THE FOREIGNER'S GIFT

Sahib, you know our Kareem also saw such a cloud of smoke that night. It was not purple though but white, more like a ghoul swimming in the air in search of its prey. That night was a night of great cold for us. I could see Baburam, my son breathing cloud of mist while sitting outside in the damp ground smoking bidi. Soon the white fog of death encompassed us and all started coughing, frothing and vomiting. It bleached the eye-balls of our people into white beads. Those who had little life in them started running to wherever they could go. The air was filled with howling of dying animals and wailing of mothers. Most of the children died instantly. No one knew what to do. Many people died of stampede. They were all fleeing Mauthganj. Few days after that dreadful night, I visited the local hospital in search of Chandu .A ghost I am now, I can go anywhere. You know Sahib, how much it pained to see them. Most of the known faces were blinded. I saw Chuniram the Pan-wala, as the doctor slowly opened the patti (cover) from his eyes, I shuddered. It was like a blob of sallow mass, nothing left, no eyeballs, nothing


----- The story starts at night with two persons sitting atop a dismantled pesticide factory’s methyl isocyanate tank .The factory is located in Mauthganj where thousands of people were killed by the factory’s poisonous gas. Both the person is dead, their ghosts interacting with each other. One of a nuclear Scientist, Mr. Naren Shekhawat who lost his whole family in the nuclear bombing of Shikohima in Japan in August,1945 and was also the pioneer of India’s first nuclear test in Kohran,a place in the Jaisalmer district of Rajasthan. The other is of Shantaram Pandey, a slum dweller being killed by the poisonous methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas from the American pesticide factory in Mauthganj. Shantaram was the teacher of local municipal school and lived in the Khadipore slum which mushroomed on the fringes of the factory.