Five Past Midnight in Bhopal (46 page)

There were other shocks in store on that tragic night. Two female corpses were brought in by unknown persons. When Satpathy
examined them, he realized that they had not been killed by gas but murdered. One had a deep wound to the throat, the other
had burns to a substantial part of her body. The catastrophe had provided the killers with the perfect alibi. The doctor also
saw the corpse of the same little boy three times, labeled with three different numbers. It was a fraudulent act that would
enable his family to claim three times the insurance compensation the American multinational might pay.

Other parents refused to accept the awful reality. A young father placed his son’s corpse in the arms of Dr. Deepak Gandhe,
one of the doctors on duty.

“Save him!” the stranger pleaded. “Your child is dead!” replied Gandhe, trying to give the little body back to his father.

“No! No! You can save him!”

“He’s dead, I tell you!” insisted the doctor. “There’s nothing I can do for him.”

“Then the man ran off, leaving the child in my arms,” Deepak Gandhe would recount. “In his heart of hearts he was convinced
that I could bring him back to life.”

On dissecting the first corpses, the two forensic pathologists could hardly believe what they found. The blood of a gray-goateed
Muslim, into which Satpathy dipped his finger, was as viscous as currant jelly. His lungs were ash-colored, and a multitude
of little bluish-red lesions appeared in a grayish frothy liquid. The man must have died by drowning in his own secretions.
Hearts, livers and spleens had tripled in size, windpipes were full of purulent clots. Without exception, all the organs seemed
to have been ravaged by the gas, including the brains, which were covered with a gelatinous, opalescent film. The extent of
the damage was terrifying even to specialists as hardened as old Chandra and his young colleague. A smell confirmed their
suspicions as to the nature of the agent responsible—a smell that was unmistakable. All the bodies they autopsied gave off
the same smell of bitter almonds, the smell of hydrocyanide acid. Here was the confirmation of what Jagannathan Mukund had
let slip to Bhopal’s commissioner. When it broke down, MIC released hydrocyanide acid, which instantly destroyed the cells’
ability to transport oxygen. It was hydrocyanide acid that had killed the great majority of Bhopalis who died that infernal
night.

The pathologists’ discovery was vitally important, because hydrocyanide acid poisoning had an antidote: a commonplace substance,
sodium thiosulfate or hyposulfate, well known to photographers who use it to fix their negatives. Mass injecting with hyposulfate
might possibly save thousands of victims. Chandra and Satpathy rushed to Professor Mishra who was coordinating the medical
aid with his team. Strangely, the professor refused to believe his colleagues’ findings and follow their recommendations.
As far as he was concerned, the presence of hydrocyanide acid was an invention of the forensic pathologists’ overactive imaginations.

“You take care of the dead and let me take care of the living!” he told them.

No one would really be able to account for this reaction on the part of the illustrious professor. It would deprive the victims
of a treatment that might have saved their lives.

Dawn broke at last on that apocalyptic night: a crystal clear sunrise. The minarets, cupolas and palaces were lit up by the
sun’s rays and life asserted itself once more in the entanglement of alleyways in the old part of town. Everything seemed
the same. And yet some places looked like war zones on the morning after a battle. Hundreds of corpses of men, women and children,
cows, buffaloes, dogs and goats were all over the place. Deeply alarmed by the situation, Commissioner Ranjit Singh went to
the nearby colleges in areas that had been spared and enlisted students to pick up bodies. At the Maulana Azad Technical College,
he found dozens of volunteers.

“Divide yourselves up into two teams,” he told them. “Muslims in one, Hindus in the other, and each can look after their own
dead.”

His suggestion provoked a vehement reaction. “Is there any difference between Hindus and Muslims at a tragic time like this?”
objected one student.

“Is there even a god when such a catastrophe is allowed to happen?” said another.

“I made myself very small,” the commissioner said afterward. “I was trying to think of the strongest possible terms in which
to thank them.”

With bandannas over their mouths and noses, the students set off on scooters for the slums that Colonel Khanuja and his trucks
had partially evacuated during the night. There were still a few survivors left among the mass of bodies. Student Santosh
Katiyar was party to a scene that touched him deeply. While he was preparing to remove the body of a Muslim woman from one
of the huts in Chola, a hand stopped him. A woman, whom he recognized by the red dot on her forehead as a Hindu, slipped all
her bracelets off her wrist and slid them onto her dead neighbor’s arm.

“She was my friend,” she explained, “she must look beautiful to meet her god.”

A little farther on, Santosh noticed four veiled Muslim women, sitting under the porch roof to a small Hindu temple. They
were consoling a woman who had lost her entire family. In such extreme distress, distinctions of religion, caste or background
vanished. Very swiftly, however, the sordid took its place alongside the sublime. No sooner had Rajiv Gandhi announced over
the radio that all families would be compensated for the loss of their loved ones, than people began to squabble over the
corpses. Outside the medical college Colonel Khanuja saw two women pulling the body of a man by his arms and legs in opposite
directions. One was a Hindu; the other Muslim. Both were claiming that the deceased was her relative. They were pulling so
hard that the poor man’s body was in danger of being torn in two. The colonel decided to intervene.

“Undress him! Then you’ll see whether or not he’s circumcised.”

The two women tore off his lunghi and underpants and examined his penis. The man was circumcised. Furious, the Hindu woman
got up and set off in search of another corpse.

The number of expressions of solidarity multiplied. Never before had the India of a thousand castes and twenty million divinities
shown itself so united in adversity. Tens of organizations, institutions, associations, hundreds of entrepreneurs and businessmen,
thousands of private individuals of all social classes, the Rotarians, the Lions, the Kiwanis and the scouts, all came rushing
to the rescue of the survivors. Many towns in Madhya Pradesh sent truckloads of medicines, blankets and clothing. Volunteers
of different religious faiths spread out cloths on the corners of avenues, in squares, all over the place, onto which people
threw mountains of rupees.

That day after the catastrophe was also a time for anger. A policeman came to warn Mukund, who had remained closeted in his
office, that thousands of rioters were heading for the factory, yelling, “Death to Carbide!” After trying all night to get
hold of his superiors in Bombay, the works manager finally got through by telephone to one of them.

“There’s been an accident,” he informed his boss K.S. Kamdar. “An MIC leak. I don’t know yet how or why.”

“Any fatalities?” Kamdar asked anxiously. “Yes.”

“Many?”

“Alas! Yes.”

“Two figures?”

“More.”

“Three?”

“More like four, Kamdar.”

There was a long silence at the other end of the line. Kamdar was stunned. At last he inquired, “Do you have the situation
in hand?”

“Until the crowd invades the factory. Or the police come and arrest me.”

Just then, they were interrupted by several uniformed policemen and two plainclothes inspectors from the Criminal Bureau of
Investigation. They carried a warrant to detain Mukund and his assistants.

Outside the situation was growing worse. Police chief Swaraj Puri, who had seen so many of his men disappear the previous
night, feared violent action. With no means to oppose it, he decided to resort to a stratagem. He summoned the driver of the
only vehicle left to him with a loudspeaker.

“Drive all over town,” he ordered the officer, “and announce that there’s been another gas leak at Carbide.”

The effect of the ruse was miraculous. The rioters who had been about to overrun the factory scattered instantly. In a matter
of minutes the city was empty. Only the dead remained.

The fatal cloud had spared the vast enclosure at the end of Hamidia Road where, in the shade of century-old mango and tamarind
trees, generations of Muslims had been laid to rest. The man in charge of the place was a frail little individual with dark
skin and a chin studded with a small salt-and-pepper goatee. Abdul Hamid had been born in that cemetery. He had grown up there
and become its master. It was a position that enabled him to live in comfort; for every burial he received a hundred rupees
and he oversaw two or three each day. Abdul Hamid was a central and familiar figure in the Muslim community. They all, at
one time or another, had to deal with him. Although he was no stranger to death, the poor man could never have anticipated
the spectacle that awaited him that morning at the entrance to his cemetery. Dozens of bodies wrapped in shrouds were piled
up like parcels outside the fence. “It was the first time I’d ever seen so many corpses at once,” he said later.

Hamid called his sons and set to work digging graves. Volunteers came to help him. But how was he to give so many dead a decent
burial? How was he to receive their families appropriately? In the absence of any members of the clergy, it was Abdul himself
or one of his grave diggers who recited a
namaz
, or prayer, for the dead. In a few hours there was nowhere left to dig fresh holes and the men had to stop for fear of disturbing
the remains of earlier burials. “I was the guardian of the dead,” Abdul Hamid was to say. “I had no right to violate tombs.
If I did no one would trust me anymore.”

In the two other Muslim cemeteries, the congestion was even worse, a fact that forced the city’s grand mufti, the venerable
Kazi Wazid ul-Hussein, to issue an urgent fatwa authorizing the disturbance of old tombs in order to make room for Carbide’s
victims. The fatwa stipulated that some ten bodies could be buried in the same grave. Soon a flood of trucks, cars and handcarts
turned up with their macabre loads. The deceased were deposited at the entrance to Abdul Hamid’s cemetery in the columned
building set aside for preparation of the dead. In the absence of relatives, this ritual was carried out by volunteers, who
undressed the bodies and washed them in tepid water. Men and women were dealt with separately. The elderly Iftekar Begum,
the eighty-year-old dowager who directed operations, marveled that so many of the deceased were wearing embroidered burkahs
and flowers in their hair.