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By Root 1019 0

into a rose garden. Dozens of jardinières and pots of flowers stood alongside the rows of jars containing the livers, kidneys, hearts, spleens and brains that enabled him to extract information from the bodies brought in by the police. Satpathy spent any free time he had watering, pruning and feeding his dwarf bushes and climbing roses. The same fingers that immersed themselves in human entrails carried out delicate grafts to produce new varieties, the secrets of which he alone knew. He had given them such lyrical names as “Black Diamond,” “Moschata,” “Chinensis,” “Odorata” and “Golden Chrysler.” In two days’ time the doctor was going to exhibit these wonders in the greenhouses at the monumental floral show that, for one week, would turn Bhopal into India’s rose capital.

Alas the events of that Sunday were to thwart the two doctors’ plans. Toward midday a telephone call from police headquarters informed them that two bodies, those of a man and a woman, were on their way to the morgue. It was a matter of urgency that the doctors establish the cause of death.

Before starting work, the two medical examiners enlisted the help of the accomplice who was party to all their dissections. With his beige cap eternally crammed down over his long hair, the twenty-eight-year-old photographer Subashe Godane looked more like an artist than an accessory to a postmortem examination. He dreamed of making his mark on the world of fashion and advertising photography and had assembled an impressive portfolio of women’s portraits that he was preparing to show at the New Delhi biennial exhibition. In the meantime, he and his Pentax K-1000 supported his wife and three children by photographing corpses riddled with stab wounds, decapitated children and women who had been slashed to ribbons. Godane was absolutely convinced that his films had registered every conceivable horror humanity could inflict. He was wrong.

The autopsies on the two bodies took three hours. The absence of any signs of violence on the couple, who were both in their forties, suggested a double suicide by poisoning. Analysis of the internal organs confirmed Doctors Chandra and Satpathy’s hypothesis. In the victims’ stomachs they found copious quantities of a whitish powder that had caused extensive damage to the digestive and respiratory organs. Although the two practitioners were unable to determine the precise nature of the substance, they were probably dealing with a strong pesticide in the DDT family. Returning to the village where the bodies had been found, the police discovered that the victims were peasants whom the latest drought had reduced to ruin. Unable to pay back the loans they had taken out to buy seed, fertilizer and insecticides for their next crop, they had decided to end their lives. Such cases were by no means unusual in India, nor was the method used. That Sunday, December 2, Carbide’s beautiful factory had started to sow its seeds of death. In the peasants’ hut, the police found an empty package of Sevin.

A Sunday of prayer and mourning but a Sunday of folly, too. Around a circle of dust in an old hangar attached to the Lakshmi Talkies, the city’s oldest and largest cinema, clustered three hundred overexcited gamblers. The building shook with all the shouting and heckling and the din from the loudspeakers. Men in shirts and lunghis, their fingers clutching bundles of rupees, pushed their way through the onlookers to pick up the bets. In the front row of the arena a light complexioned man, whose elegant kurta was out of keeping with the general scruffiness, was silently massaging the claws of a cock. Omar Pasha, the godfather of the bustees, never talked before a fight.

Pressed around him like a bodyguard were his friends from the Kali Grounds led by Belram Mukkadam, Ganga Ram and Rahul. All had bet on Yagu, Omar Pasha’s champion, the creature with the murderous spurs that the old man was holding on his belly. A victory that afternoon would open the way to the championships in Ahmadabad in January, then Bangalore in March and finally New Delhi in April.