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By Root 1084 0

into an air-conditioned room, they had rushed in, destroying everything in their path, breaking up the train indicator board, tearing out the telephones. Disaster reigned. Even the appearance of the tall figure of Dr. Sarkar failed to calm the plunderers’ fury. The railway doctor had managed to get to the station on foot. He was carrying a bag with a red cross on it, a derisory symbol in this setting of agony and death. He had filled his bag with bottles of eye lotion, cough lozenges, bronchodilators, cardiac stimulants and anything else he could find in his medicine cabinet. But what use were such remedies? The doctor bent over the first body. Then, on the platform, he came across a scene that would haunt him for the rest of his life: a baby suckling at the breast of its dead mother.

Like many other passengers on the Gorakhpur Express, Sajda Bano had not heard the deputy stationmaster’s announcement. She got out with her two children and her suitcases. In the yellowish mist enveloping the platform, she tried to look for the figure of the good Mr. Khan, her husband’s friend. But with her eyes smarting from the vapors, she could only make out a confusion of corpses in a deathly silence. “It was as if the train had stopped in a cemetery,” she was to say. Three-year-old Soeb and five-year-old Arshad were immediately assailed by the gases and racked with coughing. Sajda herself felt her throat and trachea become inflamed. She could not breathe. Stepping over the corpses, she dragged her sons toward the waiting room in the middle of the platform. The room was filled to overflowing with people on the verge of death, coughing, vomiting, urinating, defecating and delirious. Sajda stretched the two boys out in a corner of a seat, put a teddy bear, a gift from their grandmother, in the youngest’s arms, and placed two wet handkerchiefs over their little livid faces. “Don’t worry,” she told them, “I’m going to get help and I’ll be back straightaway.” As she went out, she passed the window to the ticket sales and reservations office. With his lifeless head propped on a pile of registers, the portly Mr. Gautam looked as if he was sleeping.

All night long Sajda Bano wandered about among thousands of Bhopalis, looking for a vehicle to come and take her children to a hospital. The panic in the station and surrounding area was such that she did not get back to them until the early hours of the morning. She found her two boys where she had left them. Little Soeb was still clutching his teddy bear to his chest and breathing weakly, but clotted blood had formed a red ring around the motionless lips of his brother Arshad. Sajda knelt down and put her ear to the frail, lifeless chest. Carbide’s gas had taken her husband. Now it had stolen one of her children, too.

41

“All Hell Has Broken Loose Here!”

It was a silent, insidious, and almost discreet massacre. No explosion had shaken the city, no fire had set its sky ablaze. Most Bhopalis were sleeping peacefully. Those still reveling in the reception rooms of the Arera Club, under the wedding shamianas of the rich villas in New Bhopal, or in the smoke-hung rooms of Shyam Babu’s restaurant, overrun that night, as every Sunday night, with the medical college students—all those people suspected nothing. In Spices Square in the old city, an exultant crowd went on acclaiming the mushaira’s poets. Salvos of ecstatic “Vah! Vahs!” shook nearby window panes. Even the eunuchs had turned out in force, a rare occurrence, because it was one of their rules to be home by sunset. The presence of the legendary Jigar Akbar Khan, however, and of several other masters of poetry from all four corners of the country, had persuaded the gurus of the various eunuch “families” to give their protégés free reign. There was just one condition: they must travel in groups of four. The audience contained some of the more famous members of their unusual community: the plump Nagma, for example, the ravishing Baby and the disconcerting Shakuntual with his large, dark, kohl-encircled eyes.

In keeping with tradition,