Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [133]
In the two other Muslim cemeteries, the congestion was even worse, a fact that forced the city’s grand mufti, the venerable Kazi Wazid ul-Hussein, to issue an urgent fatwa authorizing the disturbance of old tombs in order to make room for Carbide’s victims. The fatwa stipulated that some ten bodies could be buried in the same grave. Soon a flood of trucks, cars and handcarts turned up with their macabre loads. The deceased were deposited at the entrance to Abdul Hamid’s cemetery in the columned building set aside for preparation of the dead. In the absence of relatives, this ritual was carried out by volunteers, who undressed the bodies and washed them in tepid water. Men and women were dealt with separately. The elderly Iftekar Begum, the eighty-year-old dowager who directed operations, marveled that so many of the deceased were wearing embroidered burkahs and flowers in their hair.
“Last night was Sunday,” a friend explained to her, “they died while they were celebrating.”
Other surprises awaited those dealing with the burial of the dead. Under pressure from the gases produced by the chemical decomposition of MIC, the corpses were subject to strange twitches. Here an arm stretched itself out, there a leg. Some bodies buried near the surface of the earth seemed to want to stand up. Terrified by these extraordinary “resurrections,” some people fainted, others shouted at the ghostly apparitions and yet others ran away screaming. Abdul Hamid was struck dumb; his cemetery had become a theater of ghosts.
Bhopal’s most celebrated restaurateur had been obliged to hand over control of his ovens to his two sons and two sisters while he arranged for the Hindu funeral pyres. His associates from the Vishram Ghat Trust, the group in charge of cremations, were overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task. The Hindu religion ordains that, with the exception of children, the bodies of the deceased must be burned. For that they needed firewood, but how were they to find enough for thousands of corpses? Shyam Babu worked a miracle. In the space of a few hours, he managed to fill fifteen trucks with enough wood to incinerate several hundred bodies. Cloth-makers brought him miles of linen with which to make shrouds.
While he prepared to set light to the first pyre, two envoys of the mufti appeared. They had come to make certain that no Muslims would be burned by mistake. It was almost impossible to confuse men from the two communities; the followers of Allah wore a characteristic goatee, amulets around their necks, and bore marks left on their foreheads by their repeated prostrations. Not to mention the fact that they were circumcised. Unless they were veiled with their burkahs, women were more difficult to distinguish. Nevertheless, the mufti’s envoys left reassured. Shyam Babu was just about to plunge his torch into the pile of wood when someone grabbed his arm. The student Piyush Chawla had spotted a little gold cross around one young woman’s neck.
“This woman isn’t a Hindu!” he cried. He extricated the body and placed it to one side of the pyre.
Then he noticed an almost imperceptible quivering of her eyelids. Intrigued, he bent over the body. The hands and feet were neither rigid nor cold. This woman with bells on her ankles was not dead, he was sure of it. He put her on one of the trucks that was going to bring back more corpses from Hamidia Hospital and climbed up beside her. Frothy bubbles were coming out of her half-open mouth. Piyush Chawla could not help wondering whether he was witnessing some supernatural