Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [115]
Panicked, Sharda Diwedi tried to telephone the only person he believed was in a position to explain what was going on. But Jagannathan Mukund’s telephone line was busy. In between two attempts, Diwedi’s own telephone rang. He recognized the voice of the man in charge of the electricity substation in Chola.
“Sir, we’re surrounded by a suffocating cloud of gas. We’re requesting permission to leave. Otherwise we’re all going to die.”
Diwedi thought briefly. “Whatever you do, stay right where you are!” he urged. “Put on the masks Carbide gave you and block up all doors and windows.”
“Sir,” replied the voice, “there’s just one problem: there are four of us and only one mask.”
Disconcerted, Diwedi searched for the right thing to say. “You’ll just have to take it in turns,” he eventually advised. At the other end of the line there was a derisive laugh and then a click. His employee had hung up. The head of Bhopal’s power station had no idea that he had just saved four men’s lives. Next day when the military gathered up the dozens of corpses sprawled around the grounds of the substation, they would be surprised to discover four workers inside, still breathing.
“Bachao! Bachao!” Coughing, spitting, suffocating and with burning eyes, Rinu and her fiancé found themselves trapped in a nightmare, along with all those who had come to celebrate with them. They were scrambling about in all directions, desperate for something to drink, fleeing toward the railway station, seeking refuge in the local houses. Realizing that the panic-stricken crowd must be evacuated before the cloud killed everybody, Diwedi overcame the bout of coughing that was setting his throat on fire and ran to the garages to requisition the trucks that belonged to the shamiana rental and the caterer. But the garages were empty. Even his car had disappeared. At the first cries of “Bachao!” the cooks, servants, the men who put up the tents, the electricians and musicians had all jumped in the vehicles and driven off. The four men in charge of the generator set had decamped on their scooters. The indomitable little man decided then to go on foot to his home, seven or eight hundred yards away, where he would at least find his old Willis Jeep. On his way back he was intercepted by a frenzied crowd. People stormed his old jalopy, throwing themselves onto the seats, hood and bumpers. There were twenty, thirty, fifty of them, struggling with the last vestiges of their strength to climb on-board. These were the survivors from the Kali Grounds’ neighborhoods. They were weeping, pleading, threatening. Many of them, exhausted by this final effort, collapsed unconscious. Others coughed up the last blood from their lungs and keeled over. Just then, a truck roared like a rocket through the crowd of dying people. Diwedi heard skulls cracking against the fenders. The driver left a pulp of crushed bodies in his wake before disappearing. A moment later, through vapor-burned eyes, Diwedi could see a woman throwing her baby over the guard rail of the bridge on the railway line, before jumping into the void herself. “I realized then that something awful was going on,” Sharda Diwedi would say, “something beyond all comprehension.”
The Rev. Timothy Wankhede had spent Sunday afternoon preaching to hospital patients on the epistle of St. Paul, imploring the mercy of the Lord upon his children, who in the pursuit of riches had “fallen into temptation and a snare, and into many hurtful and foolish lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition.” The young priest and his wife Sobha had just been woken with a start by the cries of Anuradh, their ten-month-old son. The toxic vapors had entered the modest red-brick vicarage they occupied in the Railway Colony, next door to the Holy Redeemer’s Church. In a few seconds they too were overtaken by the same symptoms of gas inhalation. They struggled to understand what was going on.
“Perhaps it’s an atomic bomb,