Five Past Midnight in Bhopal

by Dominique Lapierre; Javier Moro

  34

  A Sunday Unlike Any Other

  The dawn prayer. Every morning Bhopal awoke to the call of the muezzins from high up in the minarets. Sunday December 2, 1984, however, was no ordinary day. In a few hours time the City of the Begums was due to celebrate Ishtema, the great prayer gathering that, once a year, brought thousands of pilgrims from all over the country, as well as Pakistan and Afghanistan, to the heartland of India. Ratna Nadar had been obliged to temporarily abandon preparations for his daughter’s wedding and go with the other station porters to meet the special trains overflowing with the faithful. There would never be more people in Bhopal than on that Sunday. The excitement had already come to a head in the Taj ul-Masajid, the great mosque where teams of electricians were installing the floodlighting that would illuminate the splendid building for a week. Volunteers were unrolling hundreds of prayer mats and hooking up loudspeakers that, for three days and three nights, would broadcast the celebration of the greatness of Allah.

  All around the city’s mosques and outside the hotels on Hamidia Road, the bus station and the railway station, hundreds of street vendors were taking up their positions. Ishtema was a lucrative time for any business in Bhopal. Jolly and rubicund, his lip accentuated by a thin mustache and his forehead decorated with Vishnu’s trident, Shyam Babu, a forty-five-year-old Hindu, was the proprietor of the city’s largest restaurant. Muslim, Hindu or secular, the many festivals in the Indian calendar made his fortune. Situated in the old part of the city, his establishment, the Agarwal Poori Bhandar, could serve up to eight hundred patrons a day and never closed. “Our meals are the best and the cheapest in town,” he assured people. And it was true; for ten rupees, the equivalent of less than fifty cents, one could eat one’s fill of vegetables, chicken or fish curry and samosas. But Shyam Babu was not just a businessman; he was also a kind man. The lepers and beggars who hauled themselves up the steps of the great mosque, and the penniless pilgrims who camped out in the ruins of the palace of Begum Shah Jahan knew that they would always find a bowl of rice and vegetables if they went to him.

  Shyam had started that Sunday as he began every day, with a morning prayer in the small temple to Lakshmi, goddess of wealth. He had brought her baskets of fruit and flowers, for he was going to have particular need of her support that day. For him, the eve of any festival was always difficult. The massive arrival of visitors meant that many police reinforcements had to be brought in. The municipal government counted on Shyam to feed these men. It had become a tradition. The restaurateur had ordered up an extra 650 pounds of potatoes, the same quantity of flour, and doubled the stocks of fuel to supply his fifteen ovens. “Don’t you worry, I could feed the whole city,” he informed the police chief who had come to make sure that his men would be adequately nourished.

  Not far from Shyam Babu’s restaurant, a notice board drew attention to another, rather quaint business, which had sprung into action for this Sunday unlike any other. For three generations the Bhopal Tent and Glass Store had been renting out equipment and accessories for the city’s weddings and public celebrations. The grandson of its founder, fifty-two-year-old Mahmoud Parvez, a Muslim who looked like a mullah with his little goatee and his embroidered skullcap, ran his business by telephone from a worktable set up in the street. The warehouse behind him was a veritable Ali Baba’s cave whose secrets he alone knew. In it were piles of plates, crates of glassware, drawers full of cutlery, candlesticks of all sizes, old gramophones, antique generators, elephant bells, flintlock guns and harquebuses. Parvez’s pride and joy was a gleaming Italian percolator. “I’m the only one in town, in the whole of Madhya Pradesh even, who can serve espresso coffee!” he boasted. What had earned him the most renown, however, was his impressive collection of carpets and shamianas, the multicolored tents used for public and private ceremonies. He had them to suit all tastes and all budgets; some could even hold up to two thousand guests. Others, by virtue of the refinement of their patterns, were real museum pieces. Parvez only hired them out on very special occasions and then only to friends or people of prominence. That Sunday, his staff was preparing the most beautiful shamiana for the wedding of the daughter of the controller-in-chief of the Bhopal railway, the Hindu Ashwini Diwedi, whose brother Sharda was managing director of the city’s power station, two people of standing whom Mahmoud was eager to please. The remaining rugs and shamianas would be used in the day’s numerous other weddings, the Ishtema festival on the following day, as well as the mushaira, the poetry recital arranged for ten o’clock that night in Spices Square. For this event, Parvez would also be providing small cushions so that the poets could relax between recitations, accessories all the more necessary because a number of these men of letters were members of the celebrated Lazy Poets’ Circle.

  Mahmoud Parvez rubbed his hands as he watched his storehouse empty. That Sunday was going to be an auspicious one for the Bhopal Tent and Glass Store.

  The feverish preparations had spread as far as the workshops of Kali Grounds’ two main artisans. The shoemaker Mohammed Iqbal had been working since dawn to finish the shoes made of Agra leather and sandals encrusted with precious stones that several of the wedding guests had ordered. With the help of his young apprentice Sunil Kumar, the son of poor peasants newly arrived in the bustee, he cut, trimmed and sewed away, surrounded by the suffocating smell of glue and varnish that filled the hut where his wife and three children were still sleeping. Across the way, in hut No. 240, his friend Ahmed Bassi had also been up since dawn, finishing embroidering the saris and veils ordered by the wealthy families of Arera Colony for their daughters’ weddings. Bassi had such fine silk fabrics brought from Benares that his shop attracted Bhopal’s smart set, despite its location in the poor quarter. Five times a day, he thanked Allah for all the benefits He had bestowed upon him. His order book was overflowing. In two weeks’ time, it would be Eid, the most important festival in the Muslim year. The treadle of his sewing machine would not stop, as he made kurtas out of satin and sherwanis in Lucknow brocade.

  At the other end of town, in a church with a slate-covered steeple in the Jehangirabad district, on that same December 2, Bhopal’s Christian minority gathered to celebrate Advent. The first Sunday in Advent was the beginning of a time of prayer and recollection leading up to the year’s most important Christian festival: Christmas. A life-size crèche commemorated the birth of the Messiah in a Bethlehem stable. A noisy and colorful congregation of women in superb saris with the embroidered ends covering their heads, and sumptuously dressed men and children filled the nave, cooled by a battery of fans. Majestic in his immaculate alb and red silk vestments, Eugene de Souza, the Roman Catholic archbishop, originally from Goa, read the first psalm with fervor. “Awake thy glory, O Lord, and deliver us, for our transgressions have led us into imminent danger.”

  That morning one pew remained unoccupied. Sister Felicity had called the prelate to ask him to excuse her, and to request that his vicar, Father Lulu, come to Ashanitekan, the House of Hope, to give mass for the handicapped children in the building’s small chapel. There, to the right of the altar stood a large picture of Jesus, under which were inscribed the simple words: I AM WITH YOU ALWAYS.

  A dozen children were kneeling on jute sacks sewn end to end. Among them was Raina, the little girl with spina bifida, whom the nun had put in her own bedroom in order to better care for her. For much of the time, especially at night, her illness plunged her into a comalike state, almost as if she were dead. The previous night, however, Raina had suddenly woken up, screaming.

  “People with this kind of illness have a very special sensitivity,” Sister Felicity explained. “Raina never woke up in the night unless something unusual was going to happen, like a storm, or the beginning of the monsoon. But the weather was so beautiful in Bhopal that second day of December that I couldn’t understand why all at once she started to yell.”

  The nun was to find her answer in the gospel that Father Lulu read that day. “The sun shall be d
arkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken …”

  In the northern part of the immense city, in the Railway Colony, the Anglican incumbent of the small white church of the Holy Redeemer was also meditating with his flock upon the somber predictions of the holy scriptures. Short and stocky with a round smiling face, the thirty-one-year-old vicar Timothy Wankhede had come originally from Maharashtra. Together with his wife and ten-month-old baby named Anuradh, the Hindi word meaning “joy,” he lived in a modest red-brick vicarage next to the church. Like Archbishop de Souza, he poured endless energy into keeping the flame of Christian faith alight in a city inhabited by an overwhelming majority of Muslims and Hindus. Timothy had become a Christian one day while listening to the radio. He was twenty years old when an announcement in Marathi, his mother tongue, suddenly came over the airwaves. “He who chooses and believes in Jesus Christ will be saved and all his kinfolk with him,” said the voice on the radio. “I was overwhelmed,” Timothy would recount. “I rushed to the only public telephone in the village and called the radio station, wanting to know more about Jesus Christ.” After being baptized, on what he described as “the most wonderful day” of his life, he had traveled India for three years, preaching the Gospel. Then he had spent four years at theological college studying for the ordination that would throw open the doors of the Bhopal parish.

  The Reverend Wankhede’s ministry was not confined to leading worship. That first Sunday of Advent, he was preparing to take his parishioners to visit the city’s various hospitals. “It’s our duty to comfort our suffering brethren,” he said, “and tell them that Jesus’ hands can heal, if only we believe in him.” In his shoulder bag he carried editions of the Bible in a dozen different languages. For that Advent Sunday, he had chosen to read a verse from St. Paul to the sick, which in a few hours’ time would prove to be tragically relevant. “O God, forgive your children who were missed by those who had lured them with the promise of wealth.”

  The two men were practitioners of a medical specialty of which crime writers are particularly fond. Sixty-two-year-old Prof. Heeresh Chandra and his young assistant, thirty-four-year-old Ashu Satpathy, performed autopsies on the corpses that sundry incidents throughout the year—accidents, crimes or suicide—dispatched to the examination tables of the Department of Forensic Medicine at the Gandhi Medical College. In a city with six hundred thousand inhabitants, there were plenty of violent deaths, even on Sundays and holidays. In the absence of a suitably refrigerated morgue, the two pathologists had to be constantly available to perform autopsies as soon as the corpses came in.

  With his dignified air and imposing white mustache, Professor Chandra looked like a maharajah from a Rajput kingdom. Despite his unusual profession, he was best known for his hobbies: dogs and vintage cars. He owned three sand-colored Labradors and a 1930 National, known throughout the city for the way it backfired. On December 2, the eccentric professor was getting ready to take his venerable vehicle and his Labradors out for a drive, as he did every Sunday, to Delawari National Park, a favorite resort of the Bhopalis.

  Meanwhile, his young colleague Ashu Satpathy spent his leisure time indulging his passion for roses. Because the garden of his Idgah Hills cottage was not big enough, he had transformed the corridors and terraces of the Department of Forensic Medicine into a rose garden. Dozens of jardinières and pots of flowers stood alongside the rows of jars containing the livers, kidneys, hearts, spleens and brains that enabled him to extract information from the bodies brought in by the police. Satpathy spent any free time he had watering, pruning and feeding his dwarf bushes and climbing roses. The same fingers that immersed themselves in human entrails carried out delicate grafts to produce new varieties, the secrets of which he alone knew. He had given them such lyrical names as “Black Diamond,” “Moschata,” “Chinensis,” “Odorata” and “Golden Chrysler.” In two days’ time the doctor was going to exhibit these wonders in the greenhouses at the monumental floral show that, for one week, would turn Bhopal into India’s rose capital.

  Alas the events of that Sunday were to thwart the two doctors’ plans. Toward midday a telephone call from police headquarters informed them that two bodies, those of a man and a woman, were on their way to the morgue. It was a matter of urgency that the doctors establish the cause of death.

  Before starting work, the two medical examiners enlisted the help of the accomplice who was party to all their dissections. With his beige cap eternally crammed down over his long hair, the twenty-eight-year-old photographer Subashe Godane looked more like an artist than an accessory to a postmortem examination. He dreamed of making his mark on the world of fashion and advertising photography and had assembled an impressive portfolio of women’s portraits that he was preparing to show at the New Delhi biennial exhibition. In the meantime, he and his Pentax K-1000 supported his wife and three children by photographing corpses riddled with stab wounds, decapitated children and women who had been slashed to ribbons. Godane was absolutely convinced that his films had registered every conceivable horror humanity could inflict. He was wrong.

  The autopsies on the two bodies took three hours. The absence of any signs of violence on the couple, who were both in their forties, suggested a double suicide by poisoning. Analysis of the internal organs confirmed Doctors Chandra and Satpathy’s hypothesis. In the victims’ stomachs they found copious quantities of a whitish powder that had caused extensive damage to the digestive and respiratory organs. Although the two practitioners were unable to determine the precise nature of the substance, they were probably dealing with a strong pesticide in the DDT family. Returning to the village where the bodies had been found, the police discovered that the victims were peasants whom the latest drought had reduced to ruin. Unable to pay back the loans they had taken out to buy seed, fertilizer and insecticides for their next crop, they had decided to end their lives. Such cases were by no means unusual in India, nor was the method used. That Sunday, December 2, Carbide’s beautiful factory had started to sow its seeds of death. In the peasants’ hut, the police found an empty package of Sevin.

  A Sunday of prayer and mourning but a Sunday of folly, too. Around a circle of dust in an old hangar attached to the Lakshmi Talkies, the city’s oldest and largest cinema, clustered three hundred overexcited gamblers. The building shook with all the shouting and heckling and the din from the loudspeakers. Men in shirts and lunghis, their fingers clutching bundles of rupees, pushed their way through the onlookers to pick up the bets. In the front row of the arena a light complexioned man, whose elegant kurta was out of keeping with the general scruffiness, was silently massaging the claws of a cock. Omar Pasha, the godfather of the bustees, never talked before a fight.

  Pressed around him like a bodyguard were his friends from the Kali Grounds led by Belram Mukkadam, Ganga Ram and Rahul. All had bet on Yagu, Omar Pasha’s champion, the creature with the murderous spurs that the old man was holding on his belly. A victory that afternoon would open the way to the championships in Ahmadabad in January, then Bangalore in March and finally New Delhi in April. The creature relaxed, clucking with pleasure as his master gently massaged its thighs, joints and claws. Then, with the help of a file, Omar Pasha sharpened its spurs and beak into deadly daggers.

  The sound of a gong announced the beginning of the fight. The godfather stood up and carefully placed Yagu in front of his opponent. The two cocks immediately hurled themselves at one another with a fury that roused the fever of their audience. Beaks and spurs spun in the light like steel-tipped arrows. The blood spurting in all directions did nothing to diminish the fury of the two combatants. The crowd yelled their names, clapped and stamped their feet. When one of the birds rolled over in the dust, the audience was nearly delirious. Omar Pasha followed the ferocious battle with the detachment of a Buddha. Yagu bled, staggered and fell but each time he got up to strike again. With a final blow of his spurs he managed to put out an eye
of his adversary, who collapsed, mortally wounded. Another sound of the gong signaled the end of the fight. The godfather stood up and retrieved his bloody but victorious cockerel. Parading the creature above his head like a trophy, he greeted the crowd.

  35

  A Night Blessed by the Stars

  A Sunday of frivolity and freedom from care. Usually closed on Sundays, the stores in the Chowk Bazaar, scattered around the minarets and golden-spired cupolas of the Jama Masjid, were doing a record trade. That December 2 was, above all else, a day for marriages blessed by the stars. Elegant ladies from the smart neighborhoods came rushing in to make last-minute purchases. Necklaces, earrings, bracelets, all kinds of jewelry that were a specialty of Bhopal, were snatched up. Perfumers sold out their inventories of sandalwood, essence of roses and patchouli. Vendors were plundered of their silks, ribbons and sandals. It was as if the end of the world were at hand.

  On the other side of town, the Arera Club, a splendid institution inherited from the British, was doing the sort of business it did on all festival Sundays. Its members thronged around an abundantly laden buffet table, the tennis courts, and immaculately manicured lawns, and the Olympic-size swimming pool and the reading rooms.

  Executives from Carbide and other Bhopal companies were entitled to membership in this club that nestled in an oasis of mauve, bloodred, orange and white bougainvilleas, palm, frangipani and neem trees. With its gala evenings, balls, tennis and bridge tournaments, and games of bingo, the Arera Club had at one time given the South Charleston expatriates and their young Indian colleagues a glimpse of the life led by its British administrators in the great days of the empire. Recently things had changed somewhat. On that Sunday December 2, 1984, there were no longer any American Carbiders sampling the pots of chicken curry and other Indian delicacies on the buffet. There were hardly even any Indian engineers left; the factory had been deserted by so many of its local senior staff. One of their few remaining representatives, Works Manager Jagannathan Mukund, had brought his wife and son, who was on break from university, to lunch there. That evening, Mukund and his wife planned to take their son to several marriage celebrations. And next day, they were going to show him some of the picturesque sites surrounding the City of the Begums. The plant had ceased operations, so there was no reason its captain could not be gone for a day or two.