That Night
Cette Nuit-là
«Quand j'ai vu les feuilles des arbres noircir et s'enrouler sur elles-mêmes, ainsi que les oiseaux mort tomber du ciel, j’ai su que c'était la mort qui venait parmi nous comme on l'avait prédit. Mon seul regret est d’y avoir survécu »[1].
La mort est venue d'un ciel clair. Vers minuit, un vent frais qui balayait les rues de la ville et faisait s’amincir la brume provenant des feux de bois, dévoila le spectacle d’un ciel éclairé par une nexus d’étoiles brillantes. Ici et là, les brasiers brûlaient pour réchauffer le corps de ceux qui étaient obligés de demeurer dehors à cette heure tardive. Sans attirer l’attention, un mince filet de vapeur blanche commença à s’échapper d’une structure surélevée de l'usine que tant de personnes avaient déjà appris à craindre. S’enroulent doucement dans les courants froid de la brise nocturne, celle-ci se transformât en une brume mortelle qui, soufflée vers le sol, se mélangea à la fumées provenant des foyer; formant ainsi un épais brouillard qui s’abattit sur la ville endormie. Dans les fragiles maisons précairement construites les unes sur les autres, et dont les portes et les fenêtres mal ajustées faisaient de celle-ci des nids à courants d’air, les habitants somnolents se réveillèrent au son des hurlements afin de ressentir à leur tour les effets douloureux d’une future mort probable. Le gaz venait de faire de leurs gorge un brasier sec, de leurs yeux des piments humides et de leur nez un inhalateur de douleur.
[1] “When I saw the leaves on the trees curl and turn black and birds fall dead out of the sky, I knew that this was Death, come among us as foretold. My regret is that I survived”.
Ferme‘When I saw the leaves on the trees curl and turn black and birds fall dead out of the sky, I knew that this was Death, come among us as foretold. My regret is that I survived.’
Death came out of a clear sky. Midnight, a cold wind blowing, the stars brilliant as they are in central India, even through the thin pall of cooking-fire smoke that hung above the city. Here and there, braziers were burning to warm those who were obliged to be out late. From the factory which so many had learned to fear, a thin plume of white vapour began streaming from a high structure. Caught by the wind, it became a haze and blew downward to mix with smokes coming from somewhere nearer to the ground. A dense fog formed. Nudged by the wind, it rolled across the road and into the alleys on the other side. Here the houses were packed close, ill-built, with badly-fitting doors and windows. Those within were roused in darkness to the sound of screams with the gases already in their eyes, noses and throats. It burned terribly, it felt like fire.
When dawn broke over the city, thousands of bodies lay in heaps in the streets. Even far from the factory, near the lake at Rani Hira Pati ka Mahal, the ground was so thick with the dead that you could not avoid treading on them. The army dumped hundreds of bodies in the surrounding forests and the Betwa river was so choked with corpses that they formed log-jams against the arches of bridges. Families and entire communities were wiped out, leaving no one to identify them.
