Five Past Midnight in Bhopal (31 page)

“We’re going to kill you,” Ganga Ram declared, caressing the man’s throat with the point of his dagger. “You’re scum. All
Sikhs are scum. They killed our Indira. You’re going to pay for that.” With his shoulder, he shoved the moneylender up against
the bars on the terrace. “And you can open up your shit hole of a house at once, otherwise we’ll set fire to it and you.”

Scared, the Sikh took a key from his waist and unlocked the padlock to the grille. Cowering together, Sister Felicity and
Padmini observed the scene. The nun recalled something an old man from Orya Bustee had explained to her one day: “You keep
your head down, you wear yourself to a frazzle, you put up with everything, you bottle up your bitterness against the factory
that’s poisoning your well, the moneylender who’s bleeding you dry, the speculators who are pushing up the price of rice,
the neighbors’ kids who stop you sleeping by spewing up their lungs all night, the political parties that suck up to you and
do damn all, the bosses that refuse you work, the astrologer who asks you for a hundred rupees to tell you whether your daughter
can get married. You put up with the mud, the shit, the stench, the heat, the mosquitoes, the rats and the hunger. And then
one day, bang! You find some pretext and the opportunity’s given to you to shout, destroy, hit back. It’s stronger than you
are: you go for it!” Sister Felicity had often marveled that in such conditions, there were not more frequent and more murderous
outbreaks of violence. How many times in the alleyways had she seen potentially bloody altercations suddenly defused into
streams of verbal insults, as if everyone wanted to avoid the worst.

A series of explosions shook the Sikh’s house. Immediately afterward the veranda went up in flames. There were shouts of,
“Death to Pulpul Singh!” And others of, “We’re avenging you, Indira!”

Salar appeared, brandishing a knife. “Prepare to die!” he shouted, and advanced toward the terror-crazed Sikh. Another second
and Salar would have lunged at Singh. But the moment he raised his arm, someone intervened.

“Put down your knife, brother,” ordered Sister Felicity, seizing the young man firmly by the wrist.

Stunned, Salar’s friends did not dare interfere. Ganga Ram stepped forward, accompanied by his wife Dalima. She still walked
unsteadily. Nevertheless she had managed to catch up with the crowd. She had just seen the nun throw herself between Salar
and the moneylender.

“Killing that bastard wouldn’t do any good!” Dalima cried, turning on the rioters. “I’ve a better idea!” She pulled from her
sari a small pair of scissors. “Let’s chop this Sikh’s beard off! That’s a far worse form of vengeance than death!”

Ganga flashed his wife a smile of admiration. “Dalima’s right, let’s cut the shit’s beard off and throw it on the flames of
his house.”

Salar, the tailor Bassi and Iqbal grabbed the usurer and pinned him against the trunk of a palm tree. Dalima handed the scissors
to Belram Mukkadam. After all, it was only right that the manager of the teahouse should have the honor of humiliating the
man who had exploited him for so many years. Resigned to his fate, the usurer did not protest. The process took a while. Everyone
held their breath. The scene was both pathetic and sublime. When there was not a trace of hair left on Singh’s cheeks, neck
or skull, a joyful ovation went up into a sky obscured by the smoke from his flaming house.

Then Mukkadam’s deep voice was heard to say, “Indira, rest in peace! The poor of the Kali Grounds have avenged you.”

The vengeance wrought by the occupants of the slums on the Sikh moneylender was a tiny spark in a terrible explosion that
erupted throughout India against the followers of Guru Nanak. The flames of Indira Gandhi’s funeral pyre had scarcely gone
out before violence was unleashed in the country’s principal cities. Everywhere Sikhs were brutally attacked, their houses,
schools and temples were set on fire. Soon the fire department, hospitals and emergency services were overwhelmed by the flare-up
of violence, which reminded many people of the horrors that surrounded the country’s partition in 1947. Despite a rigorous
curfew and the intervention of the army, more than three thousand Sikhs were immolated on the altar of vengeance.

On the morning of November 2, this murderous frenzy hit the City of the Begums in a particularly horrible fashion. Forty-five-year-old
Gurcharan Singh Khanuja, the Sikh officer in command of the electrical and mechanical engineering corps stationed in Bhopal,
came out of his barracks accompanied by an escort to go to the train station. Several members of his family—his two brothers,
his brother-in-law and nephews—were returning from a pilgrimage to the Golden Temple of Amritsar. When Khanuja opened the
door to the compartment reserved for his family, he found nothing but charred corpses. Assassins had stopped the train between
Amritsar and Bhopal, slit the throats of all the Sikh passengers and set fire to their corpses.

Five days later, a special train decorated with flags and garlands of flowers pulled in at the same platform in Bhopal station.
It was bringing the population one of the thirty-two urns with the ashes of the dead prime minister that were making their
way around the country. An honor guard of uniformed soldiers carrying inverted rifles, and a brass band playing a funeral
march, waited to take the precious relic to an altar that had been erected in the middle of the parade ground where the city’s
poetry evenings were usually held.

The entire city had gathered along the route. Belram Mukkadam, Ganga Ram, Dalima and Dilip, Padmini and her parents, Salar,
all the occupants of the Kali Grounds, including old Prema Bai and the legless cripple Rahul on his wheeled plank, were there
to pay their respects to the woman who had one day proclaimed that the eradication of poverty should be India’s first priority.
For two days thousands of Bhopalis of all castes, religions and origins came to throw flowers at the foot of the altar decorated
with the flags of the country and of Madhya Pradesh. Banners identified the various groups: Congress party members, associations
for businessmen, or the unemployed.

After its sojourn in Bhopal, followed by a pilgrimage through the cities of Madhya Pradesh, the urn was taken back to New
Delhi. There, a military aircraft escorted by two MiG-23s, carried it, with the other urns, over the highest peaks of the
Himalayas. On board the aircraft was Rajiv Gandhi. He emptied all the urns into a basket, which he covered with a red satin
veil. As the plane flew over the eternal snows of the river Ganges’s birthplace, India’s new leader cast the basket into the
crystal clear air. Indira Gandhi’s ashes were returned to the high valleys of Kashmir, the land of the gods and the cradle
of her family.

N
ovember, the month for festivities. While Union Carbide abandoned its Indian industrial jewel to its sad fate, the unconcerned
City of the Begums gave itself up to all the joy and celebration of the world’s most festive calendar. Nowhere did this taste
for rejoicing manifest itself with as much intensity as in the Kali Grounds bustees. There, festivals wrested the poor from
the harsh realities of their dayto-day lives. A more effective vehicle for religion than any catechism, these festivals set
hearts and senses ablaze with the charm of their songs and the rituals of their long and sumptuous ceremonies.

The Hindus opened the festivities with a frenzied four-day celebration in honor of Durga, the conqueror-goddess of the buffalo
demon that rampaged through the world a hundred thousand years ago. The entire city was filled with splendid
pandals
, temporary altars built to hold the statues of the goddess, all dressed up and magnificently bejeweled. Two such altars brightened
up the otherwise gloomy Chola and Jai Prakesh Bustees. For four days, people processed past them, regardless of any distinctions
of faith. The men wore woolen sherwanis over their trousers; the women silk kurtas and dangling earrings that made them look
like royalty.

At twilight on the fourth day, the statues of the goddess were hoisted onto a luggage cart that Ratna Nadar had borrowed from
the train station. His wife and Dalima had draped it with a piece of shimmering cloth and decorated it with flowers. Ganga
Ram’s musicians were there again to provide accompaniment. At the same time, in other parts of Bhopal, similar processions
were setting out. They made for the shores of the Upper Lake in the heart of the city, where the statues crowned with their
gilded diadems were immersed in the sacred waters, bearing with them all the joys and afflictions of the Bhopalis.

A little while later, it was the anniversary of the birth of the prophet Muhammad and the Muslims’ turn to celebrate. The
Kali Grounds’ families painted their homes, outside and in, with whitewash tinged with green, the color of Islam. Chains of
multicolored garlands were strung across the alleyways. Prostrate in the direction of the mystical and distant Kaaba, Salar,
Bassi and Iqbal, spent a night of devotion, squeezed with hundreds of other faithful, into the two small mosques built beside
the railway line in Chola and Jai Prakash. The next day a human tide, vibrant with faith and reciting suras at the tops of
their voices, poured through the neighborhood alleyways. “
Allah ho Akbar!
God alone is great!” recited the multitude from beneath banners representing the domes of the sacred mosques of Jerusalem,
Medina and Mecca, symbols that imbued the bustee with faith, piety and fantasy.

The Muslims had barely finished commemorating the birth of Muhammad before a myriad luminous snakes streaked across the sky
above the Kali Grounds. Celebrated during one of the longest nights of the year, Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, marks
the official arrival of winter. The illuminations were to celebrate one of the most beautiful episodes in the
Ramayana,
the return of the goddess Sita to the arms of her divine husband Rama after her abduction by the demon Ravana. That night
in their huts, Hindu families played cards like mad, for the festival also commemorated the famous dice game in which the
god Shiva won back the fortune he had lost to Parvati, his unfaithful wife. To achieve this victory, Shiva appealed to his
divine colleague Vishnu, who very opportunely assumed the form of a pair of dice. Diwali was thus a homage to luck. The residents
gambled with ten-, five- or one-rupee notes, or even with small coins. The poorest would gamble a banana, a handful of puffed
rice or some sweets. Every alleyway had its big gambler, often it was a woman. The most compulsive was Sheela Nadar. Padmini
would look on bewildered as her mother shamelessly fleeced old Prema Bai.

“It’s a good omen, my girl!” Sheela would explain after every winning hand. “The god of luck is with us. Rest assured that
your marriage will be as beautiful an occasion as Diwali.”

In exactly one week’s time, on Sunday, December 2, the happy conjunction of Jupiter and the sun would transform Padmini into
a princess out of
A Thousand and One Nights.
On that day, Jagannath, the glorious avatar of Vishnu worshipped by the Adivasis from Orissa, would bless her marriage to
Dilip.