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By Root 958 0

was no small feat. But without an escort the poor had little chance of being examined by a doctor. And even if they were lucky enough to see a physician, they would not have been able to explain what was wrong with them or understand the recommended treatment. The majority of the inhabitants of the bustees spoke neither Hindi nor Urdu but one of the innumerable regional dialects or languages. Omar Pasha demanded that the slum dwellers be treated like human beings and made certain they actually received the medicines they were prescribed. Yet this saint was one of Bhopal’s most notorious godfathers. It was he who controlled the traffic in opium and ganja, the local hashish, as well as the brothels in the Lakshmi Talkies district; he ran the gambling, especially satha, which consisted of betting on the daily share-price of cotton, gold and silver.

He was also head of a real estate racket that made him one of the richest property owners in the town. To assure himself of the political support necessary to maintain his business interests he gave generously to the Congress party (the political party in power at that time), where he served as one of the district’s most active electoral agents. The ballots of Orya, Chola and Jai Prakash Bustees were in his hands. Good old Omar Pasha! His enormous fingers and powerful biceps testified to the fact that he had been a boxer and wrestler in his youth. With advancing age he had turned to another sport: cockfighting. He bought his champions in Madras and fed them himself, on a mixture of egg yolk, clarified butter, and crushed pistachio and cashew nuts. Before every fight he would rub each one down “like a boxer before a match,” he would say with a hint of nostalgia. His ten cocks roamed freely about the floors of his house, watched over by bodyguards, for each one was worth between twenty and thirty thousand rupees, almost a thousand dollars—a sum Padmini’s father could not hope to earn in ten years of hard labor.

The area was home to a host of other colorful people. The dairyman Karim Bablubhai distributed a portion of the milk from his seventeen buffalo cows to children with rickets. He dreamed of Boda, the young orphan girl from Bihar whom he had just married, giving him an heir. The yellow-robed sorcerer Nilamber, who exorcized evil spirits by sprinkling those possessed with country liquor, had promised him that this dream would come true provided Boda performed a puja at the sacred tulsi every day. There was also the Muslim shoemaker Mohammed Iqbal, whose hut on alleyway No. 2 smelled unbearably of glue, and his associate Ahmed Bassi, a young tailor of twenty, who was famous for embroidering the marriage saris for the rich brides of Bhopal. The Carbide engineers might have been surprised to discover that in the sheds made out of planks, sheet metal and bamboo, which they could see from the platforms of their giant factory, men in rags were producing masterpieces. The shoemaker and the tailor, like their friend Salar the bicycle repairman in alley No. 4, were always ready to respond to Belram Mukkadam’s call. In the bustee no one ever declined to give him a helping hand.

Certainly this was true of Hussein, the worthy mullah with the small gray goatee who taught local children suras from the Koran on the porch of his small, mud-walled mosque in Chola. And the old midwife Prema Bai who, crippled by childhood polio, dragged herself from hut to hut in her white widow’s clothing, leaning heavily on a stick. Yet, her luminous smile out-shone her suffering. In one corner of her hut, under the little altar where an oil lamp burned day and night before a statuette of Ganesh, the old woman carefully laid out the instruments that made her an angel of the bustee: a few shreds of sari, a bowl, two buckets of water and the Arabian knife she used to cut the babies’ umbilical cords.

Who would have believed it? America and all her advanced technology was moving into the middle of a ring of hovels, and she knew nothing about those who washed up against the walls of her installation like the