Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [5]
The truck stopped outside a long, open, tiled shed, with a baked earth wall at the back and pillars to support the roof at the front. It was not yet daybreak and kerosene lamps scarcely lit the vast building. The foreman was a thin, overbearing, bully of a man, wearing a collarless shirt and a white loincloth.
“In the darkness, his eyes seemed to blaze like the embers in our chula, ‡ ” Padmini would recount.
“All of you sit down along the wall,” he ordered.
Then he counted the children and split them into two groups, one for cigarettes, the other for matches. Padmini was separated from her brothers and sent to join the bidi group.
“Get to work!” the man in the white loincloth commanded, clapping his hands.
His assistants then brought trays laden with leaves like those Padmini had picked in the forest. The oldest assistant squatted down in front of the children to show them how to roll each leaf into a little funnel, fill it with a pinch of shredded to bacco, and bind it with a red thread. Padmini had no difficulty imitating him. In no time at all she had made up a packet of bidis. “The only thing I didn’t like about it was the pungent smell of the leaves,” she would confide. “To get through the pile of leaves in front of us, we found it best to concentrate on the money we’d be taking home.”
Other workmen deposited piles of tiny sticks in front of the children assigned to making matches.
“Place them one by one in the slots of this metal support,” the foreman explained. “Once it’s full, turn it round and dip the ends of the sticks in this tank.”
The receptacle contained molten sulfur. As soon as the tips had been dipped and lifted out again, the sulfur solidified instantly.
Padmini’s younger brother surveyed the steaming liquid with apprehension.
“We’ll burn our fingers!” he said anxiously, and loudly enough for the foreman to hear.
“You little idiot!” the man retorted. “I told you, you only immerse the end of the wooden sticks, not the whole thing. Have you never seen a match?”
Gopal shook his head. But his fear of being burned was nothing compared with the real risk of being poisoned by the toxic fumes coming off the tank. It was not long before some of the children began to feel their lungs and eyes burning. Many of them passed out. The foreman and his assistants slapped their faces and doused them with buckets of water to revive them. Those who fainted again were mercilessly expelled from the factory.
“Shortly after our arrival, a second shed was built to house a work unit to make firecrackers,” Padmini would recount. “My brother Ashu was assigned to it with about twenty other boys. After that I only saw him once a day, when I took him his share of the food our mother had prepared for us. The foreman would ring a bell to announce the meal break. Woe betide any of us who were not back in our places by the second bell. The boss would beat us with the stick he carried to frighten us and make us work faster and faster. Apart from that short break, we worked without interruption from the time we arrived until nightfall, when the truck would take us home again. My brothers and I were so tired we would throw ourselves onto the charpoy* without anything to eat and fall asleep straightaway.”
A few weeks after the opening of the firecracker unit, tragedy struck. Suddenly Padmini saw a huge flame blazing in the shed where her brother Ashu was working. An explosion ripped away the roof and wall. Boys emerged, screaming, from the cloud of smoke. They were covered in blood. Their skin was hanging off them in shreds. The foreman and his assistants were trying to put out the fire with buckets of water. Padmini rushed frantically in the direction of the blaze, shouting her brother’s name. She was running about in all directions when she stumbled. As she fell, she saw a body on the ground. It was her brother. His arms had been blown off in the blast. “His eyes were open