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EXCERPT
PROLOGUE
ANJALI
December 3, 1984.
Bhopal Railway Station, Bhopal, India
I waited patiently for the first hour, and then I started to get
impatient. The Bhopal Railway Station was abuzz with late-night
activities. The homeless were wandering, begging for money and food;
some people were waiting for their train to arrive and others, like
me, were waiting for someone to pick them up, as the hands of the
big dirty clock in front of me came together to welcome midnight.
I turned my wrist again to look at the watch my husband had given me
after our wedding just a few months ago. It was a nice Titan watch,
with a green background and red numbers and hands. It was a
compulsive action to look at the watch, since I already knew what
the time was.
Why wasn’t he here? He knew when I was getting back. He had bought
the tickets himself. How could he have forgotten?
Soon the homeless stopped begging and started looking for places to
settle in for the night. The Station Master used a long, thick
wooden stick to prod the homeless, who were sleeping in front of his
office and the waiting rooms, into moving. He was successful with
some and unsuccessful with others. He looked at me curiously and
then ignored me. He had probably seen many women wait for their
husbands or loved ones at the railway station.
I flipped once again through the Femina magazine I had bought at the
Hyderabad Railway Station. By now I had read all the articles and
the short story, and the advertisements, but I looked through them
once more to avoid staring at the dirty white clock or my beautiful
watch.
“Memsaab, taxi?” a Sardarji taxi driver asked me.
I inched farther back into the metal chair I was sitting on,
grasping my purse tightly in my lap and moving my sari-clad leg to
touch my small suitcase in a subconscious effort to protect it.
“No,” I said, and focused on the slightly crumpled pages of my
magazine.
“Late in the night it is now, Memsaab.” Sardarji was undeterred by
my casual refusal. “Not safe it is at the station.”
I let the fear of being accosted late in the night pass first. My
husband would be here soon, I told myself. I thought up an excuse:
His scooter must have broken down. I thought up another: The tire
must have been punctured. It happened all the time on the bad roads
of Bhopal.
“Where do you have to go?” Sardarji asked me.
I took a deep breath and looked at him. He didn’t look dangerous in
the dim yellow lights of the railway station, but you can never tell
by someone’s face what he is capable of.
“Bairagarh,” I said succinctly, and he moved away from me without
comment. The EME Center was in Bairagarh and if I lived there, I was
an army wife, and he probably didn’t want to mess with me.
I kept time with my shifting feet and the rustle of the oft-turned
pages of the magazine, pages that didn’t look brand-new and glossy
anymore, but were wrinkled like the ones roadside peanut vendors
wrapped fried peanuts in. My eyes wandered to the entrance of the
station, again and again looking for a familiar face.
I didn’t even know how to get in touch with my husband—we didn’t
have a phone. Colonel Shukla did. I could call him, I thought, and
then decided against it. How would it look if people knew my husband
forgot to pick me up?
I turned my head when there was a small commotion at the other end
of the station, and it started then. Slowly, but surely, it spread.
I became aware of it for the first time when I inhaled and felt my
lungs being scratched by nails from the inside, like someone had
thrown red chili powder into my nose. I took another breath and it
didn’t change. I clasped my throat and closed my eyes as they
started to burn and water. Something was wrong, my mind screamed
wildly as I, along with the others, tried to seek a reason for the
tainted air we were breathing.
Sardarji, who was standing nearby, looked at me, our eyes matching
the panic that was spreading through the railway station. The
homeless had started gathering their meager belongings, while others
were standing up, moving, looking around, asking questions, trying
to find out what could be done. Soon it became unbearable and the
exodus began. People started to clamor to get out of the station.
The entrance was jam-packed; heaving bodies slammed against each
other as they tried to squeeze past the small entrance to save their
lives. Some people jumped across the tracks to get to the other
platform and look for an exit from there. People were everywhere,
like scrounging ants looking for food.
“Taxi, Memsaab,” Sardarji cried out as he came toward me.
I didn’t question his generosity and picked up my suitcase and
started to run along with him to the entrance. Our bodies joined the
others as we looked for a small hole, a pathway, out of the railway
station. People were running helter-skelter, trying to breathe.
Something is wrong, I thought again, this time in complete panic,
something about the air in the railway station is very wrong.
The struggle to get out of the station became harder because no one
could breathe. My lungs felt like they would implode and even though
I tried to suck in as much air as I could, it was not really air
that I was breathing. It was something toxic, something acrid,
something that was burning my insides and scratching my eyes. Each
breath I took made me dizzy and the burning sensation, that terrible
burning sensation, wouldn’t go away.
My suitcase and purse got lost somewhere in the crowd, but I was
half-crazed with the need to breathe and forgot about them.
Sardarji was having trouble breathing as well. His voice was
high-pitched and shaky and I could hear him hiss as he tried to
breathe. He pointed in the direction of his taxi and we started
running, pushing past people who just like us were trying to find a
way out. It looked like every automobile in the city was out on the
streets. The sound of honking vehicles mingled with the cries for
help, while the city stood bright, lit up with car, scooter, and
auto rickshaw headlights, like a bride covered in gold and diamonds
just before her wedding.
“What’s happening?” someone screamed.
“Run, out of the city, out of the city!” someone else cried out.
We reached the taxi and as soon as we got inside, people clamored
and banged at the car windows.
For once, compassion failed me. “Drive,” I said through my misery,
and the engine mercifully started.
Navigating the taxi out of the crowded parking lot, where cars lay
haphazardly like dead and wounded soldiers in a battlefield, proved
to be difficult. Sardarji tried his best. The honking of his taxi
joined the sounds of other impatient cars. It was getting
increasingly difficult to drive. The crowds were blocking the way
and our inability to breathe was not helping either.
I held the edge of my sari to my nose, hoping to dissipate some of
the spice in the air, but nothing would make the air clean.
A few cars moved and we managed to get to the road, which could just
as well have been a parking lot itself because the cars were not
moving. As I struggled to stay alive, a new fear gripped me. Was my
husband caught in this? I shuddered at the thought and prayed he had
indeed forgotten to pick me up. But if he had come and picked me up
when my train arrived two hours ago, we would have been safe. I
would have been safe, my mind cried out.
“Memsaab, we will never get out of here,” Sardarji said, stumbling
over the words. “Maybe we should get out of the car and run.”
“Run where?” I asked, hysteria sprinkled over my voice. “Where would
we go?”
When he didn’t answer, I turned to him and saw him lying on the
steering wheel. I shook him hard, screaming for him to wake up and
drive us out of there.
He managed to straighten himself, but before he could step on the
accelerator or drive into the space the car ahead of us had made, he
collapsed on the steering wheel again, and this time I couldn’t wake
him up.
My heart felt like it had stopped beating for an instant. I didn’t
know how to drive; I had never learned. My husband and I didn’t even
have a car. I wanted to help Sardarji, check on him, but I couldn’t,
I couldn’t even breathe, and suddenly nothing seemed more important
than breathing. I had taken it for granted all my life and now I
couldn’t breathe without feeling my insides rip open against the
onslaught of the spice in the air.
I opened the taxi door and pushed into the people who swarmed around
the car. There was no relief for anyone.
Someone got into the taxi as soon as I left and I saw Sardarji’s
lifeless body being pushed out of the driver’s seat onto the road.
I looked around as people jostled me, searching for a way out.
People were running in all directions and I wondered, Which one was
the right direction? Which direction gave you life? I moved
aimlessly, going first in one direction and then in another. The
world revolved around me in slow motion as my eyes started to shut
on their own accord. I knew that I was going to join Sardarji.
It was then, when I was almost sure that I was going to die, that I
saw an army Jeep, and it looked like a beacon of hope. I cried out
for help, but my voice was drowned by the voices of others,
screaming and yelling and demanding the gods for an answer.
I think the Jeep driver saw me first, and then someone from inside
called out to me. They knew my name and they knew whose wife I was.
I felt relief sweep through me, even as energy seeped out. Just like
it happens in the movies, I quietly collapsed onto the asphalt road.
My eyes had trouble
adjusting to the whiteness. Everything around me was white. But I
knew I was not dead. I knew I was in a hospital because of the
telltale smell of medicines. I lifted my hands but couldn’t see
anything. I could feel there were tubes going into my nose and some
were coming out of my hands. I felt like an octopus.
I wanted to talk, to ask someone what was going on, but my throat
was clogged, and then I remembered in fuzzy detail the night I
thought I had died. I breathed in with trepidation and was relieved
to not feel any burning, but my lungs still felt full and heavy, as
if water had been pumped into them.
I licked my dry lips and tried to speak. I called out for my husband
and waited, but I wasn’t sure if I was making enough sound to
attract his attention. I wasn’t even sure if anyone was near me. I
could hear some voices at a distance, far away.
I could not concentrate clearly on anything, but I heard the faint
voice of a newscaster saying something about a Union Carbide factory
and some gas that had leaked into the city of Bhopal.
Excerpted from A Breath of
Fresh Air by Amulya Malladi Copyright 2002 by Amulya
Malladi. Excerpted by permission of Ballantine Books, a division
of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt
may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from
the publisher.
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I
held the edge of my sari to my nose, hoping to dissipate some of the
spice in the air, but nothing would make the air clean.
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