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By Root 1076 0

bulging, and foam and blood frothing out of their mouths. The youngest had died sucking their thumbs. Khanuja had the elderly couple taken away by truck and went off in search of other survivors. On Berasia Road where men came to beg Carbide’s tharagars for jobs, the ground was scattered with bodies, struck down in midflight. Suddenly the colonel’s attention was drawn to that of a very young woman whose ankles sparkled in the moonlight. He turned on his flashlight and saw that she was wearing anklets with bells on them. With her hands and feet decorated in henna, her close-fitting bodice and cotton loincloth that fell in a fan shape over her hips and thighs, the officer thought she looked like one of the sacred dancers he’d seen on television. A braid of white jasmine flowers had been tucked in her bun. The Sikh also noticed a small cross on a chain around her neck. From all indications, the girl was dead. Just as he was about to switch off his flashlight, the officer glimpsed a trembling of the corner of her mouth. Was he mistaken? He knelt down, cleared one ear of the folds of his turban and pressed it to the young woman’s chest, but her heart seemed to have stopped beating. Just in case, however, he called for a stretcher.

“Hamidia Hospital, quickly!” he shouted to the driver.

After Mahmoud Parvez’s staff had returned with his wedding shamianas, the approaches to the great hospital looked like the encampment of some tribe struck down by a curse from above. In each tent Parvez, who had recovered from gas inhalation, unrolled mats, and set up tables and benches, toward which the medical college students tried to channel the hordes of dying people who kept on pouring in. Picking out from this tide those who would benefit from a few blasts of oxygen or a cardiac massage was impossible. The white-smocked student who felt for Padmini’s pulse was quite sure that his patient was a hopeless case. As in wartime, it was better to work on those who had some chance of pulling through. He had her stretcher taken to the morgue where hundreds of corpses were already piled up.

In addition to pulmonary and gastric attacks, most arrivals were suffering from serious ocular lesions: burned corneas, burst crystalline lenses, paralysis of the optic nerve, collapsed pupils. A few drops of atropine and a cotton pad for each eye was all the medical teams could offer their tortured patients. Seeing the cohorts of blind people stumbling over the bodies of the dying, Professor Mishra said to himself, “Tonight the Bhopalis are going through their Hiroshima.”

Forty-eight-year-old commissioner Ranjit Singh was the highest civil authority for the city of Bhopal and the surrounding region. As soon as he heard about the catastrophe, he jumped in his car and sped to the police headquarters in the heart of the old town. It was from this nerve center that he intended to mobilize evacuation and rescue operations. Ranjit Singh would never forget his first glimpse of that hellish night. On the bridge running along the Lower Lake, he saw “tens, hundreds, thousands of sandals and shoes lost by people running away in their scramble to escape death.”

The commissioner found the police headquarters in total disarray: gas had infiltrated the old building, burning the eyes and lungs of many of the officers. Yet calls were coming in, one after another without interruption, in the command room on the second floor. One of them was from Arjun Singh, chief minister of Madhya Pradesh. Rumor had it that he had fled his official residence and taken refuge outside the city. Arjun Singh was calling in by radio to speak to the police chief Swaraj Puri.

“You must stop people leaving,” the head of the government insisted. “Put barricades across all roads leading out of the city and make people go back to their homes.”

The chief minister, it seemed, had no idea of the chaos that ruled Bhopal that night. In any case Puri had a good rebuttal.

“Sir,” he answered, “how can I stop people leaving when my own policemen have disappeared along with the other fugitives?”

The