Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [102]
Rehman Khan set to work by closing the main stopcock. It was a complicated process because the stopcock was located three yards off the ground, at the center of a tangle of pipes that were difficult to get to. Bracing himself against two girders, he put all his weight on the handle that closed the stopcock, yet he still could not be sure that he had managed to seal it completely, so rusted and corroded were the metal parts. After that, he climbed back down to turn off the other stopcock and start flushing. He had only then to connect a hosepipe to one of the draincocks on the pipework and turn on the tap. For a few seconds he listened to the water rushing vigorously into the pipes and noted the time in the logbook: it was eight-thirty.
The young operator quickly realized that something unusual was going on: the injected water was not, as it should have been, coming out of the four draincocks provided for the purpose. Khan tapped them lightly with a hammer and discovered that the filters in two of them were blocked with metal debris. He immediately cut off the water supply and alerted his supervisor by telephone. The latter did not arrive for quite a while, and when he did, his lack of experience meant he was not much help.
He simply instructed Khan to clean the filters on the evacuation draincocks well, and turn the water back on. “With the pressure of the flow, they’ll let the water out eventually.”
The young Muslim agreed, with some reservations. “But if the water doesn’t come out through the draincocks, it’ll go somewhere else,” he suggested.
The supervisor failed to grasp the vital implications of this remark. “We’ll just have to see!” he replied, clearly irritated that he had been disturbed for something so trivial.
As soon as his superior had gone, Khan began cleaning the filters, then turned the wash tap back on. Shankar was right: the water flowed out normally through the first two draincocks and, after a moment, through the third one, too. But the fourth seemed to be permanently blocked. Khan was not unduly worried. As his boss had said, the system would eventually clear itself. He went on flushing the pipes, using all the pressure in his hose. Several hundred gallons poured into the pipes. Two hours later, at ten-thirty, half an hour before the changeover of shifts, he knocked on the door to his superior’s cabin.
“What shall I do?” he asked. “Shall I keep the water running, or should I turn it off?”
Shankar looked doubtful. He rubbed his chin.
“Keep it running,” he said eventually. “The insides of those bloody pipes are supposed to be completely spotless. The night shift will turn the tap off.”
At these words, Rehman Khan penciled in a brief report of the operation in progress in the logbook.
“Good night, sir. See you tomorrow!” he then said. He was in a hurry to shower and dress for the evening’s big event, the mushaira in Spices Square.
It was now eleven o’clock at night. Spices Square was humming with poetry lovers impatient to hear their favorite poets. On the other side of the city, the reception rooms and lawns of the Arera Club were teeming with guests, as were the sumptuously decorated tents set up for the marriages in the affluent neighborhoods of New Bhopal and Shamla Hills. On the Kali Grounds, strings of bulbs lit up Dilip and Padmini’s wedding celebrations. The whole of Bhopal had given itself up to rejoicing on that night blessed by the stars. It was in the Railway Colony beneath a shower of fireworks, that the festivities were most splendid. The one thousand