It's a night of horror that will live on forever in the mind of the man unfortunate enough to have been working in the forensic department of the medical college here when gas leaked out of the Union Carbide plant, killing 3,000 people instantly.
Twenty years after that dreadful night of Dec 2-3, 1984, the memories have not receded into the folds of time. Doctor Divya Kishor Satpathy, Bhopal's "autopsy man", still shudders when he recalls how his department performed 1,000 autopsies on Dec 3, 725 the next day and 55 on the third day.
"There were small babies, many of them still cuddling their mothers. But all dead. What was their fault? They had nothing to do with Union Carbide, nothing to do with Sevin (the pesticide the multinational produced)," says Satpathy, wiping a tear.
He was then working at the forensic department of Bhopal's Gandhi Medical College and is now the director of the medico-legal department of the college.
Two decades after the world's worst industrial disaster, that killed an estimated 20,000 people over the years and maimed many, many more, has been relegated to token headlines, Satpathy remembers.
"I was home when I got a call for doctor Heeresh Chandra, the then director. He asked me to come to the mortuary immediately. Thousands were lying around, many dead, many others unconscious. And none of these people had anyone to attend to, because the relatives had run away to save their own lives."
"We had only 10-15 doctors. And no one had a clue what gas it was. We called experts, including the Union Carbide people, but no one seemed to know. Clearly, Union Carbide had never told its Indian employees about methyl-isocyanate because nobody would have worked there otherwise," says the 55-year-old.
Nearly 40 tonnes of methyl-isocyanate had escaped from tank number 610 of the Union Carbide plant that night, killing 3,000 people instantaneously.
"It was not possible to do post-mortem for every body, so we went by the sample method. After all, if 50 people drown in a river, it is pointless to perform autopsies on all 50," he says.
Moreover, he had a bigger problem on hand -- what to do with the bodies?
"I assigned 10 bodies to each medical student who would take their details - height, features, the clothes they were wearing and so on - and keep records. That helped people to know the fate of their relatives," Satpathy recalls.
Another problem was shortage of shrouds to cover the dead. Cloth merchants of Bhopal were generous enough to throw open their shops and give away bundles and bundles.
The Muslim victims were covered in white and the Hindus in red. Pharmacy stores were opened and medicines given away, though nothing much could be done to help the gas victims except treat them for symptoms like burning in the eyes, vomiting and coughing.
"We were in the mortuary for five days. No one went home. And every half an hour one of us used to cry," Sathpathy says, tears welling up in his eyes.
"The living always lie. It is the dead who tell the truth," says Bhopal's autopsy man.
--Indo-Asian News Service