Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [124]
It was not enough that the dreadful fog had burned people’s bronchia, eyes and throats. It had also impregnated their clothes, hair, beards and mustaches with toxic emissions so persistent that the medics themselves ended up experiencing symptoms of suffocation. A swift injection with Derryfilin mixed with ten cubic centimeters of Decadron was usually enough to prevent any complications. The courage generally displayed, however, did not mean that there were not moments of weakness: one panic-stricken young doctor tore the oxygen mask off a dying man, clamped it to his own face and greedily took a few gasps before fleeing. Yet he came back at daybreak and for three days and three nights was one of the mainstays of the emergency wards.
Suddenly, in the midst of all the chaos, Sister Felicity appeared. She had left little Nadia momentarily to rush to the carnage of the wards and corridors. There were so many bodies all over the place that she could not move without bumping into an arm or a leg. It was almost impossible to distinguish between the living and the dead. People’s faces were so swollen that their eyes had disappeared. She volunteered her help and Deepak Gandhe put her in charge of one of the rooms where an attempt was being made to regroup the scattered victims’ families. Felicity bent over an old man who lay unconscious beside the body of a woman in a mauve sweater. Gently she stroked his forehead. “Wake up, Granddad! Tell me whether your wife was wearing a mauve sweater,” she insisted. The poor man did not answer and Sister Felicity turned to another woman stretched out between two young children. Were they hers? Or did they belong to the third woman a little farther on, the one with cotton pads on her eyes?
In that terrible place of death, the living had lost the power of speech.
Professor Mishra knew that the invasion was only just beginning. The toxic cloud would continue to wreak havoc. Thousands, possibly even tens of thousands of fresh victims would keep on coming. It was urgent that the campus between the medical college and Hamidia be turned into a gigantic field hospital. How were they going to achieve so mammoth a task in the middle of the night? Mishra had an idea. Once again, he picked up the telephone and woke Mahmoud Parvez, the man who rented out shamianas, who was fast asleep in his recently built house in New Bhopal, safe from the toxic gases.
Mishra told him about the tragedy that had struck the city, then added, “I need your help. You must go and get all the shamianas, all the carpets, covers, furniture and crockery you hired out for yesterday evening’s weddings and bring them outside Hamidia Hospital as fast as possible.”
Parvez showed no trace of surprise. “You can count on me, professor! Tonight, those in need can have anything I own.”
The little man then woke his three sons, called all his employees to arms, sent his trucks out to every site where he had delivered the accessories and trappings for wedding celebrations. He had the two enormous shamianas set up in the courtyard of the great mosque taken down. Never mind Ishtema! That night Bhopal was suffering and his duty as a good Muslim was to help relieve it. He directed one of his sons to empty his warehouses of any armchairs, settees, chairs and beds, not forgetting the famous percolator because “a good Italian coffee, can do a fellow a power of good.”
Marvelous Mahmoud Parvez! As his staff and sons brought his wares to the afflicted, he kept one mission for himself. It was he, and he alone, who would dismantle the jewel of his collection, the magnificent, venerable shamiana embroidered with gold thread that he had rented to his friend, the director of Bhopal