Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [64]
It took only a few minutes to dismantle the joint. Just as he was fitting the new component, however, Ashraf saw through his mask a small quantity of liquid phosgene spurt from the upper side of the piping. A few drops landed on his sweater. Aware of the danger, he rushed into a shower cabin to rinse his clothing. It was then that he made a fatal mistake. Instead of waiting for the powerful jet of water to complete the decontamination process, he took off his mask. The heat of his chest immediately caused the few drops of phosgene still nestling in the wool of his sweater to vaporize. Apart from a slight irritation of the eyes and throat, which rapidly disappeared, Ashraf felt no discomfort at the time. He did not know that phosgene has a stealthy way of killing its victims. First it gives them a sense of euphoria.
“I’d never seen my husband so voluble,” Sajda Bano later recalled. “He seemed to have forgotten the accident. He took us out in the car to visit a small country house he wanted to buy beside the Narmada River. He was as cheerful as he was during the first days of our engagement.”
Then, all of a sudden, he collapsed, with his lungs full of a fierce flood of secretions. He started to vomit a gush of transparent fluid mixed with blood. Panic-stricken, Sajda called the factory, who had him taken by ambulance to the intensive-care unit Carbide had helped set up at Hamidia Hospital. He was placed on an artificial respirator where his agony continued. He threw up more and more fluids, up to four and a half pints an hour. Soon he did not even have the strength to expectorate.
Sajda had to push aside some of her in-law’s family to get to her husband’s bedside. “He was as white as a sheet,” she would remember, “but when he sensed my presence, he opened his eyes and tore off his oxygen mask. ‘I’d like to say goodbye to the children. Go and fetch them!’ he whispered.”
When the young woman came back with the two boys, the dying man took the youngest in his arms. “Son, how do you fancy a fishing trip?” he asked, forcing a smile. The effort set off a violent bout of coughing. Then came a succession of rattles and a last sigh. It was all over. Bhopal’s beautiful plant had claimed its first victim. It was Christmas day. For the young woman who had come from a far distant province to marry a Carbide man, three months and thirteen days of mourning were about to begin.
The entire factory grieved for its martyr. One of those most affected by the accident was its managing director. “We had nothing to reproach ourselves for,” Warren Woomer would say. “Mohammed Ashraf had been properly trained for the dangers of his profession. By neglecting to put on his rubber coat and taking off his mask too soon, he had broken safety regulations. It was the first time in my life as an engineer that I’d lost one of my men. I’d had people injured but never a death. It was the kind of situation where you had to know exactly what had gone wrong because it must never be allowed to happen again. No matter what the circumstances of the accident.”
Two employees took it upon themselves to provide a response to the works manager’s questions. Thirty-two-year-old Hindu Shankar Malviya and thirty-one-year-old Muslim Bashir Ullah led the firm’s main trade union. Both came from very poor families in the Bhopal bustees. Their energy and readiness to intervene on behalf of their comrades had made them immensely popular. In a strongly worded