Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [125]
Barely five hundred yards from the improvised hospital into which the gas victims were pouring by the hundreds, a man in a red pullover, his face protected by a damp towel and motorcycle goggles, came out of a small house in the old part of town, in the company of his young wife and her fifteen-year-old sister. All three straddled the scooter that was waiting, propped against the door. The journalist Rajkumar Keswani had been woken a few moments earlier by a strange smell of ammonia. He had closed the window without ever for one moment imagining that the smell might be an indication of the very catastrophe he had warned the city against. He had called the police headquarters.
“What’s going on?” he asked. “An accident at Carbide,” answered a voice strangled with anxiety. “A gas tank explosion. We’re all going to die.”
From his window Keswani then saw people fleeing in all directions, and understood. Settling his two passengers on the scooter, he gripped the handlebars and set off like the wind toward the distant neighborhoods of New Bhopal, out of reach of the gases from the cursed factory.
42
A Half-Naked Holy Man in the Heart of a Deadly Cloud
An act of barbarity had broken him; the Carbide catastrophe would make him a hero. One month after discovering six members of his family burned alive in reprisal for the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the Sikh colonel Gurcharan Singh Khanuja, commanding officer of the electrical and mechanical engineering corps in Bhopal, found himself confronted with yet another tragedy. That night, with nothing to protect him but fireman’s goggles and a wet towel over his face, the officer had sprung to the head of a column of trucks to rescue four hundred cardboard factory workers and their families, all of whom were surprised by the gas as they slept.
Having completed that rescue operation, the colonel and his men returned to the danger zone, this time to search the Kali Grounds neighborhoods for any survivors. The corpse of the white horse from Padmini’s wedding was blocking the entrance to Chola Road. With its hooves in the air, its body swollen with gas and its eyes bloodshot, the animal was still in its harness. The soldiers tied a rope around its front legs and pulled it to one side. A little farther on, the officer came across other vestiges of the festivities: on the small mandap stage, the flames of the sacrificial fire were still flickering, gilded armchairs, the musicians’ drums and dented trumpets, saucepans full of curry and rice, and even the generator hired to light up what should have been the greatest moment in Dilip and Padmini’s lives. Abandoned outside a hut, Khanuja now found the wedding presents: some cooking utensils, clothing and pieces of material. He picked up the parasol the groom had carried as he proceeded on his white mare. With military discipline he took the time to jot down an inventory of all the debris in a notebook. Then, stepping over the corpses littering the alleyways, he systematically inspected every dwelling. He had given his men the order to move in total silence. “We were on the alert for the slightest sign of life,” he would say. Now and then they would hear a moan, a groan, a cough or a child crying. “Bodies had to be shaken to ascertain which ones were still alive,” the officer would recount, “but often we were too late. The crying had stopped. There was nothing left but the dreadful, frightening silence of death.”
In one hut, Khanuja found an elderly couple sitting calmly on the edge of a charpoy. They smiled at the officer as if they had been expecting him for a visit. In the shack next door an entire family had been wiped out: the parents and their six children lay sprawled on the beaten earth floor, their eyes