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By Root 953 0

for all his blessings by dancing for him and for all the occupants of Orya Bustee. Discreetly she had gone to her hut to change from her wedding sari into the costume worn by performers of Odissi, the traditional Orissan dance. True, it was not made out of silk embroidered with gold thread, like those of the temple dancers, but of simple cotton material. But what did that matter? Dalima and Sheela adjusted her bodice and draped the material around her thighs before spreading it out like a fan from her waist to her knees. They caught the young woman’s long tresses up in a bun and adorned it with a braid of jasmine flowers, then fastened imitation jewelry around her neck, in her ears, round her arms, wrists and waist. Finally they put anklets with bells on her ankles. The god would be pleased. The blood of Orissa definitely flowed through the veins of the former peasant girl from Mudilapa. And it was the thousand-year-old culture of her distant home that carried the young newlywed along, as her bare feet began to pound the mandap on which she had sealed her marriage but a short time previously.

Dalima’s singing and Dilip’s staccato beating of two tambourines accompanied her dance. The crowd of enthralled guests cried out in delight with “Vah! Vahs!” that fired their poverty-stricken neighborhood with triumphal fervor. Suddenly, however, Belram Mukkadam raised his stick above the audience. He had just heard the distant howl of Carbide’s siren. Padmini’s feet stood still, the bells on her ankles fell silent. Everyone strained their ears anxiously in the direction of the metal structure, which still appeared so peaceful in the distant halo of its thousand lightbulbs.

“Don’t say we’re going to have to go through what we did the other evening,” the midwife Prema Bai protested vehemently. “Because I, for one, am staying at home this time.”

Yet again it was Rahul who allayed their fears. “You’re getting uptight about nothing, friends,” he assured them. “Since the last alert, they’ve decided to demolish their factory. But apparently it’s so rotten they’re frightened they won’t be able to dismantle it. It’s riddled with holes.”

“Perhaps that’s why the siren’s going, like the other evening when there was a gas leak,” suggested the dairyman Bablubhai.

His remark went unanswered; the howl of the siren had suddenly stopped. Padmini started to dance again, Dalima resumed her singing and Dilip his tambourine playing. The show went on even more enchantingly than before. The god was being really indulged. And the guests, too. But why could they no longer hear the siren? None of them knew that those in charge of the factory had recently modified it. In order to make it easier to broadcast instructions to the workers during an emergency, and to prevent the neighbors from panicking at the least little incident, the siren stopped automatically after ten minutes. A quieter alarm, which could not be heard outside the factory boundaries, took over.

Soon, however, there were other indications to arouse the anxious curiosity of the revelers. First it was a pungent odor.

“Little mischief-makers have thrown chilies on the chula again!” said Ganga Ram who, as a former leper, had a particularly keen sense of smell.

“Bah!” replied the shoemaker Iqbal, “you know very well that it’s tradition …”

He was interrupted by an ear-splitting bellow. Out of the darkness surged Nandi the bull with his painted horns, followed by the five cows Mukkadam and his friends had bought with Carbide’s compensation money, staggering as if they were drunk. They were vomiting yellow froth, their pupils had swollen up like balloons and tears poured from their eyes. The animals took a few more steps, then sank to the ground with a last rattle. It was one-thirty in the morning. On the Kali Grounds, the apocalypse had begun.

The two geysers of gas had merged to form an enormous cloud about a hundred yards wide. Twice as heavy as air, the MIC made up the base of the gaseous ball that was formed by the chemical reaction in tank 610. Above it, in several successive layers,