Mishra would never forget the sight of those boys and girls scrambling wordlessly out of bed and running almost in their sleep across the street to the hospital. Some demonstrated their heroism almost immediately. One of them bent over a child suffocating from the gaseous vapors. Without any hesitation, he began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. This shock treatment revived the little boy. But when the medical student stood up, Deepak Gandhe saw him turn suddenly livid and stagger. In snatching the child from death, he had inhaled the toxic gas from his lungs. It was he who was to die.
It was not enough that the dreadful fog had burned people’s bronchia, eyes and throats. It had also impregnated their clothes, hair, beards and mustaches with toxic emissions so persistent that the medics themselves ended up experiencing symptoms of suffocation. A swift injection with Derryfilin mixed with ten cubic centimeters of Decadron was usually enough to prevent any complications. The courage generally displayed, however, did not mean that there were not moments of weakness: one panic-stricken young doctor tore the oxygen mask off a dying man, clamped it to his own face and greedily took a few gasps before fleeing. Yet he came back at daybreak and for three days and three nights was one of the mainstays of the emergency wards.
Suddenly, in the midst of all the chaos, Sister Felicity appeared. She had left little Nadia momentarily to rush to the carnage of the wards and corridors. There were so many bodies all over the place that she could not move without bumping into an arm or a leg. It was almost impossible to distinguish between the living and the dead. People’s faces were so swollen that their eyes had disappeared. She volunteered her help and Deepak Gandhe put her in charge of one of the rooms where an attempt was being made to regroup the scattered victims’ families. Felicity bent over an old man who lay unconscious beside the body of a woman in a mauve sweater. Gently she stroked his forehead. “Wake up, Granddad! Tell me whether your wife was wearing a mauve sweater,” she insisted. The poor man did not answer and Sister Felicity turned to another woman stretched out between two young children. Were they hers? Or did they belong to the third woman a little farther on, the one with cotton pads on her eyes?
In that terrible place of death, the living had lost the power of speech.
Professor Mishra knew that the invasion was only just beginning. The toxic cloud would continue to wreak havoc. Thousands, possibly even tens of thousands of fresh victims would keep on coming. It was urgent that the campus between the medical college and Hamidia be turned into a gigantic field hospital. How were they going to achieve so mammoth a task in the middle of the night? Mishra had an idea. Once again, he picked up the telephone and woke Mahmoud Parvez, the man who rented out shamianas, who was fast asleep in his recently built house in New Bhopal, safe from the toxic gases.
Mishra told him about the tragedy that had struck the city, then added, “I need your help. You must go and get all the shamianas, all the carpets, covers, furniture and crockery you hired out for yesterday evening’s weddings and bring them outside Hamidia Hospital as fast as possible.”
Parvez showed no trace of surprise. “You can count on me, professor! Tonight, those in need can have anything I own.”
The little man then woke his three sons, called all his employees to arms, sent his trucks out to every site where he had delivered the accessories and trappings for wedding celebrations. He had the two enormous shamianas set up in the courtyard of the great mosque taken down. Never mind Ishtema! That night Bhopal was suffering and his duty as a good Muslim was to help relieve it. He directed one of his sons to empty his warehouses of any armchairs, settees, chairs and beds, not forgetting the famous percolator because “a good Italian coffee, can do a fellow a power of good.”
Marvelous Mahmoud Parvez! As his staff and sons brought his wares to the afflicted, he kept one mission for himself. It was he, and he alone, who would dismantle the jewel of his collection, the magnificent, venerable shamiana embroidered with gold thread that he had rented to his friend, the director of Bhopal’s electric power station, for his niece’s wedding. The task came very close to killing him. Asphyxiated by a pocket of gas floating along the ground, Mahmoud collapsed, unable to breathe. By some miracle, a rescue team picked him up. He was among the first to receive emergency treatment under one of his own tents.
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.
42
A Half-Naked Holy Man in the Heart of a Deadly Cloud
An 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 Ca
rbide’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.
The tailor Ahmed Bassi, the bicycle repairman Salar and the worker-poet Rehman Khan all availed themselves of the healing waters. Then they set off together in search of their families who had been scattered by the disaster. In Spices Square, strewn with the bodies of poetry lovers and hundred of pigeons and parrots, they met Ganga Ram carrying Dalima in her festival sari. After escaping the gunfire from the owner of the house in which they had sought refuge, they had miraculously avoided the gases. They had headed directly south toward the great mosque rather than toward the station. Such reunions lightened an otherwise devastating night.
In all this turmoil of suffering, fear and death, Sister Felicity did her best to save abandoned children in the corridors and wards of the hospital. There were dozens of them wandering about, almost blind, or lying groaning in their own vomit on the bare floor. The first thing the nun did was regroup them at the far end of the ground floor of the hospital where she h
ad set up her help center. Word traveled quickly, and other children were brought to her. Most of them had got lost during the night when their panic-stricken parents entrusted them to passengers in some truck or car.
With the help of two medical students, the nun carefully cleaned their eyes. Sometimes the effect was instantaneous. Her own eyes filled with tears when one of her protégés cried, “I can see!” Then she would guide those who had been miraculously cured to the aid center and give her attention to other young victims, whom she bombarded with questions.
“Do you know this little girl?”
“Yes, she’s my sister,” answered one child. “And this boy?”
“He goes to my school,” answered another. “What’s his name?”
“Arvind,” a third told her.
Thus, little by little, the links between these suffering people were reestablished, and sometimes a distressed father or mother was reunited with a much loved child.
A tall young man dressed in a festive sherwani, his feet shod in spangled mules, paced ceaselessly through the corridors and wards of that same hospital. He was looking for someone. Sometimes he would stop and gently turn a body over to look at a face. Dilip was sure that he would find Padmini somewhere in this charnel house. He did not know that his young wife had just been carried away to the morgue on a stretcher.
The potbellied little man, who had promised the police chief that he was prepared “to feed the whole city” if necessary, never imagined that he would have to keep his promise so soon. Shyam Babu, the proprietor of the Agarwal Poori Bhandar, the most famous restaurant in Bhopal, had just gone to bed, when two men rang his doorbell. He recognized the president and the secretary of the Vishram Ghat Trust, a Hindu charitable organization of which he was a founding member.
Five Past Midnight in Bhopal Page 28