Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [94]
The nun was to find her answer in the gospel that Father Lulu read that day. “The sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken …”
In the northern part of the immense city, in the Railway Colony, the Anglican incumbent of the small white church of the Holy Redeemer was also meditating with his flock upon the somber predictions of the holy scriptures. Short and stocky with a round smiling face, the thirty-one-year-old vicar Timothy Wankhede had come originally from Maharashtra. Together with his wife and ten-month-old baby named Anuradh, the Hindi word meaning “joy,” he lived in a modest red-brick vicarage next to the church. Like Archbishop de Souza, he poured endless energy into keeping the flame of Christian faith alight in a city inhabited by an overwhelming majority of Muslims and Hindus. Timothy had become a Christian one day while listening to the radio. He was twenty years old when an announcement in Marathi, his mother tongue, suddenly came over the airwaves. “He who chooses and believes in Jesus Christ will be saved and all his kinfolk with him,” said the voice on the radio. “I was overwhelmed,” Timothy would recount. “I rushed to the only public telephone in the village and called the radio station, wanting to know more about Jesus Christ.” After being baptized, on what he described as “the most wonderful day” of his life, he had traveled India for three years, preaching the Gospel. Then he had spent four years at theological college studying for the ordination that would throw open the doors of the Bhopal parish.
The Reverend Wankhede’s ministry was not confined to leading worship. That first Sunday of Advent, he was preparing to take his parishioners to visit the city’s various hospitals. “It’s our duty to comfort our suffering brethren,” he said, “and tell them that Jesus’ hands can heal, if only we believe in him.” In his shoulder bag he carried editions of the Bible in a dozen different languages. For that Advent Sunday, he had chosen to read a verse from St. Paul to the sick, which in a few hours’ time would prove to be tragically relevant. “O God, forgive your children who were missed by those who had lured them with the promise of wealth.”
The two men were practitioners of a medical specialty of which crime writers are particularly fond. Sixty-two-year-old Prof. Heeresh Chandra and his young assistant, thirty-four-year-old Ashu Satpathy, performed autopsies on the corpses that sundry incidents throughout the year—accidents, crimes or suicide—dispatched to the examination tables of the Department of Forensic Medicine at the Gandhi Medical College. In a city with six hundred thousand inhabitants, there were plenty of violent deaths, even on Sundays and holidays. In the absence of a suitably refrigerated morgue, the two pathologists had to be constantly available to perform autopsies as soon as the corpses came in.
With his dignified air and imposing white mustache, Professor Chandra looked like a maharajah from a Rajput kingdom. Despite his unusual profession, he was best known for his hobbies: dogs and vintage cars. He owned three sand-colored Labradors and a 1930 National, known throughout the city for the way it backfired. On December 2, the eccentric professor was getting ready to take his venerable vehicle and his Labradors out for a drive, as he did every Sunday, to Delawari National Park, a favorite resort of the Bhopalis.
Meanwhile, his young colleague Ashu Satpathy spent his leisure time indulging his passion for roses. Because the garden of his Idgah Hills cottage was not big enough, he had transformed the corridors and terraces of the Department of Forensic Medicine