• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 988 0

guests at the wedding of Rinu Diwedi, younger daughter of the chief controller of the Bhopal railway to the son of a Vidisha merchant, watched with wonder the ritual procession of the Barat. Perched on a white mare covered with a velvet cloth embroidered with gold, wearing a span-gled turban on his head, young Rajiv caracoled toward his fiancée who was waiting for him under Parvez’s most beautiful shamiana. Before he straddled his mount, his father had marked his forehead with the red and black spots that would banish the evil eye forever and guarantee Rajiv a propitious future. He had also been given a coconut with red stripes scratched onto it, a traditional token of good luck. In front of the white mare walked a woman taking tiny steps: his mother. She was dressed in the double silk and gold sari she kept for special occasions. Fervently she strewed the ground with handfuls of salt, to eliminate all of life’s pitfalls from her son’s path.

37

“What if the Stars Were to Go on Strike?”

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

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

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

“Apparently the Sevin sales aren’t going too well anymore,” said the Jain from Bombay.

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

“Which country?” the Jain asked anxiously.

“Venezuela!” replied the Muslim from Jabalpur.

“Not Venezuela!” corrected Qureshi who had sources in the management offices. “Brazil.”

“Meanwhile, we’re the ones Carbide drops in the shit,