Five Past Midnight In Bhopal Part 9

32.

The Vengeance of the People of the Kali Grounds Not for the world would she have missed her meeting with the ordinary people of India. Every morning before leaving to perform her onerous duties as prime minister of the world's most populous democracy, Indira Gandhi received those who came to seek a darshan, a visual contact, with the woman who embodied supreme authority. The encounter took place in the rose- and bougainvillea-laden garden of her residence on Safdarjang Road, New Delhi. For the sixty-seven-year-old patrician who for seventeen years had ruled over a fifth of humanity, such morning gatherings were an opportunity to immerse herself in the multifaceted reality of her country. Draped in a sari, she would move from group to group, speaking first to peasants from the extreme south, next to a delegation of railway workers from Bengal, then to a group of young schoolgirls with long braids, and thereafter to a squad of barefoot sweepers who had come from their distant province of Bihar. The mother of the nation had a few words to say to each group. She read the pet.i.tions presented to her, responded with a promise and posed graciously for souvenir photographs. As in the days of the Mogul emperors, the most humble parts of India had, for a moment's interlude, daily access to the seat of power.

That morning of Wednesday October 31, 1984, promised to be a splendidly clear, bright autumn day. A soft breeze rustled the leaves of the neem trees in the vast garden where a privileged few waited to receive their morning darshan. They were joined by a British television crew who had come to interview the prime minister. On the previous evening, Indira had returned from an exhausting electoral tour of Orissa, the native state of most of the refugees in Orya Bustee. In the presence of the thousands of followers who had come to hear her, she had concluded her speech with surprising words. "I don't have the ambition to live a long life, but I am proud to live it serving the nation," she had said. "If I were to die today, each drop of my blood would make India stronger."

At eight minutes past nine, she walked down the three steps from her residence into the garden. She was wearing an orange sari, one of the three colors of the national flag. On pa.s.sing the two sentries on either side of the path, she pressed her hands together at her heart in a cordial namaste. The two men wore traditional Sikh beards and turbans. One of them, forty-year-old Beant Singh, was well known to her; for ten years he had formed part of her closest bodyguard. The other, twenty-one-year-old Satwant Singh, had been in her service only four months.

A few weeks earlier, Ashwini k.u.mar, former director general of the Border Security Force of India, had come to see Indira Gandhi to express his concern. "Madam, do not keep Sikhs in your security service," he had urged her. He had reminded her that Sikh extremists had sworn to get back at her for the army's bombardment and b.l.o.o.d.y seizure of the Sikhs' most sacred sanctuary, the Golden Temple of Amritsar. On June 6 of the previous year, the attack had killed 650 Sikhs. Indira Gandhi had smiled and rea.s.sured her visitor. Indicating the figure of Beant Singh in the garden, she had replied, "While I'm fortunate enough to have Sikhs like him about me, I have nothing to fear." Skeptical, the former police executive had insisted. Irritated, she ended their meeting. "How can we claim to be secular if we go communal?" she demanded.

On that thirty-first of October, she had scarcely finished greeting the two guards when the elder pulled out his P-38 and fired three bullets point blank into her chest. His young accomplice promptly emptied the thirty rounds in the magazine of his Sten gun into her body. At least seven shots punctured her abdomen, ten her chest, several her heart. The mother of India did not even have time to cry out. She died on the spot.

Just as the a.s.sa.s.sination of Mahatma Gandhi thirty-six years previously had done, the news plunged the nation into painful stupor. By the middle of the afternoon, every city in India had become a ghost town. In Bhopal, a twelve-day period of mourning was decreed. All ceremonies, celebrations and festivities were canceled, while cinemas, schools, offices and businesses closed their doors. Flags were flown at half-mast. Newspapers published special editions in which they invited readers to express their despair. "INDIA HAS BEEN ORPHANED," proclaimed one of the headlines. Another paper wrote, "In a country as diversified as ours, only Indira could guarantee our unity."

"We will no longer hear the irresistible music of her eloquence ..." lamented Bhopal's people recalling her recent visit for the inauguration of the Arts and Culture building. "The realization of this project will make Bhopal the cultural capital of the country," she had announced to applause and cheers of "Indira Ki Jai!" The city's companies, businesses and organizations filled the newspapers with notices expressing their grief and offering their condolences. One of the messages was signed Union Carbide, whose entire staff, so it declared, wept for the death of India's prime minister.

That afternoon, the shattered voice of the governor of Madhya Pradesh resounded over the airwaves of All India Radio. "The light that guided us has gone out," he declared. "Let us pray G.o.d to grant us the strength to remain united in this time of crisis." A little later the inhabitants of the bustees gathered around the transistor belonging to Salar the bicycle repairman. Arjun Singh, chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, who had made them property owners by granting them their patta, was also expressing his sorrow. "She was the hope of millions of poor people in this country. Whether they were Adivasis, harijans, inhabitants of the bustees or rickshaw-pullers, she always had time for them and a solution to offer to their problems... . May her sacrifice inspire us to continue to go forward ..."

It was not until the next day, however, when the funeral was held, that the residents of Bhopal along with all the people of India really became conscious of the tragedy that had befallen their country. For the first time in history, television was going to broadcast the event all over the nation. Anyone who had access to a set, whether through some zamindar, * organization or club would see the images relayed live. All at once an entire nation was to be joined together by media communion. At daybreak, at the behest of Ganga Ram, owner of the only TV in the bustees, Kali Grounds huts were empty of all occupants. Belram Mukkadam and the shoemaker Iqbal had stacked several of the teahouse tables on top of one another and covered them with a large white sheet, a symbol of purity and mourning, and then decorated their makes.h.i.+ft altar with garlands of yellow marigold and jasmine flowers. Then they had positioned the set high enough for everyone to see the screen.

Since the early hours of the morning, the crowd had been gathering in silence outside the teahouse: men on one side, women and children on the other. Before the ceremony started, they watched silently as representatives of the country's different religions succeeded one another, reciting prayers and appealing for forgiveness and tolerance.

Suddenly, a murmur rose from the a.s.sembly. Wide-eyed, the residents of the Kali Grounds were witnessing an historic event: the transportation to the funeral pyre of the woman, who, only the previous day, had ruled the country. The litter, covered with a bed of rose petals, jasmine flowers and garlands of marigolds, filled the screen. Indira Gandhi's face, with the veil of her red cotton sari set like a halo around it, emerged from an ocean of flowers. With her eyes closed and her features relaxed, she radiated an unusual serenity. The screen showed hundreds of thousands of Indians ma.s.sed along the funeral route leading to the sacred banks of the Yamuna River, where the cremation would take place. The cameras lingered on tearful faces, on people clinging to street lamps and branches of trees or perched on rooftops. Like waters coming together again in the wake of a s.h.i.+p, the crowd rushed in behind the funeral carriage-ministers, coolies, office workers, businessmen, Hindus, Muslims, even Sikhs in their turbans, representatives of all the castes, religions, races and colors of India, all united in shared grief. For three hours this endless river swelled with fresh waves of humanity. When, finally, the procession reached the place where a pyre had been built on a brick platform, the residents of the Kali Grounds watched as a groundswell surged through the hundreds of thousands of people gathered around their fallen leader. To Padmini, all those people looked like millions of ants in a nest. To old Prema Bai, who remembered seeing photographs of Mahatma Gandhi's funeral, it was the finest tribute to any servant of India since the death of the nation's liberator. Among the crowd of television viewers, a woman with short hair said her rosary. Sister Felicity had wanted to share the sorrow of her brothers and sisters in the bustees.

As soon as the funeral carriage stopped, a squad of soldiers carried the mortal remains of Indira Gandhi to the pyre. The people of the Kali Grounds saw a man dressed in white, wearing the legendary white cap of the Congress party and a white shawl lined in red over his shoulders. They all recognized Rajiv, Indira's elder son, her heir, the man the country had chosen to succeed her. According to tradition, it was his responsibility to carry out the last rites. The cameras showed him spreading a mixture of ghee, coconut milk, camphor essence and ritual powders over his mother's corpse. While the television set flooded the esplanade with Vedic mantras recited by a group of priests in saffron robes, Rajiv took hold of the cup containing the sacrificial fire. Five times India's new leader circled the pyre, from left to right, the direction in which the Earth revolves around the sun. The crowd saw his son Rahul appear next to him, together with his wife Sonia and their daughter Priyanka. Although traditionally women did not take part in cremations, they helped place firewood around the body. A camera focused next on the flaming cup, which Rajiv raised for a moment above the surrounding heads before plunging it into the pyre. When the first flames began to lick at the blocks of sandalwood, a voice intoned the same Vedic prayer that Belram Mukkadam had recited on the death of his father.

Lead me from the unreal to the real, From darkness to light From death to immortality ...

At that instant, a mighty howl broke forth from the crowd. The cry uttered over six hundred miles away acted like a detonator. Suddenly, the voice of Rahul drowned out the sound of the television. "We must avenge Indira!" he yelled. His usually smiling mouth was twisted with fury. "Rahul is right, Indira should be avenged!" numerous other voices took up the cry. "This city's full of Sikhs. Let's go and burn down their houses!" someone shouted. At this cry, the entire group leaped to their feet, ready to rush to Hamidia Road and the area around Bhopal's main gurdwara, or Sikh temple.

Climbing onto the platform, Ganga Ram addressed the mult.i.tude. "No need to go to Hamidia. It would be enough ..."

He had no time to finish his sentence. Ratna Nadar had jumped on the platform. "Friends, Nilamber has just been found dead. He hung himself from a beam of his hut. On his charpoy, there is a picture of Indira and a garland of flowers."

Nilamber, the sorcerer whom everybody loved because he only predicted good fortune! The news of his suicide bewildered all those present. Death was a familiar enough event in the bustees but this time it was different. Nilamber had been overcome by grief. It was Belram Mukkadam's turn to mount the stage.

"Ganga's right," he cried. "It isn't worth going all the way to Hamidia Road to set fire to the Sikh houses, it would be enough to set fire to the moneylender's, the man who sucks us dry. Everyone to Pulpul Singh's house!"

By setting fire to Pulpul Singh's house they would be making a Sikh pay for the horrible murder perpetrated by two of his brothers in religion, but they would also be avenging all the crimes committed by the loan shark who had, at one time or another, humiliated each and every one of them. His safe already contained several property deeds mortgaged against pitiful loans. Pulpul Singh was the ideal scapegoat. By setting fire to his house, obliging him to flee, perhaps even killing him, they would be avenging Indira, avenging Nilamber, avenging all the injustices of life.

At the first cry for vengeance Sister Felicity slipped away from the crowd. She felt it was her duty to prevent her brothers' and sisters' anger from ending in tragedy. Spotting the dark silhouette hurrying away, Padmini joined her. Preempting her question, the nun took the young Indian girl by the arm and swept her along with her.

"Come with me quickly to Pulpul Singh's. We must warn him so he has time to get away."

Together they ran to the two-story house at the entrance to Chola.

Pulpul Singh was surprised by the arrival of the two women. Neither the nun nor young Padmini belonged to his usual clientele.

"What wind of good fortune blows you this way?" he asked.

"Get out of here! For the love of G.o.d, leave immediately with your family!" the nun begged him. "They want to take vengeance on you for Indira Gandhi's a.s.sa.s.sination."

She had scarcely finished speaking when the front-runners of the crowd arrived. They were armed with iron bars, pickaxes, bricks, bolts and even Molotov c.o.c.ktails.

"For the first time I saw a sentiment on their faces that I had thought not to find in the poor," Sister Felicity later remembered. "I saw hatred. The women were among the most over-wrought. I recognized some whose children I'd nursed, even though their contorted features made them almost unrecognizable. The residents of the Kali Grounds had lost all reason. I realized then what might happen one day if the poor from here were to march on the rich quarters of New Bhopal."

Terrified, Pulpul Singh and his family fled out of the back of their house but, not before wasting precious time trying to push the safe to the back of the veranda and hide it with a cloth. In the meantime, the rioters had thrown their first bottle of flaming petrol. It hit the ground just behind Sister Felicity and Padmini who had remained outside. The explosion was so powerful that they were thrown toward each other. Dense smoke enveloped them. When the cloud cleared, they found themselves in the middle of the rampaging crowd. The shoemaker Iqbal had brought a crowbar to force open the gate. Suddenly someone shouted, "Get them! They've escaped out the back!" A group took off in pursuit of the fugitives. Their Amba.s.sador automobile had failed to start, so they were trying to get away on foot. Restricted by their saris, the women had difficulty running. Soon the family was caught and brought roughly back to the house. In his flight Pulpul Singh had lost his turban.

"We're going to kill you," Ganga Ram declared, caressing the man's throat with the point of his dagger. "You're sc.u.m. All Sikhs are sc.u.m. They killed our Indira. You're going to pay for that." With his shoulder, he shoved the moneylender up against the bars on the terrace. "And you can open up your s.h.i.+t hole of a house at once, otherwise we'll set fire to it and you."

Scared, the Sikh took a key from his waist and unlocked the padlock to the grille. Cowering together, Sister Felicity and Padmini observed the scene. The nun recalled something an old man from Orya Bustee had explained to her one day: "You keep your head down, you wear yourself to a frazzle, you put up with everything, you bottle up your bitterness against the factory that's poisoning your well, the moneylender who's bleeding you dry, the speculators who are pus.h.i.+ng up the price of rice, the neighbors' kids who stop you sleeping by spewing up their lungs all night, the political parties that suck up to you and do d.a.m.n all, the bosses that refuse you work, the astrologer who asks you for a hundred rupees to tell you whether your daughter can get married. You put up with the mud, the s.h.i.+t, the stench, the heat, the mosquitoes, the rats and the hunger. And then one day, bang! You find some pretext and the opportunity's given to you to shout, destroy, hit back. It's stronger than you are: you go for it!" Sister Felicity had often marveled that in such conditions, there were not more frequent and more murderous outbreaks of violence. How many times in the alleyways had she seen potentially b.l.o.o.d.y altercations suddenly defused into streams of verbal insults, as if everyone wanted to avoid the worst.

A series of explosions shook the Sikh's house. Immediately afterward the veranda went up in flames. There were shouts of, "Death to Pulpul Singh!" And others of, "We're avenging you, Indira!"

Salar appeared, brandis.h.i.+ng a knife. "Prepare to die!" he shouted, and advanced toward the terror-crazed Sikh. Another second and Salar would have lunged at Singh. But the moment he raised his arm, someone intervened.

"Put down your knife, brother," ordered Sister Felicity, seizing the young man firmly by the wrist.

Stunned, Salar's friends did not dare interfere. Ganga Ram stepped forward, accompanied by his wife Dalima. She still walked unsteadily. Nevertheless she had managed to catch up with the crowd. She had just seen the nun throw herself between Salar and the moneylender.

"Killing that b.a.s.t.a.r.d wouldn't do any good!" Dalima cried, turning on the rioters. "I've a better idea!" She pulled from her sari a small pair of scissors. "Let's chop this Sikh's beard off! That's a far worse form of vengeance than death!"

Ganga flashed his wife a smile of admiration. "Dalima's right, let's cut the s.h.i.+t's beard off and throw it on the flames of his house."

Salar, the tailor Ba.s.si and Iqbal grabbed the usurer and pinned him against the trunk of a palm tree. Dalima handed the scissors to Belram Mukkadam. After all, it was only right that the manager of the teahouse should have the honor of humiliating the man who had exploited him for so many years. Resigned to his fate, the usurer did not protest. The process took a while. Everyone held their breath. The scene was both pathetic and sublime. When there was not a trace of hair left on Singh's cheeks, neck or skull, a joyful ovation went up into a sky obscured by the smoke from his flaming house.

Then Mukkadam's deep voice was heard to say, "Indira, rest in peace! The poor of the Kali Grounds have avenged you."

The vengeance wrought by the occupants of the slums on the Sikh moneylender was a tiny spark in a terrible explosion that erupted throughout India against the followers of Guru Nanak. The flames of Indira Gandhi's funeral pyre had scarcely gone out before violence was unleashed in the country's princ.i.p.al cities. Everywhere Sikhs were brutally attacked, their houses, schools and temples were set on fire. Soon the fire department, hospitals and emergency services were overwhelmed by the flare-up of violence, which reminded many people of the horrors that surrounded the country's part.i.tion in 1947. Despite a rigorous curfew and the intervention of the army, more than three thousand Sikhs were immolated on the altar of vengeance.

On the morning of November 2, this murderous frenzy hit the City of the Begums in a particularly horrible fas.h.i.+on. Forty-five-year-old Gurcharan Singh Khanuja, the Sikh officer in command of the electrical and mechanical engineering corps stationed in Bhopal, came out of his barracks accompanied by an escort to go to the train station. Several members of his family-his two brothers, his brother-in-law and nephews-were returning from a pilgrimage to the Golden Temple of Amritsar. When Khanuja opened the door to the compartment reserved for his family, he found nothing but charred corpses. a.s.sa.s.sins had stopped the train between Amritsar and Bhopal, slit the throats of all the Sikh pa.s.sengers and set fire to their corpses.

Five days later, a special train decorated with flags and garlands of flowers pulled in at the same platform in Bhopal station. It was bringing the population one of the thirty-two urns with the ashes of the dead prime minister that were making their way around the country. An honor guard of uniformed soldiers carrying inverted rifles, and a bra.s.s band playing a funeral march, waited to take the precious relic to an altar that had been erected in the middle of the parade ground where the city's poetry evenings were usually held.

The entire city had gathered along the route. Belram Mukkadam, Ganga Ram, Dalima and Dilip, Padmini and her parents, Salar, all the occupants of the Kali Grounds, including old Prema Bai and the legless cripple Rahul on his wheeled plank, were there to pay their respects to the woman who had one day proclaimed that the eradication of poverty should be India's first priority. For two days thousands of Bhopalis of all castes, religions and origins came to throw flowers at the foot of the altar decorated with the flags of the country and of Madhya Pradesh. Banners identified the various groups: Congress party members, a.s.sociations for businessmen, or the unemployed.

After its sojourn in Bhopal, followed by a pilgrimage through the cities of Madhya Pradesh, the urn was taken back to New Delhi. There, a military aircraft escorted by two MiG-23s, carried it, with the other urns, over the highest peaks of the Himalayas. On board the aircraft was Rajiv Gandhi. He emptied all the urns into a basket, which he covered with a red satin veil. As the plane flew over the eternal snows of the river Ganges's birthplace, India's new leader cast the basket into the crystal clear air. Indira Gandhi's ashes were returned to the high valleys of Kashmir, the land of the G.o.ds and the cradle of her family.

33.

Festivities That Set Hearts Ablaze November, the month for festivities. While Union Carbide abandoned its Indian industrial jewel to its sad fate, the unconcerned City of the Begums gave itself up to all the joy and celebration of the world's most festive calendar. Nowhere did this taste for rejoicing manifest itself with as much intensity as in the Kali Grounds bustees. There, festivals wrested the poor from the harsh realities of their dayto-day lives. A more effective vehicle for religion than any catechism, these festivals set hearts and senses ablaze with the charm of their songs and the rituals of their long and sumptuous ceremonies.

The Hindus opened the festivities with a frenzied four-day celebration in honor of Durga, the conqueror-G.o.ddess of the buffalo demon that rampaged through the world a hundred thousand years ago. The entire city was filled with splendid pandals, temporary altars built to hold the statues of the G.o.ddess, all dressed up and magnificently bejeweled. Two such altars brightened up the otherwise gloomy Chola and Jai Prakesh Bustees. For four days, people processed past them, regardless of any distinctions of faith. The men wore woolen sherwanis over their trousers; the women silk kurtas and dangling earrings that made them look like royalty.

At twilight on the fourth day, the statues of the G.o.ddess were hoisted onto a luggage cart that Ratna Nadar had borrowed from the train station. His wife and Dalima had draped it with a piece of s.h.i.+mmering cloth and decorated it with flowers. Ganga Ram's musicians were there again to provide accompaniment. At the same time, in other parts of Bhopal, similar processions were setting out. They made for the sh.o.r.es of the Upper Lake in the heart of the city, where the statues crowned with their gilded diadems were immersed in the sacred waters, bearing with them all the joys and afflictions of the Bhopalis.

A little while later, it was the anniversary of the birth of the prophet Muhammad and the Muslims' turn to celebrate. The Kali Grounds' families painted their homes, outside and in, with whitewash tinged with green, the color of Islam. Chains of multicolored garlands were strung across the alleyways. Prostrate in the direction of the mystical and distant Kaaba, Salar, Ba.s.si and Iqbal, spent a night of devotion, squeezed with hundreds of other faithful, into the two small mosques built beside the railway line in Chola and Jai Prakash. The next day a human tide, vibrant with faith and reciting suras at the tops of their voices, poured through the neighborhood alleyways. "Allah ho Akbar! G.o.d alone is great!" recited the mult.i.tude from beneath banners representing the domes of the sacred mosques of Jerusalem, Medina and Mecca, symbols that imbued the bustee with faith, piety and fantasy.

The Muslims had barely finished commemorating the birth of Muhammad before a myriad luminous snakes streaked across the sky above the Kali Grounds. Celebrated during one of the longest nights of the year, Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, marks the official arrival of winter. The illuminations were to celebrate one of the most beautiful episodes in the Ramayana, the return of the G.o.ddess Sita to the arms of her divine husband Rama after her abduction by the demon Ravana. That night in their huts, Hindu families played cards like mad, for the festival also commemorated the famous dice game in which the G.o.d s.h.i.+va won back the fortune he had lost to Parvati, his unfaithful wife. To achieve this victory, s.h.i.+va appealed to his divine colleague Vishnu, who very opportunely a.s.sumed the form of a pair of dice. Diwali was thus a homage to luck. The residents gambled with ten-, five- or one-rupee notes, or even with small coins. The poorest would gamble a banana, a handful of puffed rice or some sweets. Every alleyway had its big gambler, often it was a woman. The most compulsive was Sheela Nadar. Padmini would look on bewildered as her mother shamelessly fleeced old Prema Bai.

"It's a good omen, my girl!" Sheela would explain after every winning hand. "The G.o.d of luck is with us. Rest a.s.sured that your marriage will be as beautiful an occasion as Diwali."

In exactly one week's time, on Sunday, December 2, the happy conjunction of Jupiter and the sun would transform Padmini into a princess out of A Thousand and One Nights. On that day, Jagannath, the glorious avatar of Vishnu wors.h.i.+pped by the Adivasis from Orissa, would bless her marriage to Dilip.

The ritual for an Adivasi marriage is as strict as any that unites high-caste Hindus. Nine days before the ceremony, Padmini and Dilip had to submit themselves to all kinds of ablutions in the homes of neighborhood families, before a meal and the presentation of gifts to equip their household. Four days later, the married women took charge of the young couple for a purification ceremony, in which they were rubbed down with castor oil and other ointments that smelled strongly of saffron and musk. Once this oiling had been completed, they proceeded to the interminable trying on of the wedding outfits made by the tailor Ba.s.si. The cost of these outfits had been subject to keen negotiation. For a humble coolie working at the train station, marrying his daughter off meant substantial sacrifices.

Three days before the wedding, Ratna Nadar and several of his neighbors built the mandap, the platform on which the union would be celebrated. This was a dais about ten yards wide, raised about twenty inches from the ground and made out of mud coated with a smooth, dry mixture of cow dung and clay. Branches from two of India's seven sacred trees covered the sides of the platform and in the middle, on an altar decorated with flowers, stood the image of the G.o.d Jagannath. Strings of lightbulbs provided the finis.h.i.+ng touch to the decorations. On the evening of the ceremony, they would be lit by a generator hired for the occasion. Belram Mukkadam had chosen a prime position for the celebration. Padmini and Dilip would be married where all the community's great events took place-on the teahouse esplanade-looking out at the tanks and pipework of the plant that represented the hope of a better life.

34.

A Sunday Unlike Any Other The dawn prayer. Every morning Bhopal awoke to the call of the muezzins from high up in the minarets. Sunday December 2, 1984, however, was no ordinary day. In a few hours time the City of the Begums was due to celebrate Ishtema, the great prayer gathering that, once a year, brought thousands of pilgrims from all over the country, as well as Pakistan and Afghanistan, to the heartland of India. Ratna Nadar had been obliged to temporarily abandon preparations for his daughter's wedding and go with the other station porters to meet the special trains overflowing with the faithful. There would never be more people in Bhopal than on that Sunday. The excitement had already come to a head in the Taj ul-Masajid, the great mosque where teams of electricians were installing the floodlighting that would illuminate the splendid building for a week. Volunteers were unrolling hundreds of prayer mats and hooking up loudspeakers that, for three days and three nights, would broadcast the celebration of the greatness of Allah.

All around the city's mosques and outside the hotels on Hamidia Road, the bus station and the railway station, hundreds of street vendors were taking up their positions. Ishtema was a lucrative time for any business in Bhopal. Jolly and rubicund, his lip accentuated by a thin mustache and his forehead decorated with Vishnu's trident, Shyam Babu, a forty-five-year-old Hindu, was the proprietor of the city's largest restaurant. Muslim, Hindu or secular, the many festivals in the Indian calendar made his fortune. Situated in the old part of the city, his establishment, the Agarwal Poori Bhandar, could serve up to eight hundred patrons a day and never closed. "Our meals are the best and the cheapest in town," he a.s.sured people. And it was true; for ten rupees, the equivalent of less than fifty cents, one could eat one's fill of vegetables, chicken or fish curry and samosas. But Shyam Babu was not just a businessman; he was also a kind man. The lepers and beggars who hauled themselves up the steps of the great mosque, and the penniless pilgrims who camped out in the ruins of the palace of Begum Shah Jahan knew that they would always find a bowl of rice and vegetables if they went to him.

Shyam had started that Sunday as he began every day, with a morning prayer in the small temple to Lakshmi, G.o.ddess of wealth. He had brought her baskets of fruit and flowers, for he was going to have particular need of her support that day. For him, the eve of any festival was always difficult. The ma.s.sive arrival of visitors meant that many police reinforcements had to be brought in. The munic.i.p.al government counted on Shyam to feed these men. It had become a tradition. The restaurateur had ordered up an extra 650 pounds of potatoes, the same quant.i.ty of flour, and doubled the stocks of fuel to supply his fifteen ovens. "Don't you worry, I could feed the whole city," he informed the police chief who had come to make sure that his men would be adequately nourished.

Not far from Shyam Babu's restaurant, a notice board drew attention to another, rather quaint business, which had sprung into action for this Sunday unlike any other. For three generations the Bhopal Tent and Gla.s.s Store had been renting out equipment and accessories for the city's weddings and public celebrations. The grandson of its founder, fifty-two-year-old Mahmoud Parvez, a Muslim who looked like a mullah with his little goatee and his embroidered skullcap, ran his business by telephone from a worktable set up in the street. The warehouse behind him was a veritable Ali Baba's cave whose secrets he alone knew. In it were piles of plates, crates of gla.s.sware, drawers full of cutlery, candlesticks of all sizes, old gramophones, antique generators, elephant bells, flintlock guns and harquebuses. Parvez's pride and joy was a gleaming Italian percolator. "I'm the only one in town, in the whole of Madhya Pradesh even, who can serve espresso coffee!" he boasted. What had earned him the most renown, however, was his impressive collection of carpets and shamianas, the multicolored tents used for public and private ceremonies. He had them to suit all tastes and all budgets; some could even hold up to two thousand guests. Others, by virtue of the refinement of their patterns, were real museum pieces. Parvez only hired them out on very special occasions and then only to friends or people of prominence. That Sunday, his staff was preparing the most beautiful shamiana for the wedding of the daughter of the controller-in-chief of the Bhopal railway, the Hindu Ashwini Diwedi, whose brother Sharda was managing director of the city's power station, two people of standing whom Mahmoud was eager to please. The remaining rugs and shamianas would be used in the day's numerous other weddings, the Ishtema festival on the following day, as well as the mushaira, the poetry recital arranged for ten o'clock that night in Spices Square. For this event, Parvez would also be providing small cus.h.i.+ons so that the poets could relax between recitations, accessories all the more necessary because a number of these men of letters were members of the celebrated Lazy Poets' Circle.

Mahmoud Parvez rubbed his hands as he watched his storehouse empty. That Sunday was going to be an auspicious one for the Bhopal Tent and Gla.s.s Store.

The feverish preparations had spread as far as the workshops of Kali Grounds' two main artisans. The shoemaker Mohammed Iqbal had been working since dawn to finish the shoes made of Agra leather and sandals encrusted with precious stones that several of the wedding guests had ordered. With the help of his young apprentice Sunil k.u.mar, the son of poor peasants newly arrived in the bustee, he cut, trimmed and sewed away, surrounded by the suffocating smell of glue and varnish that filled the hut where his wife and three children were still sleeping. Across the way, in hut No. 240, his friend Ahmed Ba.s.si had also been up since dawn, finis.h.i.+ng embroidering the saris and veils ordered by the wealthy families of Arera Colony for their daughters' weddings. Ba.s.si had such fine silk fabrics brought from Benares that his shop attracted Bhopal's smart set, despite its location in the poor quarter. Five times a day, he thanked Allah for all the benefits He had bestowed upon him. His order book was overflowing. In two weeks' time, it would be Eid, the most important festival in the Muslim year. The treadle of his sewing machine would not stop, as he made kurtas out of satin and sherwanis in Lucknow brocade.

At the other end of town, in a church with a slate-covered steeple in the Jehangirabad district, on that same December 2, Bhopal's Christian minority gathered to celebrate Advent. The first Sunday in Advent was the beginning of a time of prayer and recollection leading up to the year's most important Christian festival: Christmas. A life-size creche commemorated the birth of the Messiah in a Bethlehem stable. A noisy and colorful congregation of women in superb saris with the embroidered ends covering their heads, and sumptuously dressed men and children filled the nave, cooled by a battery of fans. Majestic in his immaculate alb and red silk vestments, Eugene de Souza, the Roman Catholic archbishop, originally from Goa, read the first psalm with fervor. "Awake thy glory, O Lord, and deliver us, for our transgressions have led us into imminent danger."

That morning one pew remained unoccupied. Sister Felicity had called the prelate to ask him to excuse her, and to request that his vicar, Father Lulu, come to Ashanitekan, the House of Hope, to give ma.s.s for the handicapped children in the building's small chapel. There, to the right of the altar stood a large picture of Jesus, under which were inscribed the simple words: I AM WITH YOU ALWAYS.

A dozen children were kneeling on jute sacks sewn end to end. Among them was Raina, the little girl with spina bifida, whom the nun had put in her own bedroom in order to better care for her. For much of the time, especially at night, her illness plunged her into a comalike state, almost as if she were dead. The previous night, however, Raina had suddenly woken up, screaming.

"People with this kind of illness have a very special sensitivity," Sister Felicity explained. "Raina never woke up in the night unless something unusual was going to happen, like a storm, or the beginning of the monsoon. But the weather was so beautiful in Bhopal that second day of December that I couldn't understand why all at once she started to yell."

The nun was to find her answer in the gospel that Father Lulu read that day. "The sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken ..."

In the northern part of the immense city, in the Railway Colony, the Anglican inc.u.mbent of the small white church of the Holy Redeemer was also meditating with his flock upon the somber predictions of the holy scriptures. Short and stocky with a round smiling face, the thirty-one-year-old vicar Timothy w.a.n.khede had come originally from Maharashtra. Together with his wife and ten-month-old baby named Anuradh, the Hindi word meaning "joy," he lived in a modest red-brick vicarage next to the church. Like Archbishop de Souza, he poured endless energy into keeping the flame of Christian faith alight in a city inhabited by an overwhelming majority of Muslims and Hindus. Timothy had become a Christian one day while listening to the radio. He was twenty years old when an announcement in Marathi, his mother tongue, suddenly came over the airwaves. "He who chooses and believes in Jesus Christ will be saved and all his kinfolk with him," said the voice on the radio. "I was overwhelmed," Timothy would recount. "I rushed to the only public telephone in the village and called the radio station, wanting to know more about Jesus Christ." After being baptized, on what he described as "the most wonderful day" of his life, he had traveled India for three years, preaching the Gospel. Then he had spent four years at theological college studying for the ordination that would throw open the doors of the Bhopal parish.

The Reverend w.a.n.khede's ministry was not confined to leading wors.h.i.+p. That first Sunday of Advent, he was preparing to take his paris.h.i.+oners to visit the city's various hospitals. "It's our duty to comfort our suffering brethren," he said, "and tell them that Jesus' hands can heal, if only we believe in him." In his shoulder bag he carried editions of the Bible in a dozen different languages. For that Advent Sunday, he had chosen to read a verse from St. Paul to the sick, which in a few hours' time would prove to be tragically relevant. "O G.o.d, forgive your children who were missed by those who had lured them with the promise of wealth."

The two men were pract.i.tioners of a medical specialty of which crime writers are particularly fond. Sixty-two-year-old Prof. Heeresh Chandra and his young a.s.sistant, thirty-four-year-old Ashu Satpathy, performed autopsies on the corpses that sundry incidents throughout the year-accidents, crimes or suicide-dispatched to the examination tables of the Department of Forensic Medicine at the Gandhi Medical College. In a city with six hundred thousand inhabitants, there were plenty of violent deaths, even on Sundays and holidays. In the absence of a suitably refrigerated morgue, the two pathologists had to be constantly available to perform autopsies as soon as the corpses came in.

With his dignified air and imposing white mustache, Professor Chandra looked like a maharajah from a Rajput kingdom. Despite his unusual profession, he was best known for his hobbies: dogs and vintage cars. He owned three sand-colored Labradors and a 1930 National, known throughout the city for the way it backfired. On December 2, the eccentric professor was getting ready to take his venerable vehicle and his Labradors out for a drive, as he did every Sunday, to Delawari National Park, a favorite resort of the Bhopalis.

Meanwhile, his young colleague Ashu Satpathy spent his leisure time indulging his pa.s.sion for roses. Because the garden of his Idgah Hills cottage was not big enough, he had transformed the corridors and terraces of the Department of Forensic Medicine into a rose garden. Dozens of jardinieres and pots of flowers stood alongside the rows of jars containing the livers, kidneys, hearts, spleens and brains that enabled him to extract information from the bodies brought in by the police. Satpathy spent any free time he had watering, pruning and feeding his dwarf bushes and climbing roses. The same fingers that immersed themselves in human entrails carried out delicate grafts to produce new varieties, the secrets of which he alone knew. He had given them such lyrical names as "Black Diamond," "Moschata," "Chinensis," "Odorata" and "Golden Chrysler." In two days' time the doctor was going to exhibit these wonders in the greenhouses at the monumental floral show that, for one week, would turn Bhopal into India's rose capital.

Alas the events of that Sunday were to thwart the two doctors' plans. Toward midday a telephone call from police headquarters informed them that two bodies, those of a man and a woman, were on their way to the morgue. It was a matter of urgency that the doctors establish the cause of death.

Before starting work, the two medical examiners enlisted the help of the accomplice who was party to all their dissections. With his beige cap eternally crammed down over his long hair, the twenty-eight-year-old photographer Subashe G.o.dane looked more like an artist than an accessory to a postmortem examination. He dreamed of making his mark on the world of fas.h.i.+on and advertising photography and had a.s.sembled an impressive portfolio of women's portraits that he was preparing to show at the New Delhi biennial exhibition. In the meantime, he and his Pentax K-1000 supported his wife and three children by photographing corpses riddled with stab wounds, decapitated children and women who had been slashed to ribbons. G.o.dane was absolutely convinced that his films had registered every conceivable horror humanity could inflict. He was wrong.

The autopsies on the two bodies took three hours. The absence of any signs of violence on the couple, who were both in their forties, suggested a double suicide by poisoning. a.n.a.lysis of the internal organs confirmed Doctors Chandra and Satpathy's hypothesis. In the victims' stomachs they found copious quant.i.ties of a whitish powder that had caused extensive damage to the digestive and respiratory organs. Although the two pract.i.tioners were unable to determine the precise nature of the substance, they were probably dealing with a strong pesticide in the DDT family. Returning to the village where the bodies had been found, the police discovered that the victims were peasants whom the latest drought had reduced to ruin. Unable to pay back the loans they had taken out to buy seed, fertilizer and insecticides for their next crop, they had decided to end their lives. Such cases were by no means unusual in India, nor was the method used. That Sunday, December 2, Carbide's beautiful factory had started to sow its seeds of death. In the peasants' hut, the police found an empty package of Sevin.

A Sunday of prayer and mourning but a Sunday of folly, too. Around a circle of dust in an old hangar attached to the Lakshmi Talkies, the city's oldest and largest cinema, cl.u.s.tered three hundred overexcited gamblers. The building shook with all the shouting and heckling and the din from the loudspeakers. Men in s.h.i.+rts and lunghis, their fingers clutching bundles of rupees, pushed their way through the onlookers to pick up the bets. In the front row of the arena a light complexioned man, whose elegant kurta was out of keeping with the general scruffiness, was silently ma.s.saging the claws of a c.o.c.k. Omar Pasha, the G.o.dfather of the bustees, never talked before a fight.

Pressed around him like a bodyguard were his friends from the Kali Grounds led by Belram Mukkadam, Ganga Ram and Rahul. All had bet on Yagu, Omar Pasha's champion, the creature with the murderous spurs that the old man was holding on his belly. A victory that afternoon would open the way to the champions.h.i.+ps in Ahmadabad in January, then Bangalore in March and finally New Delhi in April. The creature relaxed, clucking with pleasure as his master gently ma.s.saged its thighs, joints and claws. Then, with the help of a file, Omar Pasha sharpened its spurs and beak into deadly daggers.

The sound of a gong announced the beginning of the fight. The G.o.dfather stood up and carefully placed Yagu in front of his opponent. The two c.o.c.ks immediately hurled themselves at one another with a fury that roused the fever of their audience. Beaks and spurs spun in the light like steel-tipped arrows. The blood spurting in all directions did nothing to diminish the fury of the two combatants. The crowd yelled their names, clapped and stamped their feet. When one of the birds rolled over in the dust, the audience was nearly delirious. Omar Pasha followed the ferocious battle with the detachment of a Buddha. Yagu bled, staggered and fell but each time he got up to strike again. With a final blow of his spurs he managed to put out an eye of his adversary, who collapsed, mortally wounded. Another sound of the gong signaled the end of the fight. The G.o.dfather stood up and retrieved his b.l.o.o.d.y but victorious c.o.c.kerel. Parading the creature above his head like a trophy, he greeted the crowd.

35.

A Night Blessed by the Stars A Sunday of frivolity and freedom from care. Usually closed on Sundays, the stores in the Chowk Bazaar, scattered around the minarets and golden-spired cupolas of the Jama Masjid, were doing a record trade. That December 2 was, above all else, a day for marriages blessed by the stars. Elegant ladies from the smart neighborhoods came rus.h.i.+ng in to make last-minute purchases. Necklaces, earrings, bracelets, all kinds of jewelry that were a specialty of Bhopal, were s.n.a.t.c.hed up. Perfumers sold out their inventories of sandalwood, essence of roses and patchouli. Vendors were plundered of their silks, ribbons and sandals. It was as if the end of the world were at hand.

On the other side of town, the Arera Club, a splendid inst.i.tution inherited from the British, was doing the sort of business it did on all festival Sundays. Its members thronged around an abundantly laden buffet table, the tennis courts, and immaculately manicured lawns, and the Olympic-size swimming pool and the reading rooms.

Executives from Carbide and other Bhopal companies were ent.i.tled to members.h.i.+p in this club that nestled in an oasis of mauve, bloodred, orange and white bougainvilleas, palm, frangipani and neem trees. With its gala evenings, b.a.l.l.s, tennis and bridge tournaments, and games of bingo, the Arera Club had at one time given the South Charleston expatriates and their young Indian colleagues a glimpse of the life led by its British administrators in the great days of the empire. Recently things had changed somewhat. On that Sunday December 2, 1984, there were no longer any American Carbiders sampling the pots of chicken curry and other Indian delicacies on the buffet. There were hardly even any Indian engineers left; the factory had been deserted by so many of its local senior staff. One of their few remaining representatives, Works Manager Jagannathan Mukund, had brought his wife and son, who was on break from university, to lunch there. That evening, Mukund and his wife planned to take their son to several marriage celebrations. And next day, they were going to show him some of the picturesque sites surrounding the City of the Begums. The plant had ceased operations, so there was no reason its captain could not be gone for a day or two.

Not far from the Mukunds' table, a heated game of bridge was going on. One of the players was a young doctor in white trousers and a sports s.h.i.+rt. Both a swimming and a bridge champion, the athletic, thirty-two-year-old doctor L.S. Loya had been recruited in March by cla.s.sified advertis.e.m.e.nt to take over the running of Carbide's on-site clinic. For the son of a Rajasthani corn chandler who had struggled hard to get his degree in toxicology, landing a job for an international company making chemical products was an achievement. In eight months, Loya had not had to deal with a single serious medical emergency, which was just as well because the management had not provided him with any detailed information about the composition of the princ.i.p.al and most dangerous gas produced by the plant, and even less about how to treat the effects of it in case of accident.

He was the man who probably would have the most onerous responsibilities on that remarkable Sunday. Fifty-two-year-old Sharda Diwedi was the managing director of Bhopal's power station. That evening, his turbines would have to supply enough current to light up the many feasts and wedding celebrations. The grandest was to take place in the Railway Colony. It was to mark the nuptials of Rinu, youngest daughter of the chief controller of the Bhopal railroad.

The Railway Colony was typical of the neighborhoods built by the British to house railway employees close to the stations in which they worked. A small town within a town, not too unlike the villages of Suss.e.x or Surrey, with its lawns, its cottages, its cricket pitch, tearoom, bank and a church with a Victorian gothic bell tower. And one of those inst.i.tutions that seem to crop up whenever two Englishmen get together: a club. On that particular Sunday, the colonial-style railway employees' club accommodated the parents and at least two hundred guests of the groom's family. Later that evening, over a thousand people were due to squeeze themselves under Mahmoud Parvez's huge shamianas erected on lawns illuminated with strings of multicolored bulbs and floodlights. The managing director of the power station had just one worry: that one of the power cuts to which India was accustomed might plunge the festivities into darkness. To cover that eventuality, he had a powerful emergency generator set up behind one of the shamianas.

A cool, bright winter's night had just fallen upon the City of the Begums. While preparations were going on in the Railway Colony and elsewhere across the city, the married women in Orya Bustee had just finished dressing Padmini in her ceremonial clothes. Her father appeared at the entrance to the hut.