Five Past Midnight In Bhopal Part 11

"Nadia?"

"Yes. She had a terrible fit. She started smashing everything up. She yelled far more loudly than last night, louder than any of the nights before the monsoon. She yelled like a madwoman. She called for you. Three of us tried to calm her down, restrain her, but ..."

"But?"

"She got away from us. She threw herself out of the window."

"Oh my G.o.d!" The nun felt her heart pound. For a few seconds she remained silent, then slowly crossing herself, she said softly, "Lord Jesus, receive your innocent child into your Paradise."

"She's not dead, sister!" Anita said quickly. "An ambulance has taken her to Hamidia Hospital."

Fifteen minutes later, Anita and Sister Felicity ran through the emergency entrance to the building where the air was thick with the smell of disinfectant and ether. The floor was spotted with red stains left where people chewing betel had spat. The wards were almost empty. Sunday was not a day for too many accidents. Under the inscription DOCTORS ON DUTY, two doctors were settling down for a quiet night in their small office. Tall and lanky, with his black shock of hair carefully combed, the thirty-five-year-old Hindu Deepak Gandhe, and his young Muslim colleague Mohammed Sheikh had been students together at the Gandhi Medical College, the enormous building on the other side of the road. Since then they had been inseparable. One was a general pract.i.tioner; the other a surgeon. That was the usual combination for a tour of duty. The arrival of Sister Felicity and the young Indian girl caught them right in the middle of a game of dominoes. They stood up.

"Doctors, we've come about Nadia," said Sister Felicity.

Dr. Sheikh's face froze. He played nervously with his mustache. The two women prepared themselves for the worst. Dr. Gandhe, however, gave the faintest of smiles.

"Little Nadia has undergone an operation," he said softly. "For the moment she has survived her injuries. We hope to be able to save her. She's in intensive care."

The Scotswoman's eyes filled with tears. "May I see her?"

"Yes, Sister, you can even spend the night with her. You'll have the whole ward to yourself. There's no one else in intensive care this evening."

While Sister Felicity and young Anita began a prayer and vigil night beside little Nadia's injured body, the thousand guests at the wedding in the Railway Colony tucked into pet.i.ts fours, kebabs, prawns, diced chicken in ginger and pieces of cheese wrapped in spinach delivered by an army of turbaned servants. Despite the fact that his cardiologist had forbidden him alcohol because of his coronary problems, Harish Dhurve, the stationmaster, tested his luck with the gla.s.ses of "English liquor," the imported British whisky being served. Suddenly he found himself nose to nose with his doctor.

"Indulge me, doctor, this evening is exceptional, a night blessed by the stars!" he apologized.

Dr. Sarkar was the official doctor for the residents of the Railway Colony and the station staff. His Bengali sense of humor meant that he was never at a loss for repartee. Looking pointedly at his patient's gla.s.s, he asked, "And what if the stars decided to go on strike?"

This reply brought a slightly forced smile to the stationmaster's face. More than anyone else in Bhopal that night he needed the blessing of the stars. Like most of the other railway employees invited to the festivities, he would have to slip away a little before midnight to attend to his duties at the station. In fact that night was expected to be extremely busy because of the pilgrims arriving to celebrate Ishtema. Dhurve had had all the station staff requisitioned, including the 101 coolies. His station was one of the country's princ.i.p.al railway junctions. He had promised himself that he would control the excess traffic with punctuality and suppleness, and provide the thousands of visitors with a welcome befitting Bhopali hospitality.

Midnight. In the factory, unknown to anyone, a bomb had just been primed. After the night-shift operators had tried vainly to drain the system of the rinse water that had been injected into it for the last three hours, it had started to blow back into tank 610. It went rushing in, carrying with it metal debris, sodium chloride crystals and all the other impurities it had dislodged from the lining of the pipes. This ma.s.sive influx of contaminants promptly set off the exothermic reaction the chemists always dreaded. In a matter of minutes, the forty-two tons of methyl isocyanate disintegrated in an explosion of heat, which would very quickly transform the liquid into a hurricane of gas.

When their eyes began to smart, the six men sitting less than forty yards from the tanks, finally conceded that their colleague Varma was right. It was not the smell of Flytox he had detected, but indeed the characteristic boiled cabbage odor of methyl isocyanate. They still did not know, however, what was going on in tank 610.

Qureshi turned to V.N. Singh and Varma. "Guys, you'd better go and do a tour around the rinsing area," he suggested.

The two technicians picked up their torches, put on their helmets and stood up.

"Don't forget your masks!" said Qureshi.

"It's not worth it! It's not the first time this factory's smelled of MIC," replied V.N. Singh. "Have the tea ready for us in a minute!"

"Of course!" Qureshi called.

"And if you're not back in time we'll send out a search party with a bottle of oxygen!" joked the Jain from Bombay, provoking general laughter.

In a few minutes, the two men reached the pipework being cleaned. The smell was getting stronger and stronger. They listened to the rushing of the water still circulating at full force through the piping, and directed the beams of their flashlights onto the network of pipes. They scrutinized every stopc.o.c.k, valve and f.l.a.n.g.e. All of a sudden Singh noticed, at a drainc.o.c.k some eight yards off the ground, a bubble of brownish water surmounted by a small cloud.

"There's some gas escaping up there!" he shouted.

Varma pointed the beam of his flashlight at the cloud. "You're right. And it's not Flytox!"

The two men ran back to the control room.

"Shekil! There's a pipe p.i.s.sing MIC!" Singh said. "You should come and take a look."

Qureshi looked at his colleague in disbelief. "Stop fooling about!" he protested. Then emphasizing each word, he insisted, "Get it into your heads once and for all that there can't be a leak in a factory where production has been stopped. Any idiot knows that."

"But it really is p.i.s.sing out, and it smells very strong!" Singh insisted, rubbing his eyes.

Qureshi shrugged his shoulders. "Perhaps it's a drop of residual MIC escaping from the drainage c.o.c.ks with the rinse water," he conceded. "All we have to do is turn the water taps off. We'll see if we can still smell it after that." With these words he looked at his watch and added, "For now, guys, it's midnight and time for tea!"

The sacrosanct tea break! Thirty-six years after their colonizers had departed, no Indian, not even the six Carbide men perched atop an erupting volcano, would forego a ritual that had entered their culture as surely as the game of cricket. Qureshi led the team to the building a hundred or so yards away that housed the staff cafeteria. Shortly after midnight, a young Nepalese lad with small, laughing eyes made his appearance. He was the tea boy. In his basket he carried a kettle full of scalding milky tea, some gla.s.ses and a plateful of chocolate cookies.

Qureshi and his workmates settled down comfortably to sip the delicious brew steeped in the rich perfume of the distant hills of a.s.sam. Suddenly, a worried face appeared in the doorway. It was Suman Dey, the duty head of the control room.

"Shekil," he called out to the Muslim supervisor, "the pressure needle for tank 610 has shot up from two to thirty psig!"

Qureshi shrugged his shoulders, then gave his colleague a smile. "Suman, you're getting in a sweat about nothing! It is your dial that's gone mad."

38.

Geysers of Death Stations along the world's second largest rail network knew nothing about closing for the night. In Bhopal, platform No. 1, the same platform that, a hundred years previously, had greeted the kingdom of the Begums' first train with a double line of mounted lancers and turbaned sepoys, was seething with activity. That night it was swarming with hundreds of pa.s.sengers waiting for the Gorakhpur Express. As a precaution against thieves, many of them had chained their luggage to their ankles. Tormented by mosquitoes, hordes of children were running about in all directions, playing hide-and-seek among the suitcases and squabbling among themselves. Dozens of street vendors, porters in red tunics, lepers shaking their bowls and ringing their bells, beggars, and policemen in blue caps were wandering among the travelers and their luggage in an acrid atmosphere of bidi smoke, betel and incense sticks.

Midnight was the time for the shifts to change. Deputy Stationmaster V.K. Sherma, his a.s.sistant, Madan Lal Paridar, and their young aid, the traffic regulator Rehman Patel, had just settled themselves in front of the control board in their office at the end of the platform. With its Victorian gothic architecture it looked like a Suss.e.x cottage. The room was equipped with two powerful air-conditioning units, which in the summertime made it possible to forget the heat and pollution outside. Now, however, it was winter, and the machines were switched off. Cool air from outside came in through the wide open doors and windows. Inside, the office was equipped with a long board on which moveable pegs of different colors and lights marked the location of trains on their way to Bhopal and the position of the signals and switches. On the table in the middle of the room stood several telephones, one of which was an old-fashioned crank phone that they used to call other stations to check what time the trains went through. Because of a thick fog over part of Madhya Pradesh that night, and the unusual amount of activity, most of the trains due to arrive before midnight showed significant delays. None of them was expected before two or three in the morning.

Such was the case with the Gorakhpur Express, in which Sajda Bano, the widow of Mohammed Ashraf, Carbide's first gas victim, was traveling. Together with her two sons, three-year-old Soeb and five-year-old Arshad, she had meant to catch the train on the previous day. At the last minute, however, a neighboring Hindu woman had begged the young Muslim not to travel on Sat.u.r.day, because it was considered by followers of her religion to be the most ill-omened day of the week.

In their office, the station staff prepared for one of the long waits to which Indian railway employees and their twelve million daily pa.s.sengers are well accustomed.

Suddenly, the deputy stationmaster picked up one of the phones. "I'm calling the boss," he informed his a.s.sistant. "There's no need for him to come for a good two hours yet."

"You're right," his colleague agreed, "that way he'll be able to down a few more gla.s.ses of English liquor!"

The three men laughed. They were well aware of Harish Dhurve's weakness for alcohol. It was at this point that a coolie in a red tunic appeared at the door.

"Quickly, come and see! Arjuna and his chariot are here with presents for you."

The porter Satish Lal was in a state of extreme excitement. His reference to the mythological Pandava prince and his celestial chariot was not wholly inaccurate. Ratna Nadar, whom he had introduced to his team of porters two years previously, had just arrived, pushing a rickshaw full of small cardboard boxes.

"There are a hundred and five, one for each coolie, four others for the bosses and the last is for good old Gautam behind his ticket office window," Padmini's father announced.

Each box contained a hard-boiled egg, a kebab on a stick, a small bowl of rice with dal on it, a vegetable samosa, a chapati and two b.a.l.l.s of rossigola, a very sweet confection made out of pastry steeped in syrup. In India every feast is shared. Ratna Nadar had been eager for his workmates and superiors to have their share of the banquet held that night to mark the most important event in his life: his daughter's marriage. Toward eleven o'clock, he had slipped away from the festivities to change from his ceremonial clothes into his red tunic. That night he, too, had been requisitioned to a.s.sist the expected pa.s.sengers.

"Ratna Nadar Ki Jai! Ratna Nadar Zindabad!" * A rousing ovation in Hindi and Urdu acclaimed the father of the bride and his cartload of delicacies.

"Thank you, friends! Thank you, my friends!" he repeated over and over again as he handed out his little boxes.

Drawn by the unusual cl.u.s.ter of red tunics right in the middle of the platform, some of the pa.s.sengers gathered around. Ratna Nadar cast an emotional eye over the dilapidated facades of the vast station where once he had disembarked with all his family, driven from his village by the curse of aphids; the same station that today incorporated all his hopes. Thanks to it, to its pa.s.sengers' mountains of bags and packages and to the heavy crates in its cargo bays, he was going to be able to pay back the twelve thousand rupees borrowed from Pulpul Singh for his daughter's wedding. Every train would bring him nearer to that blessed day when he would be able to recover the property deed he had p.a.w.ned to the moneylender.

Less than half a mile away, the curtain was rising on the tragedy of which the journalist Rajk.u.mar Keswani had forewarned the people of Bhopal. The supervisor Shekil Qureshi showed no signs of hurrying his cup of tea. In his opinion the man in charge of the control room was overreacting. He knew that thirty pounds of pressure per square inch were not really grounds for alarm. The South Charleston engineers had designed the MIC tanks with special steel and walls thick enough to resist pressures five or six times greater. But the needle on the dial in the control room had now leaped up again and, at 55 psig, was at the upper end of the scale on the dial. More important, it was twice the limit the engineers referred to as the "permitted maximum working pressure." Was the instrument malfunctioning as Qureshi supposed, or was the pressure it was showing real? For Suman Dey, there was only one way to find out: by going into the zone where the three tanks were, to look at the pressure gauge directly attached to tank 610. If it confirmed the figures on the control room dial, then something out of the ordinary was going on.

"Let's go, Chandra!" said Dey to one of the operators on duty.

"Are we taking the masks?"

"You bet! Masks and bottles!" insisted Dey, who had a visceral fear of chemical substances.

Each bottle was guaranteed to last half an hour. When it was down to just five minutes' worth of oxygen, an alarm went off.

It took less than three minutes for the two men to get to tank 610 and establish that the needle on the pressure gauge was also indicating 55 psig. Dey climbed onto the concrete sarcophagus in which the tank was imbedded, knelt down on the top, took off his glove and palpated the metal casing meticulously.

"There's a h.e.l.l of a lot of movement going on in there!" he shouted through his mask.

The stirring he had felt was the now gaseous methyl isocyanate sweeping into the pipes leading to the decontamination tower. That was where it was supposed to go in such circ.u.mstances. But, that night, the stopc.o.c.ks controlling access to the safety device were turned off because the factory was not in service. Under pressure that was mounting by the minute, the column of gas was popping bolts like champagne corks. Some of the gas then escaped, giving rise to the sort of small brownish cloud that operators Singh and Varma had spotted before their tea break. Both had returned hastily to the zone where the pipes were being cleaned, this time equipped with masks and oxygen bottles. The first thing they did was turn off the water tap, turned on four hours earlier by their colleague Rehman Khan. Even with their masks on, they could smell powerful gas emissions.

"It stinks of MIC and phosgene too," grunted V.N. Singh, who had recognized the characteristic smell of freshly mown gra.s.s.

"And of MMA!" added Varma, picking up the suffocating smell of monomythylamine ammonia.

A hissing noise like that of a jet stream was suddenly heard overhead. Instantly they looked up at the network of pipes. A geyser had just burst from the spot where they had first detected the gas leak. Despite his terror V.N. Singh managed to keep a cool head. There was only one thing to do in such circ.u.mstances. He had done it before at the time of the great fire in the alpha-naphthol unit. He hurled himself at the nearest alarm point, broke the gla.s.s, and pressed the b.u.t.ton that set off the general alarm siren.

The howl wrested Shekil Qureshi from his cup of tea. He ran out of the cafeteria and rushed to the control room where he met V.N. Singh, who had just come back up from the pipe-cleaning zone. Singh took off his mask. He was livid.

"The worst has happened. There's nothing we can do," he muttered, shaking his head, overwhelmed.

Qureshi protested fiercely, "It must be possible to contain this b.l.o.o.d.y reaction. I'm going quickly to see what's going on."

Singh called after his disappearing figure, "Your mask!"

"Can't give orders with that thing over my face!" replied the Muslim, who was already scrambling down the stairway.

When he reached the erupting geyser, he stopped dead in his tracks. He could not believe his eyes. "It's not true ..." he murmured. There he was, the man who had been so convinced that no accident could happen in a factory that was not running, witnessing precisely the catastrophe of which all Carbide's manuals, all its safety exercises, and all its security campaigns had persistently warned against: a terrifying, uncontrollable, cataclysmic exothermic reaction of methyl isocyanate. A ma.s.sive reaction of a whole tank full, not just a few drops left in a pipe. How had such an accident come about, despite all the safety regulations? Qureshi beat a retreat and made for the zone where the tanks were. He had an idea. Even if it was too late to stem the eruption of tank 610, at least the contamination could be prevented from reaching the twenty tons stored in tank 611. His eyes were beginning to burn painfully. He was having progressively more difficulty breathing. In a blur he saw Suman Dey and his companion descending from the sarcophagus onto which they had courageously climbed to check the pressure indicator. The tank and its concrete casing were trembling, cracking and creaking as if shaken by an earthquake. The voice of the Muslim supervisor was faintly audible through the chaos.

"We must isolate 610! We must isolate 610!" He shouted himself out of breath.

Suman Dey did not agree. By turning off the valves and stopc.o.c.ks connecting the reacting tank to its neighbor, they would risk increasing the pressure and possibly set off an explosion. But Qureshi had faith in the tank's capacity to resist anything. How could this technological masterpiece that he had once witnessed arrive from Bombay, this precious jewel, the connections to which he had lovingly maintained, repaired and nurtured for so many years, possibly disintegrate like some common petrol tank? Dragging his two companions with him, he threw himself at the pipework. The ground was cracking beneath their feet. There was a noise as if the end of the world were coming. In ten minutes, they managed to shut off all communication between the two tanks. The twenty tons stored in the tank 611 would not be caught up in the gaseous apocalypse.

Their task completed, they immediately retreated at a run. Before disappearing into the stairway leading to the control room, they turned around. Tank 610's concrete carapace had just shattered, releasing an enormous steel tank that emerged from its sarcophagus like a rocket, stood vertically, toppled, fell and stood up again before tumbling heavily onto the concrete and metal debris. But it had not burst. From a ruptured pipe at ground level a second geyser then erupted, more powerful and even fiercer than the first.

Before entering the control room Qureshi glanced at the wind sock flying from the top of its mast. He grimaced. Filled by an unremitting wind, the white material cone pointed clearly south, toward the neighborhoods of the Kali Grounds, the station and the old part of the city. That night, however, true Carbider that he was, he felt most responsible for the safety of his men. He turned to the chief of the watch.

"Suman! Turn your siren on and yell into the loudspeakers. Get everyone to a.s.semble in the formulation zone on the north side, except the operators in our unit who should remain available with their masks. We may need them later."

39.

Lungs Bursting in the Heart of the Night For the supervisor Shekil Qureshi, the young Muslim who, at his wedding in Bhopal's great mosque, had thought he could wear no finer clothing than "the linen coverall with the blue-and-white logo," all was not yet lost. He wanted to attempt the impossible.

"Suman! Try and get the decontamination tower up and running," he ordered the man in charge of the control room. "You never know, perhaps the maintenance team has finished its repairs."

Suman Dey tried the control lever, but there was no reaction on the dial on the control panel. The indicator did not light up and the pressure needle remained at zero.

The telephone rang. Qureshi picked it up. It was S.P. Chowdhary, the production manager, calling from his villa in Arera Colony on the other side of Bhopal. He had just been woken by one of the night-shift operators.

"I'll be there as quickly as I can!" he shouted into the phone. "In the meantime try and get the flare going!"

Qureshi could not believe his ears. What? The man in charge of production at the factory did not know that the emergency flare was undergoing repairs?

"The flare?" he repeated. "But there are five or six yards of pipe missing from it! They were rotten."

"Replace them!" the production manager insisted.

Qureshi held the telephone receiver outside the window. "Do you hear that? That's gas pouring out. Even if we were to manage to replace the pipes, we'd have to be out of our minds to light the flare. We'd all be blown up and the factory and the entire city with us!"

Furious, Qureshi hung up, but he still refused to admit defeat. "Get me the fire squad!" he told Suman Dey.

Qureshi begged Carbide's fire chief to send men as fast as possible to douse the geyser spurting out from under the decontamination tower. He knew that water, which could cause the methyl isocyanate to explode in an enclosed environment could also neutralize it in the open air-a chemical contradiction that had induced the three American engineers who came to inspect the factory in 1982 to call for the installation of an automatic sprinkler system in the sensitive MIC production zone. Their recommendation had not been implemented, and as a result, men would have to risk their lives trying to act as human sprinklers.

In less than five minutes, the firemen were on the scene. Almost immediately, their chief's voice came over the radio speaker.

"Impossible to reach the leak! Our hose jets won't go that high!"

This time Qureshi realized that there was nothing more he could do.

"Give the order for everyone to evacuate, directly to the north," he ordered Suman Dey, "and let's get out of here!"

The proud Muslim rushed to the cloakroom to pick up his mask. But his locker was empty and his mask was gone. He had to escape with his face exposed. With his eyes burning, his throat on fire and gasping for breath, he ran like a madman. He thought of his wife and children. "I was so afraid of dying, I felt capable of anything," he said later. In fact, he did scale the six-foot-high perimeter wall of the factory and the coils of barbed wire on top and drop down on the other side. In his fall, he tore his chest and broke an ankle. Fortunately for him, the wind was driving the bulk of the deadly cloud in the opposite direction.

Blissfully unaware of the tragedy occurring a few hundred yards from the Kali Grounds, Dilip and Padmini's wedding guests were having a marvelous time. Padmini had kept a surprise in store for them. No feast took place in India without homage also being paid to the G.o.ds. That night the young woman was going to give thanks to Jagannath for all his blessings by dancing for him and for all the occupants of Orya Bustee. Discreetly she had gone to her hut to change from her wedding sari into the costume worn by performers of Odissi, the traditional Orissan dance. True, it was not made out of silk embroidered with gold thread, like those of the temple dancers, but of simple cotton material. But what did that matter? Dalima and Sheela adjusted her bodice and draped the material around her thighs before spreading it out like a fan from her waist to her knees. They caught the young woman's long tresses up in a bun and adorned it with a braid of jasmine flowers, then fastened imitation jewelry around her neck, in her ears, round her arms, wrists and waist. Finally they put anklets with bells on her ankles. The G.o.d would be pleased. The blood of Orissa definitely flowed through the veins of the former peasant girl from Mudilapa. And it was the thousand-year-old culture of her distant home that carried the young newlywed along, as her bare feet began to pound the mandap on which she had sealed her marriage but a short time previously.

Dalima's singing and Dilip's staccato beating of two tambourines accompanied her dance. The crowd of enthralled guests cried out in delight with "Vah! Vahs!" that fired their poverty-stricken neighborhood with triumphal fervor. Suddenly, however, Belram Mukkadam raised his stick above the audience. He had just heard the distant howl of Carbide's siren. Padmini's feet stood still, the bells on her ankles fell silent. Everyone strained their ears anxiously in the direction of the metal structure, which still appeared so peaceful in the distant halo of its thousand lightbulbs.