
chapatis, which they wrapped in newspaper. Stacked into Babu’s Land Rover, these makeshift meals were taken at once and distributed
to the survivors. This was not to be the only good deed done by the restaurateur. Having taken care of the living, Shyam Babu
would have to see to the dead.

Under the great tamarind tree in Kamla Park on the narrow strip of garden separating the Upper Lake from the Lower, a sadhu
looked on impassively as people fled the deadly cloud. All through that night of panic, the Naga Baba, or naked holy man,
as the Bhopalis called him, remained cross-legged in the lotus position. For thirty-five years he had lived there ever since
a five-day
samadhi
, a spiritual exercise in which he was buried alive, had turned him into a holy man. Half-naked, with his body covered in
ashes and his long mop of hair divided into a hundred tresses, a pilgrim’s stick topped with Shiva’s trident and a bowl in
which he collected food provided by the faithful as his only possessions, the Naga Baba, detached from all desires, material
things, appearances and aversions, spent his days meditating, in quest of the absolute. With prayer beads in his fingers,
and his gaze seemingly vacant behind his half-closed lids, he seemed indifferent to the chaos that surrounded him. Overtaken
by small, eye-level pockets of monomethylamine and phosgene borne along by the breeze, dozens of men and women whose lungs
were dilated from running, collapsed around him. Trained to breathe only once every three or four minutes by his ascetic exercises,
the Naga Baba did not inhale the vapors from the passing cloud. He was the only person to survive in Kamla Park.

T
he dead were everywhere. In the corridors, in the consulting rooms, in the operating theaters, in the general wards, even
in the kitchens and the nurses’ canteen. Laid out on stretchers or on the bare floor, some looked as if they were sleeping
peacefully; others had faces deformed by suffering. Strangely, they gave off no smell of decomposition. It was as if the MIC
had sterilized anything in them that might rot. Removing these corpses became as pressing a problem as caring for the living.
Already the vultures had arrived. Not the carrion birds, but the professional body riflers for whom the catastrophe was a
godsend. Dr. Mohammed Sheikh, one of the two doctors on duty, surprised a pillager with a pair of pliers in his hands, preparing
to yank gold teeth from the mouths of the dead. One of his accomplices was stripping the women of their jewels, including
those embedded in their noses. Another was recovering watches. Their harvest was likely to be a thin one, however; Carbide’s
gases had primarily killed the poor.

Once alerted, Professor Mishra sent some students to stand guard over the corpses and telephoned the two forensic pathologists
at the medical college. The collector of vintage cars, Heeresh Chandra and his young colleague who loved roses, Ashu Satpathy,
were already on their way to the hospital. Chandra knew that the autopsies he and Satpathy would perform that night could
save thousands of lives; the bodies of the dead could yield definitive information about the nature of the killer gases and
might enable them to find an antidote.

What the two doctors saw on their arrival chilled them to the bone. “We were used to death, but not to suffering,” Satpathy
would later recount. The hundreds of bodies they had to step over to gain access to the medical college looked as if they
had been tortured.

“What chemical substances could be capable of doing that kind of damage?” wondered Chandra as he hurried first to the faculty
library. His colleague Mishra had mentioned methyl isocyanate. The pathologist leafed frantically through a toxicology textbook.
The entry on the molecule did not contain much information, but Chandra suspected that it was capable of breaking down into
highly toxic substances like hydrocyanide acid. Only hydrocyanic acid would be likely to inflict such deadly marks.

As for Dr. Satpathy, he went first to the terraces, to make sure that his roses had not been damaged by the toxic cloud. After
examining every pot, plant, leaf and bud with all the concern and tenderness of a lover at his endangered mistress’s bedside,
he heaved a sigh of relief. The Black Diamonds and Golden Chryslers he had so lovingly grafted appeared to have survived the
passing of the deadly fog. In two days’ time, Satpathy would be able to exhibit them as planned at the Bhopal Flower Show.
Before returning to the inferno on the ground floor, he telephoned the third member of his medical team, the photographer
Subashe Godane.

“Get over here quickly, and bring a whole suitcase full of film with you. You’re going to have hundreds of photos to take.”

The young man who had dreamed of making his name photographing glamorously dressed women, hurriedly threw on his clothes,
loaded his Pentax and hopped on his scooter.

Before beginning the autopsies, it was essential that the two forensic pathologists devise a system for identifying the victims.
Nearly all of them had been caught in their sleep and had fled their homes half naked. Satpathy enlisted the help of a squad
of medical college students.

“Examine each corpse,” he told them, “and jot down its description in a notebook. For example, ‘circumcised male, approximately
forty, scar on chin, striped underpants.’ Or again, ‘little girl aged about ten, three metal bracelets on right wrist, etc.’
Make a note of any deformities, tattoos and any distinctive features likely to facilitate identification of the victim by
their next of kin. Then place a card with a number on it on each body.”

The doctor turned then to Godane. “You photograph the numbered bodies. As soon as you’ve developed your negatives, we’ll put
them on display. In that way families will be able to try and find anyone they’ve lost.”

Next, addressing himself to everyone, he added, “Get a move on! They’ll be coming for the bodies!”

Soon the shutter on the Pentax was firing like a tommy gun over the stiffened bodies. Although he had spent years immortalizing
the victims of minor accidents on glossy paper, Subashe Godane was suddenly face to face with a wholly different form of death:
industrial death, death on a huge scale. While he was working, he found himself wondering whether he had not photographed
a particular young woman in a multicolored sari, or a particular little girl whose long braids were adorned with yellow marigolds,
on a previous occasion. Perhaps on Hamidia Road, or in the jewelry market at the great mosque, or near the fountain in Spices
Square. But that night his models’ eyes had rolled back into their skulls, the amber tint of their skin had turned the color
of ashes and their mouths had set into dreadful rictuses. Godane had difficulty continuing with his macabre documentary. All
at once he thought he was seeing things. By the light of his flash, he saw the features of a face twitch. Two eyes opened.
“This man isn’t dead!” he yelled to Satpathy who came running with his stethoscope. Sure enough, the man was still alive.
The doctor called for a stretcher and had him taken to a recovery ward where he regained consciousness. He was wearing a railway
worker’s tunic. It was V.K. Sherma, the deputy stationmaster who had saved hundreds of passengers by risking his life to get
the Gorakhpur Express to leave.