Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [51]
20
“Carbide Has Poisoned Our Water!”
One was called Parvati, after the wife of the god Shiva; another Surabhi, “the cow with all gifts” born, according to the Vedas, of the great churning of the sea of milk; a third was Gauri, “the light”; and the last two were Sita and Kamadhenu. So gentle were they that little children were not afraid to stroke their foreheads and gaze into their large eyes surrounded by lashes so long they looked as if they were wearing makeup. These five cows were some of the three hundred million heads that made up the world’s largest stock of cattle. For the five families in Orya Bustee to whom they belonged, they were an enviable asset. Belram Mukkadam, the cripple Rahul, Padmini’s father Ratna Nadar, the former leper Ganga Ram and the shoemaker Iqbal were the lucky owners of this modest herd. The few pints of milk they gave each day provided a little butter and yogurt, the only animal protein available to the hungry people of the bustee apart from goat milk. The dung from these cows was carefully collected and made into cakes that were dried in the sun and used as cooking fuel. Each animal knew its way home and, after a day spent roaming the Kali Grounds in search of greenery, returned to its owner in the evening. On the twelfth day of Asvina’s moon in September, of Kartika’s moon in November, and during the festival of new rice, the owners dyed the cows’ horns blue and red and decorated them with garlands of marigold and jasmine. The animals were then arranged in a semicircle outside Belram Mukkadam’s teahouse, so the sorcerer Nilamber could recite mantras over them. As the neighborhood’s most long-standing resident, it fell to Mukkadam to make the customary speech.
He did so with particular feeling. “Each one of our cows is a celestial animal, a symbol of the mother who gives her milk,” he declared. “She was created on the same day as Brahma, founder of our universe, and every part of her body is inhabited by a god, from the nostrils where Asvin dwells to the fringing of her tail, where Yama resides.”
The sorcerer Nilamber, in his saffron robe, intervened in his turn to emphasize “how sacred everything that comes from the cow is.” Upon these words, Rahul brought a bowl filled with a paste. It was the traditional purée made out of gifts from the precious animal—milk, butter, yogurt, dung and urine. The receptacle was passed from hand to hand so that everyone could take a small ball of the purifying substance. Later, led by Padmini, young girls would spread a little earth and fresh dung mixed with urine over the mud flooring of their huts. This protective layer had the power to repel scorpions, cockroaches and above all, mosquitoes, the persistent scourge of the Bhopalis.
That autumn festival day, Mukkadam had a special mission of his own. As soon as the ceremony was over, he attached a garland of flowers to the horns of his cow Parvati, and led her away to his hut at the end of the first alleyway. Inside the one and only room, Mukkadam’s elderly father lay stretched out on a charpoy, watched over by his two daughters who fanned him and uttered prayers. His halting breath and dull eyes suggested that death was imminent. Mukkadam pushed the cow over to the dying man’s bedside, then took the tip of her tail and tied it with a piece of cord to his father’s hand.
“Lead this holy man from the unreal to the real, from darkness to light, from death to immortality,” he murmured gently, stroking the animal’s forehead.
Four days after the death of Belram Mukkadam’s father, a catastrophe befell the inhabitants of Orya Bustee. Padmini was drawing a bucket of water from the well when she smelled a noxious odor coming from the shaft. The water was a strange whitish color. The old woman Prema Bai plunged her hand into the bucket, scooped up a little of the liquid, and