Five Past Midnight In Bhopal Part 13

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

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

Oh my friend, I cannot tell you Whether she was near or far, Real or a dream ...

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

It was like a river flowing through my heart.

Like a moon lit up, I devoured her face And felt the stars dance about my head ...

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

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

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

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

"Is it serious?" asked Mishra anxiously.

"I'm sure not, the factory's out of production. A few inconsequential poisonings, I imagine."

"A gas leak?"

"So they tell me. I'll know more when I've visited the scene."

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

"No, methyl isocyanate."

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

"What are the symptoms?"

"Oh, nausea, sometimes vomiting and difficulty in breathing. But with damp compresses and a little oxygen everything should be all right. Nothing really serious ..."

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

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

"To the factory!" answered Mukund through the closed window.

"To the factory! You're mad! Turn back or you're dead!"

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

"We've had it, sir," he wailed.

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

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

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

"It's not a deadly gas," he claimed, "just irritating, a sort of tear gas."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Professor Mishra," he begged after describing the situation, "come quickly! All h.e.l.l has broken loose here!"

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

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

"I recognized your voice, professor. Allah be with you! I'll give all your calls priority."

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

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

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

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

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

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 s.n.a.t.c.hing 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 b.u.mping 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 Rajk.u.mar 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 pa.s.sengers 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 a.s.sa.s.sination 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 Carbide'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 ma.s.sage 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 Hiros.h.i.+ma."

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 h.e.l.lish 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 reb.u.t.tal.

"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 munic.i.p.al 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 Amba.s.sador 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 Qures.h.i.+, 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 rea.s.sure 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 G.o.dsend. Victims rinsed their burning eyes and drank deeply in order to purge themselves of deadly molecules.

The tailor Ahmed Ba.s.si, 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 had 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 pa.s.sengers 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 proteges 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.

"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 G.o.ddess 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, a.s.sistants 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 makes.h.i.+ft 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.