Five Past Midnight in Bhopal (39 page)

Dalima’s singing and Dilip’s staccato beating of two tambourines accompanied her dance. The crowd of enthralled guests cried
out in delight with “Vah! Vahs!” that fired their poverty-stricken neighborhood with triumphal fervor. Suddenly, however,
Belram Mukkadam raised his stick above the audience. He had just heard the distant howl of Carbide’s siren. Padmini’s feet
stood still, the bells on her ankles fell silent. Everyone strained their ears anxiously in the direction of the metal structure,
which still appeared so peaceful in the distant halo of its thousand lightbulbs.

“Don’t say we’re going to have to go through what we did the other evening,” the midwife Prema Bai protested vehemently. “Because
I, for one, am staying at home this time.”

Yet again it was Rahul who allayed their fears. “You’re getting uptight about nothing, friends,” he assured them. “Since the
last alert, they’ve decided to demolish their factory. But apparently it’s so rotten they’re frightened they won’t be able
to dismantle it. It’s riddled with holes.”

“Perhaps that’s why the siren’s going, like the other evening when there was a gas leak,” suggested the dairyman Bablubhai.

His remark went unanswered; the howl of the siren had suddenly stopped. Padmini started to dance again, Dalima resumed her
singing and Dilip his tambourine playing. The show went on even more enchantingly than before. The god was being really indulged.
And the guests, too. But why could they no longer hear the siren? None of them knew that those in charge of the factory had
recently modified it. In order to make it easier to broadcast instructions to the workers during an emergency, and to prevent
the neighbors from panicking at the least little incident, the siren stopped automatically after ten minutes. A quieter alarm,
which could not be heard outside the factory boundaries, took over.

Soon, however, there were other indications to arouse the anxious curiosity of the revelers. First it was a pungent odor.

“Little mischief-makers have thrown chilies on the chula again!” said Ganga Ram who, as a former leper, had a particularly
keen sense of smell.

“Bah!” replied the shoemaker Iqbal, “you know very well that it’s tradition …”

He was interrupted by an ear-splitting bellow. Out of the darkness surged Nandi the bull with his painted horns, followed
by the five cows Mukkadam and his friends had bought with Carbide’s compensation money, staggering as if they were drunk.
They were vomiting yellow froth, their pupils had swollen up like balloons and tears poured from their eyes. The animals took
a few more steps, then sank to the ground with a last rattle. It was one-thirty in the morning. On the Kali Grounds, the apocalypse
had begun.

The two geysers of gas had merged to form an enormous cloud about a hundred yards wide. Twice as heavy as air, the MIC made
up the base of the gaseous ball that was formed by the chemical reaction in tank 610. Above it, in several successive layers,
were other gases, among them phosgene that had escaped from a nearby reactor, hydrocyanic acid and monomethylamine with its
suffocating smell of ammonia. Because these gases were less dense that MIC, the cloud would spread rapidly, widely and farther.
At the same time the movement of the noxious bank of fog was not homogenous. It progressed in fits and starts, striking or
sparing according to the temperature of the location, the degree of humidity and the strength of the wind.

The vapors that reached the areas closest to the factory poisoned at random along the way, but the smell of boiled cabbage,
freshly cut grass and ammonia covered the entire area in a matter of seconds. No sooner had Belram Mukkadam spotted the cloud,
than he felt its effects. Realizing that death was about to strike, he yelled, “
Bachao! Bachao!
Get out of here!” The wedding guests were immediately seized with panic and ran off in all directions.

For Bablubhai, it was already too late. Orya Bustee’s dairyman would never again bring milk to children suffering from rickets.
When Nandi the bull died, he rushed from the banquet to his stable where he could hear his buffalo cows bellowing to him.
The seventeen beasts were lying down when they were hit head-on by a small blanket of gas moving along at ground level. Several
had already succumbed. Devastated, Bablubhai ran to his hut to check on his newborn son and wife Boda.

“The oil lamp has gone out,” murmured the young woman tearfully.

Bablubhai bent over to grab his child. A gust of vapor caught him there. It paralyzed the dairyman’s breathing instantaneously
and he was struck down in a faint over the body of his lifeless baby.

Similar respiratory paralysis overtook several of the other guests in midflight. Another small greenish cloud laden with hydrocyanic
acid drifted into old Prema Bai’s hut. It killed the midwife outright, as she lay on her charpoy. She and many of the other
guests had sought refuge in their homes. In the hut next door, Prodip and Shunda, Padmini’s grandparents, also succumbed in
seconds. Of all the gases making up the toxic mass, hydrocyanic acid was one of the deadliest. It blocked the action of the
enzymes carrying oxygen from the blood to the brain, causing immediate death.

One of the first victims of this creeping layer of gas was the cripple Rahul on his wheeled plank. Because of his robust constitution,
he did not die right away but only after several minutes of agony. He coughed, choked and spewed up blackish clots. His muscles
shook with spasms, his features contorted, he tore off his necklaces and his shirt, groaning and gasping for something to
drink, then finally toppled from his board and dragged himself along the ground in a last effort to breathe. The man who had
always been such a tireless source of moral support to the community, who had so frequently appeased the fears of his companions
in misfortune, was dead.

Awakened with a start by all the yelling and shouting, those who had been asleep rushed panic-stricken out of their huts.
For the first time Muslim women emerged with their faces uncovered. From out of all the alleyways came small carts laden with
old people and children. Very soon, however, the men pulling them suffocated and collapsed. Unable to get back on their feet,
they lay sprawled in their own vomit. Little girls and boys who were lost, fastened on to passing fugitives and bicycles.
Many of the residents of Chola and Jai Prakash bustees took refuge in the small temple to the monkey god Hanuman, or in the
little mosque that was soon overflowing with distressed people. In their panic, men and women left other family members behind
in their huts. Ironically, their activity was often their own undoing, while those left behind were in many instances recovered
alive. The gas claimed more victims among those obliged to breathe deeply because they were moving, than those who kept still.

Others, such as the shoemaker Iqbal and the tailor Bassi made sure, before they fled, that no one was left behind in any of
the homes in their alleyway. That was how they came to find the old mullah with the goatee. Persuaded that Allah had decreed
that the world should end that night, the holy man had knelt down on his prayer mat and was reading suras from the Koran by
the light of a Carbide flashlight.

“You are My creature, and you will not rise up against My will,” he repeated as his neighbors scooped him up to carry him
away. As he emerged from the hovel, into which the deadly vapors were about to pour, he asked his rescuers, “Are you quite
sure that the end of the world is tonight?”

In the fetid, stinking darkness people called for their spouses, children or parents. For those blinded by the gas, shouting
a name became the only way of making contact with their loved ones again. Time and again Padmini’s name resounded through
the night. In the stampede, the heroine of the evening had found herself brutally separated from her husband, mother and brother.
She, too, was almost blind. Carried along by the human torrent, with her bells jangling around her ankles, coughing blood,
Padmini did not hear the voices calling out to her. And soon the calling stopped; people’s throats had constricted from the
gas and no one could utter a sound. In an effort to relieve the dreadful pains in their chests, people were squeezing their
thorax with all their strength. Stricken with pulmonary edema, many of them coughed up a frothy liquid streaked with blood.
Some of the worst affected spewed up reddish streams. With their eyes bulging out of their heads, their nasal membranes perforated,
their ears whistling and their cyanotic faces dripping sweat, most of them collapsed after a few paces. Others, overcome with
heart palpitations, dizziness and unconsciousness fell right there in the doorways of the huts they had tried to leave. Yet
others suddenly turned violet and coughed dreadfully. The sound of coughing resounded through the night in sinister harmony.

Amid all this chaos, one man and one woman walked, with difficulty, against the tide. Having given the signal for everyone
to escape, Belram Mukkadam had decided to go in the opposite direction. He was taking his wife Tulsabai back to their hut.
The mother of his three children wanted to die at home. Suffering from awful stomach pains, unable to breathe anymore, the
poor woman stumbled over the corpses that lay outstretched in the alleyways. On arriving outside her hut, she turned around
to look for her husband. It was then that she realized that the last body she had tripped over was Belram’s. Half-blinded,
she had not seen him fall. The pioneer of Orya Bustee, the man who had drawn out the plot for each of its huts with the tip
of his stick, who for twenty-five years had protected the poor, restored their dignity and fought for their rights, the legendary
figure of the teahouse, had been brought down by Carbide’s gas.

Many of the bustee dwellers believed doors and windows could keep out the gases. They tried to take refuge in brick houses.
The nearest one was the godfather Omar Pasha’s. Its two stout stories rose out of the disaster area like a fortress. Persuaded
that the blanket of gas moved along the ground, the old man had retreated to the second floor with his family and his best
fighting cocks. In the panic, Yagu, winner of that Sunday’s duel, had been forgotten. Brought down by the toxic gases, he
lay with burst lungs in the living room on the ground floor.

The godfather had his servants and bodyguards take in the refugees. Their arrival was greeted with acts of extraordinary generosity.
Omar Pasha’s eldest son took a little girl who was hardly breathing in his arms and laid her gently on the charpoy in his
room. The women of the house tore off their muslin veils, dipped the pieces of material in a bowl of water and applied them
as cooling compresses to eyes that were on fire. One of the godfather’s wives, a plump matron whose arms jangled with bracelets,
sponged away the blood flowing from people’s lips, handed out glasses of water, and comforted one and all. Even Omar Pasha
himself helped. With gold-ringed fingers he handed around plates of biscuits and sweets in a kindness that the survivors of
that apocalyptic night would never forget.

Not all the brick built houses bordering on the slums were as welcoming. Ganga Ram and Dalima chose to flee along the railway
line leading to Bhopal station. Ganga was convinced that he would find refuge a little farther on in one of the villas occupied
by the railway workers. He knocked on the door of the first but received no response. Afraid that the wave of gas would catch
up with him again, he did not hesitate before breaking a window and climbing inside. A moment later came the sound of gunshots.
Believing he was the victim of a break-in and still unaware of the accident at the factory, the owner of the property had
fired his revolver. Fortunately, in the darkness, he missed his target.

The unspeakable was happening. Driven by the wind, the wave of gas was catching up with the flood of humanity trying to escape.
Out of their minds with terror, people with shredded clothes and torn veils ran in all directions, trying to find a pocket
of breathable air. Some, whose lungs were bursting, rolled on the ground in awful convulsions. Everywhere the dead with their
greenish skins lay side by side with the dying, still wracked with spasms and with yellowish fluid coming out of their mouths.