Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [88]
By setting fire to Pulpul Singh’s house they would be making a Sikh pay for the horrible murder perpetrated by two of his brothers in religion, but they would also be avenging all the crimes committed by the loan shark who had, at one time or another, humiliated each and every one of them. His safe already contained several property deeds mortgaged against pitiful loans. Pulpul Singh was the ideal scapegoat. By setting fire to his house, obliging him to flee, perhaps even killing him, they would be avenging Indira, avenging Nilamber, avenging all the injustices of life.
At the first cry for vengeance Sister Felicity slipped away from the crowd. She felt it was her duty to prevent her brothers’ and sisters’ anger from ending in tragedy. Spotting the dark silhouette hurrying away, Padmini joined her. Preempting her question, the nun took the young Indian girl by the arm and swept her along with her.
“Come with me quickly to Pulpul Singh’s. We must warn him so he has time to get away.”
Together they ran to the two-story house at the entrance to Chola.
Pulpul Singh was surprised by the arrival of the two women. Neither the nun nor young Padmini belonged to his usual clientele.
“What wind of good fortune blows you this way?” he asked.
“Get out of here! For the love of God, leave immediately with your family!” the nun begged him. “They want to take vengeance on you for Indira Gandhi’s assassination.”
She had scarcely finished speaking when the front-runners of the crowd arrived. They were armed with iron bars, pickaxes, bricks, bolts and even Molotov cocktails.
“For the first time I saw a sentiment on their faces that I had thought not to find in the poor,” Sister Felicity later remembered. “I saw hatred. The women were among the most over-wrought. I recognized some whose children I’d nursed, even though their contorted features made them almost unrecognizable. The residents of the Kali Grounds had lost all reason. I realized then what might happen one day if the poor from here were to march on the rich quarters of New Bhopal.”
Terrified, Pulpul Singh and his family fled out of the back of their house but, not before wasting precious time trying to push the safe to the back of the veranda and hide it with a cloth. In the meantime, the rioters had thrown their first bottle of flaming petrol. It hit the ground just behind Sister Felicity and Padmini who had remained outside. The explosion was so powerful that they were thrown toward each other. Dense smoke enveloped them. When the cloud cleared, they found themselves in the middle of the rampaging crowd. The shoemaker Iqbal had brought a crowbar to force open the gate. Suddenly someone shouted, “Get them! They’ve escaped out the back!” A group took off in pursuit of the fugitives. Their Ambassador automobile had failed to start, so they were trying to get away on foot. Restricted by their saris, the women had difficulty running. Soon the family was caught and brought roughly back to the house. In his flight Pulpul Singh had lost his turban.
“We’re going to kill you,” Ganga Ram declared, caressing the man’s throat with the point of his dagger. “You’re scum. All Sikhs are scum. They killed our Indira. You’re going to pay for that.” With his shoulder, he shoved the moneylender up against the bars on the terrace. “And you can open up your shit hole of a house at once, otherwise we’ll set fire to it and you.”
Scared, the Sikh took a key from his waist and unlocked the padlock to the grille. Cowering together, Sister Felicity and Padmini observed the scene. The nun recalled something an old man from Orya Bustee had explained to her one day: “You keep your head down, you wear yourself to a frazzle, you put up with everything, you bottle up your bitterness against the factory that’s poisoning your well, the moneylender who’s bleeding you dry, the speculators who are pushing up the price of rice, the neighbors’ kids who stop you