Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [107]
Midnight was the time for the shifts to change. Deputy Stationmaster V.K. Sherma, his assistant, Madan Lal Paridar, and their young aid, the traffic regulator Rehman Patel, had just settled themselves in front of the control board in their office at the end of the platform. With its Victorian gothic architecture it looked like a Sussex cottage. The room was equipped with two powerful air-conditioning units, which in the summertime made it possible to forget the heat and pollution outside. Now, however, it was winter, and the machines were switched off. Cool air from outside came in through the wide open doors and windows. Inside, the office was equipped with a long board on which moveable pegs of different colors and lights marked the location of trains on their way to Bhopal and the position of the signals and switches. On the table in the middle of the room stood several telephones, one of which was an old-fashioned crank phone that they used to call other stations to check what time the trains went through. Because of a thick fog over part of Madhya Pradesh that night, and the unusual amount of activity, most of the trains due to arrive before midnight showed significant delays. None of them was expected before two or three in the morning.
Such was the case with the Gorakhpur Express, in which Sajda Bano, the widow of Mohammed Ashraf, Carbide’s first gas victim, was traveling. Together with her two sons, three-year-old Soeb and five-year-old Arshad, she had meant to catch the train on the previous day. At the last minute, however, a neighboring Hindu woman had begged the young Muslim not to travel on Saturday, because it was considered by followers of her religion to be the most ill-omened day of the week.
In their office, the station staff prepared for one of the long waits to which Indian railway employees and their twelve million daily passengers are well accustomed.
Suddenly, the deputy stationmaster picked up one of the phones. “I’m calling the boss,” he informed his assistant. “There’s no need for him to come for a good two hours yet.”
“You’re right,” his colleague agreed, “that way he’ll be able to down a few more glasses of English liquor!”
The three men laughed. They were well aware of Harish Dhurve’s weakness for alcohol. It was at this point that a coolie in a red tunic appeared at the door.
“Quickly, come and see! Arjuna and his chariot are here with presents for you.”
The porter Satish Lal was in a state of extreme excitement. His reference to the mythological Pandava prince and his celestial chariot was not wholly inaccurate. Ratna Nadar, whom he had introduced to his team of porters two years previously, had just arrived, pushing a rickshaw full of small cardboard boxes.
“There are a hundred and five, one for each coolie, four others for the bosses and the last is for good old Gautam behind his ticket office window,” Padmini’s father announced.
Each box contained a hard-boiled egg, a kebab on a stick, a small bowl of rice with dal on it, a vegetable samosa, a chapati and two balls of rossigola, a very sweet confection made out of pastry steeped in syrup. In India every feast is shared. Ratna Nadar had been eager for his workmates and superiors to have their share of the banquet held that night to mark the most important event in his life: his daughter’s marriage. Toward eleven o’clock, he had slipped away