Five Past Midnight In Bhopal Part 10

"Sister Felicity, look how beautiful my daughter is," whispered Ratna Nadar proudly. The nun had come to be with Padmini during the last moments of her adolescence.

"Oh yes, your daughter is very beautiful," the Scotswoman replied, "because G.o.d's loving hand created her."

In a scarlet sari dotted in gold thread, her face concealed behind a muslin veil, her bare feet painted red, her toes, ankles and wrists glittering with jewels from the dowry brought by her future husband's emissaries, Padmini, escorted by her mother, was preparing to take her place on the straw mat in the center of the mandap. It was there, beside the sacred fire burning in a small brazier, that she would await the arrival of the man whom destiny had given her as a husband.

Eyes s.h.i.+ning with happiness, lips parted in a gratified smile, Ratna Nadar could not take his eyes off his child. It was the most beautiful sight of his life, a fairy-tale scene, obliterating at a single stroke so many nightmare images: Padmini crying of hunger and cold on the Bhopal station platform, foraging with her little hands through the piles of rubbish in between the rails, begging a few sc.r.a.ps of coal from the engine drivers ... For this child of poverty-stricken parents there had been no play or schooling, only the supervision of her brother, the drudgery of carrying water, doing laundry and household ch.o.r.es. It had been a life of slavery that only her meeting with Sister Felicity had relieved. Today, dressed like a princess, Padmini savored her happiness, her triumph, her revenge on a cursed karma.

A piercing cry, then the sound of moaning suddenly rent the night. A neighbor came running: "Come quickly! Boda's having her baby." Without a thought for her wedding clothes, Padmini dragged Sister Felicity to the hut where the wife of the dairyman Bablubhai was writhing in pain. Old Prema Bai was already there. Padmini held a candle over the thin, agonized face of the woman in labor. She was soaked in blood. Sister Felicity could see the child's skull showing between Boda's thighs. The young woman could not manage to expel it.

"Pus.h.!.+" urged the nun. "Push as hard as you can."

Boda made such an effort that the tears poured down her cheeks.

"No, not like that, little sister! Push downwards. First try and breathe deeply, then push as you force the air out of your lungs. Quickly!"

Padmini lit a second candle to shed more light on Boda's lower belly.

"For the love of G.o.d, push harder!" begged the nun.

The dairyman's wife bore down with all her strength. Sister Felicity, who had a.s.sisted with dozens of births among the dest.i.tute, knew that this was their last chance of bringing a living child into the world.

"Stand opposite me!" she ordered the old midwife, who seemed overwhelmed by the situation. "While I try and straighten the baby, you ma.s.sage her stomach from top to bottom."

As soon as the old woman started rubbing, the nun gently slid her hand behind the nape of the infant's neck. Boda let out a wail.

"Breathe deeply," ordered the nun, "and push regularly, without jerking."

All the young woman's muscles grew taut. With her head thrust back and her teeth clenched, she made a desperate effort.

The nun would never be able to explain what happened next. Her hand had just reached the baby's shoulders when two rats fell off the roof and pa.s.sed in front of her eyes before landing on the stomach of the laboring woman. Taken by surprise, she withdrew her hand. Was it the suddenness of her movement or the shock occasioned by the creatures' fall? One thing was sure: all at once the child emerged.

Prema Bai cut the cord with her knife and tied it off with a strand of jute. The newborn baby was a fine boy. Sister Felicity guessed he must have weighed nearly six pounds. Padmini watched as he filled his lungs, opened his mouth and let out a cry that was greeted with a tremendous echo of joy inside the hut and out into the alleyway.

"Big sister, you've given me a son!" The dairyman Bablubhai was overjoyed. He brought a bowl full of rice, which he held out to Sister Felicity. "Put this rice next to my boy, so that the G.o.ddess may grant him a long and prosperous life."

Then he called for an oil lamp. According to tradition, it had to burn without interruption until the next day. If it went out, it would be a sign that the child born on this Sunday blessed by the stars would not live.

The magic moment in Padmini's life had at last arrived. A bra.s.s band burst into play, accompanied by singing. Preceded by a troupe of dancers outrageously made up with kohl, the groom's procession made its entry onto the parade ground outside the teahouse. When she saw the boy astride his white horse, Sister Felicity thought she was witnessing "the appearance of a prince from some Eastern legend." Indeed, with his cardboard crown sparkling with spangles, a brocade tunic over white silk jodhpurs and mules encrusted with gla.s.s beads, the former little ragpicker and train scavenger looked like one of those Indian rulers popularized in engravings. Before climbing onto the mandap, where his bride awaited him beside the sacrificial fire, Dilip had to submit to the ritual of purdah: the imposition of a veil so that his betrothed's eyes might not see him before the appointed moment in the liturgy. He was then invited by the master of the ceremonies to sit down beside Padmini. Belram Mukkadam had put on an elegant brand-new white punjabi for the occasion. Before the ceremony he had secretly conducted his own private celebration. He had tied his bull Nandi, bought with Carbide's compensation money, to the trunk of an acacia tree, and again painted his horns red and decorated his forehead with a trident, the emblem of the G.o.d s.h.i.+va. With this tribute, Mukkadam sought to invoke the sacred animal's blessing on the union of Dilip and Padmini.

"In the kingdom of heaven, theirs will be the most beautiful faces," thought Sister Felicity as she looked at the men, women and children, in their festival clothes, encircling the bride and groom. With her bowed head partially concealed by her veil, Padmini seemed deep in meditation. This was the moment in which the nun chose to do something close to her heart. Sister Felicity got up and walked to Padmini.

"This little gold cross was given to me by my mother when I consecrated my life to G.o.d," she said, fastening the chain around Padmini's neck. "It has protected me. Now I'm giving it to you so that it may protect you."

"Thank you, big sister, I shall wear it always in remembrance of you," whispered Padmini, her eyes bright with emotion.

Then began the long ritual of an Adivasi marriage, punctuated with mantras in Sanskrit, the language of the sacred texts. Mukkadam had learned them by heart for the occasion, although neither he nor anyone else there understood them. He began by asking the couple to plunge their right hands into a baked clay jar filled with a paste made of sandalwood and tuber. In it two rings were hidden. The first to find a ring had the right to extract a forfeit from the other. After this preamble came the panigrahan. For the Adivasis as for Hindus, this was an essential part of the marriage rite. The officiant took from the pocket of his punjabi a small piece of mauve cord and, taking hold of the couple's right hands, tied them together as he repeated their names aloud. The culminating moment had arrived. The band and the congregation fell silent. Now Mukkadam invited the married couple to officially make each other's acquaintance. Slowly, timidly, each parted the other's veil with their free hand. Dilip's delighted face appeared before Padmini's big, slanting eyes. Her heart was pounding. Her mother, father and brother watched her with barely contained emotion. Dalima, for her part, could no longer hold back tears. Already Mukkadam was asking the pair to complete the last part of the ceremony: with their right hands still bound together by the piece of cord, husband and wife walked seven times around the sacrificial fire.

It was ten o'clock at night and the celebrations were only just beginning. Helped by a group of women, Dalima started laying out plates made out of banana leaves on the sisal mats that had been rolled out near the teahouse. All the guests from Orya Bustee would soon sample the wedding banquet, looking out over the strange towers and pipework of the Carbide factory, lit up with strings of lights like an oceanliner.

While other marriage ceremonies were taking place in all four corners of the city, several hundred people were preparing to pay tribute to the G.o.ddess of poetry in Spices Square.

The organizers of that Sunday evening's mushaira had given their program particular l.u.s.ter by inviting one of the most famous Urdu language poets. Jigar Akbar Khan was a legend in his own lifetime. In Bhopal he had such a following that a taxi driver had once abducted him to force him, at gun point, to give a private recital. Jigar could declaim more than fifty ghazals in a single evening. Whenever he appeared, his audience went into a frenzy. His sublime incantations, his sonorous voice- sometimes caressing, sometimes imploring-were magical. It was common knowledge that the elderly bearded poet enveloped in his shawl, was a hopeless drunkard, but what did that matter? Bhopal was indebted to him for too many nights of exaltation not to forgive him. It was said that one of his disciples had actually left his wife on their wedding night in order to accompany the master poet back to the railway station and put him on his train. Just as the train was pulling away, the waggish Jigar had grabbed hold of his admirer and prevented him from jumping back onto the platform. The newlywed had not returned to Bhopal for a year, a year spent following his idol from festivals to mushairas across India.

With their hands outstretched toward the speaker in a gesture of offering, eyes closed upon some vision of ecstasy, gently shaking their heads in approval, the audience greeted each verse with an enthusiastic "Vah!", or "Marvelous!" A slight chilly breeze blowing from the north nipped at their flesh, but exaltation warmed bodies as well as souls.

Was it a premonition? The elderly poet began his recital with a verse about the suddenness of death: Death which appears.

Like a silent dragonfly.

Like the dew on the mountain.

Like the foam on the river.

Like the bubble on the spring.

Part Three.

THREE SARCOPHAGI UNDER THE MOON.

36.

Three Sarcophagi under the Moon.

In their reinforced concrete tomb, the three tanks, two yards high and thirteen long, looked like enormous sarcophagi left behind by some pharaoh. They lay, half buried, side by side, at the foot of the metal structures on view to Dilip and Padmini's wedding guests. They had no names on them, only numbers: 610, 611, 619. These tanks were masterpieces of the most advanced metallurgy. No acid, liquid or corrosive gas could eat into their sh.e.l.ls, which were made out of SS14 stainless steel. At least, that was the theory: methyl isocyanate had not yet revealed all of its secrets. A complex network of pipes, stopc.o.c.ks and valves linked the tanks to each other and to the reactors that produced the MIC and Sevin. To prevent any accidental leakage of their contents into the atmosphere, each tank was connected to three specific safety systems. The first was a network of fine piping contained in the tank's lining. When freon gas flowed through it, the MIC would be constantly refrigerated to a temperature close to 0 C. The second was a monumental cylindrical tank called a "decontamination tower." It contained caustic soda to absorb and neutralize any escaping gas. The third was a 120-foot-high flare. Its role was to burn off any effluents that might have escaped the barrage of caustic soda.

That December 2, 1984, there were sixty-three tons of methyl isocyanate in the tanks-a "real atomic bomb right in the middle of the plant" as the German chemist from Bayer had described it to Eduardo Muoz-and not one of the three safety systems was operational. The refrigeration had been off for a month and a half and the MIC was being kept at the ambient temperature, about 20 C in a winter month. The alarm that was supposed to go off in case of any abnormal rise in temperature in the tanks had been disconnected. As for the decontamination tower and the flare to incinerate the gases, several of their components had been dismantled the preceding week for maintenance.

No mention was made of it in the technical handbooks, but there was a fourth safety device. Neither corrosion nor cutbacks could put this one out of commission because the only power source this funnel-shaped piece of material needed was the breath of the winds. The wind sock fluttering over the factory supplied the plant workers with an essential piece of information: the wind direction. Lit up at nightfall, it was visible from all workstations. The occupants of the surrounding neighborhoods, however, could not see it. No one had thought to fly another one over their bustees.

There were further grounds for concern. With forty-two tons of MIC inside, tank 610 was almost full, and that was in absolute violation of Carbide's safety regulations. The tanks were never meant to be filled to more than half their capacity, just in case a solvent had to be injected to stop a chemical reaction. Tank 611, next to it, contained twenty tons of MIC. As for the third tank, 619, which was supposed to remain empty to act as an emergency tank in case the other two suffered an accident, it contained one ton of MIC.

Since October 26, the day on which the factory stopped production, the contents of these tanks had not been a.n.a.lyzed. That was another serious breach of regulations. Methyl isocyanate is not an inert substance. Because it is made up of multiple gases, it has a life of its own and is constantly changing and reacting. Was the MIC inside the three tanks still the "pure, clear mineral water" Shekil Qures.h.i.+, Pareek's young a.s.sistant, had admired? Or had it been polluted by impurities likely to cause a reaction? Broken down by heat, the MIC could then emit all kinds of gases, including the deadly hydrocyanic acid. In the event of a leak, these gases of varying densities would form toxic clouds that would spread at different speeds and on several levels, saturating a vast area in one fell swoop.

With the level of deterioration the plant had reached, someone should have been antic.i.p.ating the worst. Moreover, there were indications that strange things were going on in tank 610 as well as in the apparatus next to it. Twice in succession, on November 30 and December 1, operators had tried to transfer some of the forty-two tons of MIC to the unit that was still manufacturing Sevin on a batch basis. In an operation of this kind, the contents of the tank had first to be pressurized by introducing nitrogen, a routine process in a properly maintained factory. But the beautiful plant was no longer in very good shape. Because of a defective valve, the nitrogen escaped as fast as it was put in. The valve was not replaced, and the forty-two tons of MIC were left in a tank that had not been properly pressurized. This meant that potential contaminants could get into the tank without meeting any resistance, and thus trigger an uncontrollable chemical reaction.

Rehman Khan was a twenty-nine-year-old Muslim who seldom parted from his embroidered skullcap, even when wearing his safety helmet. Originally from Bombay, he had moved to Bhopal to get married. His wife worked as a seamstress in the workshop that made Carbide's coveralls. It was thanks to her that, after a brief training period, he had joined the MIC production unit as an operator. He had been working there for four months and earned a monthly salary of 1,400 rupees, a comfortable amount, given his lack of experience and qualifications. Like most of the 120 workers also on the site that evening, he had practically nothing to do. The factory's production of MIC had been stopped. Khan was part of the second s.h.i.+ft, and was on duty until twenty-three hundred hours. A pa.s.sionate lover of poetry, as soon as his s.h.i.+ft was over he intended to go to Spices Square for the grand mushaira being held in honor of the festival of Ishtema. To kill time that dreary winter's evening, he had been playing cards with some of his comrades in the canteen when an urgent telephone call summoned him to the duty supervisor, Gauri Shankar, a tall bald Bengali who seemed extremely irritated.

"That lazy maintenance team hasn't even managed to flush out the pipes!" he grumbled.

Shankar was referring to the pipework that carried the liquid MIC produced by the plant's reactors to the tanks. Highly corrosive in nature, methyl isocyanate attacks pipes, leaving scoria deposits on their lining. High pressure jets of water had constantly to be sent into the piping to get rid of these impurities, not just because they would eventually block the flow, but above all because they could get into the storage tanks and contaminate the MIC.

Shankar brandished the logbook for the MIC production unit. "Here are the instructions left by A.V. Venugopal," he explained. "The production supervisor wants us to flush the pipes."

Khan knitted his thick eyebrows. "Is it absolutely necessary to do it this evening? The plant's stopped. I would have thought it could wait till tomorrow. Don't you think?"

Shankar shrugged his shoulders. He had no idea. In truth neither he nor Venugopal the supervisor were knowledgeable about the factory's very complex maintenance procedures. They had both only just arrived there, one from Calcutta, the other from Madras. They knew virtually nothing about MIC or phosgene apart from their very distinctive smells. Like the former superdirector Chakravarty, the only industry they were familiar with was the one that produced Carbide's fortune in India: batteries.

In his note, the supervisor had given succinct instructions as to how the requisite was.h.i.+ng operation should be carried out. He stipulated that it should begin with the cleaning of the four filters and the circuit valves. He went on to supply a list of stopc.o.c.ks to be turned off to prevent the rinse water from entering the tanks containing the MIC. But he had forgotten to recommend one crucial precaution: the placing of solid metal discs at each end of the pipes connected to the tanks. Two segments of the pipework had only to be disconnected and the discs slid into the housings provided for the purpose, then the whole thing bolted up again. The process required a little less than an hour. Only the presence of these "slipbinds" as the engineers called them, could guarantee that the tanks were hermetically sealed. The valves and stopc.o.c.ks under attack from corrosion could not, alone, ensure their insulation.

Rehman Khan set to work by closing the main stopc.o.c.k. It was a complicated process because the stopc.o.c.k was located three yards off the ground, at the center of a tangle of pipes that were difficult to get to. Bracing himself against two girders, he put all his weight on the handle that closed the stopc.o.c.k, yet he still could not be sure that he had managed to seal it completely, so rusted and corroded were the metal parts. After that, he climbed back down to turn off the other stopc.o.c.k and start flus.h.i.+ng. He had only then to connect a hosepipe to one of the drainc.o.c.ks on the pipework and turn on the tap. For a few seconds he listened to the water rus.h.i.+ng vigorously into the pipes and noted the time in the logbook: it was eight-thirty.

The young operator quickly realized that something unusual was going on: the injected water was not, as it should have been, coming out of the four drainc.o.c.ks provided for the purpose. Khan tapped them lightly with a hammer and discovered that the filters in two of them were blocked with metal debris. He immediately cut off the water supply and alerted his supervisor by telephone. The latter did not arrive for quite a while, and when he did, his lack of experience meant he was not much help.

He simply instructed Khan to clean the filters on the evacuation drainc.o.c.ks well, and turn the water back on. "With the pressure of the flow, they'll let the water out eventually."

The young Muslim agreed, with some reservations. "But if the water doesn't come out through the drainc.o.c.ks, it'll go somewhere else," he suggested.

The supervisor failed to grasp the vital implications of this remark. "We'll just have to see!" he replied, clearly irritated that he had been disturbed for something so trivial.

As soon as his superior had gone, Khan began cleaning the filters, then turned the wash tap back on. Shankar was right: the water flowed out normally through the first two drainc.o.c.ks and, after a moment, through the third one, too. But the fourth seemed to be permanently blocked. Khan was not unduly worried. As his boss had said, the system would eventually clear itself. He went on flus.h.i.+ng the pipes, using all the pressure in his hose. Several hundred gallons poured into the pipes. Two hours later, at ten-thirty, half an hour before the changeover of s.h.i.+fts, he knocked on the door to his superior's cabin.

"What shall I do?" he asked. "Shall I keep the water running, or should I turn it off?"

Shankar looked doubtful. He rubbed his chin.

"Keep it running," he said eventually. "The insides of those b.l.o.o.d.y pipes are supposed to be completely spotless. The night s.h.i.+ft will turn the tap off."

At these words, Rehman Khan penciled in a brief report of the operation in progress in the logbook.

"Good night, sir. See you tomorrow!" he then said. He was in a hurry to shower and dress for the evening's big event, the mushaira in Spices Square.

It was now eleven o'clock at night. Spices Square was humming with poetry lovers impatient to hear their favorite poets. On the other side of the city, the reception rooms and lawns of the Arera Club were teeming with guests, as were the sumptuously decorated tents set up for the marriages in the affluent neighborhoods of New Bhopal and Shamla Hills. On the Kali Grounds, strings of bulbs lit up Dilip and Padmini's wedding celebrations. The whole of Bhopal had given itself up to rejoicing on that night blessed by the stars. It was in the Railway Colony beneath a shower of fireworks, that the festivities were most splendid. The one thousand guests at the wedding of Rinu Diwedi, younger daughter of the chief controller of the Bhopal railway to the son of a Vidisha merchant, watched with wonder the ritual procession of the Barat. Perched on a white mare covered with a velvet cloth embroidered with gold, wearing a span-gled turban on his head, young Rajiv caracoled toward his fiancee who was waiting for him under Parvez's most beautiful shamiana. Before he straddled his mount, his father had marked his forehead with the red and black spots that would banish the evil eye forever and guarantee Rajiv a propitious future. He had also been given a coconut with red stripes scratched onto it, a traditional token of good luck. In front of the white mare walked a woman taking tiny steps: his mother. She was dressed in the double silk and gold sari she kept for special occasions. Fervently she strewed the ground with handfuls of salt, to eliminate all of life's pitfalls from her son's path.

37.

"What if the Stars Were to Go on Strike?"

Twenty-three hundred hours-11 P.M. It was time for a change of watch on the bridge of the vessel Rehman Khan and his comrades from the previous s.h.i.+ft had just left. The man who took over command of the control room was a Bengali Hindu named Suman Dey. Twenty-six years old, with a degree in science from the University of California, he was both competent and respected. The seventy-five dials lit up in front of him made up the factory's control panel. Every needle, every luminous indicator supplied information, showed the state of activity in each section, signaled an eventual anomaly. Temperatures, pressures, levels, outputs-in his capacity as officer of the watch, Suman Dey was kept constantly apprised of the condition of the plant. At least that was the theory, because, for some time now, some of the apparatus had been breaking down. Dey was therefore obliged to go and get his information on site. He was not always able to. For the past several days, because of a fault in the transmission circuit, there had been no temperature reading coming through from tank 610. To calm his own frustration, he meditated on the words of a large notice hanging on the wall above the dials: "SAFETY IS EVERYBODY'S BUSINESS." There was nothing definite, however, to make the young Bengali believe that the safety of the factory was not a.s.sured.

Certainly, the faces of the six night-s.h.i.+ft operators betrayed no sign of disquiet. They settled in for the night around the brazier in the small room adjoining the control room used as the site canteen because those in it could be mobilized immediately in case of alert. The men on duty that night were a perfect reflection of India's enormous diversity. Next to the Muslim supervisor Shekil Qures.h.i.+, the man who had escorted the MIC trucks, sat the Sikh V.N. Singh whose parents had been so thrilled to see him join Carbide. Next to him was a tall, twenty-nine-year-old Hindu with a melancholy face. Mohan Lal Varma was in the midst of a dispute with the management who, for six months, had been refusing to give him his cla.s.sification and salary as a sixth-grade operator. There was also a Jain, originally from Bombay and as thin as a wire, a son of a railway employee from Jabalpur and a former trader from Bihar.

Apart from Qures.h.i.+, Singh and Varma, who were to continue the cleaning operation that the previous s.h.i.+ft had started, the men had nothing specific to do that night because their production units had been stopped. They chatted about the plant's gloomy future, smoked bidis, chewed betel and drank tea.

"Apparently the Sevin sales aren't going too well anymore," said the Jain from Bombay.

"They're going so badly that they've decided to dismantle the factory and send it in bits to some other country," added the merchant from Bihar who had become a specialist in alpha naphthol.

"Which country?" the Jain asked anxiously.

"Venezuela!" replied the Muslim from Jabalpur.

"Not Venezuela!" corrected Qures.h.i.+ who had sources in the management offices. "Brazil."

"Meanwhile, we're the ones Carbide drops in the s.h.i.+t," Varma said angrily. His struggles with his superiors had made him aggressive.

Qures.h.i.+ tried to allay his colleagues' fears. They all liked this tall, slightly clumsy fellow, who was always ready to share his inexhaustible repertoire of ghazals. Listening to him sing his poems, the nights did not seem quite so long. They had been pleasantly surprised to find him there that evening, because the roster had not shown him on duty until the next day. At the last minute, however, he had agreed to stand in for a colleague who had been invited to one of the weddings-a very n.o.ble gesture on his part on a night when there was a mushaira.

While still carrying on with the discussion, Qures.h.i.+ cast an eye over the logbook, brought up to date by the previous s.h.i.+ft. On the page for tank 610, for the pressure reading for twenty hundred hours, he read, "2 psig." He gave a smile of satisfaction. Two pounds per square inch of pressure! That meant that all was well inside the tank. The Muslim's expression darkened, however, when he realized that this information was three hours old. Three hours!

"Before half the technicians were laid off, we used to take pressure and temperature readings every two hours. Now it's every ..."

"Eight hours," specified Suman Dey who had just emerged from the control room.

An atmosphere of extreme depression prevailed for some time over the metal structures of the factory. Ever since the departure of the men who had given it its soul-Woomer, Dutta, Pareek, Ballal-morale had plummeted, discipline had lapsed and, worst of all, the safety culture had gone out the window. It was rare now for those handling toxic substances to wear their helmets, goggles, masks, boots and gloves. It was even rarer for anyone to go spontaneously in the middle of the night to check the welding on the pipework. Eventually, and insidiously, the most dangerous of ideas had crept in, namely that nothing serious could happen in a factory when all the installations were turned off. As a result, plant workers preferred card games in the site canteen to tours of inspection around the dormant volcano.

"Hey guys! Can you smell it? Hey, can you smell it?" Mohan Lal Varma had sprung to his feet. He sniffed noisily. "Have a sniff, go on! I swear there's MIC in the air!"

This sudden excitement on the part of the quiet young Hindu provoked much amus.e.m.e.nt all around.

"Sort out your snoot! Idiot!" cried the Jain from Bombay. "There can't be any smell of MIC in a factory that's stopped!"

"It's not MIC you can smell, it's Flytox!" interrupted the factory worker from Bihar. "They sprayed a whole canister of it about before we got here!"

"That's why we haven't been eaten up by mosquitoes yet!" confirmed the Muslim from Jabalpur.

Everyone in Bhopal agreed: Flytox was a G.o.dsend. It was, after all, the miracle insecticide that provided protection against the City of the Begums' worst scourge: its mosquitoes.

Amid all the hullabaloo of the festivities taking place on the other side of the Kali Grounds, no one noticed a frail young girl dressed in a simple blouse and blue cotton skirt. She threaded her way through the guests preparing to dine on the sisal mats. She approached several of the guests, apparently looking for someone.

"Do you know where Sister Felicity is?" she asked, clearly agitated.

Dalima, who had overheard the question, joined the stranger and scrutinized the faces by the light of the strings of bulbs. The banquet had begun. The men were on one side, the women on the other. Only the bride was missing from the feast. She had momentarily withdrawn to a neighbor's hut to open her wedding presents. Eventually, Dalima spotted the missionary sitting among a group of women. The young messenger rushed over to her.

"Anita, what are you doing here?" the nun asked, surprised. "Sister, you must come at once! There's been an accident at home."

The Scotswoman led Anita to an autorickshaw parked outside the teahouse.

"What is it?" she asked, concerned.

"The little one you have in your room ..."