Five Past Midnight in Bhopal

by Dominique Lapierre; Javier Moro

  With a wet towel over his mouth, Sherma left his post to run to the head of the train and order the engine driver to leave. He knew that this order was illegal. All trains stopping in Bhopal were required to undergo routine mechanical checks. Curtailing a stop meant preventing these checks. That night, however, there were no maintenance teams or parts supervisors left. There were only hundreds of people who might yet be saved. Terrified that the vapors might already have reached the engineer, that he might have passed out or be dead at the controls of his locomotive, Sherma hurried as fast as he could. Recognizing his uniform, dying people clung to him in a last desperate effort. Others threatened him and tried to block his way, demanding help. Stepping over bodies and slipping in vomit, he at last reached the front of the train. There, his railway worker’s reflexes came back to him. He took his little flag out of his pocket and banged on the window of the locomotive’s cab.

  “All clear. Depart immediately!” he announced.

  That was the ritual formula. The engine driver responded with a nod of his head, took the brakes off and leaned hard on the regulator of his diesel engine. To the accompaniment of grinding noises and whistle blasts, the Gorakhpur Express extricated itself from the dreadful necropolis. Drenched in sweat, breathing painfully and with a pounding heart, but proud of his achievement, the deputy stationmaster picked his way back through the carnage to his office at the other end of the platform. But Bhopal’s stationmaster’s office was no longer recognizable.

  The small notice “A/C OFFICE” displayed over the door had attracted some of the passengers driven frantic by the toxic cloud. In the conviction that the gases would be unable to get into an air-conditioned room, they had rushed in, destroying everything in their path, breaking up the train indicator board, tearing out the telephones. Disaster reigned. Even the appearance of the tall figure of Dr. Sarkar failed to calm the plunderers’ fury. The railway doctor had managed to get to the station on foot. He was carrying a bag with a red cross on it, a derisory symbol in this setting of agony and death. He had filled his bag with bottles of eye lotion, cough lozenges, bronchodilators, cardiac stimulants and anything else he could find in his medicine cabinet. But what use were such remedies? The doctor bent over the first body. Then, on the platform, he came across a scene that would haunt him for the rest of his life: a baby suckling at the breast of its dead mother.

  Like many other passengers on the Gorakhpur Express, Sajda Bano had not heard the deputy stationmaster’s announcement. She got out with her two children and her suitcases. In the yellowish mist enveloping the platform, she tried to look for the figure of the good Mr. Khan, her husband’s friend. But with her eyes smarting from the vapors, she could only make out a confusion of corpses in a deathly silence. “It was as if the train had stopped in a cemetery,” she was to say. Three-year-old Soeb and five-year-old Arshad were immediately assailed by the gases and racked with coughing. Sajda herself felt her throat and trachea become inflamed. She could not breathe. Stepping over the corpses, she dragged her sons toward the waiting room in the middle of the platform. The room was filled to overflowing with people on the verge of death, coughing, vomiting, urinating, defecating and delirious. Sajda stretched the two boys out in a corner of a seat, put a teddy bear, a gift from their grandmother, in the youngest’s arms, and placed two wet handkerchiefs over their little livid faces. “Don’t worry,” she told them, “I’m going to get help and I’ll be back straightaway.” As she went out, she passed the window to the ticket sales and reservations office. With his lifeless head propped on a pile of registers, the portly Mr. Gautam looked as if he was sleeping.

  All night long Sajda Bano wandered about among thousands of Bhopalis, looking for a vehicle to come and take her children to a hospital. The panic in the station and surrounding area was such that she did not get back to them until the early hours of the morning. She found her two boys where she had left them. Little Soeb was still clutching his teddy bear to his chest and breathing weakly, but clotted blood had formed a red ring around the motionless lips of his brother Arshad. Sajda knelt down and put her ear to the frail, lifeless chest. Carbide’s gas had taken her husband. Now it had stolen one of her children, too.

  41

  “All Hell Has Broken Loose Here!”

  It was a silent, insidious, and almost discreet massacre. No explosion had shaken the city, no fire had set its sky ablaze. Most Bhopalis were sleeping peacefully. Those still reveling in the reception rooms of the Arera Club, under the wedding shamianas of the rich villas in New Bhopal, or in the smoke-hung rooms of Shyam Babu’s restaurant, overrun that night, as every Sunday night, with the medical college students—all those people suspected nothing. In Spices Square in the old city, an exultant crowd went on acclaiming the mushaira’s poets. Salvos of ecstatic “Vah! Vahs!” shook nearby window panes. Even the eunuchs had turned out in force, a rare occurrence, because it was one of their rules to be home by sunset. The presence of the legendary Jigar Akbar Khan, however, and of several other masters of poetry from all four corners of the country, had persuaded the gurus of the various eunuch “families” to give their protégés free reign. There was just one condition: they must travel in groups of four. The audience contained some of the more famous members of their unusual community: the plump Nagma, for example, the ravishing Baby and the disconcerting Shakuntual with his large, dark, kohl-encircled eyes.

  In keeping with tradition, the mushaira also gave a few unknown amateurs the opportunity to recite their poetry. The Muslim workman who, until twenty-three hundred hours, had been busy flushing out the pipes in the Carbide factory, was among those privileged few. When his turn arrived, however, Rehman Khan froze with fright. His young son Salem took his hand and led him onto the stage. The crowd held its breath. The hands that had just set off an inevitable tragic sequence gripped the microphone.

  Oh my friend, I cannot tell you

  Whether she was near or far,

  Real or a dream …

  The worker-poet spoke fervently, his eyes half-closed.

  It was like a river flowing through my heart.

  Like a moon lit up, I devoured her face

  And felt the stars dance about my head …

  Jagannathan Mukund would not go picnicking with his son beside the Narmada’s sacred waters the next day. The sound of his telephone ringing had just rudely awoken the works manager of the factory where Rehman Khan worked. S.P. Chowdhary, his production manager, informed him that a gas leak had occurred in the MIC storage zone. Mukund refused to believe it. He simply could not let go of the idea an accident could happen in a dormant factory.

  “Come and get me,” he ordered Chowdhary. “I want to go and look at the site.”

  While he was getting dressed, the telephone rang again. It was Swaraj Puri, the city’s police chief, to inform him that panic-stricken residents were fleeing from the Kali Grounds. Many of them showed signs of poisoning. Mukund decided to call his friend, Professor N.P. Mishra, dean of the Gandhi Medical College and chief of internal medicine at Hamidia Hospital. The doctor had just come back from a wedding.

  “N.P.!” he warned. “Get ready for some emergency admissions at the hospital. It seems there’s been an accident at the plant.”

  “Is it serious?” asked Mishra anxiously.

  “I’m sure not, the factory’s out of production. A few inconsequential poisonings, I imagine.”

  “A gas leak?”

  “So they tell me. I’ll know more when I’ve visited the scene.”

  The doctor pressed his friend. “Phosgene?” he asked, remembering the death of Mohammed Ashraf.

  “No, methyl isocyanate.”

  This answer left the professor at a loss. Carbide had never supplied Bhopal’s medical teams with any detailed information about the substance.

  “What are the symptoms?”

  “Oh, nausea, sometimes vomiting and difficulty in breathing. But with damp compresses and a little oxygen everything should be all right. Nothi
ng really serious …”

  Was this reputable engineer, chosen by Carbide to succeed the plant’s last American manager, acting a part? Or was he simply ignorant? Did he really not know that MIC was a deadly substance? When, a few minutes later, he reached Hamidia Road, his white Ambassador was suddenly swamped by a throng of people coughing their lungs out, vomiting, groping their way about. Fists banged on the body of his car.

  “Where are you going?” shouted a man who was frothing at the mouth.

  “To the factory!” answered Mukund through the closed window.

  “To the factory! You’re mad! Turn back or you’re dead!”

  At these words, the engineer wound down his window. A powerful smell of chemicals overwhelmed the interior. Mukund’s driver immediately started to choke. Crumpled over his steering wheel, he began to turn the car around.

  “We’ve had it, sir,” he wailed.

  Mukund grabbed him by the arm. “Carry straight on,” he ordered, pointing to the avenue leading up to Carbide’s site. “That’s where we’re going.”

  Fortunately, Mukund had taken the precaution of bringing some handkerchiefs and a bottle of water. He handed out compresses to the production manager and the driver while the car carved its way through the middle of the fleeing crowd.

  In a matter of minutes the emergency rooms of Hamidia Hospital looked like a morgue. The two doctors on duty, Deepak Gandhe and Mohammed Sheikh, had thought they were going to have a quiet night after Sister Felicity’s visit. All at once the department was invaded. People were dropping like flies. Their bodies lay strewn about the wards, corridors, offices, verandas and the approaches to the building. The admissions nurse closed her register. How could she begin to record the names of so many people? The spasms and convulsions that racked most of the victims, the way they gasped for breath like fish out of water, reminded Dr. Gandhe of Mohammed Ashraf’s death two years earlier. The little information he could glean confirmed that the refugees came from areas close to the Carbide factory. So all of them had been poisoned by some toxic agent. But which one? While Sheikh and a nurse tried to revive the weakest with oxygen masks, Gandhe picked up the telephone. He wanted to speak to his colleague Loya, Carbide’s official doctor in Bhopal. He was the only one who would be able to suggest an effective antidote to the gas these dying people had inhaled. It was nearing two in the morning when he finally got hold of Loya. “That was the first time I heard the cruel name of methyl isocyanate,” Dr. Gandhe was to say later. But just as Mukund had been earlier, Dr. Loya turned out to be most reassuring.

  “It’s not a deadly gas,” he claimed, “just irritating, a sort of tear gas.”

  “You are joking! My hospital’s overrun with people dying like flies.” Gandhe was running out of patience.

  “Breathing in a strong dose may eventually cause pulmonary edema,” Dr. Loya finally conceded.

  “What antidote should we administer?” pressed Gandhe. “There is no known antidote for this gas,” replied the factory’s spokesperson, without any apparent embarrassment. “In any case, there’s no need for an antidote,” he added. “Get your patients to drink a lot and rinse their eyes with compresses steeped in water. Methyl isocyanate has the advantage of being soluble in water.”

  Gandhe made an effort to stay calm. “Water? Is that all you suggest I use to save people coughing their lungs out!” he protested before hanging up.

  He and Sheikh decided nonetheless to follow Dr. Loya’s advice. Water, they found, did ease the irritation to the eyes and the coughing fits temporarily.

  The situation in which the two doctors found themselves was more horrific than any war story or tragedy they might have read about. “What I liked more than anything else about my profession was being able to relieve suffering,” Gandhe would say, “and there I was unable to do that. It was unbearable.”

  Unbearable was the fetid, foul breath from mouths oozing blood-streaked froth. Unbearable was the stupor in people’s expressions, their inflamed eyes about to burst, their drawn features, their quivering nostrils, the cyanosis in their lips, ears and cheeks. Many of their faces were livid. Their discolored lips already heralded death. Through their stethoscopes the two doctors picked up only the faintest, irregular sounds of hearts and lungs, or sputtering, grating, gurgling rattles. What struck them most was the state of torpor, bewilderment, exhaustion and amnesia in which they found most of the victims, which suggested that the nervous system had been profoundly affected.

  The doctors would never forget the scenes of terror. A man and a woman broke through the crowd and laid their two children, aged two and four, on the examination table. Their heartbeats were scarcely perceptible and both were frothing at the mouth. Gandhe at once injected them with Derryfilin, a powerful bronchodilator, bathed their eyes with salve and gave each an oxygen mask. The children stirred. Their parents were overjoyed, convinced their children were reviving. Then the little bodies went rigid. Gandhe listened with his stethoscope and shook his head. “Heart failure,” he mumbled angrily.

  This was only the beginning of his night of horror. Quite apart from hemorrhaging of the lungs and cataclysmic suffocation, he found himself confronted with symptoms that were unfamiliar to him: cyanosis of the fingers and toes, spasms in the esophagus and intestines, attacks of blindness, muscular convulsions, fevers and sweating so intense that victims wanted to tear off their clothes. Worst of all was the incalculable number of living dead making for the hospital as if it were a lifeboat in a shipwreck. This onslaught gave rise to particularly distressing scenes. Going out briefly into the street to assess the situation, Gandhe saw screaming youngsters clinging to their mothers’ burkahs, men who had gone mad tearing about in all directions, rolling on the ground, dragging themselves along on their hands and knees in the hope of getting to the hospital. He saw women abandon some of their children, those they could no longer carry, in order to save just one—a choice that would haunt them for the rest of their lives. In desperation, the young doctor decided to appeal to his old mentor, the man whom, a few minutes earlier, Mukund had awakened and informed that an accident was likely to give rise to “some emergency admissions” at the hospital.

  “Professor Mishra,” he begged after describing the situation, “come quickly! All hell has broken loose here!”

  His appeal mobilized a chain of events marked by remarkable efficiency and extraordinary self-sacrifice. Two of the principal people involved would remain unknown. Santosh Vinobad and Jamil Ishaq were the operators on duty at the city’s central switchboard, located on the second floor of the main post office, just opposite the Taj ul-Masajid. Decaying and antiquated, it reflected India’s backwardness when it came to telecommunications. Madhya Pradesh had only two circuits that could carry international calls, and only a dozen lines to handle all domestic communications. Those Bhopalis fortunate enough to have a telephone had to go through the switchboard operators to make any intercity calls. The bell jangled and Jamil Ishaq plugged in his connection. As soon as he heard the person on the other end of the line say “Hello” he exclaimed, “Professor Mishra! I can hear you.”

  The doctor, who had just set up his command post in his office opposite the Hamidia emergency room, was too disconcerted to speak.

  “I recognized your voice, professor. Allah be with you! I’ll give all your calls priority.”

  Mishra thought to himself that the whole city must know about the catastrophe. He expressed his gratitude.

  “Whatever you do, don’t thank me, professor. This is the very least I owe you. You operated on my gall bladder a few weeks ago!”

  Resisting the temptation to laugh, Mishra blessed his former patient’s gall bladder and at once gave him a series of numbers in Europe and the United States. Since the Carbide representatives had proven so uninformative, he would ask the World Health Organization in Geneva and Medilas in Washington for any information they might have on treating MIC poisoning. But it was still Sunday in Europe and America. It would be another ten
hours before offices opened and Mishra could obtain his information. In the meantime he decided to alert the local pharmacists and have them immediately bring all their stocks of bronchodilators, antispasmodics, eye salves, heart medication and cough syrup and drops. After that he set to work getting his colleagues, the deans of the medical schools in Indore and Gwalior, out of bed. He asked them to gather up all available medicines in their sectors and dispatch them by plane to Bhopal. Finally, he called those in charge of the various firms in Bhopal that used oxygen bottles. “Bring us all your stocks,” he told them. “The lives of twenty, thirty, possibly even fifty thousand people are at stake.”

  Once he had finished this telephone offensive, Mishra decided to rally all the medical students. Most were asleep in their hostel behind the medical college, in the wake of their celebration in Shyam Babu’s restaurant. Mishra would wake them himself. He climbed the stairs, and went along the corridors, banging on their doors.

  “On your feet, kids!” he cried. “Don’t waste time getting dressed! Come just as you are, but come quickly! Thousands of people are going to die if you don’t get there in time.”