Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [49]
“My friends made a point of translating the ghazals* for me,” Young remembered. “They all evoked tragic destinies, which love saved in the end. As I listened to the voices with their harmonies rising ever higher until they sounded almost like cries for help, I thought with embarrassment of the deadly phosgene I was making in my reactors only a few hundred yards from that prodigious happening.”
In the course of the evening one of the members of the Lazy Poets’ Circle placed a hand on the young American’s shoulder.
“Do you know, dear engineer Young, which is the most popular mushaira in Bhopal?” he asked.
The engineer pretended to think. Then with a mischievous wink, he replied, “The Lazy Poets’, I imagine.”
“You’re way off, my dear fellow. It’s the mushaira of the municipal police. The chief of police told a journalist one day that it was ‘better to make people cry through the magic of poetry than with tear gas.’ ”
Indolent, voluptuous, mischievous and always surprising— that was Bhopal. John Luke Couvaras would never forget the spectacle he came across one afternoon in the living room of his villa in Arera Colony. Stretched out on a sofa, his young Canadian wife was being massaged by two exotic creatures with kohlrimmed eyes and heavy black tresses that tumbled to their thighs. The grace of their movements, their delicacy and concentration extracted a string of compliments from the engineer, but the thanks he received in response could have come from the mouths of a pair of longshoremen; the long henna-decorated hands kneading away at his wife’s flesh belonged to two hijras, or eunuchs.
Less than eight hundred yards from the futuristic complex rising from the Kali Grounds, in old houses washed out by the monsoon, lived a whole community of hijras, a very particular caste in Indian society. They had come to the City of the Begums from every region of India, for festivals and pilgrimages, and they stayed. Three or four hundred eunuchs were reckoned to inhabit Bhopal. They lived in small groups organized around a guru who acted as head of the family. Apart from being talented masseurs, they played an important role in local Hindu society. According to religious tradition, these beings, neither men nor women, had the power to expunge sins committed by newborn babies in their previous lives. Whenever there was a birth, the hijras came running, carrying tambourines coated in red powder for the ceremony of purification. They were always generously remunerated. No one in Bhopal would haggle over the services of the hijras, for fear of incurring their maledictions.
The expatriates from South Charleston experienced a culture shock that only India could induce. For the thirty-six-year-old bachelor Jack Briley, an alpha naphthol expert, the East and all its charms were embodied in a woman. She was one of the nawab’s nieces. He had met her at a cocktail party in honor of the president of the World Bank. Refined, cultured and liberated—something that was rare in Muslim circles—and gifted with a lively sense of humor, twenty-eight-year-old Selma Jehan was, with her large kohl-rimmed eyes, “the perfect incarnation of a princess out of A Thousand and One Nights of the kind a young American from the banks of the Kanawha River might dream of.” Jack Briley allowed himself to fall easily under her spell. As soon as he could escape from the plant, the young Muslim woman showed him the city of her ancestors. As the rules of purdah* ordained, the windows of the old family Ambassador, which she drove herself, were hung with curtains to hide her passengers from others’ sight.
Selma brought her suitor first to the city palaces, where some members of her family were still living. Most of these once-grand buildings were in a sorry state, with cracked walls, ceilings occupied