Five Past Midnight in Bhopal (37 page)

“Doctors, we’ve come about Nadia,” said Sister Felicity.

Dr. Sheikh’s face froze. He played nervously with his mustache. The two women prepared themselves for the worst. Dr. Gandhe,
however, gave the faintest of smiles.

“Little Nadia has undergone an operation,” he said softly. “For the moment she has survived her injuries. We hope to be able
to save her. She’s in intensive care.”

The Scotswoman’s eyes filled with tears. “May I see her?”

“Yes, Sister, you can even spend the night with her. You’ll have the whole ward to yourself. There’s no one else in intensive
care this evening.”

While Sister Felicity and young Anita began a prayer and vigil night beside little Nadia’s injured body, the thousand guests
at the wedding in the Railway Colony tucked into petits fours, kebabs, prawns, diced chicken in ginger and pieces of cheese
wrapped in spinach delivered by an army of turbaned servants. Despite the fact that his cardiologist had forbidden him alcohol
because of his coronary problems, Harish Dhurve, the stationmaster, tested his luck with the glasses of “English liquor,”
the imported British whisky being served. Suddenly he found himself nose to nose with his doctor.

“Indulge me, doctor, this evening is exceptional, a night blessed by the stars!” he apologized.

Dr. Sarkar was the official doctor for the residents of the Railway Colony and the station staff. His Bengali sense of humor
meant that he was never at a loss for repartee. Looking pointedly at his patient’s glass, he asked, “And what if the stars
decided to go on strike?”

This reply brought a slightly forced smile to the stationmaster’s face. More than anyone else in Bhopal that night he needed
the blessing of the stars. Like most of the other railway employees invited to the festivities, he would have to slip away
a little before midnight to attend to his duties at the station. In fact that night was expected to be extremely busy because
of the pilgrims arriving to celebrate Ishtema. Dhurve had had all the station staff requisitioned, including the 101 coolies.
His station was one of the country’s principal railway junctions. He had promised himself that he would control the excess
traffic with punctuality and suppleness, and provide the thousands of visitors with a welcome befitting Bhopali hospitality.

Midnight. In the factory, unknown to anyone, a bomb had just been primed. After the night-shift operators had tried vainly
to drain the system of the rinse water that had been injected into it for the last three hours, it had started to blow back
into tank 610. It went rushing in, carrying with it metal debris, sodium chloride crystals and all the other impurities it
had dislodged from the lining of the pipes. This massive influx of contaminants promptly set off the exothermic reaction the
chemists always dreaded. In a matter of minutes, the forty-two tons of methyl isocyanate disintegrated in an explosion of
heat, which would very quickly transform the liquid into a hurricane of gas.

When their eyes began to smart, the six men sitting less than forty yards from the tanks, finally conceded that their colleague
Varma was right. It was not the smell of Flytox he had detected, but indeed the characteristic boiled cabbage odor of methyl
isocyanate. They still did not know, however, what was going on in tank 610.

Qureshi turned to V.N. Singh and Varma. “Guys, you’d better go and do a tour around the rinsing area,” he suggested.

The two technicians picked up their torches, put on their helmets and stood up.

“Don’t forget your masks!” said Qureshi.

“It’s not worth it! It’s not the first time this factory’s smelled of MIC,” replied V.N. Singh. “Have the tea ready for us
in a minute!”

“Of course!” Qureshi called.

“And if you’re not back in time we’ll send out a search party with a bottle of oxygen!” joked the Jain from Bombay, provoking
general laughter.

In a few minutes, the two men reached the pipework being cleaned. The smell was getting stronger and stronger. They listened
to the rushing of the water still circulating at full force through the piping, and directed the beams of their flashlights
onto the network of pipes. They scrutinized every stopcock, valve and flange. All of a sudden Singh noticed, at a draincock
some eight yards off the ground, a bubble of brownish water surmounted by a small cloud.

“There’s some gas escaping up there!” he shouted.

Varma pointed the beam of his flashlight at the cloud. “You’re right. And it’s not Flytox!”

The two men ran back to the control room.

“Shekil! There’s a pipe pissing MIC!” Singh said. “You should come and take a look.”

Qureshi looked at his colleague in disbelief. “Stop fooling about!” he protested. Then emphasizing each word, he insisted,
“Get it into your heads once and for all that there can’t be a leak in a factory where production has been stopped. Any idiot
knows that.”

“But it really is pissing out, and it smells very strong!” Singh insisted, rubbing his eyes.

Qureshi shrugged his shoulders. “Perhaps it’s a drop of residual MIC escaping from the drainage cocks with the rinse water,”
he conceded. “All we have to do is turn the water taps off. We’ll see if we can still smell it after that.” With these words
he looked at his watch and added, “For now, guys, it’s midnight and time for tea!”

The sacrosanct tea break! Thirty-six years after their colonizers had departed, no Indian, not even the six Carbide men perched
atop an erupting volcano, would forego a ritual that had entered their culture as surely as the game of cricket. Qureshi led
the team to the building a hundred or so yards away that housed the staff cafeteria. Shortly after midnight, a young Nepalese
lad with small, laughing eyes made his appearance. He was the tea boy. In his basket he carried a kettle full of scalding
milky tea, some glasses and a plateful of chocolate cookies.

Qureshi and his workmates settled down comfortably to sip the delicious brew steeped in the rich perfume of the distant hills
of Assam. Suddenly, a worried face appeared in the doorway. It was Suman Dey, the duty head of the control room.

“Shekil,” he called out to the Muslim supervisor, “the pressure needle for tank 610 has shot up from two to thirty psig!”

Qureshi shrugged his shoulders, then gave his colleague a smile. “Suman, you’re getting in a sweat about nothing! It is your
dial that’s gone mad.”

S
tations along the world’s second largest rail network knew nothing about closing for the night. In Bhopal, platform No. 1,
the same platform that, a hundred years previously, had greeted the kingdom of the Begums’ first train with a double line
of mounted lancers and turbaned sepoys, was seething with activity. That night it was swarming with hundreds of passengers
waiting for the Gorakhpur Express. As a precaution against thieves, many of them had chained their luggage to their ankles.
Tormented by mosquitoes, hordes of children were running about in all directions, playing hide-and-seek among the suitcases
and squabbling among themselves. Dozens of street vendors, porters in red tunics, lepers shaking their bowls and ringing their
bells, beggars, and policemen in blue caps were wandering among the travelers and their luggage in an acrid atmosphere of
bidi smoke, betel and incense sticks.

Midnight was the time for the shifts to change. Deputy Stationmaster V.K. Sherma, his assistant, Madan Lal Paridar, and their
young aid, the traffic regulator Rehman Patel, had just settled themselves in front of the control board in their office at
the end of the platform. With its Victorian gothic architecture it looked like a Sussex cottage. The room was equipped with
two powerful air-conditioning units, which in the summertime made it possible to forget the heat and pollution outside. Now,
however, it was winter, and the machines were switched off. Cool air from outside came in through the wide open doors and
windows. Inside, the office was equipped with a long board on which moveable pegs of different colors and lights marked the
location of trains on their way to Bhopal and the position of the signals and switches. On the table in the middle of the
room stood several telephones, one of which was an old-fashioned crank phone that they used to call other stations to check
what time the trains went through. Because of a thick fog over part of Madhya Pradesh that night, and the unusual amount of
activity, most of the trains due to arrive before midnight showed significant delays. None of them was expected before two
or three in the morning.

Such was the case with the Gorakhpur Express, in which Sajda Bano, the widow of Mohammed Ashraf, Carbide’s first gas victim,
was traveling. Together with her two sons, three-year-old Soeb and five-year-old Arshad, she had meant to catch the train
on the previous day. At the last minute, however, a neighboring Hindu woman had begged the young Muslim not to travel on Saturday,
because it was considered by followers of her religion to be the most ill-omened day of the week.

In their office, the station staff prepared for one of the long waits to which Indian railway employees and their twelve million
daily passengers are well accustomed.

Suddenly, the deputy stationmaster picked up one of the phones. “I’m calling the boss,” he informed his assistant. “There’s
no need for him to come for a good two hours yet.”

“You’re right,” his colleague agreed, “that way he’ll be able to down a few more glasses of English liquor!”

The three men laughed. They were well aware of Harish Dhurve’s weakness for alcohol. It was at this point that a coolie in
a red tunic appeared at the door.

“Quickly, come and see! Arjuna and his chariot are here with presents for you.”

The porter Satish Lal was in a state of extreme excitement. His reference to the mythological Pandava prince and his celestial
chariot was not wholly inaccurate. Ratna Nadar, whom he had introduced to his team of porters two years previously, had just
arrived, pushing a rickshaw full of small cardboard boxes.

“There are a hundred and five, one for each coolie, four others for the bosses and the last is for good old Gautam behind
his ticket office window,” Padmini’s father announced.

Each box contained a hard-boiled egg, a kebab on a stick, a small bowl of rice with dal on it, a vegetable samosa, a chapati
and two balls of
rossigola
, a very sweet confection made out of pastry steeped in syrup. In India every feast is shared. Ratna Nadar had been eager
for his workmates and superiors to have their share of the banquet held that night to mark the most important event in his
life: his daughter’s marriage. Toward eleven o’clock, he had slipped away from the festivities to change from his ceremonial
clothes into his red tunic. That night he, too, had been requisitioned to assist the expected passengers.

“Ratna Nadar
Ki Jai
! Ratna Nadar
Zindabad
!”
^*
A rousing ovation in Hindi and Urdu acclaimed the father of the bride and his cartload of delicacies.

“Thank you, friends! Thank you, my friends!” he repeated over and over again as he handed out his little boxes.

Drawn by the unusual cluster of red tunics right in the middle of the platform, some of the passengers gathered around. Ratna
Nadar cast an emotional eye over the dilapidated facades of the vast station where once he had disembarked with all his family,
driven from his village by the curse of aphids; the same station that today incorporated all his hopes. Thanks to it, to its
passengers’ mountains of bags and packages and to the heavy crates in its cargo bays, he was going to be able to pay back
the twelve thousand rupees borrowed from Pulpul Singh for his daughter’s wedding. Every train would bring him nearer to that
blessed day when he would be able to recover the property deed he had pawned to the moneylender.