Five Past Midnight In Bhopal Part 12

"Don't say we're going to have to go through what we did the other evening," the midwife Prema Bai protested vehemently. "Because I, for one, am staying at home this time."

Yet again it was Rahul who allayed their fears. "You're getting uptight about nothing, friends," he a.s.sured them. "Since the last alert, they've decided to demolish their factory. But apparently it's so rotten they're frightened they won't be able to dismantle it. It's riddled with holes."

"Perhaps that's why the siren's going, like the other evening when there was a gas leak," suggested the dairyman Bablubhai.

His remark went unanswered; the howl of the siren had suddenly stopped. Padmini started to dance again, Dalima resumed her singing and Dilip his tambourine playing. The show went on even more enchantingly than before. The G.o.d was being really indulged. And the guests, too. But why could they no longer hear the siren? None of them knew that those in charge of the factory had recently modified it. In order to make it easier to broadcast instructions to the workers during an emergency, and to prevent the neighbors from panicking at the least little incident, the siren stopped automatically after ten minutes. A quieter alarm, which could not be heard outside the factory boundaries, took over.

Soon, however, there were other indications to arouse the anxious curiosity of the revelers. First it was a pungent odor.

"Little mischief-makers have thrown chilies on the chula again!" said Ganga Ram who, as a former leper, had a particularly keen sense of smell.

"Bah!" replied the shoemaker Iqbal, "you know very well that it's tradition ..."

He was interrupted by an ear-splitting bellow. Out of the darkness surged Nandi the bull with his painted horns, followed by the five cows Mukkadam and his friends had bought with Carbide's compensation money, staggering as if they were drunk. They were vomiting yellow froth, their pupils had swollen up like balloons and tears poured from their eyes. The animals took a few more steps, then sank to the ground with a last rattle. It was one-thirty in the morning. On the Kali Grounds, the apocalypse had begun.

The two geysers of gas had merged to form an enormous cloud about a hundred yards wide. Twice as heavy as air, the MIC made up the base of the gaseous ball that was formed by the chemical reaction in tank 610. Above it, in several successive layers, were other gases, among them phosgene that had escaped from a nearby reactor, hydrocyanic acid and monomethylamine with its suffocating smell of ammonia. Because these gases were less dense that MIC, the cloud would spread rapidly, widely and farther. At the same time the movement of the noxious bank of fog was not h.o.m.ogenous. It progressed in fits and starts, striking or sparing according to the temperature of the location, the degree of humidity and the strength of the wind.

The vapors that reached the areas closest to the factory poisoned at random along the way, but the smell of boiled cabbage, freshly cut gra.s.s and ammonia covered the entire area in a matter of seconds. No sooner had Belram Mukkadam spotted the cloud, than he felt its effects. Realizing that death was about to strike, he yelled, "Bachao! Bachao! Get out of here!" The wedding guests were immediately seized with panic and ran off in all directions.

For Bablubhai, it was already too late. Orya Bustee's dairyman would never again bring milk to children suffering from rickets. When Nandi the bull died, he rushed from the banquet to his stable where he could hear his buffalo cows bellowing to him. The seventeen beasts were lying down when they were hit head-on by a small blanket of gas moving along at ground level. Several had already succ.u.mbed. Devastated, Bablubhai ran to his hut to check on his newborn son and wife Boda.

"The oil lamp has gone out," murmured the young woman tearfully.

Bablubhai bent over to grab his child. A gust of vapor caught him there. It paralyzed the dairyman's breathing instantaneously and he was struck down in a faint over the body of his lifeless baby.

Similar respiratory paralysis overtook several of the other guests in midflight. Another small greenish cloud laden with hydrocyanic acid drifted into old Prema Bai's hut. It killed the midwife outright, as she lay on her charpoy. She and many of the other guests had sought refuge in their homes. In the hut next door, Prodip and Shunda, Padmini's grandparents, also succ.u.mbed in seconds. Of all the gases making up the toxic ma.s.s, hydrocyanic acid was one of the deadliest. It blocked the action of the enzymes carrying oxygen from the blood to the brain, causing immediate death.

One of the first victims of this creeping layer of gas was the cripple Rahul on his wheeled plank. Because of his robust const.i.tution, he did not die right away but only after several minutes of agony. He coughed, choked and spewed up blackish clots. His muscles shook with spasms, his features contorted, he tore off his necklaces and his s.h.i.+rt, groaning and gasping for something to drink, then finally toppled from his board and dragged himself along the ground in a last effort to breathe. The man who had always been such a tireless source of moral support to the community, who had so frequently appeased the fears of his companions in misfortune, was dead.

Awakened with a start by all the yelling and shouting, those who had been asleep rushed panic-stricken out of their huts. For the first time Muslim women emerged with their faces uncovered. From out of all the alleyways came small carts laden with old people and children. Very soon, however, the men pulling them suffocated and collapsed. Unable to get back on their feet, they lay sprawled in their own vomit. Little girls and boys who were lost, fastened on to pa.s.sing fugitives and bicycles. Many of the residents of Chola and Jai Prakash bustees took refuge in the small temple to the monkey G.o.d Hanuman, or in the little mosque that was soon overflowing with distressed people. In their panic, men and women left other family members behind in their huts. Ironically, their activity was often their own undoing, while those left behind were in many instances recovered alive. The gas claimed more victims among those obliged to breathe deeply because they were moving, than those who kept still.

Others, such as the shoemaker Iqbal and the tailor Ba.s.si made sure, before they fled, that no one was left behind in any of the homes in their alleyway. That was how they came to find the old mullah with the goatee. Persuaded that Allah had decreed that the world should end that night, the holy man had knelt down on his prayer mat and was reading suras from the Koran by the light of a Carbide flashlight.

"You are My creature, and you will not rise up against My will," he repeated as his neighbors scooped him up to carry him away. As he emerged from the hovel, into which the deadly vapors were about to pour, he asked his rescuers, "Are you quite sure that the end of the world is tonight?"

In the fetid, stinking darkness people called for their spouses, children or parents. For those blinded by the gas, shouting a name became the only way of making contact with their loved ones again. Time and again Padmini's name resounded through the night. In the stampede, the heroine of the evening had found herself brutally separated from her husband, mother and brother. She, too, was almost blind. Carried along by the human torrent, with her bells jangling around her ankles, coughing blood, Padmini did not hear the voices calling out to her. And soon the calling stopped; people's throats had constricted from the gas and no one could utter a sound. In an effort to relieve the dreadful pains in their chests, people were squeezing their thorax with all their strength. Stricken with pulmonary edema, many of them coughed up a frothy liquid streaked with blood. Some of the worst affected spewed up reddish streams. With their eyes bulging out of their heads, their nasal membranes perforated, their ears whistling and their cyanotic faces dripping sweat, most of them collapsed after a few paces. Others, overcome with heart palpitations, dizziness and unconsciousness fell right there in the doorways of the huts they had tried to leave. Yet others suddenly turned violet and coughed dreadfully. The sound of coughing resounded through the night in sinister harmony.

Amid all this chaos, one man and one woman walked, with difficulty, against the tide. Having given the signal for everyone to escape, Belram Mukkadam had decided to go in the opposite direction. He was taking his wife Tulsabai back to their hut. The mother of his three children wanted to die at home. Suffering from awful stomach pains, unable to breathe anymore, the poor woman stumbled over the corpses that lay outstretched in the alleyways. On arriving outside her hut, she turned around to look for her husband. It was then that she realized that the last body she had tripped over was Belram's. Half-blinded, she had not seen him fall. The pioneer of Orya Bustee, the man who had drawn out the plot for each of its huts with the tip of his stick, who for twenty-five years had protected the poor, restored their dignity and fought for their rights, the legendary figure of the teahouse, had been brought down by Carbide's gas.

Many of the bustee dwellers believed doors and windows could keep out the gases. They tried to take refuge in brick houses. The nearest one was the G.o.dfather Omar Pasha's. Its two stout stories rose out of the disaster area like a fortress. Persuaded that the blanket of gas moved along the ground, the old man had retreated to the second floor with his family and his best fighting c.o.c.ks. In the panic, Yagu, winner of that Sunday's duel, had been forgotten. Brought down by the toxic gases, he lay with burst lungs in the living room on the ground floor.

The G.o.dfather had his servants and bodyguards take in the refugees. Their arrival was greeted with acts of extraordinary generosity. Omar Pasha's eldest son took a little girl who was hardly breathing in his arms and laid her gently on the charpoy in his room. The women of the house tore off their muslin veils, dipped the pieces of material in a bowl of water and applied them as cooling compresses to eyes that were on fire. One of the G.o.dfather's wives, a plump matron whose arms jangled with bracelets, sponged away the blood flowing from people's lips, handed out gla.s.ses of water, and comforted one and all. Even Omar Pasha himself helped. With gold-ringed fingers he handed around plates of biscuits and sweets in a kindness that the survivors of that apocalyptic night would never forget.

Not all the brick built houses bordering on the slums were as welcoming. Ganga Ram and Dalima chose to flee along the railway line leading to Bhopal station. Ganga was convinced that he would find refuge a little farther on in one of the villas occupied by the railway workers. He knocked on the door of the first but received no response. Afraid that the wave of gas would catch up with him again, he did not hesitate before breaking a window and climbing inside. A moment later came the sound of gunshots. Believing he was the victim of a break-in and still unaware of the accident at the factory, the owner of the property had fired his revolver. Fortunately, in the darkness, he missed his target.

The unspeakable was happening. Driven by the wind, the wave of gas was catching up with the flood of humanity trying to escape. Out of their minds with terror, people with shredded clothes and torn veils ran in all directions, trying to find a pocket of breathable air. Some, whose lungs were bursting, rolled on the ground in awful convulsions. Everywhere the dead with their greenish skins lay side by side with the dying, still wracked with spasms and with yellowish fluid coming out of their mouths.

Amid this h.e.l.l, the bicycle repairman Salar came upon a vision that would haunt him. As he reached the corner of Chola Road, he narrowly escaped being knocked over by a white horse, bridled and saddled as if for some celebration. Through the veil of gas burning his eyes, he recognized the white mare that only a few hours earlier, Dilip, Padmini's bridegroom, had ridden to his wedding ceremony. With its eyes bloodshot, its nostrils steaming with burning vapors and its mouth foaming with greenish vomit, the animal bolted away, came back at a gallop, stopped sharp, gave a heartrending whinny and collapsed.

Of all the extraordinary scenes that marked that night of horror, one in particular would leave an impression on the few survivors: the frantic flight of a fat man in his underpants and vest, gasping his lungs out pus.h.i.+ng a heavily loaded cart. Nothing could have prevented the moneylender Pulpul Singh from taking with him something more precious than life itself: his safe full of bank notes, jewels, watches, transistors, gold teeth, and, above all, the property deeds p.a.w.ned by the wretched residents of Orya Bustee.

40.

"Something Beyond All Comprehension"

Less than four hundred yards from the apocalypse taking place on the Kali Grounds, a stout man fiddled happily with his mustache. Sharda Diwedi had won. None of his power station turbines had failed. Bathed in an ocean of light, his niece Rinu's marriage ceremony was coming off with all the brightness hoped for. The final part of the ritual was reaching its conclusion. At a signal from the officiating priest, the girl's father would address his future son-in-law with the words that would officially seal the union of bride and groom. "I give you my daughter, in order that my one hundred and one families may be exalted for as long as the sun and the moon continue to s.h.i.+ne, and with a view to having an heir." The guests a.s.sembled under Parvez's beautiful shamiana held their breath. In a few seconds' time, these words would bind the two young people together forever. But they were never to be uttered. The ceremony was rudely interrupted by shouting. "There's been an accident at Carbide's! Bachao! Get out of here!" frantic voices yelled from all directions.

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. .h.i.t by deadly vapors. Letting go of his last gla.s.s 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. .h.i.t, 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 fiance 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 b.u.mpers. 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 w.a.n.khede 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 l.u.s.ts, 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 G.o.d 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 cus.h.i.+on at the foot of the altar, he went and got the bulky copy of the New Testament from which he read to his paris.h.i.+oners 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 gla.s.s 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 Amba.s.sador waiting outside the church, but in India there was nothing unusual about that. Timothy w.a.n.khede, 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 pa.s.sengers 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 a.s.sistant 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 pa.s.sed through the deputy stationmaster's mind at that moment: the Gorakhpur Express was speeding toward Bhopal with hundreds of pa.s.sengers...o...b..ard.

"Whatever happens we've got to make sure the train doesn't stop here!" he cried to his two a.s.sistants.

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, pa.s.s 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 s.h.i.+p about to be engulfed by the ocean. Even if he could do nothing for the pa.s.sengers 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 a.s.sistant 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 G.o.d," 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 a.s.sistant.

"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 a.s.sistant, 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-cla.s.s 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 G.o.d 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 hards.h.i.+p 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 progressed with difficulty. Without realizing it, they were pa.s.sing through a mult.i.tude of small residual clouds that were still lurking between the rails and along the ballast. They stumbled over corpses twisted into horrible att.i.tudes 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! Brandis.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.sengers due to get out at Bhopal to remain in their carriages. The train will depart again immediately. Pa.s.sengers 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.

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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sengers 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 pa.s.sengers 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 a.s.sailed 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 pa.s.sed 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 h.e.l.l Has Broken Loose Here!"