Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [96]
The sound of a gong announced the beginning of the fight. The godfather stood up and carefully placed Yagu in front of his opponent. The two cocks immediately hurled themselves at one another with a fury that roused the fever of their audience. Beaks and spurs spun in the light like steel-tipped arrows. The blood spurting in all directions did nothing to diminish the fury of the two combatants. The crowd yelled their names, clapped and stamped their feet. When one of the birds rolled over in the dust, the audience was nearly delirious. Omar Pasha followed the ferocious battle with the detachment of a Buddha. Yagu bled, staggered and fell but each time he got up to strike again. With a final blow of his spurs he managed to put out an eye of his adversary, who collapsed, mortally wounded. Another sound of the gong signaled the end of the fight. The godfather stood up and retrieved his bloody but victorious cockerel. Parading the creature above his head like a trophy, he greeted the crowd.
35
A Night Blessed by the Stars
A Sunday of frivolity and freedom from care. Usually closed on Sundays, the stores in the Chowk Bazaar, scattered around the minarets and golden-spired cupolas of the Jama Masjid, were doing a record trade. That December 2 was, above all else, a day for marriages blessed by the stars. Elegant ladies from the smart neighborhoods came rushing in to make last-minute purchases. Necklaces, earrings, bracelets, all kinds of jewelry that were a specialty of Bhopal, were snatched up. Perfumers sold out their inventories of sandalwood, essence of roses and patchouli. Vendors were plundered of their silks, ribbons and sandals. It was as if the end of the world were at hand.
On the other side of town, the Arera Club, a splendid institution inherited from the British, was doing the sort of business it did on all festival Sundays. Its members thronged around an abundantly laden buffet table, the tennis courts, and immaculately manicured lawns, and the Olympic-size swimming pool and the reading rooms.
Executives from Carbide and other Bhopal companies were entitled to membership in this club that nestled in an oasis of mauve, bloodred, orange and white bougainvilleas, palm, frangipani and neem trees. With its gala evenings, balls, tennis and bridge tournaments, and games of bingo, the Arera Club had at one time given the South Charleston expatriates and their young Indian colleagues a glimpse of the life led by its British administrators in the great days of the empire. Recently things had changed somewhat. On that Sunday December 2, 1984, there were no longer any American Carbiders sampling the pots of chicken curry and other Indian delicacies on the buffet. There were hardly even any Indian engineers left; the factory had been deserted by so many of its local senior staff. One of their few remaining representatives, Works Manager Jagannathan Mukund, had brought his wife and son, who was on break from university, to lunch there. That evening, Mukund and his wife planned to take their son to several marriage celebrations. And next day, they were going to show him some of the picturesque sites surrounding the City of the Begums. The plant had ceased operations, so there was no reason its captain could not be gone for a day or two.
Not far from the Mukunds’ table, a heated game of bridge was going on. One of the players was a young doctor in white trousers and a sports shirt. Both a swimming and a bridge champion, the athletic, thirty-two-year-old doctor L.S. Loya had been recruited in March by classified advertisement to take over the running of Carbide’s on-site clinic. For the son of a Rajasthani corn chandler who had struggled hard to get his degree in toxicology, landing a job for an international company making chemical products was an achievement. In eight months, Loya had not had to deal with a single serious