Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [97]
He was the man who probably would have the most onerous responsibilities on that remarkable Sunday. Fifty-two-year-old Sharda Diwedi was the managing director of Bhopal’s power station. That evening, his turbines would have to supply enough current to light up the many feasts and wedding celebrations. The grandest was to take place in the Railway Colony. It was to mark the nuptials of Rinu, youngest daughter of the chief controller of the Bhopal railroad.
The Railway Colony was typical of the neighborhoods built by the British to house railway employees close to the stations in which they worked. A small town within a town, not too unlike the villages of Sussex or Surrey, with its lawns, its cottages, its cricket pitch, tearoom, bank and a church with a Victorian gothic bell tower. And one of those institutions that seem to crop up whenever two Englishmen get together: a club. On that particular Sunday, the colonial-style railway employees’ club accommodated the parents and at least two hundred guests of the groom’s family. Later that evening, over a thousand people were due to squeeze themselves under Mahmoud Parvez’s huge shamianas erected on lawns illuminated with strings of multicolored bulbs and floodlights. The managing director of the power station had just one worry: that one of the power cuts to which India was accustomed might plunge the festivities into darkness. To cover that eventuality, he had a powerful emergency generator set up behind one of the shamianas.
A cool, bright winter’s night had just fallen upon the City of the Begums. While preparations were going on in the Railway Colony and elsewhere across the city, the married women in Orya Bustee had just finished dressing Padmini in her ceremonial clothes. Her father appeared at the entrance to the hut.
“Sister Felicity, look how beautiful my daughter is,” whispered Ratna Nadar proudly. The nun had come to be with Padmini during the last moments of her adolescence.
“Oh yes, your daughter is very beautiful,” the Scotswoman replied, “because God’s loving hand created her.”
In a scarlet sari dotted in gold thread, her face concealed behind a muslin veil, her bare feet painted red, her toes, ankles and wrists glittering with jewels from the dowry brought by her future husband’s emissaries, Padmini, escorted by her mother, was preparing to take her place on the straw mat in the center of the mandap. It was there, beside the sacred fire burning in a small brazier, that she would await the arrival of the man whom destiny had given her as a husband.
Eyes shining with happiness, lips parted in a gratified smile, Ratna Nadar could not take his eyes off his child. It was the most beautiful sight of his life, a fairy-tale scene, obliterating at a single stroke so many nightmare images: Padmini crying of hunger and cold on the Bhopal station platform, foraging with her little hands through the piles of rubbish in between the rails, begging a few scraps of coal from the engine drivers … For this child of poverty-stricken parents there had been no play or schooling, only the supervision of her brother, the drudgery of carrying water, doing laundry and household chores. It had been a life of slavery that only her meeting with Sister Felicity had relieved. Today, dressed like a princess, Padmini savored her happiness, her triumph, her revenge on a cursed karma.
A piercing cry, then the sound of moaning suddenly rent the night. A neighbor came running: “Come quickly! Boda’s having her baby.” Without a thought for her wedding clothes, Padmini dragged Sister Felicity to the hut where the wife of the dairyman Bablubhai was writhing in pain. Old Prema Bai was already there. Padmini held a candle over the thin, agonized face of the woman in labor. She was soaked in blood. Sister Felicity