Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [127]
The senior official was suspicious of Singh’s motives for stopping the exodus. With one month to go to the general election, it was conceivable that the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh was afraid of losing votes. After all, he’d already won the support of the bustees by giving them the property deeds that legalized their squats beside the high-risk factory. This had been a decision the commissioner had tried in vain to oppose for reasons of safety, and because it encouraged random settlement, the nightmare of any municipal authority. And now, when tragedy was striking the beneficiaries of Singh’s largesse, the chief minister wanted to keep survivors in their homes. Indignant, the commissioner cut short their conversation and called his subordinates to ask them to send all available vehicles to help evacuate the areas affected by the toxic cloud that was still spreading through a whole section of the city. Then, putting a damp towel over his face, he started up his Ambassador and headed for the factory.
The spectacle he encountered at the entrance to the erst-while pride of Bhopal was terrifying. Hundreds of people from districts to the north and east were banging on the doors of the dispensary where Dr. Loya, Carbide’s appointed doctor, and three overstretched nurses were trying to give a few breaths of oxygen to those most affected. On one of the four beds, with his face protected by a mask, lay the only victim of the catastrophe on the factory’s staff. Shekil Qureshi, who had believed as deeply in Carbide as he did in Allah, had been found sprawled at the foot of the boundary wall over which he had leapt after tank 610 exploded.
The commissioner was immediately brought to the office where Jagannathan Mukund had shut himself away. The first thing that caught his eye was a framed certificate on the wall, an award congratulating Mukund on his factory’s excellent safety standards. “But that night,” the commissioner would recount, “the recipient of that diploma was just a haggard man, annihilated by the magnitude of the disaster and by fear of a popular uprising.”
Ranjit Singh tried to reassure him. “I’ll have armed guards posted at the entrance to the factory, as well as outside your residence.”
Suddenly, however, the commissioner could no longer contain one burning question. “I really wanted to know whether, for years, without my being aware of it, a plant located less than two miles from the center of my capital had been producing a pesticide made out of one of the most dangerous substances in the whole of the chemical industry,” he would later explain. He recalled having read that in the United States, people were put to death using cyanide gas. “Did the gas that escaped from your plant tonight contain cyanide?” he asked.
According to the commissioner, Jagannathan Mukund grimaced before revealing the awful truth. “In the context of a reaction at very high temperature, MIC can, in fact, break down into several gases, among them hydrocyanide acid.”
All that night people called out for each other and searched for one another: in Hamidia Hospital, in the streets and in the courtyard of Bhopal’s great mosque. The water in the ablution tanks, diverted in bygone days from the Upper Lake by a British engineer, was a godsend. Victims rinsed their burning eyes and drank deeply in order to purge themselves of deadly molecules.
The tailor Ahmed Bassi, the bicycle repairman Salar and the worker-poet Rehman Khan all availed themselves of the healing waters. Then they set off together in search of their families who had been scattered by the disaster. In Spices Square, strewn with the bodies of poetry lovers and hundred of pigeons and parrots, they met Ganga Ram carrying Dalima in her festival sari. After