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By Root 1073 0

cross-legged in the lotus position. For thirty-five years he had lived there ever since a five-day samadhi, a spiritual exercise in which he was buried alive, had turned him into a holy man. Half-naked, with his body covered in ashes and his long mop of hair divided into a hundred tresses, a pilgrim’s stick topped with Shiva’s trident and a bowl in which he collected food provided by the faithful as his only possessions, the Naga Baba, detached from all desires, material things, appearances and aversions, spent his days meditating, in quest of the absolute. With prayer beads in his fingers, and his gaze seemingly vacant behind his half-closed lids, he seemed indifferent to the chaos that surrounded him. Overtaken by small, eye-level pockets of monomethylamine and phosgene borne along by the breeze, dozens of men and women whose lungs were dilated from running, collapsed around him. Trained to breathe only once every three or four minutes by his ascetic exercises, the Naga Baba did not inhale the vapors from the passing cloud. He was the only person to survive in Kamla Park.

43

The Dancing Girl Was Not Dead

The dead were everywhere. In the corridors, in the consulting rooms, in the operating theaters, in the general wards, even in the kitchens and the nurses’ canteen. Laid out on stretchers or on the bare floor, some looked as if they were sleeping peacefully; others had faces deformed by suffering. Strangely, they gave off no smell of decomposition. It was as if the MIC had sterilized anything in them that might rot. Removing these corpses became as pressing a problem as caring for the living. Already the vultures had arrived. Not the carrion birds, but the professional body riflers for whom the catastrophe was a godsend. Dr. Mohammed Sheikh, one of the two doctors on duty, surprised a pillager with a pair of pliers in his hands, preparing to yank gold teeth from the mouths of the dead. One of his accomplices was stripping the women of their jewels, including those embedded in their noses. Another was recovering watches. Their harvest was likely to be a thin one, however; Carbide’s gases had primarily killed the poor.

Once alerted, Professor Mishra sent some students to stand guard over the corpses and telephoned the two forensic pathologists at the medical college. The collector of vintage cars, Heeresh Chandra and his young colleague who loved roses, Ashu Satpathy, were already on their way to the hospital. Chandra knew that the autopsies he and Satpathy would perform that night could save thousands of lives; the bodies of the dead could yield definitive information about the nature of the killer gases and might enable them to find an antidote.

What the two doctors saw on their arrival chilled them to the bone. “We were used to death, but not to suffering,” Satpathy would later recount. The hundreds of bodies they had to step over to gain access to the medical college looked as if they had been tortured.

“What chemical substances could be capable of doing that kind of damage?” wondered Chandra as he hurried first to the faculty library. His colleague Mishra had mentioned methyl isocyanate. The pathologist leafed frantically through a toxicology textbook. The entry on the molecule did not contain much information, but Chandra suspected that it was capable of breaking down into highly toxic substances like hydrocyanide acid. Only hydrocyanic acid would be likely to inflict such deadly marks.

As for Dr. Satpathy, he went first to the terraces, to make sure that his roses had not been damaged by the toxic cloud. After examining every pot, plant, leaf and bud with all the concern and tenderness of a lover at his endangered mistress’s bedside, he heaved a sigh of relief. The Black Diamonds and Golden Chryslers he had so lovingly grafted appeared to have survived the passing of the deadly fog. In two days’ time, Satpathy would be able to exhibit them as planned at the Bhopal Flower Show. Before returning to the inferno on the ground floor, he telephoned the third member of his medical team, the photographer