Falaknuma Palace Hotel is Bhopal’s showpiece. Not only is the hotel splendid, but its cuisine too is excellent. Mughlai food is, of course, its specialty, though Chinese and English dishes are also available. I was invited there for lunch. The view from the dining room was beautiful. Outside the windows was the lake, eighteen kilometres long and broad. It looked like a little sea, with the sole difference that that there was no soft sand on its shores.
The sky was dotted with monsoon clouds: hope for more water in the lake. That very morning, I had been to the venue of the Carbide factory, which was the scene of Bhopal’s worst tragedy. I had also seen the larger-than-life stone statue that stood amidst the cluster of huts. Standing there, she represented a victim of the Carbide factory with a dead infant in her lap. Another, slightly older child was clinging to the end of her sari.
The stone statue did not represent a beautiful and delicate woman. Like the Devis carved in temples, it too is lifeless but representational – as if the whole world’s mothers and their motherhood was squeezed into this sculpture. The breasts were big and full of milk. But this milk was useless. It was full of the poison of Carbide. The poison which is in the mother’s embittered eyes is also in the veins of the dead child who died of this poison that percolated to its soul.
I had exposed only twenty pictures of the statue. I had ‘caught’ it from different angles: her head that was looking up, the close-ups of the dead child which was inadequately covered, the elder child who was trying to cling on to the end of the sari. It was a record of the tragedy that was in my camera, as I entered the Falaknuma Palace Hotel and a woman’s voice greeted me.
‘I am Captain Salmah, sir!’ the woman introduced herself.
‘Captain Salmah?’ I had repeated with some surprise. This was the first time I had heard a woman introducing herself as ‘Captain’.
When I sat down in the dining room, I dumped my camera on a marble-top table.
Captain Salmah picked up my camera and kept it on another side table.
‘Are these pictures of Bharat Bhavan?’ she questioned me.
‘No,’ I said, ‘but much more important and dangerous than those!’
‘Have you by any chance met a beauty of Bhopal? She can be quite dangerous,’ she – who was herself a beauty of Bhopal – said. ‘Where did you encounter this Bhopali beauty?’
‘She is a stone statue standing in front of the Carbide factory, and will keep standing there till her demands are satisfied.’
‘What will you eat, sir?’
‘Nothing,’ I replied. ‘Seeing that statue and the denizens of the jhopdies, I don’t feel like eating anything.’
‘Then you can have the chicken soup.’
‘It’s a good idea, but it must not smell.’
‘It will smell of chicken.’
I had the chicken soup and returned to my room. There was a chit attached to the door. It was written on with a pencil. ‘If you want to write about the gas tragedy, I can give you all the details which have not been given to any journalist so far. My off-duty hours are from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. For those four hours, I am at your disposal – Captain Salmah.’
I thought to myself – let’s hear her story. Exactly at 4 o’ clock, the doorbell rang, but rather softly. I thought, ‘Captain Salmah seems to be a little nevous!’ But I opened the door.
The girl standing outside my door was not Captain Salmah. But her face seemed familiar. It seemed as if I had seen that woman somewhere that very morning.
Her body was draped in a loose-fitting dress of sorts. It was the same sort of loose-fitting sari the statue was draped in. And in her arms was a dead child. Oh God, what am I seeing?
Coming inside, she sat on a sofa chair, putting the doll – or the dead child – on its armrest, and said, ‘Please ask whatever you have got to ask.’
‘Are you married?’
‘Was – till this tragic event descended on Bhopal.’
‘And what was your husband doing?’
‘He was an engineer in the Carbide factory. He was recruited in America. Those people were very happy that they were going to establish their factory in Bhopal. He had gone for practical training in chemical engineering to their parent factory. My husband was a very handsome young man – one in a thousand.’
‘Then please tell me about your husband. What happened?’
‘His name was … Alam Khan. When he returned from America, he was immediately appointed engineer. He was the seniormost – but for an American, of course! Night and day he worked for the factory devotedly. One day we met in Bharat Bhavan’s open-air theatre. The play was Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
‘In the interval I asked him, “What work do you do?”
‘The reply was, “Nonsense”.
‘So I had to ask, “What is that?”
‘“It if is not nonsense to be an engineer in the Carbide factory, which manufactures poisonous gas, what is? If one day this gas leaks out it will destroy the whole city.”
‘“Why do you do such dangerous work?”
‘“To earn one’s bread. What do you do?”
‘“I study in Hameedia College. It’s also a kind of nonsense. Babar won the first battle of Panipat in which year? In which year did Ashoka erect pillars? And when did he establish them and where? What did he engrave on those pillars? When did the English period begin and when did it end? All this kind of nonsense is taught to us in our history course. If it is not nonsense, what is it? I’m doing my MA now, but don’t know how to make chicken soup. I can’t prepare even khichdi.”
‘“Khichdi reminds me of a story that our grandmother used to narrate – there was a male sparrow and a female sparrow. The male sparrow brought a grain of rice. The female sparrow brought a grain of pulses. Both joined to prepare khichdi and ate it with great relish. By the way, I meant to ask you, what do you think of marriage? Is it also nonsense, like the story about the male sparrow and female sparrow?”
‘‘“Marriage is the story of the male sparrow and female sparrow. I am a sparrow all right, but one with a sharp beak. This is worth remembering.”
‘Meanwhile, the play started again and there was a pause in our conversation. As Shakespeare’s romance played on, I don’t know how Alam’s hands, which were not soft but rough like an engineer’s, came to rest on my hands. The man to whom those hands belonged could not be called a sparrow. But I enjoyed playing with them.
‘“Did you like the play?” Alam asked the moment the play ended.
‘“Which play?” I asked, not knowing whether he was referring to the play or the game we had been playing with our hands, which was very interesting.
‘“I enjoyed it very much,” I said. It applied both to the game and the play.
‘So the next week, we were married. My revered father, who was the former ruler’s courtier and crack-hunter, could not survive the shock of the state being merged. My mother was still alive, but after her husband’s death, she had taken to her ja-namaaz and was busy praying night and day. But she was worldly enough to think that her would-be son-in-law was educated in America and earned Rs 2,200 as an engineer in an American factory. She was very happy with the proposal.
‘On the third day after marriage, I asked him “Aren’t you going to show me your factory?”
‘“The factory is not worth seeing.”
‘“Why not?” I insisted. “I always wanted to see a factory. There will be big-big machines in the factory. Many engineers, including you, will be working there along with hundreds of workers. Are there women workers also? I want to meet them all.”
‘On my insistence, I went to see the factory. The workers were mostly male. There were hardly any women. I saw two doing some clerical work. I was very interested in two cylinders that were full of gas. One of these cylinders was evidently leaking, letting out an evil smell. I closed my nose with a handkerchief from my handbag. Then I forgot the factory and the evil smell coming from the cylinder of gas. I forgot it all – that was my misfortune and my city’s bad luck.
‘The very next month there was cause for excitement. The lady doctor told me I was pregnant.
‘Calculations showed later that that was the day of our good luck – the day I insisted on going to the factory.
‘“Long live your factory,” I had proclaimed in an inauspicious moment.’
In the last week of December, the lady doctor had given the ‘date’. A week before that Salmah was admitted because certain complications were worrying her. Alam was also worried about his wife, and his worry was only increasing as the date of delivery approached. On the other hand, problems were increasing in the factory, too. One huge cylinder had sprung a leak from which gas was oozing out. One worker died trying to close that dangerous aperture, which was mentioned in the factory record as an ordinary negative accident.
The next night, when Alam was still in the factory, panic gripped the workers. Alam tried to stop the fleeing workers but they shouted in a chorus, ‘Alam sahib, the gas is now flowing out. We advise you to run for your life.’ But Alam, at that time, was the engineer in-charge. He was the captain of a sinking ship. He could not afford to run for his life.
When all the workers had fled and taken refuge in their tin shacks with many apertures, and when the gas pursued them, Alam somehow stopped the oozing gas. But in his throat was an irritating sensation. Also, he was feeling drowsy. He had to control himself – at least for the ten minutes that it would take to reach the hospital. His car was a huge and heavy model that Alam had brought from America. Now, at this crucial point of time, it was also frozen in the cold. With great difficulty he was able to restart it. Controlling his drowsiness Alam carefully, and slowly, changed the gear and brought the car to the silent road where he increased the speed.
Reaching the hospital, Alam parked the car in the portico and reached his wife’s room with long strides. Finding the room empty his heartbeat stopped for a moment. The next minute a white-clad nurse told him, ‘Your wife is in the operation theatre because the doctor had decided on a caesarean operation. We tried to contact the factory, but you had probably set out from there.’
Hearing this and fearing the worst, Alam started running towards the operation theatre. On the way he met another nurse who was carrying something wrapped in a towel. Something that seemed ominous.
‘What is this?’
‘It’s your child!’ Saying this, the nurse gave it to Alam. As he unwrapped it, Alam felt giddy, his head was in a whirl. It was undoubtedly a new-born child but it could not be his. It was a progeny of the devil! It had no eyes, no ears, no face, no nose. Just a lump of flesh! ‘So this is our child,’ he screamed out aloud, and in that moment he remembered Salmah insisting on seeing the factory, nine months earlier. That was where the poison had come from. Alam was an engineer, he knew everything about what was being prepared in the factory.
Feeling faint, he collapsed on the adjacent twin bed in Salmah’s room where Salmah, regaining consciousness, found him sleeping like a fully grown baby.
‘How are you, Alam?’ Salmah asked him in a state of semi-consciousness.
‘Why has this horror been inflicted on us?’ Up to that point of time Alam was unconscious but woke up in a spasm of coughs. ‘Alam darling, what have we been punished for?’
‘For your stubborn insistence and my pliability. I was an engineer and knew all the dangers. I should not have given in. I should not have taken you to the factory.’
‘Is this lump of flesh my punishment?’
‘But I should not have taken you there because I was an engineer and knew the consequences.’
After a few days, Alam breathed his last. He was the first martyr of that factory.
‘Then I moved into those ramshackle tin huts. While there, two sculptors came, who wanted to carve a statue out of red sandstone, as a memorial to the Bhopal tragedy. When they needed a model, I offered my services.
‘They asked, “Have you got a child you can take in your lap?”
‘I answered, “There was a child, but it became a victim of the gas.” They gave me a wax model to keep in my lap. I looked at it, and then said to them, “Gouge out the child’s eyes. Seal its ears with molten wax. Do the same to his nose. Then it will look like my child. Then I will regard it as my own child.”
‘For four days I stood there as they desired, and the feelings of a mother came out through their carving. When the modelling work was over, I went to the lady doctor and asked her, “How many days do you give me?’”
‘“If you get yourself treated properly, you can live out your full life.”
‘“But I don’t want to live out my life – I’d rather lie on a hospital bed and wait for death to come.”
‘“Then we can’t guarantee anything. Hardly a year, perhaps, but you are young, with good features. Why don’t you want to live? Why do you want to die?”
‘To punish myself. I was an abettor in a crime. I decided to work for a year, took my MA degree and got the captain’s job in this hotel. Here, I would tell this story to anyone who is interested, whom I met in this one year. Today that year is over.’
That night, I went to Bharat Bhavan for a show. It was not a show, but a realistic treatment of the Bhopal tragedy. It was a true story titled Baanjh Ghati. Thirty-five actors and actresses and children recreated the tragedy of Bhopal that had occurred two years ago.
It was staged in open-air. Ten or twelve women bring their friend from a maternity home. The mother is hugging her new-born child happily to her bosom. Her friends are singing a fertility song.
At the end of the tragedy, there is another procession. The song which the women are now singing is slow, almost like a dirge. The mother is hugging a faceless lump of flesh which, they have said, is her baby, born out of her womb. She hands over this lump of flesh to a wise old man who takes it high above his head, and with his thumb and forefinger squeezes out its life.
The dirge-like song of these women rises as a chorus of a Greek tragedy. The whole valley has become infertile, barren, where children will not be born amidst songs of joy and jubilation. Life and laughter have gone out of the valley of Bhopal.
Suddenly, in a flicker of light, all the actors and actresses have, by a slight of lighting, become thousands and their song is now a challenge. And in the midst of the crowd of women is seen the fleeting profile of Captain Salmah of Bhopal.
As the light effects faded out, a woman’s voice was heard, ‘Alam darling, I have expiated our crime. I’m now coming to you!’
In the stillness of the end of the show there was a sound of a fatal cough – and the thud of a body crashing in death. And only my ears heard the words: ‘Thank you, Mr Abbas, for telling my story. But don’t forget to take a bowl of chicken soup!’