Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [113]
“You are My creature, and you will not rise up against My will,” he repeated as his neighbors scooped him up to carry him away. As he emerged from the hovel, into which the deadly vapors were about to pour, he asked his rescuers, “Are you quite sure that the end of the world is tonight?”
In the fetid, stinking darkness people called for their spouses, children or parents. For those blinded by the gas, shouting a name became the only way of making contact with their loved ones again. Time and again Padmini’s name resounded through the night. In the stampede, the heroine of the evening had found herself brutally separated from her husband, mother and brother. She, too, was almost blind. Carried along by the human torrent, with her bells jangling around her ankles, coughing blood, Padmini did not hear the voices calling out to her. And soon the calling stopped; people’s throats had constricted from the gas and no one could utter a sound. In an effort to relieve the dreadful pains in their chests, people were squeezing their thorax with all their strength. Stricken with pulmonary edema, many of them coughed up a frothy liquid streaked with blood. Some of the worst affected spewed up reddish streams. With their eyes bulging out of their heads, their nasal membranes perforated, their ears whistling and their cyanotic faces dripping sweat, most of them collapsed after a few paces. Others, overcome with heart palpitations, dizziness and unconsciousness fell right there in the doorways of the huts they had tried to leave. Yet others suddenly turned violet and coughed dreadfully. The sound of coughing resounded through the night in sinister harmony.
Amid all this chaos, one man and one woman walked, with difficulty, against the tide. Having given the signal for everyone to escape, Belram Mukkadam had decided to go in the opposite direction. He was taking his wife Tulsabai back to their hut. The mother of his three children wanted to die at home. Suffering from awful stomach pains, unable to breathe anymore, the poor woman stumbled over the corpses that lay outstretched in the alleyways. On arriving outside her hut, she turned around to look for her husband. It was then that she realized that the last body she had tripped over was Belram’s. Half-blinded, she had not seen him fall. The pioneer of Orya Bustee, the man who had drawn out the plot for each of its huts with the tip of his stick, who for twenty-five years had protected the poor, restored their dignity and fought for their rights, the legendary figure of the teahouse, had been brought down by Carbide’s gas.
Many of the bustee dwellers believed doors and windows could keep out the gases. They tried to take refuge in brick houses. The nearest one was the godfather Omar Pasha’s. Its two stout stories rose out of the disaster area like a fortress. Persuaded that the blanket of gas moved along the ground, the old man had retreated to the second floor with his family and his best fighting cocks. In the panic, Yagu, winner of that Sunday’s duel, had been forgotten. Brought down by the toxic gases, he lay with burst lungs in the living room on the ground floor.
The godfather had his servants and bodyguards take in the refugees. Their arrival was greeted with acts of extraordinary generosity. Omar Pasha’s eldest son took a little girl who was hardly breathing in his arms and laid her gently on the charpoy in his room. The women of the house tore off their muslin veils, dipped the pieces of material in a bowl of water and applied them as cooling compresses to eyes that were on fire. One of the godfather’s wives, a plump matron whose arms jangled with bracelets, sponged away the blood flowing from people’s lips, handed out glasses of water, and comforted one and all. Even Omar Pasha himself helped. With gold-ringed fingers he handed around plates