“There’s been an accident at Carbide,” announced the president before being overtaken by a coughing fit that sent him reeling.
His companion continued. “Thousands of people have been killed,” he said. “But, more important, there are thousands of injured who have nothing to drink or eat at Hamidia Hospital and under Parvez shamianas. You, and you alone, can come to their aid.”
Shyam Babu stroked his mustache. His blue eyes lit up. May the goddess Lakshmi be blessed. At last he was going to fulfill his lifelong dream of feeding the whole city.
“How many are there of them?” he asked.
The president tried to overcome his bout of coughing. “Twenty thousand, thirty thousand, fifty thousand, maybe more …”
Shyam stood at attention. “You can count on me, no matter how many there are.”
As soon as his visitors had gone, he mobilized all his employees and enlisted the support of the staff of several other restaurants. Even before daybreak, some fifty cooks, assistants and bakers were at work making rations of potatoes, rice, dhal, curry and chapatis, which they wrapped in newspaper. Stacked into Babu’s Land Rover, these makeshift meals were taken at once and distributed to the survivors. This was not to be the only good deed done by the restaurateur. Having taken care of the living, Shyam Babu would have to see to the dead.
Under the great tamarind tree in Kamla Park on the narrow strip of garden separating the Upper Lake from the Lower, a sadhu looked on impassively as people fled the deadly cloud. All through that night of panic, the Naga Baba, or naked holy man, as the Bhopalis called him, remained cross-legged in the lotus position. For thirty-five years he had lived there ever since a five-day samadhi, a spiritual exercise in which he was buried alive, had turned him into a holy man. Half-naked, with his body covered in ashes and his long mop of hair divided into a hundred tresses, a pilgrim’s stick topped with Shiva’s trident and a bowl in which he collected food provided by the faithful as his only possessions, the Naga Baba, detached from all desires, material things, appearances and aversions, spent his days meditating, in quest of the absolute. With prayer beads in his fingers, and his gaze seemingly vacant behind his half-closed lids, he seemed indifferent to the chaos that surrounded him. Overtaken by small, eye-level pockets of monomethylamine and phosgene borne along by the breeze, dozens of men and women whose lungs were dilated from running, collapsed around him. Trained to breathe only once every three or four minutes by his ascetic exercises, the Naga Baba did not inhale the vapors from the passing cloud. He was the only person to survive in Kamla Park.
43
The Dancing Girl Was Not Dead
The dead were everywhere. In the corridors, in the consulting rooms, in the operating theaters, in the general wards, even in the kitchens and the nurses’ canteen. Laid out on stretchers or on the bare floor, some looked as if they were sleeping peacefully; others had faces deformed by suffering. Strangely, they gave off no smell of decomposition. It was as if the MIC had sterilized anything in them that might rot. Removing these corpses became as pressing a problem as caring for the living. Already the vultures had arrived. Not the carrion birds, but the professional body riflers for whom the catastrophe was a godsend. Dr. Mohammed Sheikh, one of the two doctors on duty, surprised a pillager with a pair of pliers in his hands, preparing to yank gold teeth from the mouths of the dead. One of his accomplices was stripping the women of their jewels, including those embedded in their noses. Another was recovering watches. Their harvest was likely to be a thin one, however; Carbide’s gases had primarily killed the poor.
Once alerted, Professor Mishra sent some students to stand guard over the corpses and telephoned the two forensic pathologists at the medical college. The collector of vintage cars, Heeresh Chandra and his young colleague who loved roses, Ashu Satpathy, were already on their way to the hospital. Chandra knew that the autopsies he and Satpathy would perform that night could save thousands of lives; the bodies of the dead could yield definitive information about the nature of the killer gases and might enable them to find an antidote.
What the two doctors saw on their arrival chilled them to the bone. “We were used to death, but not to suffering,” Satpathy would later recount. The hundreds of bodies they had to step over to gain access to the medical college looked as if they had been tortured.
“What chemical substances could be capable of doing that kind of damage?” wondered Chandra as he hurried first to the faculty library. His colleague Mishra had mentioned methyl isocyanate. The pathologist leafed frantically through a toxicology textbook. The entry on the molecule did not contain much information, but Chandra suspected that it was capable of breaking down into highly toxic substances like hydrocyanide acid. Only hydrocyanic acid would be likely to inflict such deadly marks.
As for Dr. Satpathy, he went first to the terraces, to make sure that his roses had not been damaged by the toxic cloud. After examining every pot, plant, leaf and bud with all the concern and tenderness of a lover at his endangered mistress’s bedside, he heaved a sigh of relief. The Black Diamonds and Golden Chryslers he had so lovingly grafted appeared to have survived the passing of the deadly fog. In two days’ time, Satpathy would be able to exhibit them as planned at the Bhopal Flower Show. Before returning to the inferno on the ground floor, he telephoned the third member of his medical team, the photographer Subashe Godane.
“Get over here quickly, and bring a whole suitcase full of film with you. You’re going to have hundreds of photos to take.”
The young man who had dreamed of making his name photographing glamorously dressed women, hurriedly threw on his clothes, loaded his Pentax and hopped on his scooter.
Before beginning the autopsies, it was essential that the two forensic pathologists devise a system for identifying the victims. Nearly all of them had been caught in their sleep and had fled their homes half naked. Satpathy enlisted the help of a squad of medical college students.
“Examine each corpse,” he told them, “and jot down its description in a notebook. For example, ‘circumcised male, approximately forty, scar on chin, striped underpants.’ Or again, ‘little girl aged about ten, three metal bracelets on right wrist, etc.’ Make a note of any deformities, tattoos and any distinctive features likely to facilitate identification of the victim by their next of kin. Then place a card with a number on it on each body.”
The doctor turned then to Godane. “You photograph the numbered bodies. As soon as you’ve developed your negatives, we’ll put them on display. In that way families will be able to try and find anyone they’ve lost.”
Next, addressing himself to everyone, he added, “Get a move on! They’ll be coming for the bodies!”
Soon the shutter on the Pentax was firing like a tommy gun over the stiffened bodies. Although he had spent years immortalizing the victims of minor accidents on glossy paper, Subashe Godane was suddenly face to face with a wholly different form of death: industrial death, death on a huge scale. While he was working, he found himself wondering whether he had not photographed a particular young woman in a multicolored sari, or a particular little girl whose long braids were adorned with yellow marigolds, on a previous occasion. Perhaps on Hamidia Road, or in the jewelry market at the great mosque, or near the fountain in Spices Square. But that night his models’ eyes had rolled back into their skulls, the amber tint of their skin had turned the color of ashes and their mouths had set into dreadful rictuses. Godane had difficulty continuing with his macabre documentary. All at once he thought he was seeing things. By the light of his flash, he saw the features of a face twitch. Two eyes opened. “This man isn’t dead!” he yelled to Satpathy who came running with his stethoscope. Sure enough, the man was still alive. The doctor called for a stretcher and had him taken to a recovery ward where he regained consciousness. He was wearing a railway worker’s tunic. It was V.K. Sherma, the deputy stationmaster who had saved hundreds of passengers by risking his life to get the Gorakhpur Express to leave.
Ther
e were other shocks in store on that tragic night. Two female corpses were brought in by unknown persons. When Satpathy examined them, he realized that they had not been killed by gas but murdered. One had a deep wound to the throat, the other had burns to a substantial part of her body. The catastrophe had provided the killers with the perfect alibi. The doctor also saw the corpse of the same little boy three times, labeled with three different numbers. It was a fraudulent act that would enable his family to claim three times the insurance compensation the American multinational might pay.
Other parents refused to accept the awful reality. A young father placed his son’s corpse in the arms of Dr. Deepak Gandhe, one of the doctors on duty.
“Save him!” the stranger pleaded. “Your child is dead!” replied Gandhe, trying to give the little body back to his father.
“No! No! You can save him!”
“He’s dead, I tell you!” insisted the doctor. “There’s nothing I can do for him.”
“Then the man ran off, leaving the child in my arms,” Deepak Gandhe would recount. “In his heart of hearts he was convinced that I could bring him back to life.”
On dissecting the first corpses, the two forensic pathologists could hardly believe what they found. The blood of a gray-goateed Muslim, into which Satpathy dipped his finger, was as viscous as currant jelly. His lungs were ash-colored, and a multitude of little bluish-red lesions appeared in a grayish frothy liquid. The man must have died by drowning in his own secretions. Hearts, livers and spleens had tripled in size, windpipes were full of purulent clots. Without exception, all the organs seemed to have been ravaged by the gas, including the brains, which were covered with a gelatinous, opalescent film. The extent of the damage was terrifying even to specialists as hardened as old Chandra and his young colleague. A smell confirmed their suspicions as to the nature of the agent responsible—a smell that was unmistakable. All the bodies they autopsied gave off the same smell of bitter almonds, the smell of hydrocyanide acid. Here was the confirmation of what Jagannathan Mukund had let slip to Bhopal’s commissioner. When it broke down, MIC released hydrocyanide acid, which instantly destroyed the cells’ ability to transport oxygen. It was hydrocyanide acid that had killed the great majority of Bhopalis who died that infernal night.
The pathologists’ discovery was vitally important, because hydrocyanide acid poisoning had an antidote: a commonplace substance, sodium thiosulfate or hyposulfate, well known to photographers who use it to fix their negatives. Mass injecting with hyposulfate might possibly save thousands of victims. Chandra and Satpathy rushed to Professor Mishra who was coordinating the medical aid with his team. Strangely, the professor refused to believe his colleagues’ findings and follow their recommendations. As far as he was concerned, the presence of hydrocyanide acid was an invention of the forensic pathologists’ overactive imaginations.
“You take care of the dead and let me take care of the living!” he told them.
No one would really be able to account for this reaction on the part of the illustrious professor. It would deprive the victims of a treatment that might have saved their lives.
Dawn broke at last on that apocalyptic night: a crystal clear sunrise. The minarets, cupolas and palaces were lit up by the sun’s rays and life asserted itself once more in the entanglement of alleyways in the old part of town. Everything seemed the same. And yet some places looked like war zones on the morning after a battle. Hundreds of corpses of men, women and children, cows, buffaloes, dogs and goats were all over the place. Deeply alarmed by the situation, Commissioner Ranjit Singh went to the nearby colleges in areas that had been spared and enlisted students to pick up bodies. At the Maulana Azad Technical College, he found dozens of volunteers.
“Divide yourselves up into two teams,” he told them. “Muslims in one, Hindus in the other, and each can look after their own dead.”
His suggestion provoked a vehement reaction. “Is there any difference between Hindus and Muslims at a tragic time like this?” objected one student.
“Is there even a god when such a catastrophe is allowed to happen?” said another.
“I made myself very small,” the commissioner said afterward. “I was trying to think of the strongest possible terms in which to thank them.”
With bandannas over their mouths and noses, the students set off on scooters for the slums that Colonel Khanuja and his trucks had partially evacuated during the night. There were still a few survivors left among the mass of bodies. Student Santosh Katiyar was party to a scene that touched him deeply. While he was preparing to remove the body of a Muslim woman from one of the huts in Chola, a hand stopped him. A woman, whom he recognized by the red dot on her forehead as a Hindu, slipped all her bracelets off her wrist and slid them onto her dead neighbor’s arm.
“She was my friend,” she explained, “she must look beautiful to meet her god.”
A little farther on, Santosh noticed four veiled Muslim women, sitting under the porch roof to a small Hindu temple. They were consoling a woman who had lost her entire family. In such extreme distress, distinctions of religion, caste or background vanished. Very swiftly, however, the sordid took its place alongside the sublime. No sooner had Rajiv Gandhi announced over the radio that all families would be compensated for the loss of their loved ones, than people began to squabble over the corpses. Outside the medical college Colonel Khanuja saw two women pulling the body of a man by his arms and legs in opposite directions. One was a Hindu; the other Muslim. Both were claiming that the deceased was her relative. They were pulling so hard that the poor man’s body was in danger of being torn in two. The colonel decided to intervene.
“Undress him! Then you’ll see whether or not he’s circumcised.”
The two women tore off his lunghi and underpants and examined his penis. The man was circumcised. Furious, the Hindu woman got up and set off in search of another corpse.
The number of expressions of solidarity multiplied. Never before had the India of a thousand castes and twenty million divinities shown itself so united in adversity. Tens of organizations, institutions, associations, hundreds of entrepreneurs and businessmen, thousands of private individuals of all social classes, the Rotarians, the Lions, the Kiwanis and the scouts, all came rushing to the rescue of the survivors. Many towns in Madhya Pradesh sent truckloads of medicines, blankets and clothing. Volunteers of different religious faiths spread out cloths on the corners of avenues, in squares, all over the place, onto which people threw mountains of rupees.
That day after the catastrophe was also a time for anger. A policeman came to warn Mukund, who had remained closeted in his office, that thousands of rioters were heading for the factory, yelling, “Death to Carbide!” After trying all night to get hold of his superiors in Bombay, the works manager finally got through by telephone to one of them.
“There’s been an accident,” he informed his boss K.S. Kamdar. “An MIC leak. I don’t know yet how or why.”
“Any fatalities?” Kamdar asked anxiously. “Yes.”
“Many?”
“Alas! Yes.”
“Two figures?”
“More.”
“Three?”
“More like four, Kamdar.”
There was a long silence at the other end of the line. Kamdar was stunned. At last he inquired, “Do you have the situation in hand?”
“Until the crowd invades the factory. Or the police come and arrest me.”
Just then, they were interrupted by several uniformed policemen and two plainclothes inspectors from the Criminal Bureau of Investigation. They carried a warrant to detain Mukund and his assistants.
Outside the situation was growing worse. Police chief Swaraj Puri, who had seen so many of his men disappear the previous night, feared violent action. With no means to oppose it, he decided to resort to a stratagem. He summoned the driver of the only vehicle left to him with a loudspeaker.
“Drive all over town,” he ordered the officer, “and announce that ther
e’s been another gas leak at Carbide.”
The effect of the ruse was miraculous. The rioters who had been about to overrun the factory scattered instantly. In a matter of minutes the city was empty. Only the dead remained.
The fatal cloud had spared the vast enclosure at the end of Hamidia Road where, in the shade of century-old mango and tamarind trees, generations of Muslims had been laid to rest. The man in charge of the place was a frail little individual with dark skin and a chin studded with a small salt-and-pepper goatee. Abdul Hamid had been born in that cemetery. He had grown up there and become its master. It was a position that enabled him to live in comfort; for every burial he received a hundred rupees and he oversaw two or three each day. Abdul Hamid was a central and familiar figure in the Muslim community. They all, at one time or another, had to deal with him. Although he was no stranger to death, the poor man could never have anticipated the spectacle that awaited him that morning at the entrance to his cemetery. Dozens of bodies wrapped in shrouds were piled up like parcels outside the fence. “It was the first time I’d ever seen so many corpses at once,” he said later.
Hamid called his sons and set to work digging graves. Volunteers came to help him. But how was he to give so many dead a decent burial? How was he to receive their families appropriately? In the absence of any members of the clergy, it was Abdul himself or one of his grave diggers who recited a namaz, or prayer, for the dead. In a few hours there was nowhere left to dig fresh holes and the men had to stop for fear of disturbing the remains of earlier burials. “I was the guardian of the dead,” Abdul Hamid was to say. “I had no right to violate tombs. If I did no one would trust me anymore.”
Five Past Midnight in Bhopal Page 29