Five Past Midnight in Bhopal

by Dominique Lapierre; Javier Moro

  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!”

  The deputy stationmaster and his assistant Paridar left the office but were immediately hit in the face by a pocket of poisonous gas moving at head height. Two or three inhalations were enough to stop any air reaching their lungs. With their ears whistling and their throats and faces on fire, they beat a retreat,
gasping for breath.

  Witnessing the scene, the young traffic regulator Rehman Patel had the presence of mind to do the only useful thing possible. He closed all apertures and turned on the air-conditioning. The gusts of fresh air it emitted brought immediate relief to the two railway employees who slowly regained their senses. That was when the internal line telephone rang. Sherma recognized the voice of the man in charge of the Nichadpura Center, a fuel depot a few hundred yards from the Carbide factory.

  “There’s been an explosion at Carbide,” announced the panic-stricken speaker. “The whole area is covered with a toxic cloud. People are scrambling about in all directions. Get ready. You’ll be hit next. The wind is blowing the cloud in your direction …”

  “It’s already here,” replied Sherma.

  A vision of horror passed through the deputy stationmaster’s mind at that moment: the Gorakhpur Express was speeding toward Bhopal with hundreds of passengers onboard.

  “Whatever happens we’ve got to make sure the train doesn’t stop here!” he cried to his two assistants.

  No sooner had he spoken, however, than he shook his head. He knew what Indian railway bureaucracy was like. An order like that could not be given at his level. Only the chief stationmaster could issue such a directive. Sherma immediately dialed Harish Dhurve’s home. No one answered.

  “He must be downing a last whisky at the Railway Colony wedding,” he said, frustrated.

  There was little point in trying again. He could never receive the necessary authorization to prevent a holocaust in his station. His boss had been dead for half an hour.

  There were no vendors, lepers, beggars, coolies, children or travelers left. Platform No. 1 was nothing more than a charnel house of entangled bodies, stinking unbearably of vomit, urine and defecation. Weighed down by the gas, the toxic blanket had draped itself like a shroud over the people chained to their baggage. Here and there, an odd survivor tried to get up. But the deadly vapors very quickly entered his lungs and he fell back with mouth contorted like a fish out of water. The beggars and leprosy sufferers, whose tubercular lungs were already weak, had been the first to die.

  Thanks to the air-conditioning filtering the air, the three men in the stationmaster’s office and a few coolies who had taken refuge in their cloakroom had so far managed to escape the noxious fumes. In vain V.K. Sherma frantically cranked his telephones to call for help. All the lines were busy. At last he managed to speak to Dr. Sarkar. After evacuating the priest and his family, the railway workers’ doctor had gone back to his office in the Railway Colony. From behind the damp compresses over his mouth and nose, he sounded confused. He had just spoken to Dr. Nagu, director of the Madhya Pradesh Health Service.

  “The minister was furious,” said Sarkar. “He told me the people at Carbide didn’t want to reveal the composition of the toxic cloud. He tried to insist and asked whether they were dealing with chlorine, phosgene, aniline or I don’t know what else. It was no use. He wasn’t able to find out anything. He was told the gases were not toxic and that all anyone had to do to protect himself was put a damp handkerchief over their nose and mouth. I’ve tried it and it seems to work. Oh! I was forgetting … Carbide people also told the director to ‘breathe as little as possible’! My poor Sherma, pass that advice on to your travelers while they’re waiting for help to arrive.”

  Help! In his station strewn with the dead and the dying, the deputy stationmaster felt like the commander of a ship about to be engulfed by the ocean. Even if he could do nothing for the passengers on platform No. 1, however, he must still try to save those due to arrive. Unable to contact his superior to prevent the Gorakhpur Express from stopping at Bhopal station, he would still do all he could to impede it from running into the trap. The only way was to halt it at the previous stop. His assistant immediately called the station at Vidisha, a small town less than twelve miles away.

  “The train has just left,” the stationmaster informed him. “Curses on the god,” groaned Sherma. “Is there at least a signal we could switch to red?” asked Patel, the young traffic regulator.

  The three men looked at the luminous indicators on the large board on the wall.

  “There isn’t a single point or signal box between Vidisha and Bhopal,” Sherma established.

  “In that case, we’ll just have to run out in front of the train and signal the engine driver to stop,” declared Patel.

  The idea appeared to stupefy his two elder colleagues. “And how are you going to signal the engineer to stop a train going at full speed in the middle of the night?” asked Sherma’s assistant.

  “By waving a lamp about in the middle of the track!” Sherma nearly swallowed his quid of betel. The whole idea seemed outrageously dangerous. But after a few seconds he changed his mind.

  “Yes, you’re right. We could stop the train with lanterns. Go and fetch some able-bodied coolies!”

  “I’m volunteering,” announced Patel. “So am I,” Sherma’s assistant, Paridar, said. “Okay, but it will take at least four or five of you. Four or five lanterns will be easier to see in the dark.”

  Patel rushed to the sink at the far end of the room to soak his gamcha. After wringing it out, he plastered it over his face and went out. Two minutes later he came back with Padmini’s father and Satish Lal who had escaped the gas by taking refuge in a first-class waiting room and shutting the windows. Sherma explained their mission to them, emphasizing how vital it was.

  “If you can stop the Gorakhpur, you may save hundreds of lives,” he told them. Then he added, “You’ll be heroes and be decorated for it.”

  The prospect brought only the faintest of smiles to the four men’s faces. Sherma pressed his hands together over his chest.

  “May the god protect you,” he said, inclining his head. “You’ll find some lanterns in the maintenance store. Good luck!”

  The deputy stationmaster was overcome with emotion. Those men, he thought, are real heroes.

  Guided by Padmini’s father who knew every turn of the track by heart, the little procession moved off into a murky darkness filled with invisible dangers. Every five minutes Ratna Nadar would raise one arm to stop his comrades, kneel down between two sleepers and, for a long moment, press his ear to one of the rails. There was as yet no vibration from the approaching train.

  Huddled with her two sons on the seat of one of the forty-four train cars, Sajda Bano was counting off the last minutes of her interminable journey back to the city where her husband had been Carbide’s first victim. When she felt the train slow down, she moved nearer to the window in order to gaze out at the illuminated outline of the factory that had put an end to her happiness. She had dreaded returning to Bhopal but she had little choice. Her in-laws were determined to get their hands on the fifty thousand rupees’ compensation the factory had given her. Sajda had experienced all the hardship of being an Indian widow. No sooner had her husband been buried than her father-in-law had thrown her out of the house, on the pretext that she was refusing to renounce her inheritance. Out of her mind with grief and despair, the young widow had responded with her first act as an independent woman. She had torn off the veil she had worn since she was nine years old and rushed to the bazaar to sell it. The one hundred and twenty rupees she received in return were the first money she had ever earned. Since then she had never again worn a veil. Overcoming the triple handicap of being a woman, a Muslim and a widow in a country where, despite all the progress, customs could still be medieval, she embarked on a struggle for justice. She knew that she could count on the support of the kindly H.S. Khan, a colleague of her husband’s, who had taken her and her children in after her in-laws had put her out on the street. She had stayed with him while she looked for lodgings and hired a lawyer. Now she very much hoped that Khan would be on the platform to greet her. Poor Sajda! Having killed her husband, Carbide’s gas had just struck down her benefactor on his way to the station.

  Holding their lanterns at arms’ length, the four men pro
gressed with difficulty. Without realizing it, they were passing through a multitude of small residual clouds that were still lurking between the rails and along the ballast. They stumbled over corpses twisted into horrible attitudes of pain. Here and there, they could hear death rattles, but there was no time to stop. Then a great roar rent the darkness, accompanied by the same shrill whistle that made the occupants of the Kali Grounds tremble in their sleep. The train! Brandishing their lanterns, the four men ran to meet it. Very swiftly, however, they ran out of breath. In the end the toxic vapors had penetrated their damp cotton compresses. Hyperventilating with the effort, their lungs craved more and more air, the same air that was poisoned with deadly molecules. The weight of their lanterns became unbearable. And yet they kept on going. Staggering between the sleepers, suffocating and vomiting, the four men desperately waved their lights. The engineer of the Gorakhpur Express did not understand the signal. Thinking they were revelers fooling around the railway track, he kept on going. By the time, in a horrifying flash, he saw the men yelling at him from the middle of the rails, it was too late. With its engine cowling spattered with flesh and blood, the Gorakhpur Express was entering the station.

  The headlights of the locomotive surging out of the mist made the deputy stationmaster jump. V.K. Sherma realized that his men had failed. The train glided smoothly along the rails of platform No. 1 before stopping with a deafening grinding noise. There was still one last chance to prevent the worst.

  Like all large stations in India, Bhopal was equipped with a public address system. V.K. Sherma dashed to his console at the far end of the office, turned on the system and grabbed the microphone. “Attention! Attention!” he announced in Hindi with as calm and professional a voice as he could. “Because of a leak of dangerous chemical substances, we invite all passengers due to get out at Bhopal to remain in their carriages. The train will depart again immediately. Passengers may get out at the next station, from where buses will transport them to Bhopal.” He repeated his message in Urdu. All too quickly, he was able to gauge the success of his announcement. Doors were opening, people were getting out. Nothing could threaten the lives of pilgrims coming to celebrate Ishtema. They were secure in the knowledge that Allah would protect them.