Five Past Midnight in Bhopal
Page 20
As soon as the funeral carriage stopped, a squad of soldiers carried the mortal remains of Indira Gandhi to the pyre. The people of the Kali Grounds saw a man dressed in white, wearing the legendary white cap of the Congress party and a white shawl lined in red over his shoulders. They all recognized Rajiv, Indira’s elder son, her heir, the man the country had chosen to succeed her. According to tradition, it was his responsibility to carry out the last rites. The cameras showed him spreading a mixture of ghee, coconut milk, camphor essence and ritual powders over his mother’s corpse. While the television set flooded the esplanade with Vedic mantras recited by a group of priests in saffron robes, Rajiv took hold of the cup containing the sacrificial fire. Five times India’s new leader circled the pyre, from left to right, the direction in which the Earth revolves around the sun. The crowd saw his son Rahul appear next to him, together with his wife Sonia and their daughter Priyanka. Although traditionally women did not take part in cremations, they helped place firewood around the body. A camera focused next on the flaming cup, which Rajiv raised for a moment above the surrounding heads before plunging it into the pyre. When the first flames began to lick at the blocks of sandalwood, a voice intoned the same Vedic prayer that Belram Mukkadam had recited on the death of his father.
Lead me from the unreal to the real,
From darkness to light
From death to immortality …
At that instant, a mighty howl broke forth from the crowd. The cry uttered over six hundred miles away acted like a detonator. Suddenly, the voice of Rahul drowned out the sound of the television. “We must avenge Indira!” he yelled. His usually smiling mouth was twisted with fury. “Rahul is right, Indira should be avenged!” numerous other voices took up the cry. “This city’s full of Sikhs. Let’s go and burn down their houses!” someone shouted. At this cry, the entire group leaped to their feet, ready to rush to Hamidia Road and the area around Bhopal’s main gurdwara, or Sikh temple.
Climbing onto the platform, Ganga Ram addressed the multitude. “No need to go to Hamidia. It would be enough …”
He had no time to finish his sentence. Ratna Nadar had jumped on the platform. “Friends, Nilamber has just been found dead. He hung himself from a beam of his hut. On his charpoy, there is a picture of Indira and a garland of flowers.”
Nilamber, the sorcerer whom everybody loved because he only predicted good fortune! The news of his suicide bewildered all those present. Death was a familiar enough event in the bustees but this time it was different. Nilamber had been overcome by grief. It was Belram Mukkadam’s turn to mount the stage.
“Ganga’s right,” he cried. “It isn’t worth going all the way to Hamidia Road to set fire to the Sikh houses, it would be enough to set fire to the moneylender’s, the man who sucks us dry. Everyone to Pulpul Singh’s house!”
By setting fire to Pulpul Singh’s house they would be making a Sikh pay for the horrible murder perpetrated by two of his brothers in religion, but they would also be avenging all the crimes committed by the loan shark who had, at one time or another, humiliated each and every one of them. His safe already contained several property deeds mortgaged against pitiful loans. Pulpul Singh was the ideal scapegoat. By setting fire to his house, obliging him to flee, perhaps even killing him, they would be avenging Indira, avenging Nilamber, avenging all the injustices of life.
At the first cry for vengeance Sister Felicity slipped away from the crowd. She felt it was her duty to prevent her brothers’ and sisters’ anger from ending in tragedy. Spotting the dark silhouette hurrying away, Padmini joined her. Preempting her question, the nun took the young Indian girl by the arm and swept her along with her.
“Come with me quickly to Pulpul Singh’s. We must warn him so he has time to get away.”
Together they ran to the two-story house at the entrance to Chola.
Pulpul Singh was surprised by the arrival of the two women. Neither the nun nor young Padmini belonged to his usual clientele.
“What wind of good fortune blows you this way?” he asked.
“Get out of here! For the love of God, leave immediately with your family!” the nun begged him. “They want to take vengeance on you for Indira Gandhi’s assassination.”
She had scarcely finished speaking when the front-runners of the crowd arrived. They were armed with iron bars, pickaxes, bricks, bolts and even Molotov cocktails.
“For the first time I saw a sentiment on their faces that I had thought not to find in the poor,” Sister Felicity later remembered. “I saw hatred. The women were among the most over-wrought. I recognized some whose children I’d nursed, even though their contorted features made them almost unrecognizable. The residents of the Kali Grounds had lost all reason. I realized then what might happen one day if the poor from here were to march on the rich quarters of New Bhopal.”
Terrified, Pulpul Singh and his family fled out of the back of their house but, not before wasting precious time trying to push the safe to the back of the veranda and hide it with a cloth. In the meantime, the rioters had thrown their first bottle of flaming petrol. It hit the ground just behind Sister Felicity and Padmini who had remained outside. The explosion was so powerful that they were thrown toward each other. Dense smoke enveloped them. When the cloud cleared, they found themselves in the middle of the rampaging crowd. The shoemaker Iqbal had brought a crowbar to force open the gate. Suddenly someone shouted, “Get them! They’ve escaped out the back!” A group took off in pursuit of the fugitives. Their Ambassador automobile had failed to start, so they were trying to get away on foot. Restricted by their saris, the women had difficulty running. Soon the family was caught and brought roughly back to the house. In his flight Pulpul Singh had lost his turban.
“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.
33
Festivities That Set Hearts Ablaze
November, 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 assur
ed 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.
The ritual for an Adivasi marriage is as strict as any that unites high-caste Hindus. Nine days before the ceremony, Padmini and Dilip had to submit themselves to all kinds of ablutions in the homes of neighborhood families, before a meal and the presentation of gifts to equip their household. Four days later, the married women took charge of the young couple for a purification ceremony, in which they were rubbed down with castor oil and other ointments that smelled strongly of saffron and musk. Once this oiling had been completed, they proceeded to the interminable trying on of the wedding outfits made by the tailor Bassi. The cost of these outfits had been subject to keen negotiation. For a humble coolie working at the train station, marrying his daughter off meant substantial sacrifices.
Three days before the wedding, Ratna Nadar and several of his neighbors built the mandap, the platform on which the union would be celebrated. This was a dais about ten yards wide, raised about twenty inches from the ground and made out of mud coated with a smooth, dry mixture of cow dung and clay. Branches from two of India’s seven sacred trees covered the sides of the platform and in the middle, on an altar decorated with flowers, stood the image of the god Jagannath. Strings of lightbulbs provided the finishing touch to the decorations. On the evening of the ceremony, they would be lit by a generator hired for the occasion. Belram Mukkadam had chosen a prime position for the celebration. Padmini and Dilip would be married where all the community’s great events took place—on the teahouse esplanade—looking out at the tanks and pipework of the plant that represented the hope of a better life.