Five Past Midnight in Bhopal (44 page)

Barely five hundred yards from the improvised hospital into which the gas victims were pouring by the hundreds, a man in a
red pullover, his face protected by a damp towel and motorcycle goggles, came out of a small house in the old part of town,
in the company of his young wife and her fifteen-year-old sister. All three straddled the scooter that was waiting, propped
against the door. The journalist Rajkumar Keswani had been woken a few moments earlier by a strange smell of ammonia. He had
closed the window without ever for one moment imagining that the smell might be an indication of the very catastrophe he had
warned the city against. He had called the police headquarters.

“What’s going on?” he asked. “An accident at Carbide,” answered a voice strangled with anxiety. “A gas tank explosion. We’re
all going to die.”

From his window Keswani then saw people fleeing in all directions, and understood. Settling his two passengers on the scooter,
he gripped the handlebars and set off like the wind toward the distant neighborhoods of New Bhopal, out of reach of the gases
from the cursed factory.

A
n act of barbarity had broken him; the Carbide catastrophe would make him a hero. One month after discovering six members
of his family burned alive in reprisal for the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the Sikh colonel Gurcharan Singh Khanuja, commanding
officer of the electrical and mechanical engineering corps in Bhopal, found himself confronted with yet another tragedy. That
night, with nothing to protect him but fireman’s goggles and a wet towel over his face, the officer had sprung to the head
of a column of trucks to rescue four hundred cardboard factory workers and their families, all of whom were surprised by the
gas as they slept.

Having completed that rescue operation, the colonel and his men returned to the danger zone, this time to search the Kali
Grounds neighborhoods for any survivors. The corpse of the white horse from Padmini’s wedding was blocking the entrance to
Chola Road. With its hooves in the air, its body swollen with gas and its eyes bloodshot, the animal was still in its harness.
The soldiers tied a rope around its front legs and pulled it to one side. A little farther on, the officer came across other
vestiges of the festivities: on the small mandap stage, the flames of the sacrificial fire were still flickering, gilded armchairs,
the musicians’ drums and dented trumpets, saucepans full of curry and rice, and even the generator hired to light up what
should have been the greatest moment in Dilip and Padmini’s lives. Abandoned outside a hut, Khanuja now found the wedding
presents: some cooking utensils, clothing and pieces of material. He picked up the parasol the groom had carried as he proceeded
on his white mare. With military discipline he took the time to jot down an inventory of all the debris in a notebook. Then,
stepping over the corpses littering the alleyways, he systematically inspected every dwelling. He had given his men the order
to move in total silence. “We were on the alert for the slightest sign of life,” he would say. Now and then they would hear
a moan, a groan, a cough or a child crying. “Bodies had to be shaken to ascertain which ones were still alive,” the officer
would recount, “but often we were too late. The crying had stopped. There was nothing left but the dreadful, frightening silence
of death.”

In one hut, Khanuja found an elderly couple sitting calmly on the edge of a charpoy. They smiled at the officer as if they
had been expecting him for a visit. In the shack next door an entire family had been wiped out: the parents and their six
children lay sprawled on the beaten earth floor, their eyes bulging, and foam and blood frothing out of their mouths. The
youngest had died sucking their thumbs. Khanuja had the elderly couple taken away by truck and went off in search of other
survivors. On Berasia Road where men came to beg Carbide’s tharagars for jobs, the ground was scattered with bodies, struck
down in midflight. Suddenly the colonel’s attention was drawn to that of a very young woman whose ankles sparkled in the moonlight.
He turned on his flashlight and saw that she was wearing anklets with bells on them. With her hands and feet decorated in
henna, her close-fitting bodice and cotton loincloth that fell in a fan shape over her hips and thighs, the officer thought
she looked like one of the sacred dancers he’d seen on television. A braid of white jasmine flowers had been tucked in her
bun. The Sikh also noticed a small cross on a chain around her neck. From all indications, the girl was dead. Just as he was
about to switch off his flashlight, the officer glimpsed a trembling of the corner of her mouth. Was he mistaken? He knelt
down, cleared one ear of the folds of his turban and pressed it to the young woman’s chest, but her heart seemed to have stopped
beating. Just in case, however, he called for a stretcher.

“Hamidia Hospital, quickly!” he shouted to the driver.

After Mahmoud Parvez’s staff had returned with his wedding shamianas, the approaches to the great hospital looked like the
encampment of some tribe struck down by a curse from above. In each tent Parvez, who had recovered from gas inhalation, unrolled
mats, and set up tables and benches, toward which the medical college students tried to channel the hordes of dying people
who kept on pouring in. Picking out from this tide those who would benefit from a few blasts of oxygen or a cardiac massage
was impossible. The white-smocked student who felt for Padmini’s pulse was quite sure that his patient was a hopeless case.
As in wartime, it was better to work on those who had some chance of pulling through. He had her stretcher taken to the morgue
where hundreds of corpses were already piled up.

In addition to pulmonary and gastric attacks, most arrivals were suffering from serious ocular lesions: burned corneas, burst
crystalline lenses, paralysis of the optic nerve, collapsed pupils. A few drops of atropine and a cotton pad for each eye
was all the medical teams could offer their tortured patients. Seeing the cohorts of blind people stumbling over the bodies
of the dying, Professor Mishra said to himself, “Tonight the Bhopalis are going through their Hiroshima.”

Forty-eight-year-old commissioner Ranjit Singh was the highest civil authority for the city of Bhopal and the surrounding
region. As soon as he heard about the catastrophe, he jumped in his car and sped to the police headquarters in the heart of
the old town. It was from this nerve center that he intended to mobilize evacuation and rescue operations. Ranjit Singh would
never forget his first glimpse of that hellish night. On the bridge running along the Lower Lake, he saw “tens, hundreds,
thousands of sandals and shoes lost by people running away in their scramble to escape death.”

The commissioner found the police headquarters in total disarray: gas had infiltrated the old building, burning the eyes and
lungs of many of the officers. Yet calls were coming in, one after another without interruption, in the command room on the
second floor. One of them was from Arjun Singh, chief minister of Madhya Pradesh. Rumor had it that he had fled his official
residence and taken refuge outside the city. Arjun Singh was calling in by radio to speak to the police chief Swaraj Puri.

“You must stop people leaving,” the head of the government insisted. “Put barricades across all roads leading out of the city
and make people go back to their homes.”

The chief minister, it seemed, had no idea of the chaos that ruled Bhopal that night. In any case Puri had a good rebuttal.

“Sir,” he answered, “how can I stop people leaving when my own policemen have disappeared along with the other fugitives?”

The commissioner decided to speak to the head of the government himself. He took over the microphone. “Mr. Chief Minister,
no one can stop the human tidal wave trying to escape the blanket of gas. It’s every man for himself. What’s more, in the
name of what do you want to stop these poor people from trying to save their lives?”

The senior official was suspicious of Singh’s motives for stopping the exodus. With one month to go to the general election,
it was conceivable that the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh was afraid of losing votes. After all, he’d already won the support
of the bustees by giving them the property deeds that legalized their squats beside the high-risk factory. This had been a
decision the commissioner had tried in vain to oppose for reasons of safety, and because it encouraged random settlement,
the nightmare of any municipal authority. And now, when tragedy was striking the beneficiaries of Singh’s largesse, the chief
minister wanted to keep survivors in their homes. Indignant, the commissioner cut short their conversation and called his
subordinates to ask them to send all available vehicles to help evacuate the areas affected by the toxic cloud that was still
spreading through a whole section of the city. Then, putting a damp towel over his face, he started up his Ambassador and
headed for the factory.

The spectacle he encountered at the entrance to the erst-while pride of Bhopal was terrifying. Hundreds of people from districts
to the north and east were banging on the doors of the dispensary where Dr. Loya, Carbide’s appointed doctor, and three overstretched
nurses were trying to give a few breaths of oxygen to those most affected. On one of the four beds, with his face protected
by a mask, lay the only victim of the catastrophe on the factory’s staff. Shekil Qureshi, who had believed as deeply in Carbide
as he did in Allah, had been found sprawled at the foot of the boundary wall over which he had leapt after tank 610 exploded.

The commissioner was immediately brought to the office where Jagannathan Mukund had shut himself away. The first thing that
caught his eye was a framed certificate on the wall, an award congratulating Mukund on his factory’s excellent safety standards.
“But that night,” the commissioner would recount, “the recipient of that diploma was just a haggard man, annihilated by the
magnitude of the disaster and by fear of a popular uprising.”

Ranjit Singh tried to reassure him. “I’ll have armed guards posted at the entrance to the factory, as well as outside your
residence.”

Suddenly, however, the commissioner could no longer contain one burning question. “I really wanted to know whether, for years,
without my being aware of it, a plant located less than two miles from the center of my capital had been producing a pesticide
made out of one of the most dangerous substances in the whole of the chemical industry,” he would later explain. He recalled
having read that in the United States, people were put to death using cyanide gas. “Did the gas that escaped from your plant
tonight contain cyanide?” he asked.

According to the commissioner, Jagannathan Mukund grimaced before revealing the awful truth. “In the context of a reaction
at very high temperature, MIC can, in fact, break down into several gases, among them hydrocyanide acid.”

All that night people called out for each other and searched for one another: in Hamidia Hospital, in the streets and in the
courtyard of Bhopal’s great mosque. The water in the ablution tanks, diverted in bygone days from the Upper Lake by a British
engineer, was a godsend. Victims rinsed their burning eyes and drank deeply in order to purge themselves of deadly molecules.