Five Past Midnight in Bhopal (40 page)

Amid this hell, the bicycle repairman Salar came upon a vision that would haunt him. As he reached the corner of Chola Road,
he narrowly escaped being knocked over by a white horse, bridled and saddled as if for some celebration. Through the veil
of gas burning his eyes, he recognized the white mare that only a few hours earlier, Dilip, Padmini’s bridegroom, had ridden
to his wedding ceremony. With its eyes bloodshot, its nostrils steaming with burning vapors and its mouth foaming with greenish
vomit, the animal bolted away, came back at a gallop, stopped sharp, gave a heartrending whinny and collapsed.

Of all the extraordinary scenes that marked that night of horror, one in particular would leave an impression on the few survivors:
the frantic flight of a fat man in his underpants and vest, gasping his lungs out pushing a heavily loaded cart. Nothing could
have prevented the moneylender Pulpul Singh from taking with him something more precious than life itself: his safe full of
bank notes, jewels, watches, transistors, gold teeth, and, above all, the property deeds pawned by the wretched residents
of Orya Bustee.

L
ess than four hundred yards from the apocalypse taking place on the Kali Grounds, a stout man fiddled happily with his mustache.
Sharda Diwedi had won. None of his power station turbines had failed. Bathed in an ocean of light, his niece Rinu’s marriage
ceremony was coming off with all the brightness hoped for. The final part of the ritual was reaching its conclusion. At a
signal from the officiating priest, the girl’s father would address his future son-in-law with the words that would officially
seal the union of bride and groom. “I give you my daughter, in order that my one hundred and one families may be exalted for
as long as the sun and the moon continue to shine, and with a view to having an heir.” The guests assembled under Parvez’s
beautiful shamiana held their breath. In a few seconds’ time, these words would bind the two young people together forever.
But they were never to be uttered. The ceremony was rudely interrupted by shouting. “There’s been an accident at Carbide’s!
Bachao! Get out of here!” frantic voices yelled from all directions.

Already a suffocating smell was invading the center of the Railway Colony. Moving in small pockets at different heights, the
cloud seeped around the buffet tables, the dance floor, the swimming pool, the musicians’ stand and the cooks’ braziers that
immediately flared up in a chemical reaction. As dozens of guests collapsed, the stationmaster, Harish Dhurve, was hit by
deadly vapors. Letting go of his last glass of English liquor, he fell to the ground. Dr. Sarkar, who had forbidden him any
alcohol, braved the blanket of toxic gas and tried to resuscitate him, to no avail. A few minutes before Bhopal station was
hit, it lost its stationmaster.

Panicked, Sharda Diwedi tried to telephone the only person he believed was in a position to explain what was going on. But
Jagannathan Mukund’s telephone line was busy. In between two attempts, Diwedi’s own telephone rang. He recognized the voice
of the man in charge of the electricity substation in Chola.

“Sir, we’re surrounded by a suffocating cloud of gas. We’re requesting permission to leave. Otherwise we’re all going to die.”

Diwedi thought briefly. “Whatever you do, stay right where you are!” he urged. “Put on the masks Carbide gave you and block
up all doors and windows.”

“Sir,” replied the voice, “there’s just one problem: there are four of us and only one mask.”

Disconcerted, Diwedi searched for the right thing to say. “You’ll just have to take it in turns,” he eventually advised. At
the other end of the line there was a derisive laugh and then a click. His employee had hung up. The head of Bhopal’s power
station had no idea that he had just saved four men’s lives. Next day when the military gathered up the dozens of corpses
sprawled around the grounds of the substation, they would be surprised to discover four workers inside, still breathing.

“Bachao! Bachao!” Coughing, spitting, suffocating and with burning eyes, Rinu and her fiancé found themselves trapped in a
nightmare, along with all those who had come to celebrate with them. They were scrambling about in all directions, desperate
for something to drink, fleeing toward the railway station, seeking refuge in the local houses. Realizing that the panic-stricken
crowd must be evacuated before the cloud killed everybody, Diwedi overcame the bout of coughing that was setting his throat
on fire and ran to the garages to requisition the trucks that belonged to the shamiana rental and the caterer. But the garages
were empty. Even his car had disappeared. At the first cries of “Bachao!” the cooks, servants, the men who put up the tents,
the electricians and musicians had all jumped in the vehicles and driven off. The four men in charge of the generator set
had decamped on their scooters. The indomitable little man decided then to go on foot to his home, seven or eight hundred
yards away, where he would at least find his old Willis Jeep. On his way back he was intercepted by a frenzied crowd. People
stormed his old jalopy, throwing themselves onto the seats, hood and bumpers. There were twenty, thirty, fifty of them, struggling
with the last vestiges of their strength to climb on-board. These were the survivors from the Kali Grounds’ neighborhoods.
They were weeping, pleading, threatening. Many of them, exhausted by this final effort, collapsed unconscious. Others coughed
up the last blood from their lungs and keeled over. Just then, a truck roared like a rocket through the crowd of dying people.
Diwedi heard skulls cracking against the fenders. The driver left a pulp of crushed bodies in his wake before disappearing.
A moment later, through vapor-burned eyes, Diwedi could see a woman throwing her baby over the guard rail of the bridge on
the railway line, before jumping into the void herself. “I realized then that something awful was going on,” Sharda Diwedi
would say, “something beyond all comprehension.”

The Rev. Timothy Wankhede had spent Sunday afternoon preaching to hospital patients on the epistle of St. Paul, imploring
the mercy of the Lord upon his children, who in the pursuit of riches had “fallen into temptation and a snare, and into many
hurtful and foolish lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition.” The young priest and his wife Sobha had just been
woken with a start by the cries of Anuradh, their ten-month-old son. The toxic vapors had entered the modest red-brick vicarage
they occupied in the Railway Colony, next door to the Holy Redeemer’s Church. In a few seconds they too were overtaken by
the same symptoms of gas inhalation. They struggled to understand what was going on.

“Perhaps it’s an atomic bomb,” Father Timothy spoke through the pain in his throat.

“But why in Bhopal?” asked Sobha, discovering, to her horror, that blood was trickling from her baby’s lips.

Her husband shrugged his shoulders. He knew that he was going to die and was resigned to it. But as a man of God and despite
his pain, he wanted to prepare himself and his family for death.

“Let’s pray before we leave this world,” he said calmly to his wife.

“I’m ready,” the young woman replied.

Although standing required great effort, Father Timothy took his child in his arms and led his wife over to the other side
of the courtyard. He wanted to spend his last moments in his church. Placing the infant on a cushion at the foot of the altar,
he went and got the bulky copy of the New Testament from which he read to his parishioners each week, and came back to kneel
beside his wife and child. He opened to chapter twenty-four of the Gospel of Matthew and recited as loudly as his burning
throat would permit. “Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come …” Then they drew consolation from the
words of the psalmist. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil,” Timothy read with
feeling.

Suddenly, through the stained glass of the small church, there appeared the figure of a savior. With a damp towel plastered
over his nose and mouth, Dr. Sarkar signaled to the reverend and his wife to protect themselves in the same way, and come
out immediately. There were already five people piled into the doctor’s Ambassador waiting outside the church, but in India
there was nothing unusual about that. Timothy Wankhede, who had found Jesus Christ while listening to the radio one day, could
put a bookmark at the page of chapter twenty-four of St. Matthew’s gospel. Despite the agony he had endured, which would leave
both him and his family with serious aftereffects, his hour had not come yet.

“Your samosas are great!” said Satish Lal, the luggage porter. He and his friend Ratna Nadar were waiting at the end of platform
No. 1 for the Gorakhpur Express. Like the ninety-nine other coolies, Lal had polished off the contents of the small cardboard
box brought by Padmini’s father.

“They certainly all seemed to have tucked in,” said Nadar, proud to have been able to give his friends a treat.

“I’ll bet you’re going to have to tighten your belt a bit now,” observed Lal. “I can’t imagine Pulpul Singh giving anything
away.”

“You can say that again!” confirmed Nadar.

All of a sudden the two men felt a violent irritation in their throats and eyes. A strange smell had just invaded the station.
The hundreds of passengers waiting for their trains also felt their throats and eyes become inflamed.

“It’s probably an acid leak from one of the goods wagons,” said Lal, who knew that there were containers of toxic material
waiting to be unloaded. “It wouldn’t be the first time!”

Lal was wrong. The toxic cloud from the factory had arrived. It would turn the station into a deathtrap for thousands of travelers.

The two coolies rushed to the stationmaster’s office at the end of the platform. The deputy stationmaster V.K. Sherma was
just moving one of the pins on the traffic indicator board. The Gorakhpur Express was approaching Bhopal. It was due to arrive
in twenty minutes.

Lal could scarcely speak. “Boss,” he croaked, “something’s going on … people on the platform are coughing their guts out.
Come and see!”