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THAT NIGHT
"When the gas came everything fell, and everything fell through our fingers. Before I was poor. Afterwards, I was a beggar."
Nanko
So this is the control room where they watched,
the hard hats that could not save them
and stationary marked 'Union Carbide' strewn on the floor.
Storage tank E 610 lies dormant, hidden in the long grass,
the MIC unit is lost in vines,
the Vent Gas Scrubber stands sentinel like in the Bhopal night.
The factory groans in the wind, mangled, looted, rotten,
rust devouring pipes and dust spewing
from the sacks of lindane in the abandoned warehouse.
Cows wander through the dereliction, grazing among the debris.
A discarded kite shivers. A cricket ball
marks the spot where young women collect firewood in the half-dark.
A cobra stirs between sevin tar barrels, and children's footprints
linger in the dirt, set in time
as if their play could pick apart the threads of history.
In Jai Prakash Nagar, Kusum Bai cries in her hutment,
staring through her window, her old eyes fixed,
'this is the deadly factory that took my husband and my two sons.'
It is now 12:30 in the morning, the 3rd of December, 1984.
All over the broken shanty settlements,
they are shouting, 'Run. Run. Run for your lives.'
A little girl loses hold of her mother's hand in the panic,
many are trampled in the narrow gullies,
many choke in the poisoned air on their own body fluids.
More perish in their beds, while others stagger from their homes,
vomiting and choking in their night clothes,
coughing up sputum from their strangled lungs streaked with blood.
A woman loses her unborn child as she stumbles,
her womb spontaneously opening
in bloody abortion, her eyes on fire, blinded by the gas.
Within hours, many thousands lie dead in the streets;
then there was silence outside the old teashops,
there was no warning, no alarm sounded to wake the sleeping poor.
Weeks pass. A child is born in the dark, damp labour room
of Sultania Janada Hospital, 'you have a son,'
says the nurse, and she pats the infant to make him cry,
but the boy is already dead, blue and shrivelled, still-born.
His mother weeps behind the green curtains.
Not far away, the patiabazi are waning in the walled city.
Years pass. In the Tubercolosis hospital, Raisa Bee is dying,
her respiratory and neuropsychiatric systems are failing.
On the 31st October, 1996, 6:45 am, Raisa Bee passes away.
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