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By Root 979 0

of the muezzins from high up in the minarets. Sunday December 2, 1984, however, was no ordinary day. In a few hours time the City of the Begums was due to celebrate Ishtema, the great prayer gathering that, once a year, brought thousands of pilgrims from all over the country, as well as Pakistan and Afghanistan, to the heartland of India. Ratna Nadar had been obliged to temporarily abandon preparations for his daughter’s wedding and go with the other station porters to meet the special trains overflowing with the faithful. There would never be more people in Bhopal than on that Sunday. The excitement had already come to a head in the Taj ul-Masajid, the great mosque where teams of electricians were installing the floodlighting that would illuminate the splendid building for a week. Volunteers were unrolling hundreds of prayer mats and hooking up loudspeakers that, for three days and three nights, would broadcast the celebration of the greatness of Allah.

All around the city’s mosques and outside the hotels on Hamidia Road, the bus station and the railway station, hundreds of street vendors were taking up their positions. Ishtema was a lucrative time for any business in Bhopal. Jolly and rubicund, his lip accentuated by a thin mustache and his forehead decorated with Vishnu’s trident, Shyam Babu, a forty-five-year-old Hindu, was the proprietor of the city’s largest restaurant. Muslim, Hindu or secular, the many festivals in the Indian calendar made his fortune. Situated in the old part of the city, his establishment, the Agarwal Poori Bhandar, could serve up to eight hundred patrons a day and never closed. “Our meals are the best and the cheapest in town,” he assured people. And it was true; for ten rupees, the equivalent of less than fifty cents, one could eat one’s fill of vegetables, chicken or fish curry and samosas. But Shyam Babu was not just a businessman; he was also a kind man. The lepers and beggars who hauled themselves up the steps of the great mosque, and the penniless pilgrims who camped out in the ruins of the palace of Begum Shah Jahan knew that they would always find a bowl of rice and vegetables if they went to him.

Shyam had started that Sunday as he began every day, with a morning prayer in the small temple to Lakshmi, goddess of wealth. He had brought her baskets of fruit and flowers, for he was going to have particular need of her support that day. For him, the eve of any festival was always difficult. The massive arrival of visitors meant that many police reinforcements had to be brought in. The municipal government counted on Shyam to feed these men. It had become a tradition. The restaurateur had ordered up an extra 650 pounds of potatoes, the same quantity of flour, and doubled the stocks of fuel to supply his fifteen ovens. “Don’t you worry, I could feed the whole city,” he informed the police chief who had come to make sure that his men would be adequately nourished.

Not far from Shyam Babu’s restaurant, a notice board drew attention to another, rather quaint business, which had sprung into action for this Sunday unlike any other. For three generations the Bhopal Tent and Glass Store had been renting out equipment and accessories for the city’s weddings and public celebrations. The grandson of its founder, fifty-two-year-old Mahmoud Parvez, a Muslim who looked like a mullah with his little goatee and his embroidered skullcap, ran his business by telephone from a worktable set up in the street. The warehouse behind him was a veritable Ali Baba’s cave whose secrets he alone knew. In it were piles of plates, crates of glassware, drawers full of cutlery, candlesticks of all sizes, old gramophones, antique generators, elephant bells, flintlock guns and harquebuses. Parvez’s pride and joy was a gleaming Italian percolator. “I’m the only one in town, in the whole of Madhya Pradesh even, who can serve espresso coffee!” he boasted. What had earned him the most renown, however, was his impressive collection of carpets and shamianas, the multicolored tents used for public and private ceremonies. He