Five Past Midnight in Bhopal (22 page)

Nevertheless, four years after this accident, Carbide’s star continued to shine in the firmament over the City of the Begums.
The guest house’s panoramic restaurant overlooking the town had become the favorite meeting place of the political establishment
and local society. Those who dined there would never forget the extravagant spectacles that formed the after-dinner entertainment,
like the water ballet in the swimming pool that the wife of the managing director of Carbide’s Indian subsidiary, herself
an accomplished dancer and swimmer, had arranged. The initiated knew that this luxurious residence was also used for top-secret
meetings. Carbide had placed a suite at the permanent disposal of the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh. In Bhopal, as elsewhere,
money and power made comfortable bedfellows.

T
he word traveled from hut to shed to stall to workshop like a trail of gunpowder. The residents of the three bustees were
to gather on the teahouse esplanade for a meeting of the utmost importance.

“This is it. Carbide’s taking us all on!” shouted Ganga Ram, who had never got over being rejected because of his mutilated
hands.

“In your dreams, you poor fool!” said the shoemaker Iqbal, ever the pessimist. “It’s to inform us we’re going to be evicted.
And this time, it’ll be for good!”

The arrival of Dalima on her crutches interrupted the exchange. With a yellow marigold in her hair and glass bangles jangling
about her wrists, the young cripple had a triumphant air about her.

“It’s to tell us they’re going to install a drinking water supply with taps!” she announced.

“Why, it’s obvious,” said old Prema Bai, “they need us for the elections.”

In India, like anywhere else, it was the womenfolk who showed the most common sense.

That was when a voice from a loudspeaker rent the sky.

“People of Orya Bustee, Jai Prakash and Chola, hurry up!” it commanded.

The residents of the bustees rushed from the alleyways toward the teahouse esplanade. Sister Felicity, who was in the process
of giving several children polio vaccinations, paused.

“It’s like being at home in Scotland when a storm breaks,” she told Padmini. “All the sheep start running toward the voice
that’s calling them.”

Padmini, who had never seen sheep, made an effort to imagine the scene. At that point Rahul, the legless cripple appeared.

“Padmini! Run to the factory and tell your father and the others. Ask him to round everyone up.” Suddenly assuming the mysterious
air of one who knew more, he whispered, “I think our state’s precious chief minister has a surprise for us.”

The young girl set off for the factory at a run. Everywhere the sweatshop slaves were abandoning their tools and their machines
to make for the grand gathering. As they arrived, Belram Mukkadam, his stick waving madly, directed them to sit down. Soon
the entire esplanade was covered by a human sea.

A truck appeared. It was loaded with posters that Mukkadam immediately hung all around the teahouse. On most of them people
recognized the balding forehead, fleshy lips and thick glasses of the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh. Other posters depicted
an open hand. In the same way that Shiva had a trident as his emblem, and the religion of Islam its crescent, the Congress
party, of which Arjun Singh was one of the leading lights, had chosen as its symbol the wide open palm of a hand. The truck
was also carrying a collection of small fliers, which Rahul, Ganga Ram and others busied themselves distributing. “
WE LOVE YOU, ARJUN
!” they said. “
ARJUN, YOU ARE OUR SAVIOUR
!
ARJUN, BHOPAL NEEDS YOU
!” Some went so far as to proclaim: “
ARJUN, INDIA WANTS YOU
!”

Delayed in New Delhi with Indira Gandhi, the organizer of this incredible show had entrusted his official representative in
the Kali Grounds’ bustees to see that the display served his electoral interests. The fact that the guest of honor was missing
made the spectacle all the more quaint, for the proceedings began with the solemn arrival of an empty armchair. Carried by
two servants in dhotis, the august seat came directly from Omar Pasha’s drawing room. Encrusted with mother of pearl and ivory,
it looked more like a throne. A few minutes later, a gleaming Ambassador brought the chief minister’s representative. In honor
of the occasion, Omar Pasha was wearing the most legendary crown in India’s history, the white cap of those who had fought
for independence. Thirty-eight years after the death of Mahatma Gandhi, the godfather of the bustees knew that the white cap
was still a powerful symbol.

At a respectful distance behind the old man walked Omar Pasha’s son Ashoka, a tall fellow with a shaven head, whom the inhabitants
of the bustees had learned to fear and respect. Manager of the clandestine drink trade controlled by his father, today he
carried neither alcohol nor hashish, but a small ebony chest sealed with a copper lock. Inside this casket was a treasure,
possibly the most valuable treasure the occupants of Orya Bustee, Chola and Jai Prakash could hope to receive.

Omar Pasha sat down on his throne, in front of which Mukkadam had placed a cloth-covered table, bearing a bouquet of flowers
and incense sticks. Because of the brightness of the sun, the godfather’s eyes were hidden behind dark glasses, but people
could tell what he was thinking by the way he wrinkled his eyebrows. Mukkadam called for a microphone, which the visitor seized
between pudgy fingers dripping with gold and ruby rings.

“My friends!” he exclaimed in a strong voice that forty years of drinking and smoking had not managed to roughen. “I have
come to deliver to you, on behalf of our revered chief minister Arjun Singh.”

At this name, Omar Pasha paused, sending a tremble through the assembly bristling with posters. Someone shouted: “Arjun Singh,
ki jai
!” but the cry was not taken up. The crowd was impatient to hear the rest of the speech.

“At the request of our chief minister,” the godfather continued, “I have come to deliver to you your
patta
!
^*
”

The echo of this unbelievable, supernatural, unhoped for word hovered in the overheated air for interminably long seconds.
Surveying the stunned crowd, Sister Felicity could not help thinking of a sentence by the Catholic writer Léon Bloy: “You
don’t enter paradise tomorrow, or in ten years time. You enter it today when you are poor and crucified.”

Since the dawn of India’s history that mythical word, “patta” had haunted the dreams of millions of disenfranchised people.
It had fired the hopes of all those who, in order to survive, had had no alternative but to set up their hovel wherever they
could. The people who had ended up in the Kali Grounds were among those poor unfortunates: those people, whom Indira Gandhi’s
son had tried forcibly to drive away, the people whom the works manager of an American plant dreaded seeing encamped against
its walls, had for years been clinging desperately to the pitiful patch of dust that Belram Mukkadam had once traced out for
them with his stick. And there, suddenly, was the godfather bringing them official property deeds issued by the government
of Madhya Pradesh recognizing their right to occupy their miserable piece of squattered land.

It was too good to be true. Never mind the fact that this deed would have to be renewed in thirty years’ time, never mind
the fact that it was officially forbidden to pawn it or sell it, never mind the fact that their owners would be taxed thirty-four
rupees each year. A frenzied cheer went up from the crowd, which rose to its feet in a single movement. People chanted the
names of the chief minister, Omar Pasha and Indira Gandhi. They danced, they laughed, and congratulated one another. Caught
up in a surge, Padmini suddenly found herself raised above the surrounding heads like a figurehead, the fragile emblem of
a people throwing off its chains and achieving the beginnings of dignity. As far as these illiterate men, women and children
were concerned, the pieces of paper Omar Pasha pulled from his chest were a gift from the gods. These deeds would remove their
fears for good by allowing them to plant their roots forever in the welcoming ground, over which fluttered the flag with the
blue-and-white logo.

Every time Omar Pasha invited a beneficiary to come and collect the document inscribed with his name and the designation of
his plot, a bearded character sitting at the back wagged his head and rubbed at his enormous eyebrows. For the Sikh Pulpul
Singh, the neighborhood usurer, this was a fortune on a plate, an opportunity to increase his wealth, even if it would mean
breaking the law against pawning the deeds. Pulpul Singh could already see each sheet of paper that came out of the godfather’s
chest winding its way into his own safe. The day would come that these poor people would need to borrow money from him, and
what better guarantee could he ask for than the deposit of those magical deeds, which he could always find a way of selling
at a profit?

A N
IGHT
B
LESSED BY THE
S
TARS

W
ith his thick mustache, bushy eyebrows and round cheeks, the thirty-two-year-old Muslim Mohammed Ashraf was the mirror image
of the Indian cinema idol Shashi Kapoor. The resemblance had made him the most popular worker in the plant. In charge of a
shift in the phosgene unit, on that December 23, 1981, Ashraf had to carry out a routine maintenance operation. It was a matter
of replacing a defective flange between two pieces of pipework.

“No need to put your kit on today,” he announced to his colleague Harish Khan, indicating the heavy rubber coat hanging on
a hook in the cloakroom. “The factory isn’t running. There’s no likelihood of a leak.”

“Gases can walk about even when everything’s stopped,” Khan retorted sharply. “Better be on the safe side. A few drops of
that blasted phosgene on your pullover can hurt you. It’s not like the bangla from Mukkadam’s teahouse!”

The two men burst out laughing.

“I’m willing to bet Mukkadam’s rotgut is even more dangerous than this bloody phosgene,” Ashraf said, donning his mask.

No one had ever had cause to reproach the Muslim operator for any breach of safety procedures. Ashraf was one of the most
reliable technicians in the company, even if he did leave his workstation five times a day to go out into the courtyard and
pray on his little mat facing Mecca, and even if he did come staggering to work in the morning because he had spent all night
fishing on the banks of Upper Lake. The son of a small trader in the bazaar, he owed everything to Carbide, not least his
marriage to the daughter of a cloth merchant from Kanpur, who was honored to have an employee of the prestigious multinational
for his son-in-law, even if he was only a low-level employee. A graduate in economics, Sajda Bano was a beautiful young woman.
She had given him two sons, Arshad and Soeb, in whom he could already see two prospective “Carbiders.”

It took only a few minutes to dismantle the joint. Just as he was fitting the new component, however, Ashraf saw through his
mask a small quantity of liquid phosgene spurt from the upper side of the piping. A few drops landed on his sweater. Aware
of the danger, he rushed into a shower cabin to rinse his clothing. It was then that he made a fatal mistake. Instead of waiting
for the powerful jet of water to complete the decontamination process, he took off his mask. The heat of his chest immediately
caused the few drops of phosgene still nestling in the wool of his sweater to vaporize. Apart from a slight irritation of
the eyes and throat, which rapidly disappeared, Ashraf felt no discomfort at the time. He did not know that phosgene has a
stealthy way of killing its victims. First it gives them a sense of euphoria.

“I’d never seen my husband so voluble,” Sajda Bano later recalled. “He seemed to have forgotten the accident. He took us out
in the car to visit a small country house he wanted to buy beside the Narmada River. He was as cheerful as he was during the
first days of our engagement.”

Then, all of a sudden, he collapsed, with his lungs full of a fierce flood of secretions. He started to vomit a gush of transparent
fluid mixed with blood. Panic-stricken, Sajda called the factory, who had him taken by ambulance to the intensive-care unit
Carbide had helped set up at Hamidia Hospital. He was placed on an artificial respirator where his agony continued. He threw
up more and more fluids, up to four and a half pints an hour. Soon he did not even have the strength to expectorate.

Sajda had to push aside some of her in-law’s family to get to her husband’s bedside. “He was as white as a sheet,” she would
remember, “but when he sensed my presence, he opened his eyes and tore off his oxygen mask. ‘I’d like to say goodbye to the
children. Go and fetch them!’ he whispered.”

When the young woman came back with the two boys, the dying man took the youngest in his arms. “Son, how do you fancy a fishing
trip?” he asked, forcing a smile. The effort set off a violent bout of coughing. Then came a succession of rattles and a last
sigh. It was all over. Bhopal’s beautiful plant had claimed its first victim. It was Christmas day. For the young woman who
had come from a far distant province to marry a Carbide man, three months and thirteen days of mourning were about to begin.