Five Past Midnight in Bhopal – Read Now and Download Mobi
Copyright © 2002 by Pressinter S.A. and Sesamat Worldwide Rights S.A.
All rights reserved.
WARNER BOOKS
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.
First eBook Edition: April 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-56124-2
Contents
Part One: A NEW STAR IN THE INDIAN SKY
1 Firecrackers That Kill, Cows That Die, Insects That Murder
2 The Planetary Holocaust Wrought by Armies of Ravaging Insects
3 A Neighborhood Called Orya Bustee
4 A Visionary Billionaire to the Rescue of Humanity’s Food
5 Three Zealots on the Banks of the Hudson
6 The Daily Heroism of the People of the Bustees
7 An American Valley That Ruled the World
8 A Little Mouse under the Seats of Bhopal’s Trains
9 A Poison That Smelled Like Boiled Cabbage
10 They Deserved the Mercy of God
12 A Promised Land on the Ruins of a Legendary Kingdom
13 A Continent of Three Hundred Million Peasants and Six Hundred Languages
15 A Plant as “Inoffensive as a Chocolate Factory”
16 A New Star in the Indian Sky
17 “They’ll Never Dare Send in Their Bulldozers”
18 Wages of Fear on the Roads of Maharashtra
20 “Carbide Has Poisoned Our Water!”
21 The First Deadly Drops from the “Beautiful Plant”
22 Three Tanks Dressed up for a Carnival
23 “Half a Million Hours of Work and Not a Day Lost”
24 Everlasting Roots in the Black Earth of the Kali Grounds
Part Two A NIGHT BLESSED BY THE STARS
25 A Gas That Makes You Laugh Before It Kills You
26 “You Will Be Reduced to Dust”
27 Ali Baba’s Treasure for the Heroes of the Kali Grounds
28 The Sudden Arrival of a Cost-Cutting Gentleman
29 “My Beautiful Plant Was Losing Its Soul”
30 The Fiancés of the Orya Bustee
31 The End of a Young Indian’s Dream
32 The Vengeance of the People of the Kali Grounds
33 Festivities That Set Hearts Ablaze
35 A Night Blessed by the Stars
Part Three THREE SARCOPHAGI UNDER THE MOON
36 Three Sarcophagi under the Moon
37 “What if the Stars Were to Go on Strike?”
39 Lungs Bursting in the Heart of the Night
40 “Something Beyond All Comprehension”
41 “All Hell Has Broken Loose Here!”
42 A Half-Naked Holy Man in the Heart of a Deadly Cloud
43 The Dancing Girl Was Not Dead
44 “Death to the Killer Anderson!”
45 “Carbide Has Made Us the Center of the World”
Epilogue
What Became of Them
“All That Is Not Given Is Lost”
Other books by
Dominique Lapierre and Javier Moro
Dominique Lapierre
A Thousand Suns
Beyond Love
The City of Joy
Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins
The Fifth Horseman
Freedom at Midnight
O Jerusalem
… Or I’ll Dress You in Mourning
Is Paris Burning?
Javier Moro
The Mountains of the Buddha
The Jaipur Foot
Los Senderos de la Libertad
To the heroes of the Orya Bustee,
of Chola and of Jai Prakash Nagar.
First and foremost we would like to express our immense gratitude to our wives, Dominique and Sita, who shared every moment of our long and difficult research and who were our irreplaceable helpers in the preparation of this work.
Heartfelt appreciation to Colette Modiano, Paul and Manuela Andreota, Pascaline Bressan, Michel Gourtay, Mari Carmen Doñate, Eugenio Suarez and Antonio Ubach, who spent long hours correcting our manuscript and gave us their encouragement.
A very special thank you to Antoine Caro for his exceptional assistance with the preparation of this book, as well as to Pierre Amado for his valuable advice on India.
This book is the fruit of patient research both in the United States and in India. In the United States we would like particularly to thank engineer Warren Woomer and his wife Betty who made us welcome in their charming house in South Charleston, enabling us to reconstruct the happy years when Warren was in charge of the Bhopal factory. Similarly we would like to thank engineer Eduardo Muñoz for our innumerable meetings in San Francisco and at his villa in Sausalito, in the course of which we were able to reconstruct, almost day by day, the adventure of establishing a high-tech pesticide plant in the heartland of India, and Muñoz’s fight to limit its size and the dangers involved.
Again in the United States, we would like to thank Halcott P. Foss and engineers Jean-Luc Lemaire and William K. Frampton, for having opened wide the doors to the Institute 2 factory, the Bhopal plant’s elder sister, where Sevin is still produced from deadly methyl isocyanate. Additional thanks go to Jean-Luc Lemaire and to René Crochard for the illuminating explanations that facilitated the writing of the technical parts of our book. We include in this American tribute Ward Morehouse and David Dembo who, from their small East River office in New York, conduct an unrelenting struggle to make the truth about the Bhopal disaster known and who generously gave us access to their precious archives. And we would like to express our gratitude to Kathy Kramer for having placed at our disposal documentation concerning the Boyce Thompson Institute in Yonkers where the Sevin, which was to wipe out insects ravaging the harvests of peasants throughout the world, was invented.
Among all the Indian engineers who took part in the adventure of Bhopal’s “beautiful plant,” our gratitude is due primarily to Kamal Pareek for the entire days we spent together, reconstructing in every little detail the extraordinary hope that the Bhopal factory had brought with it, the subsequent slow agony and the eventual catastrophe. Grateful thanks also go to engineers Umesh Nanda and John Luke Couvaras who patiently shared their memories and entrusted numerous unpublished documents to us. We would similarly like to express out gratitude to Jagannathan Mukund who was the factory’s last managing director and who allowed us to bombard him with questions for three days on his Conoor property in the mountains of the Nilgiris in southern India.
Naturally a very large part of our research was conducted in Bhopal itself, where the assistance of Satinath Sarangi and his team of record keepers from the Sambhavna Trust was indispensable to us, as were the generous help and hospitality of Farah Khan and her mother Niloufar Khan, Begum Rachid, Bano and Yadar Raachid Uzzafar Khan, Sonia and Nader Raachid Uzzafar Khan, as well as Mr. and Mrs. Balthazar de Bourbon, Enamia, Kamlesh Jamaini, the chronicler Nasser Kamal, Manish Mishra and Dr. Zahir ul-Islam who helped us uncover the secrets of the culture and legendary past of their beautiful city.
We wish to thank also his excellency Mr. Digvijay Singh, the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, for his warm reception, and all those who so generously helped us in the various aspects of our research. By alphabetical order: M.M. Shyam Babu, K.D. Ballal in Bangalore, Dr. Bambhal, Sudeep Banerjee, Sajda Bano, Ahmed Bassi, Dr. Bhandari, Praful Bidwai, N.M. Buch, Father Dennis Carneiro, Amar Chand, Dr. Heeresh Chandra, T.R. Chouhan, S.P. Chowdhary, Mr. Chughtai, Deena Dayalan and the staff of The Other Media, Mr. Diwedi, Dr. Banu Dubey, R.K. Dutta, Dr. Deepak Gandhe, Brigadier Garg, Subashe Godane, V.P. Gokhale from Eveready, Ahsan Hussain, Santosh Katiyar, Rehman Khan, Colonel Gurcharan Singh Khanuja, Rajkumar Keswani, Dr. Loya, Dr. N.P. Mishra, Dr. Nagu, Shekil Qureshi, Ganga and Dalima Ram, Dr. Rajanarayan, Salar, Dr. Sarkar, Dr. Satpathy, Arvind Shrivastava, V.N. Singh, Commissioner Ranjit Singh, S.K. Trehan, Dr. Trivedi, Dr. Varadajan, Mohan Lal Varma, Rev. Timothy Wankhede.
Union Carbide’s management in India and the United States failed to respond to our requests for interviews and information.
By contrast, we are grateful to the Rhône-Poulenc division of Aventis, which took over the proprietorship of the Institute 2 factory in the United States, and to its director for agro-international public relations, Georges Santini, for having generously received us both in Institute 2 and at the research department in Lyon. We include in our appreciation Christine Giulani, in charge of public relations for Dow Agro Sciences, for the warm welcome provided at the Letcombe Regis laboratories in Great Britain.
We want to thank also our friends who made our travels and stays in India so productive and pleasant: M.M. Sanjay Basu and all the staff at Far Horizon, Ranvir Bhandari, Audrey Daver, Bharat Dhruv, Madan Kak and the whole staff of TCI, Sanjiv Malhotra, Sunil Mukherjee, Gilbert Soulaine and Gilles Renard.
We address our special gratitude to those who help us so generously in our humanitarian work: their excellencies the ambassadors Bernard de Montferrand and Kanwal Sibal, Mary Allizon, Rina and Takis Anoussis, David Backler and the Foundation Marcelle and Jean Coutu, Otto Barghezi, Jamshed Bhabha, Drs. Françoise Baylet-Vincent, Angela Bertoli, Henri-Jean Philippe and their benevolent friends of the organizations Gynécologie sans Frontières and Pathologie, Cytologie et Développement, Lon and Dick Behr, Nicolas Borsinger and the Foundation ProVictimis, Pierre Ceyrac, Kathryn and John Coo, Gaston Dayanand, Peter and Richard Dreyfus, Behram and Mani Dumasia, Catherine and David Graham, Priti Jain, Mohammed Kamruddin and the whole team of UBA, Adi and Jeroo Katgara, Ashwini and Renu Kumar, François Laborde and the whole team of HSP, Ila Lumba, Michèle Migone and all the Friends of Italy, Christina Mondadori and the Foundation Benedetta d’Intino, Aman Nath, Aloka Pal, Sabitri Pal, Shirin Paul, Mohammed Abdul Wohab and the whole staff of SHIS, Gaston Roberge, June and Paul Shorr, James Stevens and the whole team of Udayan, Sukhesi Didi and the whole staff of Belari, Ratan Tata, chairman of the Tata Group, Suzanne and Alexander Van Meerwijk, Francis Wacziarg, Harriet and Larry Weiss and all those who prefer to remain anonymous.
We could not have written this book without the enthusiastic faith of our publishers. Our warm thanks to Leonello Brandolini, Nicole Lattès and Antoine Caro in Paris; Carlos Reves and Berta Noy in Barcelona; Shekhar and Poonam Malhotra in Delhi; Helen Gummer and Katharine Young in London; Gianni Ferrari, Massimo Turchetta and Joy Terekiev in Milan; Larry Kirshbaum and Jessica Papin in New York; and finally to our friend and translator Kathryn Spink, herself the author of remarkable works on Mother Teresa, Brother Roger of Taizé, Little Sister Magdeleine of Jesus and Jean Vanier.
One day I met a tall Indian in his forties, with a red bandanna around his head and hair knotted in a braid at the back of his neck. The brightness of his smile and the warmth of his expression made me realize immediately that this was a man with compassion for the poor. Having heard that my second City of Joy dispensary boat had just been launched in the Ganges Delta to bring medical aid to the inhabitants of the fifty-four islands, he wanted to ask for my help.
Right after he got the news of a deadly chemical accident in the city of Bhopal, Satinath Sarangi, “Sathyu” as he is called, rushed to the rescue of the survivors of the worst industrial disaster in history. On the night of the second of December 1984, a massive leak of toxic gases killed between sixteen and thirty thousand people and injured around five hundred thousand others. Sathyu decided to dedicate his whole life to the victims. Since 1995, he has been running a nongovernmental, nonpolitical and nonreligious organization, which tirelessly cares for the poorest and most neglected men, women and children affected by the gas.
Sathyu wanted to ask me to finance the creation and equipment of a gynecological clinic to treat underprivileged women who, sixteen years after the tragedy, were still suffering from its dreadful effects.
I had a vague recollection of the tragedy but, in all my fifty years of roving about India, I had never visited the magnificent capital of Madhya Pradesh.
I went to Bhopal. What I found there gave me what was probably one of the strongest shocks of my life. With the help of my book royalties and the generosity of readers of The City of Joy, Beyond Love and A Thousand Suns, we were able to open the gynecological clinic. Today it takes in, treats and cures hundreds of women whom the town’s hospitals had abandoned to their fate.
Above all, however, the experience pointed me in the direction of one of the most enthralling subjects of my career as a journalist and writer: Why and how could such a monumental accident take place? Who were the people who initiated it, those involved in it, the victims of it, and finally who benefited from it?
I asked the Spanish writer Javier Moro, author of The Mountains of the Buddha, a moving book on the tragedy of Tibet, to join me in Bhopal. Our research went on for three years. This book is the fruit of it.
Dominique Lapierre
Concern for man himself and his safety
must always form the chief interest of all
technical endeavors.
Never forget this in the midst of your
diagrams and equations.
Albert Einstein
A NEW STAR IN THE INDIAN SKY
Firecrackers That Kill, Cows That Die, Insects That Murder
Mudilapa. One of India’s fifteen hundred thousand villages and probably one of the poorest in a country the size of a continent. Situated at the foot of the remote hill region of the state of Orissa, it comprised some sixty families belonging to the Adivasi community, descendants of the aboriginal tribes that had populated India over three thousand years ago before the Aryans from the north drove them back into the less fertile mountainous areas.
Although officially “protected” by the authorities, the Adivasis remained largely beyond the reach of the development programs that were trying to improve the plight of the Indian peasants. Deprived of land, the inhabitants of the region had to hire out their hands to make a living for their families. Cutting sugar cane, going down into the bauxite mines, breaking rocks along the roads—no task was too menial for those disenfranchised by the world’s largest democracy.
“Goodbye wife, goodbye children, goodbye Father, Mother, parrot. May the god watch over you while I’m away!”
At the beginning of every summer, when the village lay cloaked in a leaden and blazing heat, a lean, dark-skinned, muscular little man would bid farewell to his family before setting off with his bundle on his head. Thirty-two-year-old Ratna Nadar was embarking on a strenuous journey: three days of walking to a palm grove on the shores of the Bay of Bengal. Because of the strength in his arms and legs he had been taken on by a tharagar, an agent who traveled about recruiting laborers. Work in palm groves required an unusual degree of agility and athletic strength. Men had to climb, bare-handed and without a safety harness, to the top of date palms as tall as five-story houses in order to collect the milk secreted from the heart of the tree. These acrobatic ascents earned Ratna Nadar and his companions the nickname “monkey-men.” Every evening the manager of the enterprise would come and take their precious harvest and transport it to a confectioner in Bhubaneswar, the capital city of Orissa.
Ratna Nadar had never actually tasted this delicious nectar. But the four hundred rupees he earned from a season spent risking life and limb enabled him to feed the seven members of his family for several weeks. As soon as his wife Sheela had wind of his return, she would light an incense stick before the image of Jagannath, which decorated one corner of the hut, and thus gave thanks to the Lord of the Universe, a manifestation of the Hindu god Vishnu adopted by these Adivasis. Sheela was a frail but spirited woman with a ready smile. The braid down her back, her almond-shaped eyes and rosy cheeks made her look like a Chinese doll. There was nothing very surprising about that; her ancestors belonged to an aboriginal tribe, originally from Assam, in the far north of the country.
The Nadars had three children. The eldest, eight-year-old Padmini, was a delicate little girl with long dark hair tied in two braids. She had inherited Sheela’s beautiful, slanting eyes and her father’s determined profile. The small gold ring, which she wore, as tradition dictated, through the ala of her nose, enhanced the brightness of her face. Getting up at dawn and going to bed late, Padmini assisted her mother with all the household chores. She had helped to raise her two brothers, seven-year-old Ashu and six-year-old Gopal, two tousle-haired little rascals more inclined toward chasing lizards than fetching water from the village water hole. Ratna’s parents also shared the Nadars’ home: his father Prodip, whose gaunt face was traversed by a thin, gray mustache, and his mother Shunda, already wrinkled and bent.
Like tens of millions of other Indian children, Padmini and her brothers had never been anywhere near a school blackboard. The only lessons they had learned taught them how to survive in the harsh world into which the gods had ordained they should be born. And, like all the other occupants of Mudilapa, Ratna Nadar and his family were always on the lookout for any opportunity to earn the odd rupee. Each year, at the beginning of the dry season, one such opportunity arose: the time came to pick the various leaves used to make bidis, the slender Indian cigarettes with the tapered tips.
For six weeks, along with most of the other villagers, Sheela, her children and their grandparents, would set off each morning at dawn for the forest of Kantaroli. There, the people would invade the undergrowth like a swarm of insects. With all the precision of robots, they would detach a leaf, place it in a canvas haversack and repeat the same process over and over again. Every hour, the pickers would stop to make up bunches of fifty leaves. If they hurried, they could generally manage to produce eighty bunches a day. Each bunch was worth thirty paisa, not quite two U.S. cents, or the price of two eggplants.
During the first days, when the picking went on at the edge of the forest, young Padmini would often manage to make as many as a hundred bunches. Her brothers Ashu and Gopal were not quite as dexterous at pinching off the leaves. But between the six of them, the children, their mother and their grandparents, they brought back nearly a hundred rupees each evening, a small fortune for a family used to surviving for a whole month on far less.
One day, word went around Mudilapa and the surrounding villages that a cigarette and match factory had recently been set up in the area, and that children were being taken on as labor. Of the hundred billion matches produced annually in India, many were still made by hand, and mostly by children, whose little fingers could manage the delicate work. This was true also for rolling bidis.
The opening of this factory created quite a stir among the inhabitants of Mudilapa. There were no lengths to which people would not go to seduce the tharagar whose job it was to recruit the workforce. Mothers rushed to the mohajan, the village usurer, and pawned their last remaining jewels. Some sold their only goat. And yet the jobs they sought for their children were harsh in the extreme.
“My truck will come by at four every morning,” the tharagar announced to the parents of the children he had chosen. “Anyone who is not outside waiting for it had better look out.”
“And when will our children be back?” Padmini’s father gave voice to all the other parents’ concern.
“Not before nightfall,” the tharagar responded curtly.
Sheela saw an expression of fear pass over Padmini’s face. She sought at once to reassure her.
“Padmini, think what happened to your friend Banita.”
Sheela was referring to the neighbors’ little girl whose parents had just sold her to a blind man so they could feed their other children. There was nothing particularly unusual about the arrangement. Sometimes in the mistaken belief that their children were going to be employed as servants or in workshops, parents entrusted their daughters to pimps.
It was still pitch dark when the truck horn sounded the next morning. Padmini, Ashu and Gopal were already waiting outside, huddled together against the cold. Their mother had risen even earlier to prepare a meal for them: a handful of rice seasoned with a little dhal, * two chapatis† each and a chili pepper to share, all wrapped in a banana leaf.
The truck stopped outside a long, open, tiled shed, with a baked earth wall at the back and pillars to support the roof at the front. It was not yet daybreak and kerosene lamps scarcely lit the vast building. The foreman was a thin, overbearing, bully of a man, wearing a collarless shirt and a white loincloth.
“In the darkness, his eyes seemed to blaze like the embers in our chula, ‡ ” Padmini would recount.
“All of you sit down along the wall,” he ordered.
Then he counted the children and split them into two groups, one for cigarettes, the other for matches. Padmini was separated from her brothers and sent to join the bidi group.
“Get to work!” the man in the white loincloth commanded, clapping his hands.
His assistants then brought trays laden with leaves like those Padmini had picked in the forest. The oldest assistant squatted down in front of the children to show them how to roll each leaf into a little funnel, fill it with a pinch of shredded to bacco, and bind it with a red thread. Padmini had no difficulty imitating him. In no time at all she had made up a packet of bidis. “The only thing I didn’t like about it was the pungent smell of the leaves,” she would confide. “To get through the pile of leaves in front of us, we found it best to concentrate on the money we’d be taking home.”
Other workmen deposited piles of tiny sticks in front of the children assigned to making matches.
“Place them one by one in the slots of this metal support,” the foreman explained. “Once it’s full, turn it round and dip the ends of the sticks in this tank.”
The receptacle contained molten sulfur. As soon as the tips had been dipped and lifted out again, the sulfur solidified instantly.
Padmini’s younger brother surveyed the steaming liquid with apprehension.
“We’ll burn our fingers!” he said anxiously, and loudly enough for the foreman to hear.
“You little idiot!” the man retorted. “I told you, you only immerse the end of the wooden sticks, not the whole thing. Have you never seen a match?”
Gopal shook his head. But his fear of being burned was nothing compared with the real risk of being poisoned by the toxic fumes coming off the tank. It was not long before some of the children began to feel their lungs and eyes burning. Many of them passed out. The foreman and his assistants slapped their faces and doused them with buckets of water to revive them. Those who fainted again were mercilessly expelled from the factory.
“Shortly after our arrival, a second shed was built to house a work unit to make firecrackers,” Padmini would recount. “My brother Ashu was assigned to it with about twenty other boys. After that I only saw him once a day, when I took him his share of the food our mother had prepared for us. The foreman would ring a bell to announce the meal break. Woe betide any of us who were not back in our places by the second bell. The boss would beat us with the stick he carried to frighten us and make us work faster and faster. Apart from that short break, we worked without interruption from the time we arrived until nightfall, when the truck would take us home again. My brothers and I were so tired we would throw ourselves onto the charpoy* without anything to eat and fall asleep straightaway.”
A few weeks after the opening of the firecracker unit, tragedy struck. Suddenly Padmini saw a huge flame blazing in the shed where her brother Ashu was working. An explosion ripped away the roof and wall. Boys emerged, screaming, from the cloud of smoke. They were covered in blood. Their skin was hanging off them in shreds. The foreman and his assistants were trying to put out the fire with buckets of water. Padmini rushed frantically in the direction of the blaze, shouting her brother’s name. She was running about in all directions when she stumbled. As she fell, she saw a body on the ground. It was her brother. His arms had been blown off in the blast. “His eyes were open as if he were looking at me, but he wasn’t moving,” she would say. “Ashu was dead. Around him lay other little injured bodies. I picked myself up and went and took my other brother’s hand. He had taken refuge in a corner of the match shed. I sat down beside him, held him tightly in my arms, and together we wept in silence.”
One month after this accident, a uniformed official from the Orissa Department of Animal Husbandry appeared in Mudilapa. Driving a jeep equipped with a revolving light and a siren, he was the first government representative ever to visit the village. Using a loudspeaker, he summoned the villagers, who assembled around his jeep.
“I have come to bring you great news,” he declared, caressing the bullhorn with fingers covered in rings. “In accordance with her policy of helping our country’s most underprivileged peasants, Indira Gandhi, our prime minister, has decided to give you a present.” Bemused, the man marked the astonishment clearly visible on the faces of those present. Waving a hand at random in the direction of one of them, he inquired, “You, do you have any idea what our mother might want to give you?”
Ratna Nadar, Padmini’s father, hesitated. “Perhaps she wants to give us a well,” he ventured.
Already, the man in uniform had turned to someone else. “And you?”
“She’s going to make us a proper road.”
“And you?”
“She wants to provide us with electricity.”
“And you? …”
In less than a minute, the government envoy was in a position to assess the state of poverty and neglect in the village. But he was not concerned with any of these pressing needs. Heightening the suspense with a protracted silence, at last he continued: “My friends, I’ve come to inform you that our beloved Indira has decided to give every family in Mudilapa a cow.”
“A cow?” repeated several stupefied voices.
“What are we going to feed it on?” someone asked anxiously.
“Don’t you worry about that,” the visitor went on. “Indira Gandhi has thought of everything. Every family is to receive a plot of land on which you’ll grow the fodder you need for your animal. And the government will pay you for your labors.”
It was too good to be true.
“The gods have visited our village,” marveled Padmini’s mother. She was always ready to thank heaven for the slightest blessing. “We must offer a puja* at once.”
The government envoy continued his speech. He spoke with all the grandiloquence of a politician coming to dispense gifts before an election.
“Don’t go, my friends, I haven’t finished! I have an even more important piece of news for you. The government has made arrangements for each one of your cows to give you a calf from semen taken from specially selected bulls imported from Great Britain. Their sperm will be brought to you from Bombay and Poona by government vets who will themselves carry out the insemination. This program should produce a new breed in your region, capable of yielding eight times more milk than local cattle. But take note that to achieve this result, you will have to undertake never to mate your cow with a local bull.”
The bewilderment on the faces of the onlookers had been replaced by joy.
“Never before have we had a visit from a benefactor like you,” declared Ratna Nadar, sure that he was relaying the gratitude of them all.
The day the herd arrived, the women dug out their wedding saris and festival veils from the family coffers as if it were the Diwali or Dassahra † celebrations. All night long they danced and sang around the animals, who joined in with a concert of mooing.
The Nadars named their cow after Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth to whom the Adivasis were as fervently devoted as Hindus.
Just as the government envoy had announced, a few weeks later, vets arrived in Mudilapa. They came bearing fat syringes to inseminate the cows with British sperm. Ten moons later, in the yard outside every hut in the village, a calf made its entry into the world. But the villagers’ joy lasted only one night. Not one of the young calves managed to get to its feet and suckle from its mother. Sheela tried in vain to induce the starving newborn to drink a little milk out of a coconut shell. One after another, all the calves died. It was a disaster.
“I’m going to take Lakshmi to a local bull,” Ratna Nadar told his family one morning. “It’s because their fathers aren’t from around here that our calves died,” he said.
His neighbors decided to do the same but the attempt proved fruitless. The government agents had taken their own precautions. To prevent the peasants from having their cows inseminated by a local bull, they had had them all castrated.
The inhabitants of Mudilapa took heart once more when they saw the young shoots they had sown for their cows on the half-acre allotted to them by the government sprouting from the ground. At least they would be able to feed their cattle. Every morning Ratna Nadar took his family to the field to watch over the welfare of the future harvest. One day, they noticed that the grass had changed color. It had turned gray. It couldn’t be for want of water; the soil was still damp from the last rains. On careful examination of the stems, Ratna, and every other farmer in the village, discovered that they were infested with black aphids that were devouring the stalks’ outer layers and sucking up the sap. Calamity had struck Mudilapa. Was Jagannath angry? The Nadars and their neighbors went to ask the village priest to offer a puja to the great god in order that their fields might be restored to health. Without fodder, their cows would die. The old man with his shaven head traced a circle around a few shoots and began to dance, chanting the ritual prayers. Then he sprinkled them with ghee, clarified butter, and set fire to them one by one.
But Jagannath refused to hear. Consumed by aphids, the Nadars’ fodder died in a matter of days. It was September and they would not be able to sow again until the following spring. Soon their cow was reduced to skin and bone. The region’s cattle merchants got wind of the catastrophe. Like vultures they descended on Mudilapa, buying the animals dirt cheap while they were still alive. The Nadars had to resign themselves to letting Lakshmi go for fifty rupees, a little over a dollar.
The sale enabled them to hold out for a few more weeks. When the elderly Shunda, the grandmother who kept the family savings wrapped up in a handkerchief, had got out her last few coins, Ratna gathered his family around him.
“I’m going to the moneylender,” he declared. “I shall give him our field as security for his lending us something to live on until next seed-time. This time we’ll sow corn and lentils. And we’ll find a way of preventing those cursed little creatures from devouring our harvest.”
“Ratna, father of my children,” Sheela interrupted timidly, “I’ve hidden it from you until now so as not to worry you, but you must know that we no longer have a field. One day when you were away, working in the palm grove, the government people came and took back all the plots of land they found with no crops on them. I tried to tell them that insects had eaten what we had planted, but they would not listen. The man in charge shouted ‘You’re useless!’ and tore up the papers they gave us when they brought us the cows.”
The family fell silent, the despair palpable. Then a child’s voice rang out in the overheated hut.
“I’ll go back to rolling bidis,” declared Padmini.
Her courageous offer would not be accepted. A few days later, an unknown tharagar turned up in Mudilapa. He had been sent by the Madhya Pradesh Railroad to recruit a workforce to double the railway lines into the station in Bhopal, the state capital.
“You could earn as much as thirty rupees a day,” he told Ratna Nadar, carefully examining the date-palm climber’s muscles with a professional eye.
“What about my family?” asked Nadar.
The tharagar shrugged his shoulders.
“Take them with you! There’s plenty of room in Bhopal!” He counted the number of people in the hut. “There you go. Six train tickets for Bhopal,” he said, taking six small squares of pink paper out of his lunghi, a long cotton loincloth knotted at the waist. “It’s a two- to three-day journey. And on top of that, here’s a fifty-rupee advance on your first wages.”
The tharagar was not being generous; the Adivasis were known to be as undemanding as they were exploitable.
The deal was done in five minutes. The Nadar family’s exodus posed hardly any problems. Apart from a few tools, linens and household utensils and Mangal, the irrepressible parrot with his red and yellow plumage, they had no possessions. The next monsoon storms would demolish the hut, unless some passing family happened to take possession of it in the meantime.
One morning, just as Surya, the sun god, was casting his first pink rays over the horizon, the Nadars set off, with Ratna and his father, Prodip, leading the way. They all carried bundles on their heads. The small caravan, to which other Mudilapa families had attached themselves, left a cloud of dust behind it. Young Gopal, the parrot cage in hand, pranced for joy at the prospect of adventure. Padmini, however, could not hold back tears. Before the road veered away to the north she looked back over her shoulder for one last time and bade farewell to the hut that had been her childhood home.
The Planetary Holocaust Wrought by Armies of Ravaging Insects
The misfortune of the peasants from Mudilapa was just one tiny episode in a tragedy affecting the entire planet. The black aphids that had driven the Nadars from their land were among eight hundred and fifty thousand varieties of insects—which, since the dawn of humanity, have been stripping us of our food supply. Many of their names give scant indication of the nature and magnitude of the disasters they cause. How, after all, would anyone ever suspect the oriental fruit moths, red-banded leaf rollers, rosy apple aphids, striped stem-borers or indeed white-backed plant-hoppers, of such capacity for destruction? With their flamboyant carapaces and their elaborate and varied weapons, these parasites are among the most fabulous creatures in the bestiary of God’s imagination. The dazzling iridescence of some fruit-eating moths is reminiscent of glittering, bejeweled apparel and quite unlike the hairy coat of the repulsive caterpillars that destroy cotton fields. Every species has its own method of surviving, to the detriment of its prey. There are insects that suck, like Mudilapa’s Indian aphids. Then there are pulp-eaters, plant-eaters and wood-eaters. Some grind up their prey with their mandibles, some suck it dry with a long proboscis, others lick it before sucking it up through a sheath encircling their tongue and yet others stab it with a “dagger,” then pump out the sap. Some nibble at leaves, gnawing them into crenallated shapes or puncturing them with little holes. Others invade the leaf canals and spread themselves through the veins. Dense foliage suddenly finds itself riddled with whitish spots that harbor armadas of assailants the size of pinheads. All at once, healthy, vigorous plants find themselves covered with brownish powdery pustules, which cause them to wither and die.
The muscular, ballerinalike thighs of Mexican bean beetles enable them to jump from stem to stem like circus acrobats, while yellow stem-borers haul themselves over leaves as laboriously as tortoises. The beetles that kill grains are threadlike; the tipulas that destroy vegetables look like mosquitoes engorged with blood. Moths with shimmering, scaly, double wings that live on lentils, hairy thrips that kill olive trees, scarlet acarus worms that are the terror of the orchard—all form part of a sinister, infinitely small jungle teeming with life.
Because of their unlimited capacity to adapt, these insects are found in any environment or latitude, from the blazing sands of the African desert to the Arctic ice floes. Some have been responsible for many of humanity’s worst catastrophes: the grasshoppers that plagued ancient Egypt; the phylloxera aphid that wiped out the French vineyards at the end of the last century; the Colorado beetle that caused the Irish potato famine.
These little creatures are unrelenting. The same maggot can travel from plant to plant in fields of corn, barley, oats or rye. Stems punctured and roots consumed by the bulimia of millions of larvae, cereal crops are destroyed on a vast scale before producing a single grain. Rice, which makes up 60 percent of the grain used as food for the world’s population, is a prime target for these plunderers. Rice whorl maggots with their cylindrical bodies, pink semiloopers, biting spring beetles, grayish-colored, legless tipula, the armyworm caterpillar, June bug larvae, leafhoppers, millipedes, threadworms—over a hundred species attack this single cereal grain. Among the most devastating is a moth called “pyralid,” meaning literally “insect living in fire,” whose long, grayish caterpillars dig tunnels in the stalks of rice until they topple over. No less destructive are certain vicious little creatures armed with sucking stylets and protected from predators by thick carapaces. As for weevils, they have probably gobbled up more rice, corn and potatoes than humankind has managed to consume since agriculture first began.
For thousands of years, man has been conducting a desperate war against the authors of this destruction. Texts from ancient China, Rome and medieval Europe, all abound in extraordinary accounts of such battles. Lacking any effective means to ward off attack, our ancestors relied on magical and religious practices. Nepalese peasants posted notices in their paddy fields prohibiting insects from entry “on pain of legal proceedings.” Less naive but just as unrealistic, Roman peasants had pregnant women walk in circles around their fruit trees. Medieval Christians organized processions and novenas to counteract the cochylis and the corn and vine pyralids. Farmers in Venezuela beat the ears of their grain with belts in the hope that such rough treatment would strengthen their plants’ resistance to parasites. While Siamese farmers dotted their fields with eggshells pinned to sticks, those in Malaysia attached dead toads to bamboo poles to drive the white fly from their rice fields. Believing insect attacks to be the necessary consequence of sin in a divine and perfect creation, people took them to court. In 1120 in the Swiss city of Lausanne, caterpillars were excommunicated. Five centuries later a court in the French province of Auvergne condemned other caterpillars to go and “finish their wretched lives” in a place expressly provided for the purpose. Insects were brought to trial in Europe until 1830.
Fortunately, other more realistic countermeasures had been tried. By flooding their fields at certain times of the year, peasants in the south of India had managed to drown millions of destructive insects. In Kenya and Mexico the simple idea of planting squares of maize as lures in the middle of other crops had saved vegetable and sorghum plantations. Elsewhere the use of predatory insects had won some splendid victories. Texts dating from the third century A.D. report that Chinese growers infested their lemon trees with ants, which ate Vanessas, the richly colored butterflies that sowed terror in their orchards. Fifteen centuries later, the mandibles of a killer scarabaeid beetle saved the citrus plantations of California from the ravages of the Australian fly.
At the end of the nineteenth century, vegetable-based materials such as nicotine or the pyrethrum flower, and mineral substances such as arsenic and copper sulfate, supplied peasants with new weapons, which they called by the magic names of “insecticides,” and “pesticides.” With the discovery in 1868 that spraying the arsenic-based dye Paris green on cotton parasites had a guaranteed effect, the United States launched a frenzied campaign to commercialize natural poisons. By 1910, the new American pesticide industry was worth more than $20 million. Lead-arsenate-based products were then added to Paris green. The first world war brought about explosive expansion in other directions. With German submarines preventing the importing of Paris green and the war effort commandeering arsenic for the manufacture of munitions, flares and combat gas, insecticide producers turned to the chemical industry.
Only too delighted to find an outlet for petroleum byproducts, chemists were quick to take up the challenge. Large European and American companies invested huge sums of money in research into synthetic molecules that could destroy predatory insects. Thus the period between the two world wars witnessed the advent of a string of chemical families, each with new capabilities for exterminating parasites. The goal appeared to be reached on the eve of the second world war when Herman Mueller, a Swiss chemist trying to come up with an effective contact insecticide, discovered a molecule that seemed to meet his requirements. It bore the unwieldy name of dichlorodiphenyl-trichloroethane. Fortunately the Swiss scientist found a shorter, more convenient label. The insect world was about to tremble; DDT had been born. This spectacular discovery earned its author the Nobel prize for physiology and medicine, since DDT would bring about the mass extermination of malaria-carrying mosquitoes in the field of military operations, thereby saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of soldiers. At the end of the war this organic insecticide was put to the civilian use for which it had been invented. Field studies showed that it swiftly destroyed an extensive range of plant-eating insects, and thus immediately increased agricultural yield. Experiments carried out in New York and Wisconsin revealed that the yield from potato fields treated with DDT shot up by 60 percent. The euphoria that greeted these gratifying results subsided when scientists discovered that DDT also contaminated the earth, mammals, birds, fish and even people. It was soon declared illegal in most Western countries. In Europe and the United States, legislation was introduced to oblige pesticide manufacturers to respect the increasingly draconian protection and safety standards. Under pressure from an impatient agricultural industry, they geared their research to finding products that would reconcile the destruction of insects with a level of toxicity tolerable to humanity and its environment. An extraordinary adventure was about to begin.
A Neighborhood Called Orya Bustee
After the fifty-nine hours in the colorful congestion of an Indian train, the exiles from Mudilapa at last reached their journey’s end: Bhopal. In the months that followed India’s independence, this prestigious city had been made the capital of Madhya Pradesh, a state a little larger than California and situated at the geographical heart of the country. Padmini Nadar and her family had marveled continuously on the beauty of the countryside they traversed, especially as they drew nearer to the city. Wasn’t it in these deep, mysterious forests that the god Rama and the Pandava brothers of Hindu mythology had taken refuge, and that Rudyard Kipling had set The Jungle Book? And wasn’t it true that tigers and elephants still roamed the jungle? A few miles before their destination the railway had run past the famous caves of Bhimbekta, the walls of which were decorated with prehistoric aboriginal rock paintings.
The station where the immigrants from Orissa got off was one of those caravanserais swirling with noise, activity and smells, typical of India’s large railway terminals. It had been built the century before. Not even the most colorful festival in Adivasi folklore could have given Padmini or her family an inkling of the celebrations staged in that station on November 18, 1884, its inauguration day. A British colonial administrator had proposed linking the ancient princely city to British India’s rail network after a terrible drought had caused tens of thousands of local people to die of starvation, deprived of aid for want of communication lines. History has largely overlooked the name of the flamboyant Henry Daly who was responsible for giving Bhopal the most valuable asset an Indian town could then receive from its colonizers. A retinue of britannic excellencies in braided uniforms studded with medals and all the local dignitaries in ceremonial costumes had come running at the invitation of the begum, a slight woman hidden beneath the folds of a burkah, * who ruled over the sultanate of Bhopal. The festivities went on for three days and three nights. Along railway tracks decked out with triumphal arches in the red, white and blue of the British empire, crowds of local people had gathered to greet the arrival of the first seven carriages decorated with marigolds. On the platform stood a double file of mounted lancers, companies of turbaned sepoys and the musicians of the royal brass band. Alas, there was no radio or television in those days to immortalize the speeches exchanged by the representative of Victoria, “Empress of her subjects over the seas,” and the sovereign who presided over this small corner of British India. “I offer up a thousand thanks to the all-powerful God who has granted that Bhopal enjoy the signal protection of Her Imperial Majesty so that the brilliance of Western science may shine forth upon our land …” the Begum Shah Jahan had declared. In response, the envoy from London extolled the political and commercial advantages that the railway would bring, not only to the small kingdom of Bhopal, but to the whole of central India. Then he raised his glass in a solemn toast to the success of the modern convenience, for which the enlightened sovereign had provided the funds. A firework display crowned the occasion. That day a piece of ancestral India had espoused itself to progress.
For a long moment the Nadars hesitated without daring to take a step, so overwhelmed were they by the scene that greeted them as they got out of the train car. The platform was packed with other dispossessed peasants who had come there, like them, in search of work. The Nadars found themselves trapped in a tide of people coming and going in all directions. Coolies trotted about with mountains of suitcases and parcels on their heads, vendors offered every conceivable merchandise for sale. Never before had they seen such sumptuousness: pyramids of oranges, sandals, combs, scissors, padlocks, glasses, bags; piles of shawls, saris, dhotis;* newspapers, all kinds of food and drink. Padmini and her family were bewildered, astounded, lost. Around them many of the other travelers appeared to be just as disoriented. Only Mangal the parrot seemed completely at ease. He never stopped warbling his joy and making the children laugh.
“Daddy, what are we going to do now?” Padmini asked, visibly at a loss.
“Where are we going to sleep tonight?” added her brother, Gopal, who was holding the parrot’s cage above his head so that his parents would see him in case they got separated.
“We should look for a policeman,” advised the old man Prodip, who had been no more able than his son to decipher the contract the tharagar for the railway had given them.
Outside the station, an officer in a white helmet was trying to channel the chaotic flow of traffic. Ratna cut a way through to him.
“We’ve just arrived from Orissa,” he murmured tentatively. “Do you know if anyone from there lives around here?”
The policeman signaled to him that he had not understood the question. It was hardly surprising; so many people speaking different languages got off the train at Bhopal.
Suddenly Padmini spotted a man selling samosas, triangular fritters stuffed with vegetables or meat, on the far side of the square. With the sixth sense that Indians have for identifying a stranger’s origin and caste, the little girl was convinced she had found a compatriot. She was not wrong.
“Don’t worry, friends,” declared the man, “there’s an area around here occupied exclusively by people from our province. It’s called the Orya Bustee * and the people who live there are all from Orissa like you and me, and speak Orya, our language.” He waved an arm in the direction of the minaret of a mosque opposite the station. “Skirt that mosque,” he explained, “and continue straight ahead. When you get to the railway line, turn right. You’ll see a load of huts and sheds. That’s Orya Bustee.”
Ratna Nadar bowed down to the ground in thanks, touching the samosa seller’s sandals with his right hand, which he then placed on his head.
Padmini rushed to the parrot’s cage. “We’re saved!” she cried. The bird responded with a triumphant squawk.
As soon as he saw the little caravan approaching, the man seized his walking stick and went out to meet it. He was a hefty fellow of about fifty with a curly mop of hair and sideburns that joined the drooping ends of his mustache.
“Welcome, friends!” His soft voice belied his imposing appearance. “I guess it’s a roof that you’re after here!”
“A roof would be a lot to hope for,” stammered Ratna Nadar apologetically, “but perhaps just somewhere for me and my family to camp.”
“My name is Belram Mukkadam,” the stranger announced, pressing his hands together in front of his chest to greet the little group. “I run the Committee for Mutual Aid for neighborhoods on the Kali Grounds.” He pointed in the direction of the string of sheds and huts on the edge of a vast empty expanse along the railway line. “I’ll show you where you can settle and build yourself a hut.”
Mukkadam was not an Adivasi, but he spoke the language of the people of Orissa. Thirty years earlier he had been the very first person to settle on the wasteland on the northern side of the city, bordering on what had once been the immense parade ground of the Victoria lancers, the cavalry regiment of the nawabs of Bhopal. The hut he had built with the help of his wife Tulsabai and their son Pratap had been the first of the hundreds that now made up three neighborhoods of improvised homes, in which several thousand immigrants from different Indian regions lived. Apart from the Orya Bustee, there was the Chola Bustee and the Jai Prakash Bustee. Chola means “chickpea.” It was by planting chickpeas that the first occupants of the Chola Bustee had escaped starvation. As for Jai Prakash, it was named after a famous disciple of Mahatma Gandhi who had taken up the cause of the country’s poor.
His position as dean of the three bustees had earned Belram Mukkadam a special prerogative, one never contested by the various godfathers of the local mafia who controlled those poor neighborhoods. And since there was no municipal authority to intervene, Mukkadam was the one who allocated newcomers the plots on which to make their homes.
Leading the Nadar family along a path that ran beside the railway track, he pointed to an empty space at the end of a row of huts.
“There’s your bit of ground,” he said, tracing a square three yards by three yards in the dark earth with his tamarind stick. “The Committee for Mutual Aid will bring you materials, a char-poy and some utensils.”
Once more Ratna Nadar prostrated himself on the ground to thank this new benefactor. Then he turned to his family.
“The great god’s anger is spent,” he declared. “Our chakra* is turning again.”
Orya Bustee, which Padmini and her family would now call home, was the poorest of the three poverty-stricken neighborhoods that had grown up along the parade ground. In the labyrinth of its alleyways, one sound singled itself out from all the others: that of coughing. Here, tuberculosis was endemic.
There was no electricity. There was no drinking water, no drainage and not even the most rudimentary hospital or clinic. There were scarcely even any vendors, except for a traveling vegetable salesman and two small tea stalls. The sweet milky tea sold in clay beakers was an important source of energy for many of the local residents. Apart from four skeletal cows and several mangy dogs, the only other animals were goats. Their milk provided precious protein for their owners, who, in winter, had no reservations about swaddling their animals in old rags to prevent them from catching cold.
Yet for all its poverty, Orya Bustee was unlike any of the other slums. Firstly, it had managed to maintain a rural feel, which contrasted with the jumble of huts made out of planks and sheet metal in the other neighborhoods. Here all the dwellings were made out of bamboo and mud. These katcha, or “crude earth,” houses were decorated with geometric designs drawn in rice paste to attract prosperity, just as they were in the villages of Orissa. These houses gave this area of concentration-camplike congestion an unexpected rural charm. The former peasants who had taken refuge there were not marginalized people. In their exile they had managed to reconstruct their village life. They had built a small temple out of bamboo and baked mud to house an image of the god Jagannath. Next to it, they had planted a sacred tulsi, a variety of arborescent basil with the power to repel reptiles, especially cobras with their deadly venomous bite. The neighborhood women were particularly devoted to Jagannath: those suffering from sterility would make offerings to him in the hope to be cured. Here, as elsewhere in India, faith manifested itself in an uninterrupted succession of ritual festivities. A boy’s first tooth, his first hair cut; a girl’s first period, engagement, marriage, mourning; Diwali, the festival of lights, the Muslims’ Eid and even Christmas—all of life’s events, all festivals secular or religious, were publicly marked. For all their lack of education and material poverty, the Adivasis of Orya Bustee had managed to maintain the rites and expressions of the social and religious life that made up the rich and varied texture of their homeland.
A Visionary Billionaire to the Rescue of Humanity’s Food
The crime committed by the infamous aphids in the Mudilapa fields would not go unpunished. All over the world armies of scientists and researchers were working relentlessly to destroy the miniature monsters. One of the chief temples dedicated to the crusade against the insects was an agronomical research center in Yonkers, a residential suburb of New York City on the banks of the Hudson River. It was called the Boyce Thompson Institute.
The man who founded this institute was a billionaire with a messianic desire to commit his wealth to some great humanitarian cause. William Boyce Thompson (1869–1930) had amassed a huge fortune from copper mining in the mountains of Montana. In October 1917 the American Red Cross had made him a colonel and placed him in charge of an aid mission to Russia, then in the throes of the Bolshevik revolution. The generous industrialist had swapped his bow tie and top hat for a military uniform, and added a million dollars of his own money to the funds produced by the American government for the victims of the Russian famine. He came back from his journey convinced that world peace depended on the equitable distribution of food, a conviction that was reinforced by his ardent faith in science and which led to the formulation of a spectacular philanthropic project. Because population growth was going to increase the need for food, it was vitally urgent to understand “why and how plants grow, why they flourish or decline, how their diseases can be stemmed, how their development can be stimulated by better control of the elements that enable them to live.” The study of plants, so the generous patron claimed, could make a decisive contribution to humanity’s well-being.
Out of this conviction was born, in 1924, the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research, an ultramodern agronomical research center, built on several acres of land less than an hour from downtown New York City. Endowed by its founder with $10 million—a considerable sum at the time—the institute incorporated chemistry and biology laboratories, experimental greenhouses and insect vivaria.
It was on the front line of the battle against plant-eating species that the Boyce Thompson Institute researchers achieved their first significant victories: they eradicated the beetles killing Californian pines by inventing a subtle, sweet-smelling substance that lured the destructive little creatures into fatal traps.
At the beginning of the 1950s the Aphis fabae wrought havoc on the farmlands of the United States, Mexico, Central and South America. Found also in Malaysia, Japan and southern Europe, the Aphis fabae attacked potatoes, cereals, beetroot and fruit trees, as well as vegetables, animal fodder and garden plants. This tiny predator has a beak equipped with two very fine piercing stylets with which it sucks the sap from plants. As the Indian farmer Ratna Nadar would so painfully discover, plants abruptly deprived of their vital substance wither and perish in days. Before going in for the kill, this aphid, scarcely bigger than a pinhead, injects its victim with toxic saliva, causing hideous deformation of the stalks and leaves. To finish off the job, it exudes from its rectum honeydew to attract ants. These ants deposit a sootlike residue on the leaves, which stifles any growth.
This was not the only nightmare parasite to afflict American and Asian farmers at that time. The red vine spider, a species of armyworm and the striped stem-borer joined forces with other destructive insect species to deprive humanity of a large part of its agricultural resources. Only the chemical industry could come up with a means of eradicating such a scourge. Conscious of all that was at stake, a number of companies went into action. One of them was American. Its name was Union Carbide.
Born at the beginning of the century of a marriage of four companies that produced batteries and arc lamps for acetylene street lights and headlights for the first cars, Carbide—as it was affectionately known by its staff—owed its first glorious hour to World War I. It was helium from its stills that enabled tethered balloons to rise into the skies above France and spot German artillery fire; it was iron- and zirconium-based armor-plating of its invention that thwarted the Kaiser’s shells on the first Allied tanks; it was Carbide’s active carbon granules in gas masks that protected the lungs of thousands of infantrymen in the trenches of the Somme and Champagne. Twenty-five years later, another world war was to enlist Carbide’s services for America. Out of its collaboration with the scientists of the Manhattan Project, the first atomic bomb was born.
In less than a generation the absorption of dozens of other businesses propelled the company to the forefront of America’s multinationals. By the second half of the century it was among the mightiest of U.S. companies, with 130 subsidiaries in some 40 countries, approximately 500 production sites and 120,000 employees. In 1976 it was to announce a revenue of $615 billion. The products that emerged from its laboratories, factories, pits and mines were innumerable. Carbide was the great provider of industrial gases such as nitrogen, oxygen, carbon, methane, ethylene and propane used in the petrochemical industry, as well as chemical substances like the ammonia and urea used in the manufacture of fertilizers, among other things. It also produced sophisticated metallurgical items based on alloys of cobalt, chrome and tungsten that were used in high-tensile equipment such as airplane turbines. Finally, it made a whole range of plastic goods for general use. Eight out of ten American housewives did their shopping with plastic bags stamped with the blue-and-white logo of Union Carbide. The logo also appeared on millions of plastic bottles, food packaging, photographic film and many other everyday items. The intercontinental telephone conversations of half the planet’s inhabitants were conducted via underwater cables protected with sheathing made by Carbide. The antifreeze for one in every two cars, 60 percent of batteries, 60 percent of silicone implants used in cosmetic surgery, the rubber for one in every five tires, most aerosol fly and mosquito sprays, and even synthetic diamonds issued from the factories of a giant whose shares were among the safest investments on Wall Street.
From its imposing fifty-two-story aluminum and glass skyscraper at 270 Park Avenue in the heart of Manhattan, Carbide determined the habits and dictated the choices of millions of men, women and children across the five continents. No other industrial company enjoyed the same degree of respectability. After all, didn’t people say that what was good for Carbide was good for America—and therefore the world?
The production of pesticides was in line with its past and its experience. The objective—to rid humanity of the insects that were stealing its food—could only enhance its international prestige.
Three Zealots on the Banks of the Hudson
They looked more like Davis Cup players than laboratory researchers. Thirty-four-year-old Harry Haynes and thirty-six-year-old Herbert Moorefield, both vigorous and fit-looking men, belonged to a profession that was relatively new. They were doctors of entomology. In July 1954, Union Carbide’s management had rented an entire wing of the Boyce Thompson Institute in Yonkers for these two eminent experts. It had further strengthened the team by adding to it one of the most brilliant staff members of its South Charleston, West Virginia, research center, thirty-eight-year-old chemist Joseph Lambrech. To these three exceptionally gifted people the company entrusted a mission of the utmost importance: Devise a product capable of exterminating a wide range of parasites while adhering to prevailing standards for the protection and safety of humans and the environment. That summer, on the top floor of the multinational’s New York office, no one was in any doubt: the company that managed to reconcile these two objectives would walk away with the world pesticide market. Lambrech gave the object of his labors a code name: Experimental Insecticide Seven Seven. For convenience’s sake it would soon become “Sevin.”
Going through all his predecessors’ studies with a fine-tooth comb, the chemist combined new molecules, hoping to find one that would kill aphids, red spiders and armyworms without leaving too many toxic residues in the vegetation and environment. For months on end, his entomologist colleagues tested his combinations on leaves, stems and ears of corn infested with all kinds of insects. In its hundreds of cages and containers, the Boyce Thompson Institute harbored an unimaginably rich zoo of the infinitely small. It also had acres of glass houses in which all the climates of the planet could be recreated around a limitless variety of plants. In large glass cases the different molecules could be tested with sprays of varying doses, directed from every possible angle at samples of every variety of crop. The entomologists Haynes and Moorefield would then deposit colonies of insects raised in their laboratories on the treated surfaces. Hour by hour they would observe their subjects’ agony. They collected the corpses on glass slides, examined them under the microscope, and subjected the plants and soil to detailed analysis to find any traces of chemical pollution. Their observations would enable their chemist colleague to hone the production of an insecticide ever nearer to what was required.
After three years of intense effort the team came up with a combination of a methyl derivative of carbamic acid and alpha naphthol, in the form of whitish crystals soluble in water. Those three years had been taken up with hundreds of experiments, not just on all known species of insects, but also on thousands of rats, rabbits, pigeons, fish, bees and even shrimps and lobsters. Finally, one evening in July 1957, the three zealots in Yonkers, together with their wives, were able to crack open a bottle of champagne. Although the god DDT had had to be cast down, agriculture would not remain defenseless. Sevin, born on the banks of the Hudson, would soon put a weapon in the hands of all the farmers of the world.
Carbide was quick to flood America with brochures proclaiming the birth of its miracle product. There was no end to the praises sung to it. To underline its “low toxicity to humans,” photographs depicted Herbert Moorefield, one of the inventors of Sevin, in the process of tasting a few granules with all the glee of a child licking his chocolate-coated lips. According to the publicity, Sevin protected an infinite range of crops: cotton, wheat, lemons, bananas, pineapples, olives, cocoa, coffee, sunflowers, sorghum, sugar cane and rice. You could spread it on maize, alfalfa, beans, peanuts and soybeans right up until harvest time, with no danger of any toxic residues. It worked just as well on adult insects as it did on eggs and larvae. It was so effective that it even poisoned parasites that had developed resistances to other insecticides. Its potency was not limited to agricultural crops. A few ounces of Sevin spread around the outside of a home, or sprayed on the walls, frame or roof, exterminated mosquitoes, cockroaches and other bugs harmful to family life. Better still, Sevin controlled the number of fleas, lice and ticks on dogs, cats and farmyard animals, without putting their lives at risk. In short, Sevin was precisely the lucrative panacea that Carbide’s new agricultural products division had been waiting for.
No one was more convinced of this fact than a twenty-nine-year-old Argentinian agronomical engineer. Handsome and charming, Eduardo Muñoz came from a well-to-do Buenos Aires family. He had chosen to pursue agronomy as an act of defiance after he failed the entrance examination for the diplomatic service. He had married an attractive American girl who worked at the United States embassy, and so found among his wedding presents the perfect incentive to set off for new pastures, the celebrated green card. Out of the fifty offers he received when he sent off his curriculum vitae, he chose the first. It came from Union Carbide. A year’s training on the various company sites and a monthly salary of $485 had turned the handsome Argentinian into a proper “Carbider.” The invention of Sevin was to provide him with the opportunity to exercise his extraordinary talents as a salesman. In Mexico, Columbia, Peru, Argentina, Chile, Brazil … soon there was hardly a single farmer who was not aware of the merits of the American pesticide. Agricultural fairs, harvest competitions, farmers’ meetings—Muñoz was everywhere with his banners glorifying Sevin, his on-site demonstrations, his handouts and his sponsored lotteries. It was almost inevitable that Central and South America would one day become too restrictive for the indefatigable traveling salesman. He would have to find other places in which to satisfy his passion for selling.
The Daily Heroism of the People of the Bustees
Here, brother, it is cheaper to sweat a fellow to death than hire a buffalo,” remarked Belram Mukkadam to Padmini’s father who had just come back from a day’s work on the railway line.
The sturdy date-palm climber from Orissa was reeling with exhaustion. All day long he had carted sleepers and heavy steel tracks from one place to another. The coolies the railway management had recruited were all immigrants like him, forced into exile by the poverty of the countryside.
From the outset, this slave labor had been terrible. Ratna Nadar grew weaker by the day, stricken with nausea, cramps, bouts of sweating and dizziness. His muscles wasted visibly. Soon he had difficulty standing. He suffered from hallucinations and nightmares. He was the victim of what specialists call “convict syndrome.” The small quantity of rice, lentils and occasional fish that he bought before leaving for work in the morning was for him. It is a tradition among India’s poor that the family food be kept for the rice-earner. Even so, the frequent lack of cooking fuel prevented him from eating it. Several weeks passed before Ratna felt his strength returning. Only then could the whole family eat.
For Padmini and her brother Gopal, the brutal immersion in the overpopulated world of city workers was just as painful. Every day they saw sights that shocked the sensibilities of children raised in the countryside.
“Gopal, look!” cried Padmini one morning, pointing to a gang of youngsters scaling the back of a stationary train.
“They’re out to pinch bits of coal,” Gopal explained calmly.
“They’re thieves!” Padmini was indignant, furious that her brother did not share her outrage. Her eyes filled with tears.
“Dry your eyes, little one!” a grown-up voice commanded. “You too will pick up coal to make ladhus.* If you don’t, your mother won’t be able to cook anything for you to eat.”
The man who had just spoken had no fingers left on his right hand. Padmini and her parents would come to know and respect this prominent figure in Orya Bustee. At thirty-eight, Ganga Ram was a survivor of leprosy, a disease that still afflicts five million Indians today. Thrown out on the streets by the owner of the garage in Bombay where he used to wash cars, Ram had ended up in the communal ward of Hamidia Hospital in Bhopal. He had been treated and cured, and had a certificate given to him by a doctor to prove it. Uncertain where to go and what to do, for seven years he had remained in the wing for contagious diseases, performing small services for the nurses and patients. He had applied dressings, changed the incontinent, administered enemas and even given injections. One day, he was called upon to transport an attractive woman of about thirty with luminous green eyes. A truck had broken both her legs. Her name was Dalima, and it was love at first sight. During her stay in the communal ward, Dalima had adopted a ten-year-old orphan who had been found half dead on a sidewalk. He had been taken to the hospital in a police van. His name was Dilip. Lively and alert, this skinny urchin with short-cropped hair was the darling of the occupants of the communal ward. A few weeks later, the former leper, Dalima and young Dilip left the hospital to settle in Orya Bustee. There, with the tip of his walking stick, Belram Mukkadam had assigned them a place on which to build a hut. Some of the neighbors provided bamboo canes, planks and a piece of canvas; others brought cooking utensils, a charpoy and a little linen. “All we had by way of luggage were Dalima’s crutches,” Ganga Ram recalled.
For months they survived on Dilip’s resourcefulness alone. He was the one who inveigled the neighborhood children into pinching bits of coal fallen from the locomotives. One morning, he persuaded Padmini to go with him.
“You have to hurry up, little sister. The railway police are on the lookout.”
“Are they nasty?” The little girl was worried.
“Nasty!” The boy burst out laughing. “If they catch you, be prepared to give them a fat baksheesh.* Otherwise they’ll take you away in a van and there …” Dilip made a gesture that the little peasant girl did not understand.
When they got back from their expedition, the slum midwife, the elderly Prema Bai, who lived in the hut opposite the Nadars, gave her young neighbor a little straw and some nanny-goat droppings.
“Crumble the coal with the straw and the droppings and knead the whole lot together for a good while,” she instructed. “Then make little balls out of it and put them to dry.”
An hour later Padmini took the fruits of her harvest triumphantly to her mother.
“Here you are, Mother: ladhus. Now you’ll be able to cook Father’s food.”
For peasants used to the sovereign silence of the countryside, the din of the trains passing in front of their huts was a painful trial. Their lives revolved around the rhythm of the incessant coming and going of dozens of trains. “I got to know their timetable, to know whether they were on time or late,” Padmini recalled. “Some of them, like the Mangala Express, made our huts shake as they roared past in the middle of the night. That was the worst one. The Shatabdi Express to Delhi went by in the early afternoon and the Jammu Mail just before sunset. The drivers must have had fun, terrifying us with the roar of their whistles.”
There were some advantages to being so close to the railway tracks. When a red light brought a train to a halt outside the huts, the engineers would throw a few coins for the children to run and buy them some pan, a betel leaf filled with spices that is chewed. There was always some small change left over.
“Watch where you put your feet when you’re walking between the rails,” Dilip advised Padmini. “That’s where people go to take a crap.”
Fortunately, the tracks were also strewn with a multitude of small treasures that people on the trains had thrown away. There were bottles, old tubes of toothpaste, dead batteries, empty tins, plastic soles, shreds of clothing and tags to be picked up. Dilip used to negotiate a price for them with a ragpicker who came around every week. The daily takings could be as much as three or four rupees, about ten cents. Dilip and Gopal, Padmini’s brother, would cut out the picture of the Taj Mahal from Magnet cigarette packs and make playing cards, which they sold on the station platforms. “I shall never forget the Orya Bustee trains,” Padmini would say. “They brought a little excitement and joy into our difficult life.”
One of these joys came from an unexpected source. Every morning, Padmini’s mother and her neighbors would take up their positions along the railway line to wait for the arrival of the Punjab Express. On their heads they carried buckets, bowls and basins. As soon as the train stopped, they would rush to the engine.
“May the great god bless you!” they would call out in a chorus to the engineer. “Will you turn on your tap for us?”
If he was kindly disposed, the driver would undo the valve on his boiler and fill their containers with a few gallons of a commodity to which few of Bhopal’s poor had access: hot water.
An American Valley That Ruled the World
Dilip had an eye for these things. He saw at once that the hut built by Ratna Nadar and his family would never survive the onslaughts of the monsoon.
“You should double the roof supports,” he advised Padmini.
The little girl gave a gesture of helplessness.
“We haven’t even the money to buy incense sticks for the god,” she sighed. “It’s three days since Grandpa and Grandma have eaten. They refuse to sacrifice the parrot.”
Dilip took a five-rupee note out of his shorts.
“There,” he said, “that’s an advance on our next treasure hunt along the railway track. Your father will be able to buy two bamboo poles.”
That same year, on the other side of the world, in a lush valley in West Virginia, a team of Union Carbide engineers and workmen were putting in the girders for a new factory destined to be the multinational’s flagship. The Kanawha Valley had long served as a fief of the company with the blue-and-white logo. Curiously enough, it owed its nickname of “Magic Valley” to the most ordinary of resources: its salt beds. With reserves of almost a billion tons, the area had attracted people and animals since prehistoric times. Salt had made wild animals carve pathways through the forest to the saline pools along the river. It had sent Indians along the same routes in pursuit of game, then provided them with the brine in which to preserve their kill. In the seventeenth century, it had drawn a few intrepid explorers to an otherwise inhospitable region, for white gold was not the magic valley’s only trump. The ancient forests that covered it had provided the material necessary to build houses, as well as boats and barges in which to transport the salt, carts, bridges and mill wheels. An entire lumber industry had grown up along the Kanawha. Connecting directly with the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, the river gave the valley’s merchandise and travelers access to the center and the south of the country.
At the beginning of the first world war, the valley was also found to contain prodigious energy resources. The discovery of oil, coal and natural gas had precipitated the Kanawha into the world of the chemical industry. The 1920s had seen the region’s woodlands replaced by forests of metal chimneys, towers, flares, reservoirs, platforms, and pipe and tube work. These new factories belonged to giants like Du Pont de Nemours, Monsanto and Union Carbide. It was there, on its Institute site, and in its research center a few miles away from the peaceful little town of South Charleston, that Carbide’s chemical engineers had come up with the innumerable innovative products that were to transform the lives of millions. Turning chemistry into the Mr. Fix-it of everyday life, they had helped to revolutionize products as varied as fertilizers, medicines, textiles, detergents, paints, film … The list was endless but, because the chemical industry is not quite like any other, the revolution had its price. Many of the substances that go into these workaday goods are as dangerous as the radiation produced by the nuclear industry. Ethylene oxide, involved in the manufacture of automobile antifreeze, is potentially as deadly as plutonium dust. Phosgene, one of the components currently used in the production of fertilizers, killed thousands of World War I soldiers. Hydrogen cyanide, a gas with a pleasant almond smell and used in medicines, was adopted by a number of American prisons to execute those condemned to death. In its Kanawha Valley factories, Carbide alone produced two hundred chemical substances, many of which, like chloroform, acrylonitrile, benzene and vinyl chloride, are known or suspected carcinogens.
Like its competitors, Carbide devoted substantial sums to maintaining the safety of its staff and a strict policy of environmental safeguards. Chemical companies operating in the Kanawha Valley did not hesitate to award themselves certificates of good conduct, even as their toxic wastes were insidiously poisoning the lush countryside. Although their policy to protect the environment was widely reported by complacent medias, it didn’t always keep them out of court. Carbide was fined several times for pouring highly carcinogenic substances into the Kanawha River and the atmosphere. An inquiry conducted in the beginning of the 1970s revealed that the number of cancers diagnosed among the occupants of the valley was 21 percent higher than the national average. The incidences of lung and endocrine cancer, and leukemia in particular, were among the highest in the country. One study carried out by the state of West Virginia’s health department found that people living in areas downwind of the South Charleston and Institute factories presented twice as many cancerous tumors as the national average. Such concerns would not, however, prevent Carbide from constructing on its Institute site a completely innovative factory to facilitate the manufacture of the revolutionary insecticide the company wanted to distribute throughout the world—Sevin.
This high-tech project modified the procedure that the three researchers at the Boyce Thompson Institute had used to invent Sevin. It introduced a chemical process that would both substantially reduce production costs and eliminate waste. The manufacturing process involved making phosgene gas react with another gas called monomethylamine. The reaction of these two gases produced a new molecule, methyl isocyanate. In a second stage the methyl isocyanate was combined with alpha naphthol to produce Sevin. More commonly known by its three initials, MIC, methyl isocyanate is without any doubt one of the most dangerous compounds ever conceived by the sorcerer’s apprentices of the chemical industry. When toxicologists had tested it on rats, the results were so terrifying that the company banned their publication. Other experiments had shown that animals exposed to MIC vapors alone died almost instantaneously. Once inhaled, MIC destroys the respiratory system with lightning speed, causes irreversible blindness and burns the pigment of the skin.
German toxicologists had dared to conduct further tests by subjecting voluntary human guinea pigs to minute doses of MIC. Although disapproved of by the scientific community, these experiments did make it possible to determine the threshold of tolerance of exposure to MIC, in the same way that the level of tolerance to nuclear radiation had been established. The research was all the more helpful because thousands of workers making synthetic foam products, such as insulation paneling, mattresses and car seats, found themselves in daily contact with other isocyanates, cousins of MIC. Thanks to its new factory, Carbide could conceivably sell MIC to all those manufacturers who used isocyanates, but who were reluctant to take on the dangers involved in their production. Most important of all, with a more affordable supply, the American company could consider selling Sevin all over the world.
A Little Mouse under the Seats of Bhopal’s Trains
THE BHOPAL TEA HOUSE. There was something faintly comical about the sign. Its faded letters were displayed across the facade of a booth made out of planks, and stood opposite the entrance to Orya Bustee. There, amid the nauseating smell of frying fat, the traditional sweet tea with milk, millet flour fritters, minced chilies and onions, rice and dhal, chapatis and other kinds of griddle cakes were served. Its main trade, however, was in “country liquor,” or bangla, a local rotgut made out of fermented animal intestines, of which the teahouse sold gallons every day. A notice in English warned clients that the establishment did not give credit: YOU EAT, YOU DRINK, YOU PAY, YOU GO. The proprietor, a potbellied Sikh with bushy eyebrows, rarely showed himself. Although he was an important local figure, forty-five-year-old Pulpul Singh made his presence felt elsewhere. As the local moneylender for the three bustees, he practiced his trade from behind the heavy metal grilles of his two-story modern house at the entrance to Chola. Enthroned like a Buddha in front of his Godrej-stamped safe and two immense chromos of the Golden Temple of Amritsar and a portrait of Guru Nanak, the venerable founder of the Sikh community, Pulpul Singh exploited the economic misfortunes of the poor. To recover his debts, he had hired a convict on the run from a Punjabi prison. With a filthy turban on his head and his dagger ever at the ready, this villain was the terror of small borrowers. He had the protection of the police, whom he bribed on behalf of his master. So hated was he that his master could no longer allow him to run his drinks stall. Instead he employed the man most respected by the local people, Belram Mukkadam, whose walking stick had marked out the site for all the residents’ huts.
Founder of the Committee for Mutual Aid, which combated injustice and fought to relieve the worst cases of distress, Mukkadam was a legend in his own lifetime. For thirty years he had battled ceaselessly with corrupt officials, shady politicians, property agents and all those who wanted to get rid of the ghettos on the belt of land north of town. Because of him the date August 18, 1978, would become famous in the history of Bhopal. On that day, Mukkadam would lead two thousand poverty-stricken people to invade the local parliament and demand the cancellation of an eviction operation planned for the next day. He would encourage the poor to hold their heads high to strengthen their spirit of resistance, and he gathered around him men united regardless of religion, caste or background, who formed a sort of informal government for the bustees.
Despite the fact that a yawning divide separated this local hero from the sordid activities of his employer, Mukkadam had agreed to take on the management of the Bhopal Tea House because it provided him with a forum. Around its handful of tables reeking with alcohol, people could publicly discuss their affairs and better organize their response to any imminent danger.
The little girl bounded toward the disheveled looking man who had just appeared at the end of the alleyway, staggering like a drunk.
“Daddy, Daddy!” she cried as she ran toward her father.
Clearly, he had stopped at Belram Mukkadam’s teahouse. Although he was not a drinker, Padmini’s father had downed a few glasses of country liquor. It was an indication that something serious had happened. Padmini threw herself at his feet.
“The railway work is finished.” Ratna Nadar spoke with difficulty. “They’ve thrown us out.”
On that winter’s day more than three hundred coolies had suffered the same fate. There were no employment laws to protect temporary workers. They could be laid off at any time without notice or indemnity. For the Nadars, as for all the other families, it was a terrible blow.
“My father tried desperately to find another job,” Padmini would recount. “Every morning, he would set off in the direction of Berasia Road in the hope of meeting a tharagar who would take him on for a few hours or a few days to pull carts or carry materials. But there wasn’t any building work going on that winter. Once again our stomachs began to rumble.”
One evening when the whole family was preparing to go to bed without food, Sheela surprised them. She lined up all their bowls on the beaten earth floor and filled them with a glutinous gruel, generously sprinkled with aromatic curry powder.
“Be careful not to swallow the little bones,” she cautioned.
They all understood what she was saying. She had cooked the parrot.
The next morning, Padmini saw Dilip in the doorway to her lodging.
“Come with me and I promise you no one in your hut will ever go hungry again,” he declared.
The little girl surveyed the boy’s torn clothes with concern. His shorts and shirt were stained with blood.
“Where do you want to take me?” she asked, worried.
Dilip pointed to the amulet he wore around his neck. “Don’t be frightened. With this we won’t be in any danger.”
They walked along the railway line in the direction of the station. On the way, Dilip stopped at a pile of garbage and began to scratch furiously at it.
“Look, Padmini!” he exclaimed, brandishing two small brushes he had just unearthed. “These’ll earn you lots of rupees.”
At the station Dilip met up with the members of his gang.
“Hi there, boss!” called out one of the urchins, who was also armed with a small brush.
“No luck, the Delhi train’s late,” announced another boy.
“And the one from Bombay?” asked Dilip.
“Not announced yet,” replied a third who was wearing a little Muslim round cap on his head. The gang members belonged to all different faiths.
Dilip introduced Padmini to his companions who nodded their heads in admiration.
“With such a pretty mouse, we’re bound to make a fortune!” laughed the eldest.
The sound of a whistle cut short their conversation and spurred the small group to activity. Dilip dragged Padmini along by the hand and into the line to the other platform. The man who had blown the whistle was an inspector with the railway police. He and another policeman were about to launch themselves after the gang when Dilip raised his arm.
“I’m coming!” he called out.
Clambering over the rails with feline agility, he joined the policemen. Padmini saw her friend slip a bill discreetly into the inspector’s hand. Such bribery was standard practice. As the young man completed his transaction, the Delhi train arrived. The gang members spread themselves along the platform, dividing the various cars between them. Dilip pushed Padmini toward the first open door. He pointed out to her the rows of seats onto which the passengers were piling.
“Get down on all fours, crawl along with your brush, and pick up anything you can find,” he told her. “But hurry up! We have to get off at the next stop to come back to Bhopal!”
Padmini sneaked under the first row of seats, working as frantically as if she were prospecting for gold. Between the feet of one of the passengers, she noticed a piece of chapati. “I was so hungry I lunged at it and swallowed it,” she admitted. “Luckily people had also thrown away some banana skins and orange peels.” The little sweeper quickly gathered all this and more. At the first stop, she and her gang took an inventory of their findings.
“Guess what I’ve got in my hands,” she cried, holding her closed palm in front of the boy’s eyes.
“A diamond the size of a cork!”
“Idiot!” laughed Padmini, opening her hand to reveal two small five-paisa coins. “I’ll be able to buy my father two bidis.”
“Well done!” said Dilip with obvious excitement. He took from his waist a sock, a used battery, a sandal and a newspaper cone full of peanuts. “I’ll sell all this to my usual ragpicker. He should give me three or four rupees.”
That evening Dalima’s son brought his young accomplice a ten-rupee note. He had generously rounded up the amount he had received from the ragpicker.
Padmini caressed the note for a long moment. Then she sighed, “We’re saved.”
Soon Padmini had her favorite trains and knew all their conductors. Some of them would give her a rupee or two and sometimes a biscuit when they came across her during one of her sweeps. But there were also the big dadas* in Bhopal station. Always out for a fight, they would try and take whatever the sweepers had collected. They were in cahoots with the police and if Dilip did not give them ten or twenty rupees, out came their clubs.
“Often they would manage to snatch our entire day’s takings,” Padmini would say. “Then I would go home empty-handed and my mother and brother Gopal would start crying. Sometimes when the trains were running late, I would spend the night with Dilip and his gang in the station. When it was very cold, Dilip would light a fire on the platform. We would lie down next to the flames to sleep until the next train came through. There were times too when we slept in other stations, at Nagpur, Itarsi or Indore, waiting for a train to take us back to Bhopal.”
It was in one of these stations that one night Dilip and his companions would lose their little Adivasi sister.
A Poison That Smelled Like Boiled Cabbage
FATAL IF INHALED! Displayed on labels marked with a skull and crossbones, posters and printed pages in user manuals, the warning was directed at the manufacturers, transporters and users of MIC. The molecule was so volatile that its combination with only a few drops of water or a few ounces of metal dust would prompt an uncontrollably violent reaction. No safety system, no matter how sophisticated, would then be able to stop it from emitting a fatal cloud into the atmosphere. To prevent explosion, MIC had to be kept permanently at a temperature near 0° C. Provision had to be made for the refrigeration of any drums or tanks that were to hold it. Any plant that was going to carry stocks of it needed to be equipped with decontamination apparatus and flares to neutralize or burn it in case of accidental leakage.
Not surprisingly, the transportation of methyl isocyanate was subject to extraordinary safety precautions. Union Carbide’s internal guidelines, applicable worldwide, required delivery truck drivers to “avoid congested routes, bypass towns and cities, and stop as infrequently as possible.” In case of a sudden burning sensation in the eyes, they were to rush to the nearest telephone box and dial the four letters HELP, followed by 744-34-85, Carbide’s emergency number. They were then to evacuate their vehicle to “an unoccupied area.”
Carbide had decided to play its hand openly, which was not always the case in the chemical industry. A whole chapter of its manual detailed the horrible effects of inhaling MIC: first severe pains in the chest, then suffocation and, finally, pulmonary edema and possible death. In case of such an incident, the manual advised that contaminated parts should be rinsed with water, oxygen should be administered, as well as medication to dilate the bronchia.
All the same, Carbide did not publicly disclose all the information revealed by two secret studies undertaken at its request in 1963 and 1970 by the Mellon Institute of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. These studies of the toxicity of methyl isocyanate showed that under the influence of heat it broke down into several molecules, which were also potentially fatal. Among these molecules was hydrocyanide acid, a gas with a sinister reputation, which when inhaled in strong doses, almost invariably caused immediate death. The two studies also revealed, however, the existence of an antidote to this fatal gas. Injection with sodium thiosulfate could, in certain cases, neutralize the deadly effects of the gas. Carbide had not seen fit to include this information in its documentation for MIC.
It was in its new Institute plant on the banks of the Kanawha, that Carbide intended to make the MIC it needed for its annual production of thirty thousand tons of Sevin. Known as “Institute 2,” this plant was to operate in conditions so safe and with such regard for the environment that it would be an industrial model for the entire valley. Anchored in a sea of concrete, its metal structures were spread over five levels. Each was crammed with reactors, distillation columns, tanks, flares, condensers, furnaces, exchangers, pumps and a network of dozens of miles of piping of varying sizes and colors, according to what liquid or gas it conveyed.
“It was a really beautiful plant,” would recount American engineer Warren Woomer. He had joined Carbide at the age of twenty-two and had become an expert on high-risk plants. “It’s true that you had a sense of danger when you went in there. But I had gotten used to living among toxic substances. After all, chemical engineers spend their lives in contact with dangerous products. You have to learn to respect them and, above all, you have to get to know them and learn how to handle them. If you make a mistake, there’s very little chance they’ll forgive you.”
Warren Woomer knew that the piloting of this high-tech factory had been entrusted to the best professionals in the field. To belong to the MIC production unit was considered an honor on the Institute site. It also had its advantages as salaries there reflected the hazardous nature of the substances used: they were the highest in the company.
Carbide had provided the plant with an impressive arsenal of security systems. There were countless decontamination towers and flares capable of neutralizing and burning off large quantities of gas in case of accidental leakage. Hundreds of valves enabled any fluid showing an abnormal pressure to be evacuated into diversion circuits. Successions of thermostatic sluice gates, one-way valves, joints, rupture discs, temperature sensors and pressure gauges watched over all the sensitive equipment and the piping, which had itself been put together with high resistance welding and checked by X ray. Damping devices prevented any excessive movement of the metal. As in the most modern airplanes, the electric circuitry had been duplicated and protected to resist the onslaught of even the most corrosive acids. In the event of electricity failure, superpowerful generators would immediately cut in. Special double-skinned piping had been installed to conduct the MIC to its storage tanks. Between the skins a flux of nitrogen was circulated. Every ten yards sensors checked the purity of the gas. The tiniest escape of MIC into the nitrogen would be detected immediately and trigger an alarm and immediate intervention.
To ensure total reliability, the builders of Institute 2 had their high-performance equipment produced by International Nickel and Ingersol Rand, among the United States’ most eminent specialists in alloying and mechanical engineering.
No less exceptional precautions had been taken to ensure the safety of the staff. A network of loudspeakers and sirens, modulating differently according to the nature of the incident, was ready to go into action at the slightest alert. Crews of firemen specialized in chemical fires and a system of automatic sprinklers could flood the factory with carbonic foam in a matter of minutes. Dozens of red-painted boxes on every level equipped the workers with protective suits, breathing apparatus, ocular rinses and decontamination showers. The plant was even equipped with a monitoring system that was constantly analyzing samples taken from the atmosphere. If the safety level was exceeded, a loud alarm would sound and the location of the anomaly would appear on a screen.
With its walls studded with pressure gauges, levers and buttons, the control room looked like the flight deck on a Concorde. Day and night, different colored markers traced the plant’s every breath on rolls of graph paper. Keys, levers and handles relayed electronic orders to open or close the stop-cocks, shut down or activate a circuit, launch or interrupt a production or maintenance operation. One of the dials most carefully monitored was a temperature gauge. It was linked to thermometers located on each of the tanks of methyl isocyanate used in the continuous production of Sevin. Given that the needles on these instruments must never rise above 0° C, the builders of the American factory had lined the walls of the tanks with a skein of coils that circulated cooling chloroform.
It was on the smell, or rather the lack thereof, that the initial results of these unprecedented efforts were judged. A properly sealed chemical plant does not give off any smell. Such was not the case with the factories polluting the Kanawha Valley with emissions that none of its two hundred and fifty thousand residents could escape. “The smells ended up permeating the trees, flowers, the river water and even the air we breathed,” complained Pamela Nixon, a thirty-eight-year-old laboratory assistant at the Saint Francis Hospital in South Charleston. Along with several hundred other black families, she lived in the Perkins Avenue area, close by the tanks and chimneys of the Institute works. A few days before the launch of the new factory, Pamela and her neighbors found a leaflet in their mailboxes sent by Union Carbide’s local management. Entitled Plan for the General Evacuation of Institute, this document listed the procedures to be observed in case of an incident. The first instruction was to stay put. “Switch your radio to WCAW station, 689 meters medium wave, or your television to channel 8 on station WCHS,” the document instructed. “This is the kind of announcement that you are likely to hear: At ten o’clock this morning, the West Virginia state police reported an industrial accident involving dangerous chemical substances. The accident occurred at 09.50 hours at the Institute site of the Union Carbide Company. All persons living in the vicinity are invited to remain in their homes, close their doors and windows, turn off all fans and air-conditioning systems, and keep a listening watch for further instructions. The next communication will be broadcast in five minutes.” Pamela Nixon taped the sheet of paper to a corner of her fridge door.
Two weeks later, when the new plant had begun production, the young woman suddenly noticed a strange smell coming in through her kitchen window. It was being carried on the breeze blowing, as usual, from the direction of the industrial structures located upwind of her home. It was neither the smell of fish nor the odor of rotten eggs that she had grown accustomed to. This new smell went to show that even if the plant she could see from her house was a model of advanced technology, it was not, in fact, totally sealed. However it triggered a childhood memory. Like her mother’s cooking every Sunday after church, the methyl isocyanate produced by Union Carbide smelled like boiled cabbage. *
They Deserved the Mercy of God
The figure who entered the Orya Bustee one morning took Belram Mukkadam by surprise. He had never before seen a European venture into the neighborhood. Tall, dressed in a black, ankle-length robe, with a metal cross strung across her chest, her gray hair boyishly cropped and thick round glasses taking up much of her thin face, she sported a luminous smile. Mukkadam welcomed her with his customary friendliness.
“What a pleasant surprise! Welcome, sister. What wind of good fortune brings you here?” he asked.
The visitor saluted him the Indian way. “I’ve heard your neighborhood needs someone to provide medical care for the sick, the children and the elderly. Well, here I am. I’ve come to offer you my humble services.”
Mukkadam bowed almost to the ground.
“Bless you, sister! The god has sent you. There’s so much suffering to be relieved here.”
Forty-nine-year-old Sister Felicity McIntyre was Scottish. Born into a diplomatic family that had spent long periods in France, at eighteen she had entered a missionary order. Sent first to Senegal, then to Ceylon and finally to India, she had spent the last fourteen years in Bhopal where she ran a center for abandoned children. Most of them were suffering from serious mental handicaps. The center had been established in a modern building in the south of the city. It bore the beautiful name of “Ashanitekan”—House of Hope. Above the entrance the nun had nailed a plate with the inscription: “When God closes one door, he opens another.” Children with Down’s syndrome, autism, tuberculosis of the bone, polio; blind, deaf and mute children—all lived together in a single large room with pale green walls decorated with pictures of Mahatma Gandhi and Jesus Christ.
There, several young girls trained by Sister Felicity busied themselves with the children, helping them move, walk or play. Parallel bars, rubber balls, swivel boards and small pedal-cars took the place of physiotherapy equipment. Here life was stronger than any misfortune. Many of the patients needed special care. They had to be dressed, fed, taken to the toilet, washed. Above all, their intelligence had to be awakened, a task that demanded endless patience and love. Sister Felicity shared her bedroom with a mentally retarded twelve-year-old. Suffering from spina bifida, a paralysis of the spinal column, Nadia was as dependent as a baby. But her smile proclaimed her will to live and her gratitude. Although she refuted the idea, Sister Felicity was to Bhopal what Mother Teresa was to Calcutta.
Mukkadam led the nun through the labyrinth of alleyways.
“This is a really wretched place,” he apologized.
“I’m used to it,” his visitor reassured him, greeting those who gathered along her way with a cheerful namaste.*
She went into several huts and examined some of the children. Rickets, alopecia, intestinal infections … Orya Bustee had the full collection of diseases found in poverty-stricken neighborhoods. The nun was on familiar ground, and no stranger to the slums. She was always willing to enter people’s homes, or sit down with them, regardless of their caste or creed. She had learned to receive the confidences of the dying, to watch over the dead, to pray with their families, wash corpses and accompany the deceased on their last journey to the cemetery or the funeral pyre. Above all, with the assistance of her large, black, simulated-leather bag full of medicines and small surgical instruments, she had treated people, comforted and cured them.
“I’ll come every Monday morning,” she announced in Hindi. “I’ll need some families to take turns at letting me use their huts.”
The suggestion gave rise to an immediate commotion. All the mothers were prepared to offer the white didi, or “big sister,” the use of their lodgings so that she could care for the occupants of the bustee.
“And then I’ll need a volunteer to help me,” she added, casting a discerning eye around the faces crowded about her.
“Me, me, didi!”
Felicity turned to see a little girl with slanting eyes.
“What’s your name?”
“Padmini.”
“All right, Padmini, I’ll take you on trial as my assistant in our small clinic.”
On the following Monday an expectant line had formed in the alleyway in front of Padmini’s hut, well before Sister Felicity arrived. Padmini had tried to sort out the most serious cases in order to take them first. More often than not, these were rickety babies with swollen stomachs whom their mothers held out to the nun with a look of entreaty.
“In all my years of working in Africa, Ceylon and India, I had never seen such cases of deficiency diseases. The fontanels had not even closed up in many of the children. The bone of their skulls had become deformed for lack of calcium and their dolichocephalic features made them look a bit like Egyptian mummies,” Sister Felicity recounted.
Tuberculosis might be the number one killer in Orya Bustee and its neighboring slums, but typhoid, tetanus, malaria, polio, gastrointestinal infections and skin diseases caused damage that was often irreversible. Confronted with all these poor people looking to her for miracles, the nun felt all the strength go out of her. Sensing her fatigue, Padmini gently mopped the large beads of sweat coursing down her forehead, threatening to impede her vision. Rising above the nauseating smells and horrific sights, the young Indian girl supported her big sister with her unfailing smile. The little girl’s expression, it too born of suffering and poverty, revived the nun’s courage whenever it faltered.
One day a woman deposited an extremely emaciated baby on the table. Sister Felicity entrusted the tiny shriveled body to Padmini.
“Take him and massage him gently,” she told her. “That’s all we can do.”
Padmini sat down on a jute sack in the alleyway and placed the child in her lap. She poured a little mustard oil on her hands and began to massage the small body. Her hands came and went along its upper torso and limbs. Like a succession of waves, they started on the baby’s sides, worked across his chest and up to the opposite shoulder. Stomach, legs, heels, the soles of his feet, his hands, his head, the nape of his neck, his face, the wings of his nose, his back and his buttocks were successively stroked and vitalized, as if nourished by Padmini’s supple, dancing fingers. The child suddenly began to gurgle for sheer bliss. “I was dazzled by so much skill, beauty and intelligence,” Felicity would later say. “In the depths of that slum I had just discovered an unsuspected power of love and hope. The people of Orya Bustee deserved the mercy of God.”
Out of the thirty-eight countries on the planet where Union Carbide had hoisted its blue-and-white flag, no other had established such long-standing and warm links with the company as India. Perhaps this was due to the fact that for nearly a century the multinational had been providing a commodity as precious as air or water. For hundreds of millions of Indians who had no electricity, Carbide’s lamps brought light to the most remote villages. Thanks to the half a billion batteries made in its factories each year, the whole of India knew and blessed the American company’s name.
The rich profits from this monopoly and Carbide’s conviction that the country would one day become one of the world’s great markets, had induced the company to regroup all kinds of production under the aegis of an Indian subsidiary known as Union Carbide India Limited. So it was that the flag of this subsidiary fluttered over fourteen factories. In India, Carbide manufactured chemical products, plastic goods, photographic plates, film, industrial electrodes, polyester resin, laminated glass and machine tools. The company also had its own fleet of seven trawlers on the Bengal coast, specializing in deep-water shrimping. With an annual revenue of $170 million in 1984, Union Carbide India Limited was a successful example of the corporation’s globalization policy. Of course, Union Carbide retained ownership of 51 percent of the shares in its Indian subsidiary, the intention being that the parent company would control all production and any new projects on Indian soil.
In April of 1962, the American management of Carbide revealed the nature and scope of its new projects in a full-page advertisement in National Geographic magazine. Entitled “Science Helps to Build a New India,” the illustration was meant to be allegorical. It depicted a dark-skinned, emaciated peasant working obviously infertile soil with the aid of a primitive plow drawn by two lean oxen. Two women in saris with a pitcher of water and a basket on their heads, surveyed the scene. In the background appeared the waters of a mighty river, the Ganges. Just beyond the sacred river, glittering with a thousand fires in the sunlight, arose the gilded structures of a gigantic chemical complex with its towers, chimneys, pipework and tanks. Above it, in the upper half of the picture, a light-skinned hand emerged from the orange sky. Between thumb and index finger it was holding a test tube full of a red liquid, which it was pouring over the peasant and his plow. Carbide had no doubt drawn its inspiration from the scene on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in which Michelangelo portrays the hand of God touching Adam’s to give him life. Under the heading, “A Hand for the Future,” the company delivered its message in the space of a single paragraph:
Cattle working in the fields … the eternal River Ganges … elephants caparisoned with jewels … Today these symbols of ancient India coexist with a new vision, that of modern industry. India has built factories to strengthen its economy and provide its four hundred and fifty million people with the promise of a bright future. But India needs the technological knowledge of the Western world. That is why Union Carbide, working with Indian engineers and technicians, has made its scientific resources available to help construct a large plant to produce chemical products and plastic goods near Bombay. All over the free world, Union Carbide has undertaken to build plants to manufacture chemical products, plastic goods, gases and alloys. Union Carbide’s collaborators are proud to be able to share their knowledge and skills with the citizens of this great country.
This piece of purple prose concluded with an exhortation: “Write to us for a brochure entitled ‘The Exciting World of Union Carbide.’ In it you’ll find out how our resources in the different domains of carbon, chemical products, gases, metals, plastic goods and energy continue daily to work new wonders in your life.”
“New wonders in your life.” This eloquent promise was soon to find a spectacular opportunity for fulfillment. It was at a time when India was trying desperately to banish the ancestral specter of famine. After the severe food shortages at the beginning of the 1960s, the situation was at last improving. The source of this miracle was an apparently unassuming batch of Mexican grain. Christened Sonora 63 by its creator, the American agronomist and future Nobel peace prize winner, Norman Borlang, the grain produced a new variety of high-yielding corn. With heavy ears that were not susceptible to wind, light variation or torrential monsoon rains, and short stems that were less greedy, this fast growing seed made it possible to have several harvests a year on the same plot of land. It brought about a great change, the famous Green Revolution.
This innovation suffered serious constraints, however. In order for the high-yielding seeds to produce the multiple harvests expected of them, they needed lots of water and fertilizer. In five years, between 1966 and 1971, the Green Revolution multiplied India’s consumption of fertilizer by three. And that was not all. The very narrow genetic base of high-yield varieties and the monoculture associated with them made the new crop ten times more vulnerable to disease and insects. Rice became the favorite target for at least a hundred different species of predatory insects. Most devastating were the small flies known as green leafhoppers. The stylets with which they sucked the sap from young shoots could destroy several acres of rice fields in a few days. In the Punjab and other states, the invasion of a form of striped aphid decimated the cotton plantations. Against this scourge, India had found itself virtually defenseless. In its desire to promote the country’s industrialization, the government had encouraged the local production of pesticides. Faced with the enormity of demand, however, locally manufactured products had shown themselves to be cruelly inadequate. What was more, a fair number contained either DDT or HCH (hexachlorocyclohexane), substances considered so dangerous to flora, fauna and humans that a number of countries had banned their use.
Finding themselves unable to provide their peasants with a massive supply of effective pesticides, in 1966 Indian leaders decided to turn to foreign manufacturers. Several companies, among them Carbide, were already established in the country. The New York multinational was interested enough to dispatch one of its best scouts from its sales team to New Delhi. It chose the young Argentinian agronomical engineer, Eduardo Muñoz. After all, hadn’t this engaging sales representative managed to convert the whole of South America to the benefits of Sevin? Muñoz promptly proved himself up to the task by inaugurating his mission with a masterstroke.
The legendary emperor Asoka who had spread the Buddha’s message of nonviolence throughout India would have been amazed. On a winter evening in 1966, the hotel in New Delhi that bore his name welcomed the principal executives of Carbide’s Indian subsidiary company along with a hundred of the highest officials from the Ministry of Agriculture and the Planning Commission. These dignitaries had gathered to celebrate the quasi-historic agreement signed that afternoon at the Ministry of Agriculture in front of a pack of journalists and photographers. The contract would arm Indian peasants against aphids and other insects destroying their crops. To this end, it provided for the immediate importation of 1,200 tons of American Sevin. In return, Carbide undertook to build a factory to make this same pesticide in India within five years. Eduardo Muñoz had negotiated this agreement with a high-ranking official named Sardar Singh, who indicated he was impatient to see the first deliveries arrive. He was, as his turban and bearded cheeks indicated, a Sikh, originally from the Punjab. The peasants of his community had been the first victims of the marauding insects.
As chance would have it, the Carbide envoy was able to satisfy the hopes of his Indian partner sooner than anticipated. Discovering that a cargo of 1,200 tons of Sevin destined for farmers in the locust-infested Nile Valley, was held up in the port of Alexandria by overzealous customs officers, the Carbide envoy managed to have the ship diverted to Bombay. Two weeks later, the precious Sevin was received there like a gift from heaven.
The euphoria subsided somewhat when it was discovered that the Sevin from the Egyptian ship was actually a concentrate that could not be used until it had undergone appropriate preparation. In their own jargon, specialists called this process “formulation.” It consisted of mixing the concentrate with sand or gypsum powder. Like the sugar added to the active substance in a medicine to facilitate its consumption, the sand acts as a carrier for Sevin making it possible to either spread or spray the insecticide as needed. There was no shortage of small industrial units in India that could carry out this transformation process. But Muñoz had a better idea. Carbide itself would make its Sevin usable, by building its own formulation factory. No matter that the Industrial Development and Regulation Act reserved the construction of this kind of plant for very small firms and only those of Indian nationality, he knew he could comply tacitly with the law by finding someone to act as a front man.
Like anywhere else in the world, there is no shortage in India of intermediaries, agents, compradores prepared to act as go-betweens for any kind of business. One morning in June 1967, a jolly little man turned up in Eduardo Muñoz’s office.
“My name is Santosh Dindayal,” he announced, “and I am a devotee of the cult of Krishna.” Taken aback by this mode of introduction, the Argentinian offered his visitor a cigar. “I own numerous businesses,” the Indian went on. “I have a forestry development company, a scooter concession, a cinema, a gas station. I’ve heard about your plan to build a pesticide factory.” At this point in his account, the man assumed a slightly mysterious air. “Well, you see, it so happens that I have entrées all over Bhopal.”
“Bhopal?” repeated Muñoz, to whom the place meant nothing.
“Yes. It’s the capital of the state of Madhya Pradesh,” the Indian continued. “The state government is eager to develop its industry. It could well be useful for your project.”
Drawing vigorously on his cigar, the little man explained that the people running Madhya Pradesh had set aside an area for industrial development on vacant land north of the capital.
“What I’m proposing is that I apply in my name for a license to construct a plant that can transform the Sevin your friends have imported into a product that can be used on crops. The cost of such an undertaking shouldn’t be more than fifty thousand dollars. We can sign a partnership contract together. You do the work on the factory and then you can give me a proportion of the proceeds.”
The Argentinian was so pleased he nearly swallowed his cigar. The proposal was an excellent first step in the larger industrial venture he was counting on launching. It would provide an immediate opportunity to make Indian farmers appreciate the benefits of Sevin, and give the engineers in their research departments in South Charleston time to come up with the large pesticide plant that the Indian government seemed to want to see built on its land. Suddenly, however, a question sprang to mind.
“By the way, Mr. Dindayal, where is this town of yours, Bhopal?”
The Indian smiled and pointed proudly to his chest. “In the very heart of India, dear Mr. Muñoz.”
The heart of India! The expression excited the handsome Argentinian. Taking the Indian with him as navigator, he set off at once in his gray Mark VII Jaguar for the heart of the country. To him it was like arriving “in a large village.” The industrial zone designated by the government lay just over a mile from the city center, and a little more than half a mile from the train station. In the past, it had been the site of the royal stables for the rulers of Bhopal. The troops of the sultana infantry had used it as a parade ground. The dark color of the soil accounted for the name of the place: Kali Grounds, “kali” meaning “black.” But the term may also have derived from the color of the blood with which the earth was saturated. For it was here that, before thousands of spectators, the kingdom’s executioners used to lop off the heads of those whom the Islamic sharia* had condemned to death.
The Argentinian was not likely to be put off by such morbid associations; two days’ exploring had convinced him. This town of Bhopal held all the winning cards: a central location, an excellent road and railway system, and abundant electricity and water supplies. As for the Kali Grounds, in his eyes they held yet another trump: the string of huts and hovels extending along their boundaries promised to provide a plentiful workforce.
A Promised Land on the Ruins of a Legendary Kingdom
The large village the Carbide envoy thought he had seen from inside his Jaguar was in fact one of India’s most beautiful and vibrant cities. But then Eduardo Muñoz had not had time to discover any of Bhopal’s treasures. Since 1722, when an Afghan general fell in love with the site and founded the capital of his realm there, Bhopal had been adorned with so many magnificent palaces, sublime mosques and splendid gardens that it was justifiably known as “the Baghdad of India.” Above all, it was for its rich Muslim culture and tradition of tolerance that the town held a distinguished place in India’s history. The riches of Bhopal had been forged first by a Frenchman, and then by four progressive female rulers—despite the burkahs that concealed them from the eyes of men. The commander-in-chief of the nawab’s armies, and subsequently the country’s regent, Balthazar I de Bourbon, and after him, the begums Sikander, Shah Jahan, Sultan Jahan and Kudsia had turned their realm and its capital into a model much admired in imperial Britain as well as by other African and Asian colonial countries. Not only had the four begums used their own funds to finance the advent of the railway line, they had opened up roads and markets, built cotton mills, distributed vast areas of land to their landless subjects, set up a postal system unequalled in Asia and introduced running water to the capital. In an effort to educate their people, they had introduced free primary instruction for everyone and promoted female emancipation by increasing the number of girls’ schools.
The magnificence of the kingdom and its prestigious capital expressed itself in many different ways. A great lover of literature and herself the author of several philosophical treatises, Begum Shah Jahan attracted distinguished scholars and learned men from countries as far afield as Afghanistan and Persia to her court. The city had supplanted Hyderabad and Lahore as a beacon of renascent Islamic culture that is so rich in Urdu literature, as well as painting and music. Of all the expressions of this heritage, it was to poetry that the begum contributed most. Reviving the tradition of the mushaira, evenings of poetry recitals when the people could meet the greatest poets, she threw open the reception rooms of her palace to all and arranged for monumental performances on the household cavalry’s Lal Parade Ground. There, sixty to eighty thousand poetry lovers, three-quarters of the town’s population, used to come and sit on the ground right through the night to hear poets sing of suffering, joy and the eternal aspirations of the soul. “Weep not, my beloved,” implored one of the Bhopalis’ favorite refrains. “Even if for now your life is but dust and lamentation, it already proclaims the magic of what lies ahead.”
The next to last of these enlightened women rulers, Begum Sultan Jahan, had even created an institution—revolutionary for the time—called the Bhopal Ladies Club. There, women were free to discuss their conditions and their future. The same begum had also given her female subjects the opportunity to go shopping with their faces uncovered by building the Paris Bazaar, a huge shopping center reserved exclusively for women. There they could walk about with their faces uncovered because all the shopkeepers were women. Simply dressed and without bodyguards, the begum herself liked to visit this emporium which was well stocked with items imported from London and Paris.
The British were unsparing in their respect for this remarkable lady. King George V invited her to his coronation and, in 1922, the prince of Wales paid a visit for the inauguration of the Government Council for the Kingdom of Bhopal, a democratic institution quite unique in the princely India of that time. His visit was also intended to thank the begum for having emptied both her private purse and the state coffers to support the British war effort. After all, she had sent her eldest son to represent Bhopal and fight alongside the Allied soldiers in the trenches of the first world war.
Before she passed away, Begum Kudsia, last of the sovereign ladies of Bhopal, nevertheless expressed her regret that her subjects seemed more interested in poetry than industrial projects or affairs of state. Despite the efforts of the economic development agency she had created with the support of the British, in the period between the world wars, very few firms came to Bhopal. Two textile mills, two sugar refineries, a cardboard and a match factory—the sum total was a modest one. Nor did the ascendance of a male sovereign to the throne do anything to rectify matters. The nawab Hamidullah Khan was a charming, cultivated prince but far more interested in decorating his palaces or breeding his horses than in constructing blast furnaces or textile factories. While Mahatma Gandhi was going on a hunger strike to force the British out of the country, he was having a luxury bathroom installed on the roof of one of his hunting station wagons.
On August 15, 1947, the subcontinent’s independence cast the maharajahs and nawabs of the Indian kingdoms into the oubliette of history. The upset was a stroke of good fortune for Bhopal, which found itself promoted to the capital of the vast province of Madhya Pradesh that encompassed all the country’s central territories. Its selection spurred the city into an era of feverish development. It had been chosen for the same three reasons Carbide would select it, twenty years later, as the site of its pesticide plant. Buildings had to be constructed to house the new province’s ministries and administrative bodies, whole neighborhoods had to be built in which to lodge the thousands of officials and their families. A university, several technical colleges, a hospital with two thousand beds, a medical school, shops, clubs, theaters, cinemas, restaurants had to be erected. In the space of five years the population increased from 85,000 to nearly 400,000.
This rise had brought with it an influx of small and large firms from all over India. And now, as the chrome muzzle of a gray Jaguar had just intimated, America was about to step in where only yesterday the last nawab and his guests had still been hunting tigers and elephants. So that, for the occupants of Orya Bustee, as for the hundreds of other immigrants who stepped off the trains each day looking for work, Bhopal at the end of the 1960s, was the promised land.
A Continent of Three Hundred Million Peasants and Six Hundred Languages
The City of the Begums greeted the government of Madhya Pradesh’s decision as a gift from the gods. By assigning a five-acre plot of land on the Kali Grounds to the entrepreneur Santosh Dindayal, along with permission to build a factory to formulate pesticides, the government was offering the city all the opportunities that went with an industrial venture. Eduardo Muñoz was quick to pass on the glad tidings to his New York management before hurrying to the bar in Calcutta’s luxurious Hotel Grand to celebrate with his wife Rita and his colleagues. He then set about looking for a team to build the factory. By a stroke of incredible luck, he chanced upon the perfect trio: first Maluf Habibie, a frail Iranian chemical engineer with metal rimmed spectacles, a specialist in formulation techniques for chemical products; then Ranjit Dutta, an engineer built like a football halfback, who had previously worked with Shell in Texas; and finally, the only Bhopali, Arvind Shrivastava who had only just completed his degree in mechanical engineering. The three men set camp in the back room of the Bhopal gas station that belonged to Muñoz’s Indian associate. In two weeks they laid down the sketches for a plant, although “plant” was a very grandiose name for a workshop to house the crushers, blenders and other equipment necessary for the commercial preparation of the imported concentrate of Sevin.
Like all important events in India, the groundbreaking was marked with a ceremony. A pandit* girdled with the triple thread of a brahmin came and chanted mantras over the hole dug out of the black earth. A coconut was brought, which Arvind Shrivastava decapitated with a billhook. The pandit poured the milk slowly onto the ground. Then the young engineer cut the flesh into small pieces, which he offered to the priest and the onlookers. The brahmin raised his hand and the workmen came forward and emptied their wheelbarrow full of concrete into the cavity. The gods had given their blessing. The venture could commence.
With no complicated pipework, no glistening tanks, no burning flares, no metal chimneys, the building that rose from the Kali Grounds bore no resemblance to the American monsters in the Kanawha Valley. In fact with its triple roof and line of small windows it looked more like a pagoda. Inside was a vast hangar with a range of conical silos mounted on grinding machines. This plant was to provide the Sevin concentrate imported from America with a granular carrier agent adapted to the various methods of diffusion. The Sevin to be sprayed from the air over the huge plantations in the Punjab had to be formulated more finely than the packaged Sevin that was to be spread by hand by the small farmers of Madhya Pradesh or Bengal. Whether granular or fine as dust, the Bhopal Sevin promised to be a unique insecticide, less for its intrinsic qualities than for the carrier agent Muñoz’s engineers had found for it.
To mystical India the Narmada River is the daughter of the sun. One has simply to behold it to achieve perfect purification. One single night of fasting on its banks guarantees prosperity for hundreds of generations, and drowning in it wrests one from the cycle of reincarnations. By a fortuitous stroke of geography this sacred river flowed just twenty-five miles from Bhopal. According to the Vedas, its banks were covered with a sand as magical as the waters they confined. Mixed with the pesticide from America, sand from the Narmada would avenge the Nadar family and all the other peasants ruined by voracious insects. India was going to escape the ancestral curse of its famines.
“It was the best Christmas present I’d ever received,” the turbaned Sardar Singh, who had bought the 1,200 tons of American Sevin from Muñoz, would confide. The end of that year, 1968, saw the first delivery of Bhopal-produced insecticide arrive in his ministry’s warehouses: 131 tons to be sprayed over the cotton and cereal plantations of the Punjab. Once the requirements of his beloved Punjab had been satisfied, however, Sardar Singh was likely to find himself with about 800 tons of pesticide left on his hands. How could he ensure that other peasants in his country benefited from this providential surplus? He turned to Eduardo Muñoz for help.
“Your company sells more than five hundred million batteries a year in this damn country,” he told him. “Its agents range from the farthest reaches of the Himalayas to the backwaters of Kerala. Only an organization like yours can help me distribute my Sevin.”
The Argentinian raised his arms. “My dear Mr. Singh, a bag of insecticide is not as easy to sell as a pair of batteries for a flashlight,” he pointed out.
The Indian adopted a coaxing tone. “My dear Mr. Muñoz, what you personally have achieved in Mexico and Argentina, you will manage to achieve here too. I have every faith in you. Let’s say no more about it; your smile tells me you will help me.”
The challenge was a colossal one. From behind the wheel of his Jaguar, Muñoz had gauged the enormity and complexity of India. The country bore no resemblance to Mexico or even Argentina, both of which he had ended up knowing like the back of his hand. India was a continent whose three hundred million peasants spoke five or six hundred different languages and dialects. Half of them were illiterate and thus unable to read the label on a sack of fertilizer or a bag of insecticide. Yet they were dealing with chemical products that were potentially fatal. Muñoz had been horrified by the number of accidents the newspapers reported in rural areas: lung damage, burns to the skin, poisoning. The victims were almost always poor agricultural laborers whose employers had not seen fit to provide them with protective clothing or masks. To improve the efficacy of their manure, many peasants mixed different products together—almost always with their bare hands. Some even tasted the combination to make sure it had been mixed properly. In the poorest villages where whole families lived in one room, the bag of insecticide frequently sat in one corner, insidiously poisoning them with toxic emissions. Women drew water, did the milking or cooked food with containers that had once held DDT. The result was an alarming increase in certain disorders. A journey through the Tamil Nadu region horrified the Union Carbide representative. In some areas known for their intensive use of phytosanitary products, the instances of lung, stomach, skin and brain cancer defied counting. In the Lucknow region, half the laborers who handled pesticides were found to be suffering from serious psychological disorders as well as problems with their memory and eyesight. Worst of all, these sacrifices were pointless. Poorly informed peasants thought they could increase a product’s effectiveness by doubling or tripling the manufacturer’s recommended dosage. Their lack of understanding led many of them to ruin, sometimes even suicide. Newspaper headlines reported that the most popular method these desperate people used to kill themselves was swallowing a good dose of pesticide.
Despite his worries about the potential for misuse of insecticides, Eduardo Muñoz responded to his Indian partner’s appeal for help. He dispatched the sales teams for the batteries with the blue-and-white logo to dispose of the surplus Sevin. Soon nearly every single grocery, hardware shop, and traveling salesman would be selling the American insecticide. This apparently generous gesture was not entirely devoid of self-interest. The Argentinian was counting on it to provide him with an accurate assessment of the Indian market’s capacity to absorb pesticides. The information would be crucial when the time came to determine the size and production volume of the Indian plant that Union Carbide had promised to build.
“Work with farmers, our partners in the field.” A tidal wave of notices bearing this slogan soon broke over the Bengali and Bihari countryside. They showed a Sikh in a red turban placing a protective hand on the shoulder of a poor old farmer with a face furrowed with wrinkles. In his other hand, the knight in shining armor was brandishing a box of Sevin the size of a package of supermarket crackers. He was using it to point at an ear of corn. The copy read “My name is Kuldip Chahal. I am an area pesticide technologist. My role is to teach you how to make five rupees out of every rupee you spend on Sevin.”
Eduardo Muñoz was all the more convinced: to convert the Indian peasants to Sevin, he would need legions of Kuldip Chahals.
The sudden appearance of concrete mixers, cranes and scaffolding over the bleak horizon of the Kali Grounds caused a stir in the bustees. The blue-and-white logo flying in the vicinity of the mud huts was an even more magical emblem than the trident of the god Vishnu, creator of all things. To Eduardo Muñoz, that flag constituted a considerable victory. He had managed to persuade the New Delhi authorities that Union Carbide should no longer have to rely on an Indian intermediary to formulate its Sevin concentrate. It would be able to operate openly, under its own name. In New Delhi, as elsewhere in the world, international big business invariably found its own ways and means.
As soon as the construction site opened, several tharagars laid siege to Belram Mukkadam’s teahouse. Carbide needed a workforce. Candidates came running and soon the drink stall became a veritable job recruitment center. Among the tharagars, Ratna Nadar recognized the man who had recruited him in Mudilapa to double the railway tracks. Ratna would have liked to have given him a piece of his mind, let him know just how bitter and angry he was, shout out that the poor were sick of having others grow fat from the sweat of their labor. But this was not the moment. He might have the undreamed of opportunity to work for the American multinational.
“I pay twenty rupees a day,” the tharagar announced, exhaling the smoke from his bidi. “And I supply a helmet and cover-all, and one piece of soap a week, too.”
It was a small fortune for men used to feeding their families on less than four rupees a day. In gratitude, they bowed to wipe the dust from their benefactor’s sandals. Among them was the former leper, Ganga Ram. This would be the first job he had managed to land since leaving the wing for contagious diseases at Hamidia Hospital.
The next day at six o’clock, led by Mukkadam, all the candidates presented themselves at the gateway to the building site. The tharagar was there to check each worker’s employment document. When it came to Ganga Ram’s turn, he shook his head.
“Sorry, friend, but Carbide doesn’t take lepers,” he declared, pointing to the two stumps of finger that were awkwardly gripping the sheet of paper.
Ganga Ram foraged in the waist of his lunghi for the certificate to show that he was cured. “Look, look, it says there, I’m cured!” he implored, thrusting the paper under the tharagar’s nose.
The latter was inflexible. For Ganga Ram the opportunity to don one of Carbide’s coveralls would have to remain a dream.
That evening, those who had been fortunate enough to receive the blue linen uniform took it home with them. On the way, they presented it to the god Jagannath whose image presided over a small niche at the corner of the alleyway. Sheela, Padmini’s mother, laid her husband’s clothing at the deity’s feet, placing a chapati and some marigold petals sprinkled with sugar water beside it.
A few days later, Belram Mukkadam’s chief informant brought a piece of news that restored the hopes of Ganga Ram and all the others who had not been hired.
“This building site is just the thin end of the wedge,” announced Rahul, the legless cripple. “Soon, sahibs will be arriving from America to build other factories and they’re going to pay wages higher than even Ganesh * could imagine.”
Rahul was one of the most popular characters in Orya Bustee. He traveled at ground level on a wheeled plank, which he propelled with all the dexterity of a Formula 1 driver. With his fingers covered in rings, his long, dark hair carefully caught up in a bun, his glass bead necklaces and his shirts with gaudy, geometric patterns, Rahul introduced a note of cheeky elegance to the place. He was always abreast of any news, the slightest whisper of gossip. He was the Kali Grounds’ newspaper, radio and magazine. His attractive looks, his smile and his generous disposition had earned him the nickname “Kali Parade Ka Swarga dut”—“the Angel of Kali Parade.”
That morning he was the bearer of another piece of news that was to appall all those gathered at the teahouse.
“Padmini, Ratna and Sheela Nadar’s daughter, has disappeared,” he announced. “She hasn’t been home for four days. She wasn’t there this morning to help Sister Felicity with her clinic. Dilip, Dalima’s son says he and his friends lost her in the station at Benares.”
This piece of information sent everyone rushing to the Nadars’ hut. In the bustee, everyone shared their neighbor’s misfortune.
That winter Dilip, Padmini and the gang of young ragpickers that worked the trains had been extending their expeditions farther and farther afield. They ventured beyond Nagpur, even as far as Gwalior, which prolonged their absence by two or three days. Hopping from train to train, they roved the dense railway network of northern India with increasing audacity. One of the most lucrative destinations was the holy city of Benares, situated some 375 miles away, to which trainloads of Hindus of all castes went on pilgrimage. They could make it there and back in four days, which meant that if Padmini set out on a Monday, she would return in time for Sister Felicity’s clinic, something she would not miss for the world. These long journeys were fraught with danger. One evening when she parted from her friends to run and buy some fritters, the train left without her. It was the last one that night. Alone in Benares’s vast station overrun with travelers, vendors and beggars, Padmini panicked. She burst into tears. A man wearing a white cap approached and pressed a crumpled ten-rupee note into the palm of her hands.
“Don’t thank me, little one.
I’m the one who needs you.” He invited the little girl to sit down beside him and told her that his wife had just been called away to Calcutta to look after her dying father.
“She won’t be back for a few days and I’m looking for someone to take care of my three small children while she’s away,” he explained. “I live close by. I’ll give you fifty rupees a week.”
Without giving her time to answer, the man scooped Padmini up by the armpits and carried her to a car parked in front of the station. Like all great pilgrimage centers, Benares played host to a fair number of dubious activities. The prostitution of little girls did a particularly brisk trade. According to popular belief, de-flowering a virgin restored a man’s virility and protected him against venereal disease. The city’s numerous pleasure houses relied on professional procurers to supply them with virgins. These procurers often bought girls from very poor families, notably in Nepal, or arranged fictitious marriages with pretend husbands. In other instances, they simply abducted their victims.
Two other white-capped men were waiting in the car for an adolescent girl to be delivered to them. The vehicle took off at top speed and drove for a long time before it stopped outside the gate of a temple. Twenty girls crouched inside the courtyard, guarded by more men in white caps. Padmini tried to escape from her captors but she was forced through the gate.
In this city where every activity had sacred associations, some pimps tried to trick their young victims into believing that they would be participating in a religious rite. Padmini was captured during the festival of Makara Sankrauti, celebrated on the winter solstice. Makara is the goddess of carnal love, pleasure and fertility.
The young captives were driven inside the temple where two pandits with shaven heads and chests encircled with the brahmin’s triple cord were waiting for them. “That was the beginning of a nightmare that went on for two days and two nights,” Padmini recounted. Cajoling one minute, threatening the next, banging their gongs to punctuate their speech, performing all kinds of rituals at the feet of the numerous deities in the sanctuary, the men sought to break down the girls’ resistance and prepare them for the work that awaited them. Fortunately Padmini did not understand the language they spoke.
Once their very peculiar training was over, the captives were taken under escort to Munshigang, Benares’s brothel quarter, to be divided up between the various houses that had bought them. Padmini and two other little victims were pushed into one of the houses and taken to the first floor where a woman in her fifties was waiting for them.
“I’m your new mother,” the madam declared with a cajoling smile, “and here are some presents that will turn you into proper princesses.”
She unfolded three different colored skirts with matching blouses and showed them several boxes containing bracelets, necklaces and cosmetics. The gifts were part of what the pimps referred to as “the breaking of the girls.”
“And now, I’ll go and get you your meal,” the madam announced.
Padmini watched as she left the room, locking the door behind her. It was now or never. Barely two yards separated the three little girls from the window of the room in which they were confined. Padmini made a sign to her companions, rushed to the window, unbolted it, then jumped into the void. Her fall was miraculously broken by a fruit vendor’s stall. She picked herself up, and seconds later, was lost in the crowd. Her getaway had been so swift that no one had time to react. Following her instincts, the little girl ran straight ahead as fast as her legs would carry her. Soon she reached the banks of the Ganges and turned left along the ghats, the stairs beside the river. In her flight she had lost her two companions but she was sure that they too had been able to escape. The great god Jagannath had protected her. All she had to do now was find the station and climb aboard the first train for Bhopal. *
Two days later, as Dilip and his friends prepared to slip aboard the Bombay Express, they suddenly caught sight of their little sister getting out of a train car. They let out such shrieks of joy that the passengers flew to the windows in curiosity.
“There you are,” said Padmini, pulling a package from her bag. “I’ve brought you some fritters.”
The boys bore her aloft in triumph, then took her home. News of her return, already broadcast by the legless cripple Rahul, brought hundreds of local residents rushing to her hut.
A Plant as “Inoffensive as a Chocolate Factory”
An official letter from the Indian Ministry of Agriculture informed Eduardo Muñoz that the New Delhi government was granting Union Carbide a license to manufacture five thousand tons of pesticide a year. This time it was not just a matter of adding sand to several hundred tons of concentrate imported from America, but permission to actually produce Sevin, as well as its chemical ingredients, in India itself.
As usual, the Argentinian, along with his wife Rita and his colleagues, celebrated this latest success in the bar of the Hotel Grand in Calcutta. But as he raised his champagne glass to the success of the future Indian factory, he felt a nagging doubt. “Five thousand tons, five thousand tons!” he repeated, shaking his head. “I’m afraid our Indian friends may have been thinking a bit too big! A factory with the capacity for two thousand tons would be quite large enough for us to supply the whole of India with Sevin.”
The first sales figures for the Sevin formulated in the small unit on the Kali Grounds were not very encouraging. This was the reason for Eduardo Muñoz’s reluctance. Despite an extensive information and advertising campaign, the Indian farmers were not readily giving up familiar products like HCH and DDT. The climatic variations of so immense a country with its late or inadequate monsoons and its frequent droughts that could suddenly reduce demand, meant that regular sales of the product could not be guaranteed. A salesman above all else, Muñoz had run his numbers over and over again. His most optimistic predictions did not exceed annual sales of two thousand tons. Wisdom ordained that Carbide should limit its ambitions. Certain that he would be able to convince his superiors, he flew to New York. In his briefcase, meticulously sorted by province, groups of villages and sometimes even by individual village, were the results of his first sales effort. He hoped they would be enough to persuade his employers that they should modify their investment in India, even if it meant leaving room for eventual competitors. He was wrong. That journey to New York was to set the seal on the first act in a catastrophe.
The Argentinian could never have imagined that his greatest adversary would be a man who had been dead for twenty-one years. The whole of American industry continued to revere as a prophet the man who, shortly after the second world war, had revolutionized relations between management and work-force. As an obscure employee in a Philadelphia bank, Edward N. Hay, who sported a short Charlie Chaplin–style mustache and oversleeves to protect his starched shirts, had seemed unlikely to leave behind much of a legacy. The obsessive ideas of this nondescript clerk, however, would make him as famous a figure in the industrial world as Frederick Taylor, the man who developed the theory of scientific management of factory work. Edward N. Hay was convinced that the members of the industrial workforce did not receive the attention they warranted. Starting from this premise, he had devised a point system to evaluate every job done in a company. The idea was immediately adopted by a number of branches of American industry. By the end of the 1960s Union Carbide was one of the most enthusiastic users of his methods. All of its industrial projects were automatically assigned a point value, according to a system that determined the importance, size and sophistication of any installations to be constructed. The more numerous and complex the project, the higher the number of points. Because each point corresponded to a salary advantage, it was in the interests of the engineers assigned to planning and implementing any industrial project to see that, right from the outset, it was given the maximum number of points possible.
“I realized at once, I didn’t stand a chance,” Eduardo Muñoz would recount. “Even before they heard what I had to say, the management committee, made up of all the division heads and key members of the board of directors, had rallied enthusiastically in support of the Indian proposal.”
“India has a market of three hundred million peasants,” immediately declared one of Carbide’s executives.
“Five hundred million soon,” added one of his colleagues.
“Don’t you worry, Eduardo, we’ll sell our five thousand tons, and more!” was the message unanimously delivered. “Moreover,” announced Carbide’s CEO, “to show you just how much faith we have in this project, we’re allocating it a budget of twenty million dollars.”
“An extravagant sum that Mr. Hay’s point system was going to spread in a manner advantageous to everyone,” Muñoz would reckon after meeting the South Charleston engineers in charge of laying the plans for the factory. These men were high-level chemists and mechanics, respected leaders in the field of manufacturing processes, in charge of reputable projects; in short they were the elite of the workforce at Union Carbide’s technical research center in South Charleston. “But they were all little dictators,” Muñoz would say. “They were obsessed with just one idea, that of using their twenty-million-dollar bounty to create the most beautiful pesticide plant India would ever know.”
Showing them his documents, the Argentinian tried desperately to explain to his partners the distinctive characteristics of the Indian market. His line of reasoning left them cold.
“The Indian government’s license is for an annual production of five thousand tons of pesticide. So we have a duty to build a plant to produce five thousand tons,” Muñoz recalled the project’s chief engineer interjecting in a cutting voice.
“Clearly my commercial arguments were of no concern to those young dogs,” Muñoz would remember. “They weren’t bound by any obligation to make a profit. They were simply itching to plant their flares, reactors and miles of piping in the Indian countryside.”
In the face of such obstinacy, the Argentinian sought a compromise.
“Wouldn’t it be possible to proceed in stages?” he suggested. “That is to say, to start by building a two thousand ton unit, which could then be enlarged if the market proved favorable?”
“My question brought sarcasm from the audience,” recalled Muñoz.
“My dear Eduardo,” the project chief went on, “you must appreciate that engineering work for this type of factory requires that we establish the size of production envisaged from the outset. The reactors, tanks and controlling mechanisms of a plant that manufactures two thousand tons of Sevin are not of the same caliber as those of a factory two and a half times larger. Once a production target has been set, it can’t be changed.”
“I take your point,” Muñoz conceded, trying to be tactful. “Especially as I imagine it’s possible to slow down production in a factory that is larger than necessary to adapt production to demand?”
“That’s exactly right,” the project chief agreed, pleased to see the discussion ending with consensus.
Alas, this consensus was only an illusion.
The Argentinian still had plenty of issues to take up with the men from South Charleston. The most important one had to do with the actual conception of the Indian factory. The Institute factory near South Charleston, which had been designed to produce thirty thousand tons of Sevin a year and which was to serve more or less as a model, functioned around the clock. In order to maintain this continuity, considerable quantities of MIC, methyl isocyanate, had to be manufactured and stored. At the South Charleston plant, three tanks made out of high resistance steel and fitted with a complex refrigeration system stored up to a hundred and twenty tons of MIC.
To Muñoz’s way of thinking, stocking such a quantity of this highly dangerous product might be justifiable for a factory like the one at the Institute, which ran twenty-four hours a day, but not in a much more modest plant where production was carried out as the need arose. For his own peace of mind the Argentinian went to Bayer in Germany and to the French Littorale factory near Béziers. Both companies handled MIC.
“All the experts I met went through the roof when I told them our engineers intended to store twenty-two to twenty-six thousand gallons of MIC in the tanks at the prospective Bhopal plant,” Muñoz would recount. “One German told me, ‘We only produce our methyl icocyanate as needed. We’d never risk keeping a single liter for more than ten minutes.’ Another added, ‘Your engineers are out of their minds. They’re putting an atomic bomb in the middle of your factory that could explode at any time.’ As for the Béziers engineers, the French government had quite simply forbidden them to stock MIC in anything but the small number of twenty-gallon drums that they imported directly from the United States as required.”
Shaken by the unanimity of opinion, the Argentinian returned to South Charleston to try and convince Carbide that it should modify its plans for the future Bhopal plant. Rather than store tens of thousands of gallons of potentially fatal materials, Muñoz suggested producing MIC in batches, on an as-needed basis, a system similar to the one used at Béziers. This system eliminated the need to keep large quantities of dangerous substances on site.
“I quickly realized that my proposal ran counter to American industrial culture,” Muñoz would recall. “In the United States, they love to produce around the clock, in large quantities. They’re besotted with enormous pipes running into giant tanks. That’s how the whole of the oil industry and many others work.”
Nevertheless, the South Charleston team wanted to allay the visitor’s fears.
“The numerous safety systems with which this type of plant is equipped enable us to control any of the MIC’s potentially dangerous reactions,” the project leader assured him. “You have absolutely no need to worry. Your Bhopal plant will be as inoffensive as a chocolate factory.”
Other problems awaited the Argentinian on his return to India. His next priority was to find a site for the prospective factory. His superiors in New York and South Charleston had agreed upon the choice of Bhopal, which was already home to the Sevin formulation unit. But the new site would have to be completely different in size. The plant would be a hydra-headed monster. There would be the unit producing alpha naphthol, one for carbon oxide, one for phosgene and one for methyl isocyanate. Alongside these installations with their control rooms, works and hangars, the plant would also have a collection of administrative buildings, a canteen, an infirmary, a decontamination center and a fire station, as well as a whole string of surveillance posts. All together it would need at least one hundred and twenty acres and an infrastructure capable of supplying the enormous quantities of water and electricity that would be necessary.
The Kali Grounds met all these conditions. But the Argentinian was against the site. “I’d lost the battle over the size of the factory,” he would say. “But at least I could try and stop it being built too close to areas where people were living.” The officials of the Madhya Pradesh government rolled out the red carpet. The arrival of a multinational as prestigious as Union Carbide was an extraordinary godsend for the town and the region. It meant millions of dollars for the local economy and thousands of jobs. Ratna Nadar, along with all the other residents of the bustees, would be kept in work for years.
Together with Muñoz, the Carbide team who had come from New York examined several sites suggested by the authorities. None of them was really satisfactory. In one place the water supply was inadequate; in another the electricity was wanting; elsewhere the ground was not firm enough to bear the weight of construction. That was when the residents of Orya and its neighboring bustees witnessed cars mysteriously coming and going from the Kali Grounds. The vehicles frequently paused to let their occupants out. This activity went on for several days, then stopped. The envoys from New York had finally overcome Muñoz’s reservations. Of course the Kali Grounds, next to the formulation works, was the right place to build the plant. As for any risk to those living nearby if an accident were to occur, the New York envoys reassured Muñoz that his fears were totally unfounded.
“Eduardo, if this plant is built as it should be, there will be no danger,” declared the man in charge.
“Take New York, for example,” his assistant interjected. “Three airports surrounded by skyscrapers: La Guardia, JFK and Newark. Planes take off every minute and logically they should crash into the buildings whenever it’s the least bit foggy, or collide with one another.”
“And yet,” his boss went on, “New York’s airports are the safest in the world. It will be the same in Bhopal.”
Despite his doubts, Muñoz had little choice but to agree. He and his colleagues presented themselves at the Madhya Pradesh government offices to submit their request for a one hundred and twenty acre plot of land on the Kali Grounds. The piece of land in question had to adjoin the five acres of the formulation works. According to municipal planning regulations, no industry likely to give off toxic emissions could be set up on a site where the prevailing wind might carry effluents into densely populated areas. Such was the case with the Kali Grounds where the wind usually blew from north to south, in other words, into the bustees, the railway station and the over-populated parts of the old town. The application should have been turned down. But the Union Carbide envoys had taken care not to mention in their application that the pesticide they planned to produce would be made with one of the most lethal gases of the chemical industry.
Clearly, Indira Gandhi had no great affection for her country’s maharajahs and nawabs. When the British left, her father Jawaharlal Nehru and the leaders of the Indian independence movement had taken power away from them. She had then proceeded to confiscate their last remaining privileges and possessions. Eduardo Muñoz saw their persecution as a providential gift. The imaginative Argentinian dreamed of building in Bhopal, in tandem with the pesticide plant, a research center along the lines of the American Boyce Thompson Institute. After all, the Indian climate and the diseases and insects that damaged its crops were all factors associated with its particular environment. An Indian research center might come up with a new generation of pesticides better suited to the country. It would be an opportunity for the future plant to diversify its production and, who knows, perhaps one day hit the jackpot with new molecules that could be exported all over Asia. Indian researchers and technicians would work for salaries ten or twelve times less than those of their American colleagues. All that was missing was a location. When Muñoz discovered that the brother of the last nawab, threatened with government expropriation, was seeking to sell his Jehan Numa palace, he leaped at the chance. Rising magnificently from Shamla Hill, one of the seven hills surrounding the city, the edifice dominated the town. Its park, made up of ten acres of tropical vegetation, rare trees, shrubs and exotic blooms, formed a sumptuous oasis of coolness, color and scent. The building would probably have to be demolished, but the estate was vast enough to accommodate research laboratories, planetaria, greenhouses and even a luxurious guest house for passing visitors. Convinced that an Indian would handle the purchase more adeptly than he, Muñoz placed his assistant, Ranjit Dutta, in charge of negotiations. They were hustled through. Three days later, this jewel of Bhopal’s ancestral patrimony fell into the clutches of the American multinational for the rock-bottom price of one million one hundred thousand rupees, approximately $65,000. *
The India of the naked sadhus, * of sacred elephants caparisoned in gold; the India of devotees of a million gods praying in the waters of the Ganges; the India of sari-draped women planting rice in the south or picking leaves in the tea plantations of the Himalayas; the immemorial India of the worshippers of Shiva, Muhammad and Buddha; the India that had given the world prophets and saints such as Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Ramakrishna, Sri Aurobindo and Mother Teresa. The India of our fantasies, myths and dreams, had yet another face: the country was, by the 1960s, a developing industrial and technological power.
Few people found this more surprising than the small group of American engineers sent to Bombay by Union Carbide in 1960 to build a petrochemical complex. The venture united two vastly different cultures, with the magic of chemistry as their only common denominator. This encounter proved so productive that Carbide took on a whole team of young Indian engineers to inject new blood into the veins of the mighty American company. All those young men thought, worked and dreamed in English. They came from great schools like the Victoria Jubilee Technical Institute of Bombay founded by the British, or those created by the young Indian republic like the Madras Technical College, the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and the prestigious Rajputi College in Pilani. Some were graduates of eminent Western universities like Cambridge, Columbia or Boston’s Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Hindu, Muslim, Sikh or Christian, whatever their religion, they shared the same faith in science. The mantras they chanted were the formulae for chemical processes and reactions. Living in an economy that modeled itself on protectionism and socialism, they were only too delighted to have pried open the door of a Western company where they could show off their talents, know-how, imagination and creativity. It was Carbide’s genius to play this Indian card and involve the cream of local talent in its designs for industrial globalization.
“One good thing about this recognition was that it dispelled the archaic image many Westerners had of our country,” the engineer Kamal Pareek would say. Son of an Uttar Pradesh lawyer, a graduate of the celebrated Pilani college, tennis champion and American film buff, at twenty-three, this baby-faced young man was the embodiment of the youthful Indian energy Carbide was keen to harness. “We Indians have always been particularly sensitive to the potential of the transformation of matter,” he confided. “Our most ancient Sanskrit texts show that this sensitivity is part of our culture. We have a long-standing tradition of producing the most elaborate perfumes. Since the dawn of time our Ayurvedic medicine has used chemical formulae borrowed from our plants and minerals. The mastery of chemical elements is part of our heritage.” Pareek loved to furnish examples. “In Rajasthan there is a tribe of very backward people called the Bagrus,” he recounted. “They make dyes for fabrics out of indigo powder, which they mix with crushed horn from horses’ hoofs. To that they add pieces of bark from an ashoka tree and the residues of ant-infested corn. These people who have had no education, who are completely ignorant of the chemical phenomena operating at the heart of their concoctions, are on a par with the foremost chemists. Their dyes are the best in the world.”
The first chemical plant Carbide built in India was inaugurated on December 14, 1966. The blue-and-white flag hoisted into the sky over the island of Trombay, near Bombay, was symbolic. A few miles from the spot where, four and a half centuries earlier, the galleon Hector had unloaded the first British colonizers, it embodied the desire of a new set of adventurers to make India a platform for its industrial worldwide expansion. After the island of Trombay, it was Bhopal’s Kali Grounds that were to see the same flag fly over a highly sophisticated plant. The potentially deadly toxicity of its intended products had, however, sown doubt in the minds of a few members of the New York management team. Was it wise to hand over technology as complex and dangerous as that associated with methyl isocyanate to a third world country? In the end the excellent qualifications of the Indian engineers recruited for the Trombay factory allayed their fears. The Indians were invited to South Charleston to have some input into the plans for the Bhopal plant, an experience that the young technician, Umesh Nanda, son of a small industrialist in the Punjab, would never forget.
“Encountering the Institute Sevin plant was like being suddenly projected into the next millennium,” he recalled. “The technical center designing the project was a hive inhabited by an army of experts. There were specialists in heat exchangers, centrifugal pumps, safety valves, control instruments and all the other vital parts. You had only to supply them with the particulars of such-and-such an operation to receive in return descriptions of, and detailed plans for, all the apparatus and equipment necessary. To mitigate the dangerous nature of the substances we were going to be using in Bhopal, bulky safety reports told us about all the safety devices installed at the Institute. For weeks on end, we made a concerted effort with our American colleagues to imagine every possible incident and its consequences: a burst pipe, a pump breaking down, an anomaly in the running of a reactor or a distillation column.”
“It was a real pleasure working with those American engineers,” confirmed Kamal Pareek. “They were so professional, so attentive to details, whereas we Indians often have a tendency to overlook them. If they weren’t satisfied, they wouldn’t let us move on to the next stage.”
The pursuit of perfection was Carbide’s hallmark. The company even brought over a team of Indian welders in order to familiarize them with the special acid and temperature-resistant alloys with which they would be working. “Going to America to learn how to make up alloys as temperamental as Inconel, Monel or Hastelloy, was as epic a journey as flying off in Arjuna’s chariot to create the stars in the sky,” marveled Kamal Pareek.
The stars! Eduardo Muñoz, the magician behind the whole venture, could give thanks to the gods. The pesticide plant he was going to build on the Kali Grounds might not be exactly the one he had dreamed of, but it did promise to be a new star in the Indian sky.
At the beginning of the summer of 1972, Carbide dispatched all the plans for the factory’s construction and development to India. Unfortunately, this mountain of paperwork was not exactly the finest gift American technology could send to the developing world. The design of Bhopal’s “beautiful plant” would not include all the safety equipment and security systems equipping Carbide’s Institute plant in the U.S. Later, the precise reasons for these money-saving measures would remain obscure. It seems that the sales of the Sevin formulated in Bhopal had not reached the hoped-for level. Disastrous climatic conditions and the appearance on the market of a competing and less costly pesticide may have accounted for this reduction in sales. Because Indian law severely restricted the involvement of foreign companies in their local subsidiaries, Union Carbide India Limited suddenly found itself forced to reduce the factory’s construction budget. American and Indian experts assured, however, that none of the cutbacks were to diminish the overall safety of the plant.
Four years later, the giant puzzle designed in South Charleston and created piece by piece in Bombay, was finally transported to Bhopal for assembly.
John Luke Couvaras, a young American engineer, described taking part in the project as “embarking on a crusade. You had to put yourself into it, body and soul. You lived with it every minute of the day and night, even when you were a long way from the works. If, for example, you were installing a distillation tower you’d fussed over lovingly, you were as proud of it as Michelangelo might have been of the ceiling in the Sistine chapel. You kept an eye on it to make sure it went like clockwork. That kind of venture forced you to be vigilant at all times. It exhausted you, emptied you. At the same time you felt happy, triumphant.”
“They’ll Never Dare Send in Their Bulldozers”
American or Indian, none of the engineers and technicians working on the Kali Grounds could ever have imagined the suffering, trickery, swindling, love, faith and hope that was life for the mass of humanity who occupied the hundreds of shacks around the factory. As in any impoverished area, the worst existed alongside the best, but the presence of figures like Belram Mukkadam managed to transform these patches of hell into models for humankind. He was a devout Hindu, but when he made his unforgettable stands, he was joined by Muslims, Sikhs, animists, and perhaps most remarkably, an Irani. The Iranis with their light skin and delicate features formed a small community of some five hundred people in Bhopal. Their forefathers had come to Bhopal in the 1920s, after an earthquake destroyed their villages in Baluchistan, on the borders of Iran. Now, their leader was an august old man with honey colored eyes, by the name of Omar Pasha, invariably dressed in a kurta, a long tunic, and cotton trousers. He lived with his sons, his two wives and his henchmen in a modern three-story building on the edge of Orya Bustee. Three times a week, he would tear himself away from his comfortable life to take the sick from the three bustees to Hamidia Hospital. Driving those poor wretches through traffic that terrified them, then steering them along hospital corridors into packed waiting rooms was no small feat. But without an escort the poor had little chance of being examined by a doctor. And even if they were lucky enough to see a physician, they would not have been able to explain what was wrong with them or understand the recommended treatment. The majority of the inhabitants of the bustees spoke neither Hindi nor Urdu but one of the innumerable regional dialects or languages. Omar Pasha demanded that the slum dwellers be treated like human beings and made certain they actually received the medicines they were prescribed. Yet this saint was one of Bhopal’s most notorious godfathers. It was he who controlled the traffic in opium and ganja, the local hashish, as well as the brothels in the Lakshmi Talkies district; he ran the gambling, especially satha, which consisted of betting on the daily share-price of cotton, gold and silver.
He was also head of a real estate racket that made him one of the richest property owners in the town. To assure himself of the political support necessary to maintain his business interests he gave generously to the Congress party (the political party in power at that time), where he served as one of the district’s most active electoral agents. The ballots of Orya, Chola and Jai Prakash Bustees were in his hands. Good old Omar Pasha! His enormous fingers and powerful biceps testified to the fact that he had been a boxer and wrestler in his youth. With advancing age he had turned to another sport: cockfighting. He bought his champions in Madras and fed them himself, on a mixture of egg yolk, clarified butter, and crushed pistachio and cashew nuts. Before every fight he would rub each one down “like a boxer before a match,” he would say with a hint of nostalgia. His ten cocks roamed freely about the floors of his house, watched over by bodyguards, for each one was worth between twenty and thirty thousand rupees, almost a thousand dollars—a sum Padmini’s father could not hope to earn in ten years of hard labor.
The area was home to a host of other colorful people. The dairyman Karim Bablubhai distributed a portion of the milk from his seventeen buffalo cows to children with rickets. He dreamed of Boda, the young orphan girl from Bihar whom he had just married, giving him an heir. The yellow-robed sorcerer Nilamber, who exorcized evil spirits by sprinkling those possessed with country liquor, had promised him that this dream would come true provided Boda performed a puja at the sacred tulsi every day. There was also the Muslim shoemaker Mohammed Iqbal, whose hut on alleyway No. 2 smelled unbearably of glue, and his associate Ahmed Bassi, a young tailor of twenty, who was famous for embroidering the marriage saris for the rich brides of Bhopal. The Carbide engineers might have been surprised to discover that in the sheds made out of planks, sheet metal and bamboo, which they could see from the platforms of their giant factory, men in rags were producing masterpieces. The shoemaker and the tailor, like their friend Salar the bicycle repairman in alley No. 4, were always ready to respond to Belram Mukkadam’s call. In the bustee no one ever declined to give him a helping hand.
Certainly this was true of Hussein, the worthy mullah with the small gray goatee who taught local children suras from the Koran on the porch of his small, mud-walled mosque in Chola. And the old midwife Prema Bai who, crippled by childhood polio, dragged herself from hut to hut in her white widow’s clothing, leaning heavily on a stick. Yet, her luminous smile out-shone her suffering. In one corner of her hut, under the little altar where an oil lamp burned day and night before a statuette of Ganesh, the old woman carefully laid out the instruments that made her an angel of the bustee: a few shreds of sari, a bowl, two buckets of water and the Arabian knife she used to cut the babies’ umbilical cords.
Who would have believed it? America and all her advanced technology was moving into the middle of a ring of hovels, and she knew nothing about those who washed up against the walls of her installation like the waves of an ocean. Neither an expatriate from South Charleston nor an Indian engineer molded by Carbide’s values knew anything about the universe inhabited by those thousands of men, women and children who lived but a stone’s throw away from the three methyl isocyanate tanks they were in the process of assembling.
One day, however, Carbide did pay a visit to the terra incognita that bordered on the Kali Grounds. “People thought the end of the world had come,” Padmini’s father would recall. The occupants of the bustees heard a plane roar overhead. The aircraft made several circles, skimming so low that the people below thought it would decapitate the Chola mosque’s small minaret. Then, in a flash, it disappeared into the setting sun. This unusual apparition provided food for furious discussion at the teahouse. The legless cripple Rahul, who always liked to appear well informed, claimed that it was “a Pakistani plane come to pay homage to the fine factory that the Muslim workmen were building in their town of Bhopal.”
The plane that appeared over the Kali Grounds was indeed the bearer of an homage, but not the one Rahul had imagined. The twin-engine jet plane Gulf Stream II that put down on January 19, 1976, at Bhopal’s airport, bore the gilded wings and company crest of UCC. Inside, it carried Union Carbide’s chief executive officer, a tall strapping fellow of fifty with white hair and a youthful air. A graduate of Harvard Business School and a former Navy reserve officer, Bill Sneath had climbed every rung of the multinational before becoming its chief in 1971. He was accompanied by his wife, an elegant young woman in a Chanel suit, and an entourage of corporate officials. They had all come from New York to inaugurate the first phytosanitary research and development center built by Carbide in the third world.
The architecture of this ultramodern edifice, with its facades dripping with glass, was inspired by the American research center in Tarrytown. Built on the site of the palace that Eduardo Muñoz helped Union Carbide buy from the last nawab family, it very nearly never came into being. While digging the foundations, the masons had uncovered the skeleton of a bird and several human skulls. Word had then gone around that they belonged to three workmen who had mysteriously disappeared during the construction of the palace in 1906. In response to this appalling omen the masons abandoned the site. To entice them back, Eduardo Muñoz had had to resort to strong measures. He had tripled their salaries and arranged for a puja to lift the evil spell. When Bill Sneath arrived, the center already comprised several laboratories, in which some thirty researchers were working, and greenhouses, in which many varieties of local plants were being grown.
The central government minister of science and technology, the highest authorities of the state of Madhya Pradesh and the city of Bhopal, and all the local dignitaries from the chief administrator to the most senior police officer gathered round the Sneaths, the Muñozes and the board of directors of Carbide’s Indian subsidiary for the grandiose ceremony that sealed the marriage between the New York multinational and the City of the Begums. Before his speech, one of the sari-clad hostesses had anointed Bill Sneath with the tilak of welcome, a dot of red powder on the forehead that symbolizes the third eye that can see beyond material reality. The eyes of Carbide’s CEO surveyed with pride the vast concrete and glass block of the magnificent research center. A few moments earlier they had discovered the construction site, where towers, chimneys, tanks and scaffolding were beginning to emerge from the Kali Grounds. Wearing helmets bearing their names, Bill Sneath and his wife had toured the different units, pursued by photographers. In his hand, Sneath triumphantly brandished a package of Sevin formulated on site.
What the American CEO would not see that winter was the jumble of huts, sheds and hovels that fringed the parade ground and grew like the swelling of a malignant cancer. Most of the men who lived there with their families made up the workforce for Carbide’s various building sites. They had almost all been invited to the inauguration of the research center. The present each had been handed by Carbide’s CEO was not, perhaps, very valuable, but for Padmini’s father and all those living in homes with no electricity, a flashlight and three batteries stamped with the blue-and-white Carbide logo was indeed a royal gift.
The gift that Sanjay Gandhi, the younger son of India’s prime minister, had in store for several million of his country’s poor that same winter was of a very different nature. Taking advantage of the state of emergency his mother had imposed to establish her power and muzzle the opposition, the impetuous young man had taken it into his head to clean up India’s principal cities by ridding their pavements and suburbs of “encroachments,” in other words “squatters.” It was alleged that one-tenth of vacant land was, in certain towns, taken up by people with no title deeds. This was the case with the bustees on the Kali Grounds. The sanitary conditions there were so abominable and the risk of epidemic so flagrant that the municipal authorities had often considered destroying the neighborhoods. But the local politicians, more concerned about keeping votes in the next election than getting rid of islands of poverty, had always opposed such radical action. Strengthened by the support of the beloved son of the all-powerful Indira, however, Bhopal’s municipal leaders had decided this time to take action.
One fine morning, two bulldozers and several truckloads of policemen burst onto the esplanade in front of the teahouse. The officer in charge of the operation clambered onto the leading truck, which was equipped with a loudspeaker.
“People of Orya Bustee, Jai Prakash and Chola! By order of Sanjay Gandhi, central government and the city authorities, I am charged to warn you that you must leave the sites you are occupying illegally,” he declared. “You have one hour in which to vacate the place. After that deadline, your huts will be destroyed and all people remaining will be apprehended and taken by force to a detention camp.”
“Oddly enough, the appeal didn’t provoke any reaction at first,” Ganga Ram, the former leper, recalled. People formed a silent mob in the alleyways, stunned. Then suddenly, one woman let out a howl. With that all the other women began to shriek as if their entrails were being torn out. The sound was terrifying. Children came running from all sides like crazed sparrows. The men had rushed to the teahouse. Rolling along on his wheeled plank, Rahul, the legless cripple, rounded everyone up. Old women went to take offerings and incense sticks to the statues of the gods in the district’s various shrines. In the distance, the inhabitants of the bustee could hear the bulldozers roaring like wild elephants eager to charge. That was when Belram Mukkadam appeared. When he began to speak outside the teahouse, he seemed very sure of himself.
“This time the bastards have come with bulldozers,” he thundered. “Even if we lie down in front of their caterpillars, they won’t stop at crushing us to pulp.” He paused after these words, as if thinking. He fiddled with his mustache.
“You could see things were churning away in his head,” Ganga Ram would say.
“We do have one way of blocking those scum,” Mukkadam continued, swiping at the air several times with his cane. He seemed to be savoring what he was about to say. “My friends, we’re going to change the names of our three bustees. We’re going to call them after the much-loved son of our high priestess, Indira. We’re going to call them the ‘Sanjay Gandhi Bustees.’ They’ll never dare, yes, I can assure you, that they’ll never dare send in their bulldozers against a neighborhood named after Sanjay!”
The manager of the teahouse then pointed his stick at a rickshaw waiting outside the entrance to the Carbide worksite.
“Ganga!” he directed the former leper. “Jump in that rattle-trap and hurry to Spices Square! Get them to paint a big banner marked WELCOME TO THE SANJAY BUSTEES. If you get back in time, we’re saved!”
Just as the apostle of the Kali Grounds had so magnificently predicted, the banner strung between two bamboo poles at the mouth of the road leading to Orya Bustee caused the tide of policemen and the bulldozers to stop dead in their tracks. The piece of material that bore the first name of Indira Gandhi’s son in imposing red letters was more powerful than any threat. The residents could go back to their huts without fear. Destiny would crush them in a different way.
Wages of Fear on the Roads of Maharashtra
The deadly cargo had arrived. As soon as he received the telex, the Hindu engineer Kamal Pareek alerted his assistant, the Muslim supervisor Shekil Qureshi, a chubby, thickset fellow of thirty-six. They packed the protective suits, gloves, boots, masks and helmets provided for special operations into two suitcases, and caught a flight to Bombay. Their mission was to escort two trucks loaded with sixteen drums, each containing forty-four gallons of MIC, over a distance of 530 miles. The Bhopal factory was not yet ready to make the methyl isocyanate required to produce Sevin. So, its management had decided to have several hundred barrels brought over from the Institute plant in the United States.
“Ships transporting toxic substances had to report to Aji Bunder,” Kamal Pareek recounted. “It was a completely isolated dock at the far end of the port of Bombay. People called it ‘the pier of fear.’ ”
Pareek watched with a certain amount of apprehension as the palette of drums dangled in midair on the end of a rope. The crane was preparing to deposit its load in the bottom of a barge moored alongside the ship, which would then transport the drums to the pier. Suddenly the engineer froze. Bubbles of gas were escaping from the lid of one of the containers.
The ship’s commander who had spotted the leak, shouted to the crane operator, “Quickly! Dump those drums into the water.”
“No! Whatever you do, don’t do that!” shouted Pareek, gesticulating frantically for them to stop the maneuver. “One drum of MIC in the water, and the whole lot will go up!” Turning to the skipper of the barge, he ordered, “Scram from here! Otherwise you and your family might blow up to pieces!”
The skipper, a fragile, bare-chested man, surrounded by half a dozen kids, shook his head. “Sahib, my grandparents and my parents lived and died on this barge,” he replied. “I’m ready to do the same.”
Pareek and Qureshi swiftly pulled on their protective suits, masks and helmets. Then, armed with several fat syringes full of a special glue, they jumped onto the bridge of the ship where, with infinite caution, the crane had deposited the palette. Clusters of yellow bubbles were still oozing from the damaged cover of one of the containers. The two men carefully injected the glue into the crack. “When we managed to stem the leak, I heaved the biggest sigh of relief of my life,” Pareek later admitted.
One hour later, the sixteen drums marked with the skull and crossbones sign were loaded aboard the two trucks. An agonizing journey was about to begin. Caught up in the chaos of tongas, * rickshaws, buffalo carts, sacred elephants, other animals of all kinds and overloaded trucks, the two big rigs and Pareek and Qureshi’s white Ambassador car set out on the road to Bhopal. “Every rut, every time a horn sounded, every acrobatic overtaking of a vehicle, every railway crossing, made us jump,” Shekil Qureshi remembered.
“Have you had any dealings with MIC before?” Pareek suddenly asked his companion who was fervently muttering prayers.
“Yes, once. A sparkling liquid in a bottle. It looked just like mineral water.” At this idea the two men broke into a slightly strained laughter. “In any case,” Qureshi went on, “it was so clear, so transparent, you’d never have thought you had only to inhale a few drops for it to kill you.”
Pareek directed the driver to pass the two trucks and stop a little farther on. The sun was so hot that he was worried. “Our cans mustn’t start to boil.”
The two men were well aware that the boiling point of methyl isocyanate is 39° C. They also knew that the result could be catastrophic.
Qureshi put his head out of the window. A blast of burning air hit him in the face. “I bet it’s at least forty degrees, possibly even forty-five.”
Pareek grimaced and signaled to the driver of the front truck to stop. The two men at once rushed over to cover the drums with heavy isothermic tarpaulins. Then they took the extinguishers out of their holders. In case of danger a jet of carbonic foam could lower the temperature of a drum by a few degrees.
“But we didn’t harbor too many illusions,” the engineer later admitted.
For thirty-eight hours, the two intrepid Carbide employees acted as sheepdogs, with their Ambassador car sometimes in front of, and sometimes following, the two trucks. They had been given explicit instructions: their convoy was to stop before entering any inhabited area to allow time to fetch a police escort. “You could read the extreme curiosity on the local people’s faces at the sight of these two trucks surrounded by police officers,” Pareek would recall. “‘What can they possibly be transporting under their tarpaulins to justify that sort of protection?’ people must have been wondering.”
That first high-risk convoy was to be followed by dozens of others. Over the next six years, hundreds of thousands of gallons of the deadly liquid were to traverse the villages and countryside of Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. The day came in May 1980 when, to the delight of all the staff, especially those who had to supervise the trips, the chemical reactors of Bhopal’s brand new plant produced their first gallons of methyl isocyanate. They were dispatched into three huge tanks, which would soon store enough MIC to poison half the city.
The city that had withstood invasions, sieges and the bloodiest of political plots, was in the throes of succumbing to the charms of a foreign chemical giant. Eduardo Muñoz could rejoice; Carbide was going to achieve by peaceful means what no one else had managed in three centuries: the conquering of Bhopal. To the crescents on its mosques, the linga of its Hindu temples and the crosses on its Christian churches, the capital of Madhya Pradesh now added a profane emblem that was to forever alter its destiny: the blue-and-white logo of a pesticide plant.
“That prestigious symbol would contribute to the advent of a privileged class of workers,” Kamal Pareek would explain. “Whether you were employed at the very top of the hierarchy or as the humblest of operators, to work for Carbide was to belong to a caste apart. We were known as the ‘sahibs.’ ”
At Carbide, an engineer earned twice as much as a top official in the Indian administration. This meant he could enjoy a house, a car, several servants and travel in first-class, air-conditioned trains. What counted most, however, was the prestige of belonging to a universally recognized multinational. Social status plays as crucial a role in India as anywhere else. “When people read on my business card: ‘Kamal Pareek—Union Carbide India Limited,’ all doors were opened,” the engineer recalled.
Everyone dreamed of having a family member or an acquaintance employed by the company. Those who had that good fortune were quick to sing its praises.
“Unlike Indian companies, Carbide did not dictate what you should do with your salary,” a Carbide manager explained. “It was American liberty overlaying an Indian environment.”
For V.N. Singh, the son of an illiterate peasant from Uttar Pradesh, the envelope stamped with the blue-and-white logo that the postman delivered to him one morning “was like a message from the god Krishna falling from the sky.” The letter inside informed the young mathematics graduate that Carbide was offering him a position as an operator trainee in its phosgene unit. The boy scrambled across the fields as fast as his legs would carry him to take the news to his father. When they heard the news, his neighbors came running. Soon the entire village had formed a circle around the fortunate chosen one and his father. Both were too moved to utter a sound. Then a voice shouted: “Union Carbide ki jai! Long live Union Carbide!” All the villagers joined in the invocation, as if the entry of one of their own into the service of the American company were a benediction for all the occupants of the village.
As for Shekil Qureshi, the Muslim who had taken part in the dangerous transportation of the drums from Bombay to Bhopal, joining Carbide as a supervisor trainee brought him a sumptuous marriage at the Taj ul-Masajid, the great mosque built by Begum Shah Jahan. Dressed in a glittering sherwani, a long tunic of gilded brocade, his feet shod in slippers encrusted with precious stones, his arm entwined with the traditional band inscribed with prayers soliciting the protection of Allah for him and his wife, a red silk Rajasthani turban on his head, the young chemistry graduate from Saifia College proudly advanced toward the mihrab* of the mosque, “dreaming of the linen coverall with the blue-and-white logo that was, as far as he was concerned, the finest possible attire.”
Such was the prestige conferred by a job with Carbide that families from all over came to Bhopal to find husbands for their daughters. One morning, sensing his end was near, Yusuf Bano, a cloth merchant in Kanpur, put his eighteen-year-old daughter Sajda on the express train to Bhopal with the secret intention of having her meet the son of a distant cousin, who was working in the phosgene unit on the Kali Grounds. “My cousin, Mohammed Ashraf was a handsome boy with a thick black mustache and a laughing mouth,” the woman later recalled. “I liked him at once. All his workmates and even the director of the factory came to our wedding. They gave us a very amusing present. My husband was moved to tears: two Union Carbide helmets with our first names interlaced in gilded lettering.”
For the twenty-six-year-old mechanical engineer Arvind Shrivastava, who was part of the first team recruited by Muñoz, “Carbide wasn’t just a place to work. It was a culture, too. The theatrical evenings, the entertainment, the games, the family picnics beside the waters of the Narmada, were as important to the life of the company as the production of carbon monoxide or phosgene.”
The management constantly urged its workers to “break up the monotonous routine of factory life,” by creating cultural interest and recreational clubs. In an India where the humblest sweeper is brought up on historical and mythological epics, the result exceeded all expectations. The play entitled Shikari ki bivi put on by the workers from the phosgene unit was a triumph. It exalted the courage of a hunter who sacrificed himself to kill a man-eating tiger. As for the first poetry festival organized by the Muslims working in the formulation unit, it attracted so many participants that the performance had to be extended for three additional nights. Then came a magazine. In it, the operator of the carbon monoxide unit, who was also the editor-in-chief, called upon all employees to send him articles, news items and poems, in short any material that might “introduce ingenious ideas to contribute to everyone’s happiness.”
These initiatives, which were typically American in inspiration, soon permeated the city itself. The inhabitants of Bhopal may not have understood the function of the chimneys, tanks and pipework they saw under construction, but they all came rushing to the cricket and volleyball matches the new factory sponsored. Carbide had even set up a highly successful hockey team. As a tribute to the particular family of pesticides to which Sevin belonged, it called its team “the Carbamates.” Nor did Carbide forget the most poverty stricken. On the eve of the Diwali festival, young Padmini saw an official delegation of Carbiders handing out baskets full of sweets, bars of chocolate and cookies. While the children launched themselves at the sweets, other employees went around the huts, distributing what Carbide considered to be a most useful gift in overpopulated India: condoms.
As for the Americans, who suddenly found themselves parachuted into the heart of India, they often felt as if they had landed on another planet. In the space of twenty-four hours, forty-four-year-old Warren Woomer and his wife Betty had traveled from their peaceful, germ-free West Virginia to the bewildering maelstrom of noises, smells and frenetic activity of the City of the Begums. For the man to whom the company would shortly entrust the command of the Bhopal factory, the adventure was “a real culture shock.”
“I knew so little about India!” he candidly would admit. “I realized we’d have to adjust our thought processes and way of life to thousand-year-old traditions. How were we going to get our turbaned Sikh employees to wear a helmet while performing dangerous procedures when even the Indian army had given up with that obligation? Before I left South Charleston, I didn’t even know what a Sikh was!”
For his young compatriot, John Luke Couvaras, who, in his enthusiasm, had likened the Bhopal venture to “a crusade,” “the experience was absolutely unique. I particularly remember the feeling of excitement,” he said, “but India never failed to endear itself to us, sometimes quite comically.”
In the beginning, employees regularly arrived late to their workstations.
“Sahib, the buffalo cows had escaped,” one of Couvaras’s workers explained. “I had to run after them to milk them.”
The American admonished the former peasant gently. “The running of our factory cannot depend on the whims of your cows,” he stated clearly.
“But after six months, everything was working to order,” admitted Couvaras.
There were plenty of other surprises in store for the young engineer, starting with the difference in attitude between Hindu and Muslim engineers. “If there was a problem, a Muslim would give you the facts straight and then acknowledge his responsibility. Whereas a Hindu would remain vague and then incriminate fate. We had to adapt ourselves to these differences. Fortunately, after a certain level of education, the goddess of chemistry intervened to put us all, Indians and Americans alike, on the same wavelength.”
My very dear engineer Young, your presence does us infinite honor. Be so good as to remove your shoes and stretch out on these cushions. Our poetry recital is due to commence in a few moments. While you’re waiting, do quench your thirst with this coconut.”
Thirty-one-year-old Hugo Young, a mechanical engineer originally from Denver, Colorado, could scarcely believe his eyes. He had suddenly found himself thousands of light-years away from his phosgene reactors, in the vast drawing room of one of Bhopal’s numerous patrician residences. About him, some twenty men of different ages were reclining on silk cushions embroidered with gold and silver, their heads resting on small brocade pillows. By buying these pillows they had acquired the right of entry into the most exclusive men’s club, the Lazy Poets’ Circle. Bhopal might be launching itself into the industrial era, but as one expatriate of the Kanawha Valley testified, it was not going to give up any of its traditions. All the adepts of the Lazy Poets’ Circle continued to observe the very particular laws and rites of their brotherhood. Those reclining were considered to be lazy poets of the first order; those seated were lazy poets of the second order; and those standing were voluntarily depriving themselves of the respect of their peers. This hierarchy of posture entitled the reclining to command the seated and the seated to command the standing. It was a subtle philosophy, which even found its expression in material things. For example, cups and bowls with thick rims were strictly prohibited so members of the Lazy Poets’ Circle would not have to open their lips any wider than necessary when drinking.
All afternoon, poets, singers and musicians followed one another at the bedsides of the lazy, charming them with couplets and aubades. In the evening, after an army of turbaned servants had served them all kinds of samosas, the brotherhood took the young American to the parade ground in the old town where a poetry festival was being held. That evening, the mushaira had brought together several authors, professional and amateur, who were singing their works to a particularly enthusiastic audience.
“My friends made a point of translating the ghazals* for me,” Young remembered. “They all evoked tragic destinies, which love saved in the end. As I listened to the voices with their harmonies rising ever higher until they sounded almost like cries for help, I thought with embarrassment of the deadly phosgene I was making in my reactors only a few hundred yards from that prodigious happening.”
In the course of the evening one of the members of the Lazy Poets’ Circle placed a hand on the young American’s shoulder.
“Do you know, dear engineer Young, which is the most popular mushaira in Bhopal?” he asked.
The engineer pretended to think. Then with a mischievous wink, he replied, “The Lazy Poets’, I imagine.”
“You’re way off, my dear fellow. It’s the mushaira of the municipal police. The chief of police told a journalist one day that it was ‘better to make people cry through the magic of poetry than with tear gas.’ ”
Indolent, voluptuous, mischievous and always surprising— that was Bhopal. John Luke Couvaras would never forget the spectacle he came across one afternoon in the living room of his villa in Arera Colony. Stretched out on a sofa, his young Canadian wife was being massaged by two exotic creatures with kohlrimmed eyes and heavy black tresses that tumbled to their thighs. The grace of their movements, their delicacy and concentration extracted a string of compliments from the engineer, but the thanks he received in response could have come from the mouths of a pair of longshoremen; the long henna-decorated hands kneading away at his wife’s flesh belonged to two hijras, or eunuchs.
Less than eight hundred yards from the futuristic complex rising from the Kali Grounds, in old houses washed out by the monsoon, lived a whole community of hijras, a very particular caste in Indian society. They had come to the City of the Begums from every region of India, for festivals and pilgrimages, and they stayed. Three or four hundred eunuchs were reckoned to inhabit Bhopal. They lived in small groups organized around a guru who acted as head of the family. Apart from being talented masseurs, they played an important role in local Hindu society. According to religious tradition, these beings, neither men nor women, had the power to expunge sins committed by newborn babies in their previous lives. Whenever there was a birth, the hijras came running, carrying tambourines coated in red powder for the ceremony of purification. They were always generously remunerated. No one in Bhopal would haggle over the services of the hijras, for fear of incurring their maledictions.
The expatriates from South Charleston experienced a culture shock that only India could induce. For the thirty-six-year-old bachelor Jack Briley, an alpha naphthol expert, the East and all its charms were embodied in a woman. She was one of the nawab’s nieces. He had met her at a cocktail party in honor of the president of the World Bank. Refined, cultured and liberated—something that was rare in Muslim circles—and gifted with a lively sense of humor, twenty-eight-year-old Selma Jehan was, with her large kohl-rimmed eyes, “the perfect incarnation of a princess out of A Thousand and One Nights of the kind a young American from the banks of the Kanawha River might dream of.” Jack Briley allowed himself to fall easily under her spell. As soon as he could escape from the plant, the young Muslim woman showed him the city of her ancestors. As the rules of purdah* ordained, the windows of the old family Ambassador, which she drove herself, were hung with curtains to hide her passengers from others’ sight.
Selma brought her suitor first to the city palaces, where some members of her family were still living. Most of these once-grand buildings were in a sorry state, with cracked walls, ceilings occupied by bats and grimy furniture.
Some of these residences housed the survivors of another age. Begum Zia, Selma’s grandmother, lived among her bougainvilleas and her neem and tamarind trees in Shamla Hills. She never failed to show visitors the silver-framed portrait of the first gift she had received from her husband: a sixteen-year-old Abyssinian slave in Turkish trousers with a waistcoat embroidered with gold.
Briley had the good fortune to be a guest at several receptions held by his young friend’s unusual grandmother. There he met all the town’s uppercrust, people like Dr. Zahir ul-Islam who had just successfully performed Bhopal’s first sex-change operation, or the little man they called “the Pasha,” the town’s gossip. Wearing a wine-colored fez, and a suit of silver brocade, with his eyes made up with kohl, the Pasha spoke English with an Oxford accent. He had lived in England for twenty years but left because he said he felt too Indian there. He found living in India difficult, because he felt too English. Only in Bhopal did he feel at home.
Another regular at Begum Zia’s soirées was an eccentric old man dressed in rags, known as Enamia. Under his real name, Sahibzada Sikander Mohammed Khan Taj, this obscure, impecunious cousin of the begum had married a Spanish princess. He, too, had spent twenty years in London where he worked in a sausage factory before being dismissed for “unhygienic behavior.” No one had ever tried to find out what lay behind the peculiar charge, but the begum and her friends doted upon old Enamia. A great connoisseur of the city, nothing gave him more pleasure than showing foreign visitors around it in his old Jeep with its defunct shock absorbers. He knew the history of every street, monument and house. Enamia was Bhopal’s memory.
The begum’s dinners also brought together passing artists, politicians, writers and poets. Another regular was of course Eduardo Muñoz, to whom Bhopal owed the arrival of Carbide. The food at these dinners was reputed to be the best in Bhopal. For young Briley every invitation was a gastronomic experience. It was there that, for the first time in his life, he tasted partridge cooked in coriander and sweets made out of curdled milk in a syrup of cinnamon and ginger.
It had become a tradition: the weddings of the begum’s grandchildren, nephews and nieces were always held at her home under an immense shamiana, a large tent for festivities and ceremonies, erected in the courtyard. They were the occasion for three days of uninterrupted celebrations. The drawing rooms, courtyards and corridors of the palace were littered with divans on which guests reclined to drink and listen to ghazals and other poetic forms. Despite being a Muslim, Selma had been schooled in Hindu dance, and at these family parties she could often be persuaded to perform. Adorning her ankles and wrists with strings of bells, she would appear on the dais and give passionate performances of kathak, a southern Indian dance accompanied by the complex rhythms of tabla and sarod players. During these moments, the scent of patchouli and musk floating beneath the shamiana would become so intoxicating that the American thought he would never again be able to tolerate the smell of phosgene or MIC.
Not all the expatriates from South Charleston in the City of the Begums were lucky enough to have a love affair with a princess. But the attractions of Bhopal were numerous, starting with the uninterrupted succession of religious festivals, celebrations and ceremonies. There was the bujaria, the noisy, colorful procession of thousands of eunuchs that wound through the old town; and the great Hindu festival in honor of the goddess Durga, whose richly decorated statues were immersed in the lake in the presence of tens of thousands of faithful. Then there was the Sikh celebration of the birth of Guru Nanak, the founder of their religion, with firecrackers that woke up the whole city. And there was the Jain festival in honor of their prophet Mahavira and the return of the pilgrimage season. Autumn brought Eid and Ishtema, two Muslim festivals that drew hundreds of thousands of followers to the old part of town, as well as many other religious and secular celebrations that reflected the extraordinary diversity of the people of Bhopal.
“Carbide Has Poisoned Our Water!”
One was called Parvati, after the wife of the god Shiva; another Surabhi, “the cow with all gifts” born, according to the Vedas, of the great churning of the sea of milk; a third was Gauri, “the light”; and the last two were Sita and Kamadhenu. So gentle were they that little children were not afraid to stroke their foreheads and gaze into their large eyes surrounded by lashes so long they looked as if they were wearing makeup. These five cows were some of the three hundred million heads that made up the world’s largest stock of cattle. For the five families in Orya Bustee to whom they belonged, they were an enviable asset. Belram Mukkadam, the cripple Rahul, Padmini’s father Ratna Nadar, the former leper Ganga Ram and the shoemaker Iqbal were the lucky owners of this modest herd. The few pints of milk they gave each day provided a little butter and yogurt, the only animal protein available to the hungry people of the bustee apart from goat milk. The dung from these cows was carefully collected and made into cakes that were dried in the sun and used as cooking fuel. Each animal knew its way home and, after a day spent roaming the Kali Grounds in search of greenery, returned to its owner in the evening. On the twelfth day of Asvina’s moon in September, of Kartika’s moon in November, and during the festival of new rice, the owners dyed the cows’ horns blue and red and decorated them with garlands of marigold and jasmine. The animals were then arranged in a semicircle outside Belram Mukkadam’s teahouse, so the sorcerer Nilamber could recite mantras over them. As the neighborhood’s most long-standing resident, it fell to Mukkadam to make the customary speech.
He did so with particular feeling. “Each one of our cows is a celestial animal, a symbol of the mother who gives her milk,” he declared. “She was created on the same day as Brahma, founder of our universe, and every part of her body is inhabited by a god, from the nostrils where Asvin dwells to the fringing of her tail, where Yama resides.”
The sorcerer Nilamber, in his saffron robe, intervened in his turn to emphasize “how sacred everything that comes from the cow is.” Upon these words, Rahul brought a bowl filled with a paste. It was the traditional purée made out of gifts from the precious animal—milk, butter, yogurt, dung and urine. The receptacle was passed from hand to hand so that everyone could take a small ball of the purifying substance. Later, led by Padmini, young girls would spread a little earth and fresh dung mixed with urine over the mud flooring of their huts. This protective layer had the power to repel scorpions, cockroaches and above all, mosquitoes, the persistent scourge of the Bhopalis.
That autumn festival day, Mukkadam had a special mission of his own. As soon as the ceremony was over, he attached a garland of flowers to the horns of his cow Parvati, and led her away to his hut at the end of the first alleyway. Inside the one and only room, Mukkadam’s elderly father lay stretched out on a charpoy, watched over by his two daughters who fanned him and uttered prayers. His halting breath and dull eyes suggested that death was imminent. Mukkadam pushed the cow over to the dying man’s bedside, then took the tip of her tail and tied it with a piece of cord to his father’s hand.
“Lead this holy man from the unreal to the real, from darkness to light, from death to immortality,” he murmured gently, stroking the animal’s forehead.
Four days after the death of Belram Mukkadam’s father, a catastrophe befell the inhabitants of Orya Bustee. Padmini was drawing a bucket of water from the well when she smelled a noxious odor coming from the shaft. The water was a strange whitish color. The old woman Prema Bai plunged her hand into the bucket, scooped up a little of the liquid, and tasted it.
“This water is contaminated!” she announced.
All the other women present confirmed her verdict. Looking up at the steel structures that loomed on the horizon, Padmini’s mother shouted, “Come on everyone! Come and see! Carbide has poisoned our water!”
A few hours later, Rahul and several of the neighborhood’s young men burst into the teahouse.
“Belram, come quickly!” cried the cripple. “Your cow Parvati and all the other cows are dead. The crows and vultures that ate them are dead, too.”
Mukkadam set off at a run for the place the boys had indicated. The animals lay stretched out beside a pool fed by a rubber pipe that issued from the factory. “It’s water from Carbide that’s killed them,” he said angrily. “The same water that has poisoned our well. Let’s all go to Carbide, quickly!”
A cortege of three or four hundred people promptly set off on a march to the factory. The old man Omar Pasha and his sons, the former leper Ganga Ram, the shoemaker Iqbal, his friend Bassi the tailor and the bicycle repairman Salar marched at the head. Even the dairyman Bablubhai and the sorcerer Nilamber went. “Pay us compensation for the cows! Stop poisoning our well!” they yelled in chorus. In the second row came six men, bent beneath the weight of the charpoy they were carrying on their shoulders. On this string bed they had placed the body of the American multinational’s first victim. The painted horns, visible between the folds of the shroud, revealed that it was a cow. “Today it’s our cows. Tomorrow it will be us!” shouted the angriest members of the cortege. Hope of employment and the prestige of the uniform with the Carbide logo continued to feature in people’s dreams, but these deaths shattered any illusion they had of living in neighborly harmony.
The plant management appointed one of the engineers to settle the matter as quickly as possible. The American stood in front of the demonstrators.
“Friends, set your minds at rest!” he shouted into the megaphone. “Union Carbide will compensate you generously for your loss. If the owners of the cows that have died will just put up their hands!” The engineer was astonished to see a forest of hands spring up. He took a bundle of bills out of his pocket. “Union Carbide is offering five thousand rupees for the loss of each animal,” he announced. “That’s more than ten times the price of each of your cattle. Here are twenty-five thousand rupees. Share them between you!”
He held out the wad of bills to Mukkadam.
“And the water in our well?” insisted Ganga Ram.
“Don’t worry. We’ll have it analyzed and take whatever steps are necessary.”
The results of the tests were so horrific that the factory management never released them. In addition, soil samples taken from outside the periphery of the Sevin formulation unit revealed high levels of mercury, chromium, copper, nickel and lead. Chloroform, carbon tetrachloride and benzene were detected in the water from the wells to the south and southeast of the factory. The experts’ report was explicit: this was a case of potentially deadly contamination. Yet, for all the promises of Carbide’s representative, nothing was done to stop the pollution.
The envelope bore the stamp of the Indian Revenue Service. It contained the government’s official tribute to the man who, for nine years, had been fighting to give Indian agriculture the means to defend itself against the microscopic hordes that ravaged its crops. Eduardo Muñoz started when he read the letter inside the envelope. Becoming a tax payer in the Indian republic was not exactly one of his greatest aspirations, especially when, as the fiscal services informed him, he owed almost a 100 percent tax on his salary. He decided to pack his bags.
“Leaving India after all those thrilling years was heartbreaking,” Muñoz would recount. “But I left feeling confident. The Indian government had confirmed that Carbide was authorized to make all the ingredients for the production of Sevin on the Bhopal site. The document was numbered ‘C/11/409/75.’ After a long and difficult struggle, my beautiful plant was soon, in the words of our advertising slogan, to bring the people of India, ‘the promise of a bright future.’ ”
Muñoz’s optimism was, at the very least, ill founded. He was probably not aware that the people of the Kali Grounds’ bustees had made their first stand against the harmful effects of his beautiful plant. The state of the country he was leaving was even more worrisome. India was once again suffering from drought. All through the month of June, millions of men, women and children watched the sky for the first signs of the monsoon. Usually, it begins with a few days of buffeting wind. Then, suddenly, the sky darkens. Huge clouds roll in upon each other, scudding along at a fantastic rate. Other clouds succeed them, enormous, as if trimmed with gold. A few moments later, a mighty gust of wind brings a hurricane of dust. Finally a new bank of black clouds plunges the sky into darkness, an interminable roll of thunder rends the air, and the monsoon has begun. Agni, the fire god of the Vedas, protector of humanity and the hearth, hurls his thunderbolts. The great warm drops turn into cataracts of water. Children throw themselves, stark naked, shrieking for joy, into the deluge. Men are exultant and, under the verandas, women sing hymns of thanksgiving.
That year, however, in several regions, water, life and rebirth failed to keep their appointment. Their seedlings were parched and, in the stranglehold of debt, millions of ruined peasants had been unable to buy fertilizers or pesticides. In 1976, the sales figures for Sevin had dropped by half. Another severe blow after the drought of the previous year.
Nonetheless a pleasant surprise awaited Eduardo Muñoz on his return to New York. In recognition of his faithful services, the company had made him president of the international division of agricultural products. The appointment ceremony took place at the new head office Carbide had just opened after selling its Park Avenue headquarters to Manufacturer’s Hanover Trust Bank. A decision that so distressed the municipal government that the governor of New York, Hugh Carey, and two senators had tried to dissuade Bill Sneath from moving the prestigious multinational out of Manhattan. They offered him subsidies and tax shelters. In ten years the city had lost the headquarters of forty-four of the largest American companies and with them some five hundred thousand jobs. All the promises in the world could not persuade Carbide’s CEO to change his mind. He had systematically enumerated the disadvantages of New York, a city that both he and his colleagues judged to be overpopulated, expensive and unsafe. Moreover, standards of education were execrable, transportation was inadequate and taxes were exorbitant. The company had chosen, instead, a particularly imposing site set in the middle of a hundred-acre estate that was home to deer and other wildlife. It was situated near Danbury, a charming little town in Connecticut whose hat factory had been supplying sheriffs, senators, gangsters and America’s middle class for two centuries. The new headquarters were shaped in the form of an airport terminal with satellite wings, underground parking, auditoriums, lecture rooms, libraries, a bank, five restaurants, a fitness center, a hospital, a hairdresser, a gift shop, a newspaper stand, a travel agent and car rental, a television studio, a printer, an information center, acres of air-conditioned offices and even a one-and-a-quarter-mile jogging track. All the evidence suggested that the proud manufacturers of methyl isocyanate had found a headquarters to suit the company’s renown, importance and ambitions for the planet. It was said to have cost a mere eight hundred million dollars.
In the peaceful suburbs of West Virginia, in the vicinity of the Institute’s industrial site, the smell was an unfamiliar one. It was not MIC’s boiled cabbage, but the aroma of the small, fiery, red chilies so essential to spicy Indian cooking. “They rustled up their food in the rooms we’d rented for them,” engineer Warren Woomer would explain. On his return from India, he had been assigned to supervise the twenty or so Indian technicians and engineers sent over by the Bhopal factory. At the end of 1978, they were undergoing a six-month intensive training period in the various units of the American plant. Woomer remembered the amazement of the enthusiastic group as they discovered America. “The Indian government had only authorized them to bring five hundred dollars per person, but you can’t begin to imagine what an Indian can do with five hundred dollars! In the evenings and at weekends they would descend upon the local camera or electronics shops like locusts and set about haggling Oriental-style, extracting astronomical reductions that we Americans would never have managed to get.”
But the trainees from Bhopal had not come halfway around the world to shop. For each one of them Woomer had prepared a rigorous work program designed to train them for the imminent launch of their factory. “It was an invaluable experience,” said Kamal Pareek, “even if our factory was only a child’s toy compared with the Institute monster that, day and night, went on producing seven times more Sevin than ours would ever make.” Realizing that a ship of a hundred tons poses the same navigational and maintenance problems as a fifty-thousand-ton battleship, Woomer assigned each visitor to the department of their specialty, whether it was handling gases, working the reactors, operating electrical circuits and control systems, producing MIC, maintaining and repairing the installations, manufacturing phosgene, formulating Sevin, preventing corrosion, gestating toxic waste, protecting the environment or even running the company. With on-site instruction sessions, audio-visual shows, training periods in laboratories, and visits to the equipment suppliers and manufacturers, Woomer and his team made every effort to bring about what the American engineer called “an appropriate transfer of knowledge.” Each visitor was instructed to keep detailed notes on what he learned, so that when he returned to Bhopal he would be able to compile an instruction manual for his fellow employees.
One of the most significant transfers of knowledge from which the Indian trainees would benefit was not technical in nature; it was a message of a rather different order. In a curious doctrine that combined realism with what could be read as cynicism, the company’s managers had defined the principles of a methodology they called “Corporate Safety.” “Human beings are our most precious asset,” affirmed the preamble to the doctrine’s manifesto, “and their health and safety are therefore our number one priority.” Some of Carbide’s own employees saw more than a little tension, if not hypocrisy, in such a declaration.
“How could we not enthusiastically applaud such a profession of faith,” Pareek would ask, “when we were responsible for assuring the safety of the first plant to produce methyl isocyanate outside America?”
Carbide’s manifesto set down certain truths, the first being that “all accidents are avoidable provided the measures necessary to avoid them are defined and implemented.” But it was on another more subtle argument that the multinational’s management depended to impress upon their visitors the importance of safety. The formula they came up with was simple: “Good safety and good accident prevention practices are good business.”
“At Institute, Union Carbide’s real emblem was not the blue-and-white logo, but a green triangle inscribed with the words ‘SAFETY FIRST,’ ” stated Kamal Pareek, the future assistant manager for safety at the Bhopal factory.
This obsession with safety manifested itself primarily through the study of a voluminous four-hundred-page manual outlining in minute detail the instructions for emergency procedures to be carried out in case of an accident. It contained information on how to keep personnel continuously informed, on the constant checking of all apparatus, regular practices for safety crews and equipment, as well as the immediate identification of toxic agents, evacuation procedures and a thousand other extreme situations.
“At Institute,” the Indian engineer would say, “the posters of which the management seemed most proud were not graphs tracking the rise of Sevin sales, but safety awards the company’s various factories throughout the world had won.”
The First Deadly Drops from the “Beautiful Plant”
No plaque commemorates the day when the Titanic was launched with a bottle of champagne before plowing through the waves for the very first time. Nor does any history book make reference to May 4, 1980, the date that the first factory exported from the West to make pesticides using methyl isocyanate began production. Yet for the men who had built it, that day was “cause for jubilation” as one of them would later say. Thirteen years after Eduardo Muñoz’s gray Jaguar had first pulled up to the Kali Grounds, a dream was coming true.
With speeches, the handing out of gifts, garlands and sweets, the company with the blue-and-white logo had assembled several hundred guests under multicolored shamianas to mark the occasion. Dignitaries, ministers, senior civil servants, directors of the company, personnel from the various units— ranging from the foreman to the humblest operator—stood together at the foot of this remarkable structure. The engineers, both American and Indian, made no secret of their delight and relief at having surmounted the obstacles of a long and difficult process.
The new CEO of Union Carbide had come over from the United States especially for the event. Tall, athletic-looking, with a white plastic safety helmet atop his thick gray hair, Warren Anderson towered above the assembly. The son of a humble Swedish carpenter who had immigrated to Brooklyn, at fifty-nine he epitomized the fulfillment of the American dream. Equipped with a degree in chemistry and another in law, in thirty-five years he had climbed the ladder to the top of the world’s third largest chemical giant. The empire he now ran comprised seven hundred plants employing 117,000 people in thirty-eight countries. For this passionate fisherman who loved gardening at his Connecticut home, the birth of the Bhopal plant was a decisive step toward his life’s principal objective. Anderson wanted to turn Union Carbide into a company with a human face, a firm in which respect for moral values would carry as much weight as the rise of its shares on the stock market. Thanks to the Sevin that the Carbide teams were going to manufacture here, tens of thousands of peasants could protect their families from the ancestral curse of starvation. With a garland of marigolds around his neck, Warren Anderson had every reason to be proud and happy. This plant was a triumphant step in his remarkable career.
Getting the installation up and running had involved three challenging months of intensive preparation. Finding and training technicians in the heart of India who could cope with any emergency had been no easy matter. There were eighty entries on the list of possible problems, many of them extremely serious.
“You don’t launch such a complex plant like you turn the ignition key in a car,” Pareek would explain. “We were dealing with a kind of metal dinosaur, complete with its bad temper, its whims, its weaknesses and its birth deformities. Waking up a monster like that and bringing it to life, with its hundreds of miles of piping, its thousands of valves, joints, pumps, reactors, tanks and instruments was a task worthy of the building of the pyramids.”
It began with a rigorous check of the sealing of all circuits. The pipework was flushed repeatedly with nitrogen. To detect any leaks in the connecting joints, safety valves, pressure gauges and sluices were smeared with a soapy coating. The smallest bubble alerted the operators. Next, one by one, all the hundreds of bolts that held together the various pieces of equipment had to be tightened. Once the system was determined to be functioning correctly, the engineers began heating up the two gases, which, when brought together, would produce methyl isocyanate. These two components—phosgene and monomethylamine—had themselves been obtained by combining other substances. As the temperature of the gases rose, the operators opened up the circuits one by one. The few privileged people present in the control room held their breath. The fateful moment was approaching. John Luke Couvaras checked the dials on the reactors’ temperature and pressure gauges. Then he cried, “Go!” Whereupon an operator activated a circuit that sent the phosgene and the monomethylamine into the same steel cylinder. The combination produced a gaseous reaction. This gas was at once cooled down again, purified and liquefied. Then came a burst of applause. Six years after setting off an atomic explosion, India had just produced its first drops of methyl isocyanate.
“We weren’t able to see the first trickle of MIC,” Pareek later recalled, “because it went straight into the holding chamber. But as soon as the chamber was full we put on our protective suits to take a sample of a few centiliters of the liquid. I carried the container with as much respect as if it had been a statue of Durga to the laboratory to have the contents analyzed. We were thrilled at the result. Our Indian MIC was as pure a vintage as Kanawha Valley’s!”
While Union Carbide’s tanks were filling up, a celebration of a very different kind was going on at the southern boundary of the Kali Grounds. Belram Mukkadam, Rahul, Ganga Ram, Ratna Nadar and many of the other residents of Orya Bustee gathered around the five horned beasts the cattle merchant had just delivered. With the compensation money paid out by Carbide, Mukkadam had decided to replace his cow Parvati with a bull. He called it Nandi, after the bull the god Shiva had taken as his mount because it kept all danger and evil at bay. That night, by the light of the full moon, he marked the animal’s forehead with the trident of the god. It was an emblem that augured well. Mukkadam was sure it would guarantee the fertility of the new herd and ensure divine protection on the Kali Grounds’ bustees.
Three Tanks Dressed up for a Carnival
By appointing one of its best men to the helm of the Indian pesticide plant, the American multinational was signaling the degree of control it expected to exercise over the Bhopal installation. Modest, almost timid-looking behind his thick glasses, Warren Woomer was one of Carbide’s most experienced and respected engineers. Moreover, he was familiar with India and Bhopal after having carried out two assignments there. He had helped get up the unit that produced alpha naphthol, a substance used in the composition of Sevin. And he also had been instrumental in the launching of the Sevin plant, checking to be certain that his Indian colleagues were correctly applying everything he had taught them at Institute.
Being an American in charge of a thousand Indians of different origins, castes, religions and languages was the toughest challenge of his career. Woomer began with a detailed inspection of the ship.
“I couldn’t find anything fundamental at fault,” he would recall. “Of course the control room would seem obsolete to us now, but at the time it was the best that India could produce. I noticed nothing really shocking about either the design or the functioning of the plant. In any case my bible was the MIC manual of use with its forty pages of instructions. Every one of them was to be treated as Gospel truth, especially the directive to keep the MIC in the storage tanks at a temperature close to zero degrees Celsius. On this point I had decided to be intractable. Yes, it was imperative that every single drop of MIC was kept at zero degrees. What’s more, my long honeymoon with some of the most dangerous chemical substances made me add one recommendation to the MIC manual of use. I considered it vitally important: only stock a minimum quantity of methyl isocyanate on site.”
Although he had encountered no problems at a technical level, Woomer still realized that many things could be improved, notably the way in which staff members performed their tasks.
“For example, no one took the precaution of wearing safety goggles,” he would remember. “One day I put my hand over one of the operator’s eyes. ‘That’s how your children and grandchildren are likely to see your face if you don’t protect your eyes,’ I told him severely. The story did the rounds of the plant and, next day, I found everyone wearing safety goggles. I realized then that in India you had to touch people through the heart.”
There were plenty of other problems in store for the new captain. Firstly, how was he to remember the unpronounceable names of so many of his colleagues?
“Sathi,” he said one day to his secretary, “you’re going to teach me the correct pronunciation of the first and last names of everyone working in the plant, including those of their wives and children. And I’d like you to point out any mistakes I make because of my ignorance of the ways and customs of your country.”
“Sahb,” * the young woman replied, “in India, employees don’t tell their bosses what to do.”
“I’m not asking you to tell me what to do,” replied Woomer sharply. “I’m asking you to help me be as good a boss as possible.”
Warren Woomer was to discover, often at personal cost, the extreme subtlety of relationships in Indian society, where every individual occupies a special place in a myriad of hierarchies.
“I learned never to make a remark to anyone in the presence of his superior,” he would say. “I learned never to announce a decision without everyone having had the chance to express a view so that it appeared to be the result of a collective choice. But, above all, I learned who Rama was, who Ganesh, Vishnu and Shiva were; what events the festivals of Moharam or Ishtema commemorated; who Guru Nanak was and who was the god of work my employees worshipped so ardently and whose name was so difficult to remember.”
The god Warren Woomer could not remain ignorant of was Vishvakarma, one of the giants in the Hindu pantheon. In Indian mythology he personifies creative power, and the sacred texts glorify him as the “architect of the universe, the all-seeing god who disposes of all the worlds, gives the divinities their names and exists beyond mortal comprehension.” He is also the one who fashions the weapons and tools of the gods. He is lord of the arts and carpenter of the cosmos, builder of the celestial chariots and creator of all ornaments. That is why he is the tutelary god of artisans and patron of all the crafts that enable humankind to subsist.
Every year after the September moon, his effigy is borne triumphantly into all workplaces—from the smallest workroom to the largest factory. This is a privileged time of communication between bosses and workers, when celebrations unite rich and poor in shared worship and prayer.
Overnight the reactors, pumps and distillation columns of the Bhopal plant were decorated with wreaths of jasmine and marigold in honor of Vishvakarma. The three great tanks due to contain tens of thousands of gallons of MIC were draped in fabrics of many colors, making them look like carnival floats. The vast Sevin formulation unit, where the festivities were to be held, was covered in carpets and its walls were decorated with streamers and garlands of flowers. Workmen brought cases full of hammers, nails, pliers and hundreds of other tools, which they deposited on the ground and decorated with foliage and flowers. Others set up the colossal altar in which the statue of the god would be installed on a cushion of rose petals. Riding on his elephant covered by a cloth encrusted with precious stones, Vishvakarma looked like a maharajah. He wore a tunic embroidered with gold thread and studded with jewels. One could tell he was not a human being in that he had wings and four arms brandishing an ax, a hammer, a bow and a balance. Several hundred engineers, machine operators, foremen and workmen, most accompanied by their wives and children, and all dressed in their festival clothes, soon filled the work floor. Squatting barefoot in this sea of humanity, Warren and Betty Woomer, the only foreigners, watched the colorful ceremony with astonishment and respect.
After intoning mantras into a microphone, a pandit with a shaven head placed the sacred objects on a thali, a ritual silver plate. First the purifying fire—burning oil in a clay dish—then rose petals, a few small balls of sweet pastry, a handful of rice and finally the sindoor, a little pile of scarlet powder. Ringing his small bell vigorously, the pandit blessed the collection of tools laid out by the workers. A solitary voice then rang out, promptly followed by a hundred others. “Vishvakarma kijai! Long live Vishvakarma!” That was the signal. The ceremony was over and the festivities could commence. The management of the factory had arranged for a banquet of meat curry and vegetables, lassi and puri, little cakes of fried wheat puffed up into balloons, to be prepared in a nearby kitchen. Beer and palm wine flowed like water. The alarm system’s loudspeakers poured out a stentorian flood of popular tunes and firecrackers went off on all sides. Employers and employees gave themselves up to celebration.
Like most of those in charge of the beautiful plant, Warren and Betty Woomer were not aware that the occupants of the neighboring bustees were gathered with similar fervor around the god of tools. There was, after all, an extraordinary concentration of workers in those areas, too. The workshops belonging to the shoemaker Iqbal, the sari embroiderer Ahmed Bassi and the bicycle repairman Salar, were just three small links in a whole chain of workplaces in which devotees of Vishvakarma labored in order to survive. In Jai Prakash and Chola, children supported their families by cutting up sheets of brass to make tools, or dipping fountain pen caps in chrome baths that gave off noxious fumes. Elsewhere, youngsters slowly poisoned themselves making matches and firecrackers, handling phosphorous, zinc oxide and asbestos powder. In poorly ventilated workshops that smelled of burning oil and overheated metal, emaciated men laminated, soldered and fitted pieces of iron-work together. A few paces away from the spacious house belonging to the Sikh moneylender Pulpul Singh, a dozen men sitting cross-legged made bidis. Nearly all of them suffered from tuberculosis and thus lacked the strength to pedal a rickshaw or pull a tilagari, a hand cart. Provided they did not stop for a single minute, they could roll up to thirteen hundred cigarettes a day. Every evening a tharagar would come from the town to collect what they had produced. For one thousand bidis, they received twelve rupees, the price of two kilos of rice.
How surprised Chairman Anderson and his works manager Warren Woomer would have been if ever they had chanced upon those places where so many men and children spent their lives making springs, truck parts, axles for weaving looms, bolts, gas tanks and even turbine gears to the tenth of a micron; men and children, who with a surprising degree of dexterity, inventiveness and resourcefulness, could produce, copy, repair or renovate any part or machine. Here the smallest scrap of metal, the lowliest bit of debris was reused, transformed, adapted. Here nothing was ever thrown away. Everything was always re-born, as if by some miracle.
In anticipation of the festival, labor had stopped in the workshops on the previous day, and everyone had scrambled to clean, repaint and adorn the rooms with garlands of foliage and flowers. The workers of Orya, Chola and Jai Prakash also made the god of tools proud.
In the space of one night, hellholes had been transformed into places of worship strewn with flowers and adorned with sumptuously decorated temporary altars. The traditional chromo of the four-armed god perched on his elephant was everywhere. Yesterday’s slaves had changed into gleaming shirts and brand new lunghis; their wives had got out their festival saris, preserved in the family coffers from the greed of the cockroaches. The children were equally resplendent. The entire local population squeezed in behind a brass and drum band whose flourishes resounded through the alleyways. The godfather Omar Pasha was present, with a wife on either side of him, each dressed up like a queen in a silk sari that Ahmed Bassi had embroidered and encrusted with pearls. The Muslim tailor was there as well, for the festivities transcended all religious differences. With his crony the goateed mullah beside him, the sorcerer Nilamber, who was acting as pandit, led the procession from workshop to workshop, saying mantras and blessing the tools with purifying fire. Behind him, Padmini walked proudly, in a long dress made out of scarlet cotton, a gift from Sister Felicity. The young Indian girl had persuaded the nun to join in the celebrations. When they spotted the cross around the sister’s neck, many of the workers asked her to come and bless their tools in the name of her god. “Praise to you, oh God of the universe, who gives our daily bread, for your children in Orya Bustee, Chola and Jai Prakash love and believe in you,” Sister Felicity repeated fervently in each workshop. “And rejoice with them at this day of light in all the hardship of their lives.”
“Half a Million Hours of Work and Not a Day Lost”
The City of the Begums could not help but bless the chairman of Carbide. No other industrial enterprise housed within Bhopal’s ancient walls had been quite so concerned about its image; no other was quite so solicitous toward its staff. Each day brought new examples of this extraordinary behavior. In the plant, Muslim workers had a place of prayer facing Mecca; Hindus had little altars dedicated to their principal gods. During the Hindu festival in honor of the goddess Durga, the management gave the workers a generator to light her richly decorated statue. The material advantages were no less plentiful. A special fund enabled employees to borrow money for weddings and festivals. The insurance and pension plans put the factory ahead of most Indian firms. A canteen, accessible to all, dispensed meals for a token price of two rupees.
In accordance with what they had been taught in Institute, however, it was the safety of their staff that was the prime concern of the plant management. Carbide equipped Bhopal’s Hamidia Hospital with ultramodern resuscitation equipment, which could treat several victims of gas poisoning simultaneously. The gift was greeted with public celebrations widely reported in the press. In addition a hospital infirmary stocked with respiratory equipment, a radiology unit and a laboratory, was built at the very entrance to the site. “We were convinced all these precautions were unnecessary,” Kamal Pareek said afterward, “but they were part of the safety culture with which we had been inculcated.” Yet this same culture accommodated some surprising deficiencies. The medical staff that Carbide hired did not have any specific training in the effects of gas-related accidents, especially those caused by methyl isocyanate.
It fell to the young assistant manager for safety to share what he had learned at Institute with over a thousand men, most of whom were almost oblivious to the dangers they faced every day. “Making people appreciate the danger was virtually impossible,” Pareek would recount. “It’s in the nature of a chemical plant for the danger to be invisible. How can you instill fear into people without showing them the danger?” Meetings to inform people, emergency exercises, poster campaigns, safety demonstrations in which families took part, slogan competitions … Pareek and his superior were constantly devising new ways of awakening everyone’s survival instinct. Soon, Warren Woomer was able to send a victory report to his headquarters in America: “We are pleased to announce that half a million hours have been worked without losing a single day.”
Safety, Pareek knew, also depended upon a certain number of specific devices, such as the alarm system with which the plant was equipped. At the slightest intimation of fire or the smallest emission of toxic gas, the duty supervisor in the control room had orders to set off a general alarm siren. At the same time loudspeakers would inform personnel, first in English, then in Hindi, of the precise nature of the gas, the exact location of the leak and the direction in which the wind was blowing. This last piece of information was supplied by a wind sock at the top of a mast outside the MIC unit. In case of a major leak, staff would receive an order to evacuate the site without panic, according to the practice drills Pareek regularly organized.
All the same, this alarm system was only intended to warn the crews working on the factory site. Though nearby residents could hear the alarm, none of the loudspeakers pointed outward in the direction of the bustees where thousands of potential victims were packed together. “From the moment I got there, the proximity of all those people was one of my major worries,” Warren Woomer would admit. “Every evening I would have our guards move away those setting up camp right along our fence. Sometimes some of them would even get over the wall, and we would have all the difficulty in the world getting them out. The plant had such magnetic appeal! So many people wanted to get a job there! That’s what drew them nearer and nearer.”
One day Woomer decided to intervene personally with the municipal authorities to get them to force people to “move as far away as possible” from his installations. His efforts failed. None of the authorities appeared disposed to launch another eviction operation against the Kali Grounds squatters. Woomer proposed drawing up a plan to evacuate people in case of a major incident. The very idea of such a plan drew immediate resistance from the highest level of the Madhya Pradesh government. The people of Bhopal might panic, or worse yet, leave—a possibility that Arjun Singh, the state’s chief minister, found wholly unacceptable. The elections were approaching and he needed every possible vote, no matter where it came from. The portly Omar Pasha, his electoral agent in the three bustees, was already campaigning on his behalf. Astute politician that he was, he had anticipated everything to ensure his reelection. Not only would he prevent the expulsion of his electors, but he would win their votes by offering them the most spectacular present they could ever hope to receive.
The scene that engineer Kamal Pareek imagined one day was like a clip from a horror movie. The metal in one of the pipelines had cracked, allowing a flood of methyl isocyanate to escape. Because the accident was not the kind of leak the safety equipment could contain, the ensuing tragedy was unstoppable. A deadly cloud of MIC was going to spread through the factory, then into the atmosphere. The idea for this disastrous scenario came to Pareek as he watched a train packed with passengers come to a halt on the railway line that ran between the factory and the bustees. Would it be possible for a cloud of MIC driven by the wind to hit those hundreds of poor wretches trapped in their railway cars? the engineer wanted to know. He went to Nagpur, former capital of the Central Provinces, and presented himself at India’s national meteorological headquarters. Its archives contained records of meteorological studies carried out in India’s principal cities for the last quarter of a century: temperatures, hygrometric and barometric pressures, air density, wind intensity and direction and so on. All this information was recorded on voluminous rolls of paper. After a week spent compiling data, the engineer was able to extract from this ocean a mass of information about the meteorological conditions peculiar to Bhopal. For example, in 75 percent of the cases, the winds blew from north to east at a speed of between six and twenty miles an hour. The average temperature in December was 15° C by day but only 7° C at night.
Pareek packed this paperwork in a cardboard box and dispatched it swiftly to the safety department at Union Carbide in South Charleston to have it simulated on the computer. Taking into account the meteorological conditions prevalent in Bhopal, the technicians into the U.S. would be able to tell whether or not the toxic cloud of his scenario was likely to hit the train that had stopped next to the bustees. The reply came back three days later in the guise of a short telex. “It is not possible, even under the worst conditions, that the toxic cloud will hit the railway line. It will pass over it.”
“It will pass over it …” the engineer repeated several times, catching his breath. A vision of horror passed before his eyes. “My God,” he thought, “so the cloud would hit the bustees.”
The vigorous games of tennis Warren Woomer played every morning before going to his office reflected his ebullient morale. The Bhopal plant’s top man had every reason to be satisfied. After a mediocre first year, the production and sales of Sevin had taken off. In 1981, they reached 2,704 tons: half the factory’s capacity but 30 percent more than Eduardo Muñoz’s most optimistic predictions. Despite this success, however, the beautiful plant had some problems. The most serious arose from the alpha-naphthol production unit. The installation designed by Indian engineers had never, despite several modifications, been able to supply a product that was pure enough. They had therefore to resign themselves to importing alpha naphthol directly from Institute in the United States. In the end this fiasco would cost Carbide $8 million, 40 percent of the original budget for the entire construction.
There had been an earlier misfortune. In 1978 a fire had devastated part of the unit. The gigantic column of black smoke that hid the sun before raining down foul-smelling particles on roofs and terraces had been Carbide’s first gloomy signature in the sky over Bhopal. Seeing this incredible spectacle from his house, a young journalist by the name of Rajkumar Keswani rushed to the scene of the disaster, only to find that the area had already been cordoned off by hundreds of policemen. No one was allowed near.
Nevertheless, four years after this accident, Carbide’s star continued to shine in the firmament over the City of the Begums. The guest house’s panoramic restaurant overlooking the town had become the favorite meeting place of the political establishment and local society. Those who dined there would never forget the extravagant spectacles that formed the after-dinner entertainment, like the water ballet in the swimming pool that the wife of the managing director of Carbide’s Indian subsidiary, herself an accomplished dancer and swimmer, had arranged. The initiated knew that this luxurious residence was also used for top-secret meetings. Carbide had placed a suite at the permanent disposal of the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh. In Bhopal, as elsewhere, money and power made comfortable bedfellows.
Everlasting Roots in the Black Earth of the Kali Grounds
The word traveled from hut to shed to stall to workshop like a trail of gunpowder. The residents of the three bustees were to gather on the teahouse esplanade for a meeting of the utmost importance.
“This is it. Carbide’s taking us all on!” shouted Ganga Ram, who had never got over being rejected because of his mutilated hands.
“In your dreams, you poor fool!” said the shoemaker Iqbal, ever the pessimist. “It’s to inform us we’re going to be evicted. And this time, it’ll be for good!”
The arrival of Dalima on her crutches interrupted the exchange. With a yellow marigold in her hair and glass bangles jangling about her wrists, the young cripple had a triumphant air about her.
“It’s to tell us they’re going to install a drinking water supply with taps!” she announced.
“Why, it’s obvious,” said old Prema Bai, “they need us for the elections.”
In India, like anywhere else, it was the womenfolk who showed the most common sense.
That was when a voice from a loudspeaker rent the sky.
“People of Orya Bustee, Jai Prakash and Chola, hurry up!” it commanded.
The residents of the bustees rushed from the alleyways toward the teahouse esplanade. Sister Felicity, who was in the process of giving several children polio vaccinations, paused.
“It’s like being at home in Scotland when a storm breaks,” she told Padmini. “All the sheep start running toward the voice that’s calling them.”
Padmini, who had never seen sheep, made an effort to imagine the scene. At that point Rahul, the legless cripple appeared.
“Padmini! Run to the factory and tell your father and the others. Ask him to round everyone up.” Suddenly assuming the mysterious air of one who knew more, he whispered, “I think our state’s precious chief minister has a surprise for us.”
The young girl set off for the factory at a run. Everywhere the sweatshop slaves were abandoning their tools and their machines to make for the grand gathering. As they arrived, Belram Mukkadam, his stick waving madly, directed them to sit down. Soon the entire esplanade was covered by a human sea.
A truck appeared. It was loaded with posters that Mukkadam immediately hung all around the teahouse. On most of them people recognized the balding forehead, fleshy lips and thick glasses of the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh. Other posters depicted an open hand. In the same way that Shiva had a trident as his emblem, and the religion of Islam its crescent, the Congress party, of which Arjun Singh was one of the leading lights, had chosen as its symbol the wide open palm of a hand. The truck was also carrying a collection of small fliers, which Rahul, Ganga Ram and others busied themselves distributing. “WE LOVE YOU, ARJUN!” they said. “ARJUN, YOU ARE OUR SAVIOUR! ARJUN, BHOPAL NEEDS YOU!” Some went so far as to proclaim: “ARJUN, INDIA WANTS YOU!”
Delayed in New Delhi with Indira Gandhi, the organizer of this incredible show had entrusted his official representative in the Kali Grounds’ bustees to see that the display served his electoral interests. The fact that the guest of honor was missing made the spectacle all the more quaint, for the proceedings began with the solemn arrival of an empty armchair. Carried by two servants in dhotis, the august seat came directly from Omar Pasha’s drawing room. Encrusted with mother of pearl and ivory, it looked more like a throne. A few minutes later, a gleaming Ambassador brought the chief minister’s representative. In honor of the occasion, Omar Pasha was wearing the most legendary crown in India’s history, the white cap of those who had fought for independence. Thirty-eight years after the death of Mahatma Gandhi, the godfather of the bustees knew that the white cap was still a powerful symbol.
At a respectful distance behind the old man walked Omar Pasha’s son Ashoka, a tall fellow with a shaven head, whom the inhabitants of the bustees had learned to fear and respect. Manager of the clandestine drink trade controlled by his father, today he carried neither alcohol nor hashish, but a small ebony chest sealed with a copper lock. Inside this casket was a treasure, possibly the most valuable treasure the occupants of Orya Bustee, Chola and Jai Prakash could hope to receive.
Omar Pasha sat down on his throne, in front of which Mukkadam had placed a cloth-covered table, bearing a bouquet of flowers and incense sticks. Because of the brightness of the sun, the godfather’s eyes were hidden behind dark glasses, but people could tell what he was thinking by the way he wrinkled his eyebrows. Mukkadam called for a microphone, which the visitor seized between pudgy fingers dripping with gold and ruby rings.
“My friends!” he exclaimed in a strong voice that forty years of drinking and smoking had not managed to roughen. “I have come to deliver to you, on behalf of our revered chief minister Arjun Singh.”
At this name, Omar Pasha paused, sending a tremble through the assembly bristling with posters. Someone shouted: “Arjun Singh, ki jai!” but the cry was not taken up. The crowd was impatient to hear the rest of the speech.
“At the request of our chief minister,” the godfather continued, “I have come to deliver to you your patta! * ”
The echo of this unbelievable, supernatural, unhoped for word hovered in the overheated air for interminably long seconds. Surveying the stunned crowd, Sister Felicity could not help thinking of a sentence by the Catholic writer Léon Bloy: “You don’t enter paradise tomorrow, or in ten years time. You enter it today when you are poor and crucified.”
Since the dawn of India’s history that mythical word, “patta” had haunted the dreams of millions of disenfranchised people. It had fired the hopes of all those who, in order to survive, had had no alternative but to set up their hovel wherever they could. The people who had ended up in the Kali Grounds were among those poor unfortunates: those people, whom Indira Gandhi’s son had tried forcibly to drive away, the people whom the works manager of an American plant dreaded seeing encamped against its walls, had for years been clinging desperately to the pitiful patch of dust that Belram Mukkadam had once traced out for them with his stick. And there, suddenly, was the godfather bringing them official property deeds issued by the government of Madhya Pradesh recognizing their right to occupy their miserable piece of squattered land.
It was too good to be true. Never mind the fact that this deed would have to be renewed in thirty years’ time, never mind the fact that it was officially forbidden to pawn it or sell it, never mind the fact that their owners would be taxed thirty-four rupees each year. A frenzied cheer went up from the crowd, which rose to its feet in a single movement. People chanted the names of the chief minister, Omar Pasha and Indira Gandhi. They danced, they laughed, and congratulated one another. Caught up in a surge, Padmini suddenly found herself raised above the surrounding heads like a figurehead, the fragile emblem of a people throwing off its chains and achieving the beginnings of dignity. As far as these illiterate men, women and children were concerned, the pieces of paper Omar Pasha pulled from his chest were a gift from the gods. These deeds would remove their fears for good by allowing them to plant their roots forever in the welcoming ground, over which fluttered the flag with the blue-and-white logo.
Every time Omar Pasha invited a beneficiary to come and collect the document inscribed with his name and the designation of his plot, a bearded character sitting at the back wagged his head and rubbed at his enormous eyebrows. For the Sikh Pulpul Singh, the neighborhood usurer, this was a fortune on a plate, an opportunity to increase his wealth, even if it would mean breaking the law against pawning the deeds. Pulpul Singh could already see each sheet of paper that came out of the godfather’s chest winding its way into his own safe. The day would come that these poor people would need to borrow money from him, and what better guarantee could he ask for than the deposit of those magical deeds, which he could always find a way of selling at a profit?
A NIGHT BLESSED BY THE STARS
A Gas That Makes You Laugh Before It Kills You
With his thick mustache, bushy eyebrows and round cheeks, the thirty-two-year-old Muslim Mohammed Ashraf was the mirror image of the Indian cinema idol Shashi Kapoor. The resemblance had made him the most popular worker in the plant. In charge of a shift in the phosgene unit, on that December 23, 1981, Ashraf had to carry out a routine maintenance operation. It was a matter of replacing a defective flange between two pieces of pipework.
“No need to put your kit on today,” he announced to his colleague Harish Khan, indicating the heavy rubber coat hanging on a hook in the cloakroom. “The factory isn’t running. There’s no likelihood of a leak.”
“Gases can walk about even when everything’s stopped,” Khan retorted sharply. “Better be on the safe side. A few drops of that blasted phosgene on your pullover can hurt you. It’s not like the bangla from Mukkadam’s teahouse!”
The two men burst out laughing.
“I’m willing to bet Mukkadam’s rotgut is even more dangerous than this bloody phosgene,” Ashraf said, donning his mask.
No one had ever had cause to reproach the Muslim operator for any breach of safety procedures. Ashraf was one of the most reliable technicians in the company, even if he did leave his workstation five times a day to go out into the courtyard and pray on his little mat facing Mecca, and even if he did come staggering to work in the morning because he had spent all night fishing on the banks of Upper Lake. The son of a small trader in the bazaar, he owed everything to Carbide, not least his marriage to the daughter of a cloth merchant from Kanpur, who was honored to have an employee of the prestigious multinational for his son-in-law, even if he was only a low-level employee. A graduate in economics, Sajda Bano was a beautiful young woman. She had given him two sons, Arshad and Soeb, in whom he could already see two prospective “Carbiders.”
It took only a few minutes to dismantle the joint. Just as he was fitting the new component, however, Ashraf saw through his mask a small quantity of liquid phosgene spurt from the upper side of the piping. A few drops landed on his sweater. Aware of the danger, he rushed into a shower cabin to rinse his clothing. It was then that he made a fatal mistake. Instead of waiting for the powerful jet of water to complete the decontamination process, he took off his mask. The heat of his chest immediately caused the few drops of phosgene still nestling in the wool of his sweater to vaporize. Apart from a slight irritation of the eyes and throat, which rapidly disappeared, Ashraf felt no discomfort at the time. He did not know that phosgene has a stealthy way of killing its victims. First it gives them a sense of euphoria.
“I’d never seen my husband so voluble,” Sajda Bano later recalled. “He seemed to have forgotten the accident. He took us out in the car to visit a small country house he wanted to buy beside the Narmada River. He was as cheerful as he was during the first days of our engagement.”
Then, all of a sudden, he collapsed, with his lungs full of a fierce flood of secretions. He started to vomit a gush of transparent fluid mixed with blood. Panic-stricken, Sajda called the factory, who had him taken by ambulance to the intensive-care unit Carbide had helped set up at Hamidia Hospital. He was placed on an artificial respirator where his agony continued. He threw up more and more fluids, up to four and a half pints an hour. Soon he did not even have the strength to expectorate.
Sajda had to push aside some of her in-law’s family to get to her husband’s bedside. “He was as white as a sheet,” she would remember, “but when he sensed my presence, he opened his eyes and tore off his oxygen mask. ‘I’d like to say goodbye to the children. Go and fetch them!’ he whispered.”
When the young woman came back with the two boys, the dying man took the youngest in his arms. “Son, how do you fancy a fishing trip?” he asked, forcing a smile. The effort set off a violent bout of coughing. Then came a succession of rattles and a last sigh. It was all over. Bhopal’s beautiful plant had claimed its first victim. It was Christmas day. For the young woman who had come from a far distant province to marry a Carbide man, three months and thirteen days of mourning were about to begin.
The entire factory grieved for its martyr. One of those most affected by the accident was its managing director. “We had nothing to reproach ourselves for,” Warren Woomer would say. “Mohammed Ashraf had been properly trained for the dangers of his profession. By neglecting to put on his rubber coat and taking off his mask too soon, he had broken safety regulations. It was the first time in my life as an engineer that I’d lost one of my men. I’d had people injured but never a death. It was the kind of situation where you had to know exactly what had gone wrong because it must never be allowed to happen again. No matter what the circumstances of the accident.”
Two employees took it upon themselves to provide a response to the works manager’s questions. Thirty-two-year-old Hindu Shankar Malviya and thirty-one-year-old Muslim Bashir Ullah led the firm’s main trade union. Both came from very poor families in the Bhopal bustees. Their energy and readiness to intervene on behalf of their comrades had made them immensely popular. In a strongly worded letter, they formally accused the local plant’s management of being responsible for their comrade’s death. There was in fact an internal safety regulation that prohibited the storage of phosgene while the unit manufacturing it was not in production—as was the case at the time of Ashraf’s accident. There should not have been any gas in the pipes whatsoever. Yet, despite this regulation, a quantity of phosgene had been left in the tanks, and no one had warned the unfortunate operator. Even though Woomer punished the supervisor on duty, the company was liable for the accident in the view of some employees. According to the two trade union leaders, the accident pointed irrefutably to a decline in safety standards at Carbide. They were, therefore, going to ask the government of Madhya Pradesh to recategorize the factory immediately as a facility that produced high-risk products, and thus subject Carbide to much stricter safety requirements.
“For the first time people became aware of something that all our safety campaigns had been unable to make them appreciate: that the substances they were handling were deadly,” Kamal Pareek would say later. “But this time the danger had a face to it.”
On February 10, 1982, a little over a month after the death of Mohammed Ashraf, another accident occurred. Twenty-five workmen were poisoned and were rushed to the hospital. Fortunately there were no deaths to mourn. Gas had leaked from a phosgene pump. The fact that none of the victims had been ordered to wear protective masks while working in a sensitive area further outraged the two trade union leaders. The management defended itself by stating that leaks resulting from this type of mechanical failure never exceeded the toxicity level above which such incidents were likely to be fatal. Malviya and Ullah said they tried in vain to find out how and according to what criteria this “level,” which did not feature in any of the company’s manuals or official documents, had been determined. “It was one of many mysteries surrounding Carbide’s procedures in Bhopal,” they stated.
Their fury was not to abate. On October 5 of the same year, a third accident struck the factory in the middle of the night. This time it occurred in the unit producing methyl isocyanate. As an operator was opening a valve in a MIC pipeline, the joint linking it to several other pipes unexpectedly broke, releasing a huge cloud of toxic vapors. Before evacuating the area, the operator set off the alarm siren. A few seconds later, in accordance with the procedures set down by Kamal Pareek, the voice of the supervisor in the control room ordered a full evacuation of the plant. The position of the wind sock on top of the factory’s mast indicated a moderate wind blowing north–northeast. All those inside the factory took off as fast as their legs would carry them in the opposite direction, toward the Kali Grounds’ bustees.
The Mangala Express regularly wrested the residents of the bustees from their slumbers. Each evening, they dreaded the din it made as it went by. Only the elderly midwife Prema Bai did not suffer from its racket and that was because she was deaf. Her neighbors maintained that the noise of a herd of elephants trampling the hovels in her alleyway would not wake her. Yet it was she who gave the alert that night.
“Get up! Everybody up! There is a pandemonium at Carbide!” she shouted, running from hut to hut, her white widow’s sari flying out behind her.
Prema Bai had been the first to have heard the distant howl of the siren. Awakened by her cries, the neighbors got up one by one, grumbling. They were angry at being woken for a second time. Everyone strained their ears in the direction of the muffled howling coming from the plant.
“Perhaps someone’s set fire to it somewhere,” said a grinning Ganga Ram, who harbored a deadly hatred of Carbide.
“Calm down, friends!” intervened Belram Mukkadam. “We hear that siren nearly every day. It’s not sounding for us but for the guys inside the factory.”
“It may even have set itself off,” ventured the tailor Ahmed Bassi.
“All the same, it’s going,” interrupted Salar the bicycle repairman. “We should find out more.”
“You’re right, Salar,” the sorcerer Nilamber agreed, fiddling nervously with his goatee.
A voice then rose up from the ground. Rahul had just arrived on his wheeled board. He had taken the time to arrange his bun and put on his necklaces. “Look here, my friends, why does that siren frighten you?” he asked. “We hear it nearly every day!”
“Yes, but tonight it’s sounding without stopping,” interjected Sheela, Padmini’s mother, visibly disturbed.
The crowd was growing by the minute. Tousle-haired and barefoot, people who had been rudely awoken were arriving from Chola and Jai Prakash. Old Prema Bai’s cry had spread from alley to alley.
Ratna Nadar, Padmini’s father, bent down to Rahul. “Do you know what they make in that factory of Carbide’s?” he inquired.
Rahul appeared surprised by the question. “We should be asking you. You’ve been working there every day for two years.”
The little man appeared to think, then shrugged his shoulders in a gesture of helplessness. “No, I’ve no idea. No one’s ever told us.”
Rahul moved his plank forward into the middle of the assembly. His reputation as the best informed man in the bustee commanded attention.
“Well, I’m going to be the one to tell you what Carbide is making on the Kali Grounds,” he declared. “I’ve asked some big shots and I can assure you there’s nothing to be afraid of. Carbide makes medicine for sick plants. Small white granules to get rid of the insects that attack them and steal the harvest off the poor bastards who planted them. And little white granules aren’t dangerous to anybody. Except the blasted little creatures in the plants.”
Ratna Nadar could still see the hordes of black aphids that had devoured his field in Mudilapa. “You mean to say that all those pipes, all that machinery, all those sacks of powder that go off on trucks, are just to kill those bloody little …” His throat constricted with emotion.
“You’ve got it, brother,” confirmed Rahul. Pointing a bejeweled hand at the illuminated factory, he assumed a solemn tone, “You can go back to bed, friends. That siren isn’t for us!”
Scarcely had the legless cripple finished speaking than five men surged out of the darkness beside the railway track. Haggard, ghastly, exhausted, with their eyes starting out of their heads, they looked like specters in a horror film. One of them was dragging an unconscious comrade. Other escapees came up behind that first group.
“Get out of here! There’s been an accident,” gasped a man who had stopped to recover his breath. “The plant’s full of gas. If the wind starts to blow in this direction, you’re all done for.”
Belram Mukkadam raised his stick above the heads about him. He had tied his gamcha, a cotton scarf, to it and was waving it about like a flag.
“Let’s move out!” he cried. “Follow me! Quickly!”
The semblance of a procession formed behind him. No one panicked because, for all the howling of the siren, it was still difficult to believe in the danger. Before leaving, old Prema Bai lit incense before the statue of the god on the small altar at the end of the alleyway. It was then that a potbellied individual with a shaggy beard and a scarlet turban appeared. With the help of his two sons, the moneylender Pulpul Singh was carrying his most precious possession. He would never have left home without the safe to which he alone knew the combination.
The frequent soundings of the plant’s alarm siren did not seem to shake the confidence of the engineers running the factory. As for the local government authorities, they confined themselves to writing to the two trade union leaders to assure them that the safety of Carbide workers “would be subject to close investigation at the opportune moment.”
With the exception of the unfortunate Ashraf, the accidents had claimed no deaths either inside or outside the factory. At Carbide, these accidents were seen, therefore, as the teething pains experienced by any new plant. The two trade unionists did not share this opinion. They had six thousand notices printed, which their members posted on the walls of the factory and all over town. “BEWARE! BEWARE! BEWARE! ACCIDENTS! ACCIDENTS! ACCIDENTS!” Written in red, the poster said, “The lives of thousands of workers and hundreds of thousands of residents of Bhopal are in danger because of the toxic gases produced by Carbide’s chemical plant.” The notices listed the accidents that had occurred, and claimed that Carbide was violating both Indian labor laws and its own safety standards through understating the danger and poor maintenance. In order to truly mobilize public opinion, however, the Hindu union leader Malviya was counting on a much more effective weapon. Mahatma Gandhi had successfully used it to induce the British to agree to his demands. It consisted of offering one’s life to one’s enemy. Malviya announced that he was embarking on a hunger strike.
So the frail little man with the dark skin had actually dared to do it. For a week he had lain stretched out on a piece of khadi, a coarse cotton cloth, outside the entrance to the factory. With the nape of his neck resting on a stone, a pitcher of water beside him, he was the embodiment of the Carbide workers’ revolt against the working conditions that they believed were responsible for the death of one of their comrades. Every morning at dawn, five workers took their place beside Malviya to fast with him for twenty-four hours. Before going to their workstations, the other employees would gather around the strikers to show their solidarity. “Har zor zulm key takkar mein sangharsh hamara nara hai! We will fight against all forms of oppression!” hundreds of voices shouted in unison.
For the multinational that had built a large part of its reputation on the slogan “Safety First,” these hunger strikes and the accompanying demonstrations were unacceptable blackmail. The reaction was swift and drastic. All political and trade union meetings inside the factory were banned. D.S. Pande, the dynamic head of personnel, had no reservations about setting fire to the tent that served as the main union’s command post. In the ensuing scuffle several people were injured, among them Pande himself, with the result that the trade union leaders were promptly laid off. Without renouncing the fight, Shankar Malviya and Bashir Ullah kept up their action outside. Meetings and processions denouncing the death of Mohammed Ashraf and demanding better safety were held one after another throughout the city, seriously denting the company’s unanimously respected image in the public eye. Curiously, neither Warren Woomer, nor his Indian assistants appeared unduly alarmed at this fierce outbreak of discontent. After all, wasn’t this kind of labor unrest to be expected in Indian firms, where workers had been known to lock their bosses in their offices for weeks? But at Carbide, the fact that an ordinary worker could lie down on the pavement and defy the world’s third largest chemical giant felt like a crime of lèse-majesté; a crime that impugned the ideal of “giving India’s peasants a hand” dreamed of in New York; a crime that destroyed the myth that working for Carbide was the best possible sign of a prosperous karma; a crime that diminished the prestige of the uniform with the blue-and-white logo a whole generation of young Indian graduates dreamed of wearing.
“I knew the factory wasn’t perfect,” Warren Woomer would say later, “but we were constantly improving it. Until Ashraf’s death we’d had an excellent safety record unique in the company’s history.” The American works manager could see no reason why this situation should deteriorate. He had blind faith in his colleagues. After all it was he who had trained them in Carbide’s celebrated safety culture. He knew that the four hundred pages of notes they had compiled on their return from Institute were their bible. A man’s death was a dreadful blow but it should not cast disgrace upon the whole system. Despite the budget cuts to some of the equipment at the time of construction, Woomer was convinced that he commanded one of the safest ships in the modern industrial fleet. And the factory management dismissed these demonstrations as just a campaign by agitators in search of higher salaries and shorter working hours.
It was one of thousands of weekly newspapers that India published in its innumerable languages. Bhopal’s Rapat Weekly was in Hindi, and its modest circulation—six thousand copies— gave it very little impact in a mostly Muslim city where the predominant language was Urdu. The reliability of its investigative journalism and its independent voice had, nevertheless, earned the Weekly a fringe readership with a taste for scandal. Digging into the latter was the particular slant the founder and only editor of the Rapat Weekly had chosen.
The son and grandson of journalists, thirty-four-year-old Hindu Rajkumar Keswani belonged to a family originally from the province of Sind, who had come to Bhopal after the partition of India in 1947. At sixteen he had left college to contribute to a sports journal, then worked at the city news desk of the Bhopal Post. For years this indefatigable investigator had reported on the minor and major events that occurred in the City of the Begums. After the Post folded, Keswani had sunk his savings into the creation of a small weekly to serve the true interests of Bhopal’s citizens. For this man mad about poetry, botany and music, the threat posed by modern industry to the safety of the city was very real. The discovery of irregularities in the allocation of industrial licenses drove him to look for collusion between Carbide and the local authorities. The mysterious fire in the alpha-naphthol unit had already tickled his curiosity. The poisoning of Mohammed Ashraf clinched the matter. He embarked upon an investigation that might have turned him into a savior, if only people had listened to him.
“As luck would have it, I knew Ashraf,” he would recount. “He lived just next door to the fire station where I’d set up my office. He often had comrades from work round to his house. Together, they would talk about the dangers of their profession. They spoke about toxic gases, deadly leaks and the likelihood of explosion. Some of them made no secret of their intention to resign. I’d thought the plant was producing an innocent white powder, like the one I used to protect the roses on my terrace from greenfly, and I found what they said terrifying.”
No sooner had he carried his friend Ashraf to his grave, than the journalist rushed to see the deceased’s colleagues. “I wanted to know whether his death was an isolated incident or the result of some failure on the part of the factory.”
Keswani gathered enough witness statements to accuse Carbide of negligently violating its own safety standards. Bashir Ullah, one of the dismissed trade union leaders, even managed to smuggle the journalist inside the site at night. As he went through the various production units, he could smell phosgene’s odor of freshly cut grass and methyl isocyanate’s aroma of boiled cabbage.
Not having any scientific training, he next paid a visit to the dean of the chemistry department at an important technical college and consulted all the specialists’ works in its library. The conclusions he came to made his blood run cold.
“Merely appreciating that methyl isocyanate and phosgene are two and a half times heavier than air, and have a tendency to move along at ground level in small clouds, was enough to make me realize at once that a large scale gas leak would be disastrous,” he explained later. “After detailed examination of the safety systems in place in the plant, I knew that tragedy was only a matter of time.”
An unexpected visit was to provide Rajkumar Keswani with the technical arguments he needed to drop his journalistic bombshell. In May 1982, three American engineers from the technical center for chemical products and household plastics division in South Charleston landed in Bhopal. Their task was to appraise the running of the plant and confirm that everything was functioning according to the standards laid down by Carbide. None of Carbide’s critics outside the plant expected this internal investigation to produce any great revelations. However, the investigators uncovered over sixty breaches of operational and safety regulations.
With the help of accomplices in the factory, Keswani managed to get hold of the text of the audit. He could not believe his eyes. The document described the surroundings of the site “strewn with oily old drums, used piping, pools of used oil and chemical waste likely to cause fire.” It condemned the shoddy workmanship on certain connections, the warping of equipment, the corrosion of several circuits, the absence of automatic sprinklers in the MIC and phosgene production zones, the risk of explosion in the gas evacuation flares. It cited the poor positioning of certain devices likely to trap their operators in case of fire or toxic leakage. It criticized the lack of pressure gauges and the inadequate identification of innumerable pieces of equipment. It reported leaks of phosgene, MIC and chloroform, ruptures in pipework and sealed joints, the absence of any earth electrical connection on one of the three MIC tanks, the impossibility of isolating many of the circuits because of the deterioration of their valves, the poor adjustment of devices where excessive pressure was in danger of allowing water into the circuits. It revealed the fact that the needle on the pressure gauge of a phosgene tank full of gas was stuck on zero. It expressed alarm at the poor state and inappropriate placement of safety equipment to be used in case of leakage or fire, and at the lack of periodic checks to ensure sophisticated instruments and alarm systems were functioning correctly.
All the same it was in the area of personnel that the report came up with the most startling revelations. It expressed concern at an alarming turnover of inadequately trained staff, unsatisfactory instruction methods and a lack of rigor in maintenance reports. Three lines in the fifty-one pages described a particularly serious mistake: an engineer had cleaned out a section of pipework without blocking off the two ends of the pipe with discs designed to prevent the rinsing water from seeping into other parts of the installation. One day this same sort of negligence would spark a tragedy.
“KINDLY SPARE OUR CITY!” exclaimed Rajkumar Keswani in the headline of his first article, published on September 17, 1982. Illustrating the risk the factory represented with numerous examples, the journalist appealed first to those in charge of it. “You are endangering our entire agglomeration, starting with the Orya Bustee, Chola and Jai Prakash districts nestling against the walls of your installations.” Then, addressing his fellow citizens, Keswani urged them to wake up to the danger that Union Carbide represented to their lives. “If one day disaster strikes,” he warned them, “don’t say that you did not know.”
Unfortunate Keswani! Like Cassandra, he had been given the gift of predicting catastrophe, but not that of persuasion. His first article passed almost unnoticed. Carbide was too firmly planted on its pedestal for a few alarming words in a sensationalist newspaper to topple it.
Undaunted, the journalist returned to the fray two weeks later. “BHOPAL: WE ARE SITTING ON A VOLCANO,” announced the Rapat Weekly of September 30, 1982, in block letters across the front page. “The day is not far off when Bhopal will be a dead city, when only scattered stones and debris will bear witness to its tragic end,” the author prophesied. The article’s disclosures should have sent the entire city rushing to the Kali Grounds to demand the plant’s immediate closure. They did not. Sadly, the Rapat Weekly was a lone voice crying in the wilderness.
The following week, a third article entitled, “IF YOU REFUSE TO UNDERSTAND, YOU WILL BE REDUCED TO DUST,” described in detail the leak, which four days earlier had led to the evacuation of the factory in the middle of the night and the general scramble on the part of the residents of Orya Bustee and its adjacent neighborhoods.
In the end so much indifference and blindness disheartened the journalist. It appeared that the anger over Ashraf’s death and the hunger strikes had been short-lived. If the Bhopalis preferred to believe the protestations of safety issued by Carbide— lies as far as Keswani was concerned—he would leave them to their fate. He scuttled his newspaper, packed his music collection in two suitcases and bought a train ticket for Indore, where a big daily newspaper offered him a golden opportunity. Before he left Bhopal, however, he wanted to respond to a statement made on the parliamentary rostrum of the state of Madhya Pradesh. “There is no cause for concern about the presence of the Carbide factory because the phosgene it produces is not a toxic gas,” the minister of employment had declared. In two long letters Keswani summarized the findings of his investigations. He addressed the first to the state’s highest authority, Chief Minister Arjun Singh, whose links with the Carbide management were common knowledge. The second he sent to the president of the supreme court, along with a petition requesting the closure of the factory. Neither of the two letters received a reply.
Ali Baba’s Treasure for the Heroes of the Kali Grounds
Everyone to the teahouse! Ganga has a surprise for us!”
Rahul sped along like lightning on his wheeled plank, bearing the news from alleyway to alleyway. Orya, Chola and Jai Prakash at once emptied themselves of their occupants. Their vitality and their incredible ability to mobilize were the hallmarks of these disinherited people. With each of her weekly visits, Sister Felicity became more and more convinced that the poor she came to help were stronger than any misfortune.
The man who was promising them a big surprise was one of the most respected characters in the three bustees. With the passage of the years, Ganga Ram had become, like Belram Mukkadam and the godfather Omar Pasha, one of the Kali Grounds’ influential figures. His rejection by a Carbide tharagar a few years previously had not diminished his spirit of resistance. The same year he tried and failed to be hired at the plant, Ganga found a new trade. A few days before Diwali, the festival of lights and prosperity and the time when all Hindus repaint their houses, Ganga had turned himself into a house painter. In order to buy himself a ladder, a bucket and some brushes, he had paid a visit to another leprosy survivor, whom he had helped during his tenure at Hamidia Hospital. Welcomed as if he were the god Rama himself, Ganga had been able to borrow the money he needed. Two years later his business had six employees. Success had not gone to his head, however. Ganga Ram, together with his wife Dalima and her adopted son, had not left the neighborhood where once four lines drawn with a stick in the dust had provided them with shelter. Dalima was a great favorite in the community. Everyone adored this bright young woman with her green eyes and her tattooed hands, who got about on her crutches without complaining and always with a smile. Modest in the extreme, she never lifted the bottom of her sari to reveal the horrible scars on her legs and the fractured bones that stood out beneath her skin. Frightened by the gangrene that was spreading through her legs, the surgeon at Hamidia Hospital had wanted to amputate. The young woman’s opposition had been so passionate that she had awakened the entire hospital. “I’d rather die than lose my legs!” she told the surgeon. He gave her a metal pin and a bone graft, and though Dalima had managed to keep her legs, they were lifeless. The poor woman would be on crutches for the rest of her life, except when she allowed herself to be carried by the former leper to whose destiny she had been lucky enough to join her own.
Ganga Ram organized the surprise at the teahouse like a festival. He had exchanged his sandals and old blue painting shirt for gondola-shaped mules and a magnificent kurta of embroidered white cotton. Giving free rein to his comic talents, he had dug out a top hat, which made him look like a ringmaster in the circus. Six musicians, wearing red cardboard shakos on their heads, and yellow waistcoats with Brandenburgs over white trousers, stood around him. Two of them held drumsticks between stumps once eaten away by leprosy, two more held cymbals, and the others, dented trumpets. Santosh, one of the trumpeters, a jolly little man with a face pitted from smallpox, was Dalima’s father. He had arrived from Orissa, where that year a drought—more severe than the ones from which Padmini and her family had often suffered—was raging.
Just like on the day when the property deeds were handed out, Ganga Ram, Mukkadam, Salar the bicycle repairman and all the other members of the usual team directed arrivals to sit down in a semicircle around the teahouse. When there was no more room, Ganga greeted the crowd and signaled to the musicians to break into the first piece. Music was a necessary part of any Indian public gathering, much to everyone’s delight, and a raucous din immediately enveloped the assembly. After a few minutes, Ganga raised his top hat. The music stopped.
“My friends!” he exclaimed. “I’ve gathered you together to share in an event so happy I couldn’t keep it to myself. Now you’re all here, I’m going to fetch the surprise I have for you.”
He signaled to the musicians to clear a way for him. A few moments later, the little procession was back, to a cacophony of trumpets, a roll of drums and the crash of cymbals. Behind the musicians, walked the former leper with all the majesty of a mogul emperor. He was carrying in his arms his wife Dalima who was draped in a blue muslin sari embroidered with gold patterns. With her tattooed wrists and pendant earrings shining in her ears, the young woman was smiling and greeting people with all the grace of a princess. When the procession arrived outside the teahouse, Ganga and the musicians turned to face the crowd. The din of the trumpets and cymbals increased by another few decibels.
With a nod of his head, Ganga stopped the music. Next, throwing out his chest like a fairground athlete, he held his wife out at arm’s length as if presenting her as a gift to the crowd. Then with a face flushed with pride, he allowed Dalima to slip gently down to the ground. As soon as her feet touched the earth, she straightened up with a thrust of her loins and, cautiously, began to walk. Astonished and completely at a loss, the people of the bustees could not believe their eyes. There stood the woman whose silent torture they had witnessed for so many years. She was fragile and tottering, but on her feet. People stood up to get a closer look at the woman who had been so miraculously healed. Her husband had thought of everything; garlands of sweet-smelling yellow marigolds appeared. Padmini and Dalima’s son, Dilip, strung more flowers around her neck. Soon the young woman disappeared beneath a pile of garlands engulfing her from her shoulders to the top of her head. Ganga was crying like a baby. He brandished his top hat to speak to the assembly again.
“Brothers and sisters, the celebrations are only just beginning,” he cried in a voice choked with emotion. “I have a second surprise for you.”
This time, it was young Dilip who went off with the band to fetch Ganga Ram’s latest surprise. Dilip no longer “did” the trains. He was now a sturdy young man of eighteen who worked as a painter with his stepfather. He was known to have only one passion: kite-flying. His paper-and-rags kites were a potent symbol of an immured people’s fantasies for freedom and escape.
What the former leper would give his companions that day was a rather different means of escape. Preceded by the six musicians bellowing out a triumphal hymn, Dilip returned, carrying on his head a rectangular shape concealed beneath a red silk cloth. Dalima followed her son’s progress with the anxiety of an accomplice. Ganga ordered the young man to put the object down on a table that Mukkadam had prepared for the purpose. His mischievous smile betrayed how much he was enjoying his position. Again he silenced the music and took up his top hat.
“My friends! Can any one of you tell me what’s under this cloth?” he asked.
“A chest to keep clothes in,” cried Sheela Nadar, Padmini’s mother.
Poor Sheela! Like most of the other bustee families, hers had no furniture. A rusty tin trunk, often overrun with cockroaches, was the only place she had in which to keep her wedding sari and her family’s few clothes.
A little girl went up and pressed her ear to the “surprise.” “I bet you’ve got a bear shut in a cage under your cloth.”
Ganga burst out laughing. The child’s guess was less preposterous than one might imagine. In Orya Bustee as in all the other neighborhoods, rich and poor alike, animal exhibitors and other showmen were not unusual. Trainers of monkeys, goats, mongooses, rats, parrots and scorpions, viper and cobra charmers … at any moment, a handbell, a gong, a whistle or a voice might announce the passing of some spectacle. More popular were the bear trainers, especially as far as the youngsters were concerned. Giving the children of Orya Bustee a bear would certainly have been a marvelous idea. But Ganga Ram had had an even better one. With all the care of a conjuror about to produce a rabbit, he placed his top hat on the mysterious object. Then, clapping his hands, he gave the band its signal. The drums and cymbals mingled with the trumpets in a deafening cacophony. As if for some ritual, Ganga then invited Dalima to walk three times around the table on which his “surprise” was sitting. Proud and erect under her veil of blue silk bordered with golden fringe, the young woman proceeded cautiously. Her steps were still unsteady but no one could take their eyes off her. They were hypnotized, for, at that instant, she was the embodiment of the determination of the poor to triumph over adversity.
As soon as Dalima had completed her three passes, Ganga continued. “And now, my friends, Dalima herself is going to unveil my second surprise,” he announced.
When the young woman tugged at the cloth, an “Oh!” of amazement burst from the throats of all those present. Nearly ten years after their country had sent a satellite into space and six years after they had set off an atomic bomb, tens of millions of Indians did not even know such a device existed. Enthroned on the teahouse table sat the bustees’ first television set.
Those in charge of the beautiful plant sat down around the teak conference table to examine the crushing report sent in September 1984 by the three investigators from South Charleston. Kamal Pareek, assistant manager of safety, was particularly concerned. “The anomalies the report revealed might well have been part of the usual teething problems of a large plant,” he would say later, “but they were still serious.” The American works manager shared his opinion. Warren Woomer belonged to a breed of engineers for whom one single defective valve was a blight upon the ideal of discipline and morality that ruled his professional life. “Not tightening a bolt properly is as serious an offense as letting a phosgene reactor get out of control,” he would tell his operators. In his quiet, slightly languid voice, he enumerated the report’s observations. Before seeking out the guilty and sanctioning them, all the anomalies had to be rectified. That could take weeks, possibly even months. A schedule for the necessary repairs and modifications to the plant would have to be sent to the technical center in South Charleston and approved by its engineers.
It would fall to a new captain to bring the Bhopal factory back up to scratch, however. In its desire to proceed with the complete Indianization of all foreign companies in their country, the New Delhi government had declined to renew Woomer’s residence permit. His replacement, a forty-five-year-old Brahmin with the swarthy skin of a southerner and an impressive academic and professional record, was already sitting opposite him. The chairman of Carbide and his board of directors had unanimously approved the appointment of this exceptionally gifted individual. Yet, in the space of two years, Jagannathan Mukund was to preside over a factory sliding toward disaster.
Once more the people of the bustees demonstrated their resourcefulness. In less than an hour Ganga Ram’s television set was broadcasting its first pictures. In the absence of any electricity in the neighborhood, Ganga Ram’s friends had run a cable to the line that supplied the factory. Salar the bicycle repairman had rigged up an antenna with a wheel mounted on a bicycle fork. The pirate apparatus had a very superior look to it, like a satellite listening station.
Suddenly a picture lit up the screen. Hundreds of eyes nearly jumped from their heads as they watched a Hindi newscaster announce the program for Doordarshan, the national television network. At a single stroke that picture banished all the grayness, mud, stench, flies, mosquitoes, cockroaches, rats, hunger, unemployment, sickness and death. And the fear, too, that the great factory with its strings of lightbulbs illuminating the night, would from then on inspire.
Every evening the program on Indian television’s only channel began with the latest episode in a serial. The epic of the Ramayana is to India what the Arthurian romances are to the West. Thanks to Ganga Ram, the occupants of the Kali Grounds could watch the thousand dramas and enchantments of their popular legend unfold before them. For an hour every evening, they would live out the marvelous love story of Prince Rama and his divine Sita. They would laugh, cry, suffer and rejoice along with them. Many of them knew whole passages of the show by heart.
Padmini could remember how, when she was little, her mother used to sing to her the mythical adventures of the monkey general. Later, whenever storytellers passed through her village, all the inhabitants would gather in the square to listen to the fantastic stories that had, since the dawn of time, imbued everyday life with a sense of the sacred. No baby went to sleep without hearing its elder sister intone some episode from the great epic poem. Children’s games were inspired by its clashes between good and evil, schoolbooks exalted the exploits of its heroes, marriage ceremonies cited Sita’s fidelity as an example to the newlyweds. Bless you, Ganga Ram, for thanks to you it was possible to dream once more. Seated before your magic lamp, the men and women of the Kali Grounds’ bustees would be able to draw new strength to surmount the tribulations of their karma.
The Sudden Arrival of a Cost-Cutting Gentleman
Fourteen years, six months and seventeen days after an Indian mason had laid the first brick of the Bhopal Carbide factory on its concrete foundations, its last American captain left. “That December 6, 1982, will always be one of the most nostalgic days of my life,” Warren Woomer later said. The week prior to their departure the Woomers were caught up in a whirlwind of receptions. Everyone wanted to bid farewell to the “quiet American” who had known how to marry the different cultures in his Indian work-force with the requirements of a highly technological industrial plant. It was true that the death of Mohammed Ashraf, the trade union unrest earlier that year and the worrying conclusions of the summer audit had revealed some cracks in the ship. But Sahb, as the Indian workers affectionately called him, left with his head held high. All the problems would be resolved, the bad workmanship would be rectified, the gaps filled. He was convinced that no serious accident would ever tarnish the reputation of the beautiful plant in the heart of the subcontinent. It would continue to produce, in total safety, the precious white powder that was indispensable to India’s peasants. Woomer accepted the gifts engraved with his name in gratitude.
The American did know, however, that there were only two circumstances under which the factory could have a trouble-free future. The first was the favorable disposition of the Indian sky. Without generous monsoons to produce abundant harvests, the peasants would be unable to buy Sevin, in which case production would have to be slowed down and possibly even stopped. The financial consequences of such events would be grave. The other condition was compliance with the safety regulations. Woomer discussed this at length with his successor. Throughout his long career dealing with some of the most toxic chemical substances, he had expounded a philosophy based on one essential principle: only keep a strict minimum of dangerous materials on site. By maintaining this credo, the engineer was indirectly criticizing those who, against the advice of Eduardo Muñoz, had decided to install three enormous tanks capable of containing more than 120 tons of methyl isocyanate. “I left with the hope that those tanks would never be filled,” he would say later, “and that the small quantity of gas stored to meet the immediate needs of Sevin production would always be rigorously refrigerated as prescribed by the manual compiled by the MIC specialists.”
Like all lovers of culture, art and beauty, Warren Woomer and his wife Betty had succumbed to the magic of India. They promised themselves that they would return. The American was not aware of Rajkumar Keswani’s articles. None of the Indians who worked for him had mentioned them. Looking back for one last time at his beautiful plant through the rear window of the car taking him to the airport, Woomer wished it good luck.
The first sign that drought had once again struck the countryside of Madhya Pradesh and its bordering states was the sudden appearance of destitute families on the outskirts of the Bhopal bustees. A massive influx of untouchables, the outcasts whom Gandhi had baptized “harijans, children of god” was the first hint that not a single grain of rice or ear of corn could be gleaned from the fields that year.
Belram Mukkadam, the members of the Committee for Mutual Aid and all the other residents set about making the newcomers welcome. One person would bring a cover, someone else an item of clothing, a candle, some rice, oil, sugar, a bottle of paraffin, a few matches. Ganga Ram, Dalima and her son Dilip, Padmini and her parents, the old midwife Prema Bai, the godfather Omar Pasha with his two wives and his sons, the sorcerer Nilamber, the shoemaker Iqbal, the tailor Bassi and the legless cripple Rahul were, as always, the first to show their solidarity. Even the sons of the moneylender Pulpul Singh brought food for the refugees. Seeing all these people sharing what they had, Sister Felicity, who had rushed to the Orya Bustee with her first-aid kit, thought “A country capable of so much generosity is an example to the world.” But she was struck by the appearance of the arriving children: although their stomachs were empty, their abdomens were swollen like balloons due to acute vitamin deficiencies and the presence of worms.
A few days after the arrival of the landless untouchables, the farmers themselves came to seek refuge in Bhopal. The Kumar family, originally from a small village on the Indore road, had eight children. All of them had swollen stomachs, except Sunil, who at twelve was the eldest. Tales of this kind of famine were part of everyday life in India. Rice was invariably the protagonist. The rice they had planted, then lovingly replanted; the rice they had caressed and palpated; the emerald green rice that had soon turned the color of verdigris, then yellow for want of water; the rice that had drooped, shriveled up, dried out and finally died. Nearly all the residents of the Kali Grounds were former peasants. Almost all of them had suffered through the same tragedy as the refugees who had sought asylum among them.
For the giant factory that stood several hundred yards away, this exodus was a bad omen. Warren Woomer’s hopes were not to be fulfilled. Ten years earlier, Eduardo Muñoz had tried to make Carbide’s directors appreciate a fundamental aspect of Indian existence: the vagaries of the monsoon. The people to whom the Argentianian had spoken had swept aside his warnings and responded with a figure. To a pesticide manufacturer, India meant half a billion potential customers! In light of India’s economic crisis at the beginning of 1983, that figure had become meaningless.
The failure of the publicity campaign Muñoz had launched compounded these unfavorable conditions. In vain, Carbide flooded the countryside with posters depicting a Sikh holding a packet of Sevin and explaining to a peasant, “My role is to teach you how to make five rupees out of every rupee you spend on Sevin.” Farmers devoted most of their resources to buying seed and fertilizer. It had proven more difficult than anticipated to induce peasants to change their traditional practices and adopt farming methods involving the intensive use of pesticides. Many farmers had come to realize that it was impossible to fight the onslaught of predatory insects in isolation. The insects migrated from treated areas to untreated fields then returned to where they started as soon as the pesticide that had driven them away had lost its efficacy. These frustrating comings and goings had contributed strongly to the decline in pesticide sales. In 1982, Carbide’s salesmen had only been able to sell 2,308 tons of their white powder. That was less than half the production capacity of the industrial gem designed by the ambitious young men of South Charleston. The forecasts for 1983 were even more pessimistic.
While storm clouds gathered over the future of the proud plant, a small trivial event took place one day in a hut in Orya Bustee that was to change Padmini’s life completely. One morning, when she awoke on the charpoy she shared with her parents and brother, she found a bloodstain in her underwear. She had started her first period. For a young girl in India this intimate progression is a momentous occasion. It means that she is ready for the one great event in her life: marriage. Custom may have it that a girl is married while she is still a child, but that is only a formality; the real union takes place after puberty. Like all the other little girls of her age, even those from the humblest Adivasi families, Padmini had been prepared for the solemn day in which she would be the center of attention. From her early childhood in Mudilapa and subsequently in Bhopal, she had learned everything that a good wife and mother of a family should know. As for her parents, they knew that they would be judged on the manner in which their daughter conducted herself in her husband’s home. Unlike girls who were of strict Hindu observance, her conduct would not be assessed exclusively on submission to her husband. Among those Adivasis whose society is matriarchal, women enjoy prerogatives otherwise reserved for men. One of them is that of finding a husband for their daughters. They are, however, spared the main task associated with this responsibility—that of gathering together an acceptable dowry—because it is the fiancé who brings his betrothed a dowry.
The daughter of an unskilled worker, even one employed by Union Carbide, was not the most glittering catch. Finding a husband would therefore take some time. But, as tradition required, that morning Padmini exchanged her child’s skirt and blouse for her first sari. There was no celebration at the Nadars’. Her mother simply wrapped the panties that had absorbed the first blood in a sheet of newspaper. “When we celebrate your marriage, we will go and take these to the Narmada,” she told her daughter. “We’ll offer them to the sacred river in order that it may bless you and bring you fertility.”
It is a well-known fact that love is blind. Especially when the object of one’s passion is an industrial monster like a chemical plant. Warren Woomer had always refused to accept that the fate of Carbide’s factory in Bhopal should be determined by profitability alone. No capitalist enterprise, however, could go on absorbing the loss of millions of dollars. The projections drawn up seven years earlier, predicting annual profits of seven to eight million dollars, were no longer remotely feasible. Could Woomer’s replacement reverse the situation? The son of a former governor of the Reserve Bank of India, whose signature still appeared on two rupee notes, Jagannathan Mukund had many feathers in his cap, but he was not a magician. As an undergraduate at Cambridge, he had been a brilliant chemistry student. He went on to complete his doctorate at MIT in Boston and was promptly snapped up by Carbide. He then spent two years in Texas, two more running the Indian petrochemical plant on the island of Trombay, and finally three years at Institute in West Virginia, mastering the complicated techniques involved in the production of MIC. Mukund was married to the daughter of the deputy secretary of the United Nations, herself a distinguished economist and university professor. He was the father of a little girl who was born with a heart deformity whom American surgeons had saved by an operation that, at the time, they alone could perform. In theory, such an experienced leader was another gift from Carbide to its jewel in Bhopal. But it was in theory only, for the directors of Union Carbide India Limited, made the new works manager subject to a general manager to whom they gave the mission of reducing the factory’s losses, by whatever means necessary.
Cultured, refined and always supremely elegant in tailored suits from London, this “superdirector,” an aristocratic Bengali by the name of D.N. Chakravarty, was fifty-two years old. A great lover of poetry, high living, Scotch whisky and pretty women, he was certainly a distinguished chemist, but utterly unsuited to work in a plant that produced dangerous chemical substances. His entire career had been spent at the head of an industry where a broken conveyer belt was the worst of all possible disasters. The battery division he had run from his office in Calcutta had in fact been a sinecure, reaping colossal profits without any risk whatsoever. The appointment of this intractable administrator would prove to be a fatal mistake.
“My Beautiful Plant Was Losing Its Soul”
The young engineer who had risked his life escorting the first barrels of MIC from Bombay to Bhopal could not believe it. “When we were asked to show the new superdirector around the factory, it felt like taking a tourist round Disneyland,” Kamal Pareek would recall.
Chakravarty knew nothing at all about how a plant of that kind worked. He did not know what most of the components were for. He got their names wrong: what he was calling a mixer was in fact a blender. In English the two words may mean essentially the same thing, but in Bhopal’s technical jargon, they referred to distinct parts. “We realized at once that this savior they’d sprung on us was not party to the mystique of the chemical industry,” Pareek would remember. “The only thing he was interested in was figures and accounts.”
This might still have turned out for the good, if only the new superdirector had been prepared to admit that a plant like that could not be run like a battery factory; if he could have graciously acknowledged that, in a company of that kind, decisions must come from all levels, each one affecting as it did the lives of thousands of people; if he had understood that seemingly favorable conditions could suddenly swing the other way, that the levels in the tanks were constantly rising and falling, that the combustion of the reactors varied by the moment; in short, that it was impossible to run that sort of plant simply by sending out memos from his directorial armchair. “When you’re in charge of a pesticide plant,” Pareek explained, “you have occasionally to come out of your office, put on overalls and join the workers on site, breathing in the smell of grass and boiled cabbage.”
Carbide’s great achievement had been that of integrating a vast spectrum of different cultures and guaranteeing the humblest of its workers the right to speak. Unfortunately, neither Jagannathan Mukund, though steeped in considerable American experience, nor his superior from Calcutta, seemed inclined to engage in a dialogue. Their understanding of human relations appeared to be based upon a concept of caste, not in the religious sense, but in a hierarchical sense. The introduction of such rifts was, little by little, to corrupt, divide and demotivate.
“Once drastic cuts became the sole policy objective, and one man’s say-so was the only authority, we knew the plant was inevitably going to hell,” Kamal Pareek would confirm.
Once again it was Rahul who bore the news. In a matter of minutes it was all around the bustees.
“Carbide has just laid off three hundred coolies. And apparently that’s only the beginning.”
“Haven’t the unions done anything about it?” Ganga Ram asked sharply.
“They weren’t given any choice,” explained Rahul.
“Does that mean they’re going to shut down all the installations?” worried Sheela Nadar, afraid that her husband might be among the men laid off.
“Not necessarily,” Rahul tried to be reassuring. “But it does seem the sale of plant medicines isn’t going all that well anymore.”
“It’s not surprising,” observed Belram Mukkadam, “the rains didn’t come this year and people are leaving the countryside.”
Sunil, the eldest son of the Kumar family whose rice fields had been obliterated by the drought, spoke up. “Plant medicines are great when things are going well,” he declared. “But when there’s no water left to give the rice a drink, they’re useless.”
Sunil was right. The gathering around Rahul had increased in size. The news he had brought provoked widespread consternation. After living so long in the shadow of the factory, after burning so many incense sticks to get jobs there, after being woken with a start by the howl of its sirens, after so many years of living together on this patch of land, how could they really believe that this temple of industry was crumbling?
“This year the rains are going to be very heavy,” said the sorcerer Nilamber, whose predictions were always optimistic. “Then Carbide will take back those it kicked out today.”
Sheela Nadar gave the little man with the goatee a grateful smile. Everyone noticed that her daughter Padmini was wearing a cotton sari instead of her children’s clothes.
“The trainees from the plant have stopped coming to the House of Hope,” Padmini added. The House of Hope was the training center Carbide had set up in part of the building occupied by Sister Felicity’s handicapped children. “The classrooms have been closed for several days. I don’t think anyone’s coming back—they’ve taken away all their equipment.”
Discouraged, the group fell silent, each one contemplating the mighty structure looming on the horizon.
“I tell you they’ve only sacked our men so they can put even more money in their pocket,” decreed Prema Bai who had come from helping a new citizen of Orya Bustee into the world. “Don’t you worry: Carbide will always be there.”
The whole city adopted her opinion. Neither the death of one of its workers, nor the ensuing union unrest, nor the apocalyptic predictions of Rajkumar Keswani had been able to tarnish the factory’s prestige in the Bhopalis’ eyes. The star that Eduardo Muñoz and a group of impassioned engineers had constructed, was as much a part of the city as its mosques, palaces and gardens. It was the crowning glory of an industrial culture that was completely new to India. The residents of Bhopal might not know what exactly the chimneys, tanks and pipework were for, but they were enthusiastic participants in all the sporting and cultural activities the plant could organize. There were some indications, however, at the beginning of 1983, that the honeymoon was drawing to a close. Under pressure from Carbide’s top management, Chakravarty and Mukund devoted their energies to making further cuts. “In India, like anywhere else in the world, the only way to reduce expenditure is to reduce running costs,” Kamal Pareek was to say. “In Bhopal, wages constituted the primary expense.” After the three hundred coolies were dismissed, many skilled workers and technicians were laid off. In the methyl isocyanate production unit alone the manpower in each shift was cut by half. In the vitally important control room, only one man was left to oversee some seventy dials, counters and gauges, which relayed, among other things, the temperature and pressure of the three tanks of MIC. Maintenance crews underwent the same cuts. The plant went from a total of nearly a thousand employees to six hundred and forty-two. What was more, a hundred and fifty workers were yanked from their regular workstations to make up a pool of manpower that could be moved here and there as the need arose. The result was a drop in the standard of work as many specialists found themselves assigned to tasks for which they had not been trained. The replacement of retiring skilled personnel with unskilled workers made further savings possible at the risk of having key positions filled by inexperienced people. The latter often spoke only Hindi, while the instruction manuals were written in English.
Kamal Pareek would never forget “the painful meetings during which section heads were obliged to present their plans for cuts.” The most senior engineers were reluctant to suggest solutions that would compromise the safety of their installations. But the pressures were too great, especially when they came from Carbide’s Danbury headquarters. That was how the decision was reached not to change certain parts every six months but only once a year. And to replace any damaged stainless steel pipes with ordinary steel piping. Numerous cuts were made along those lines. Chakravarty, the man primarily responsible for this flurry of cutbacks, seemed to know only one metal, the tinplate used in batteries. He behaved as if he knew nothing about corrosion or the wear and tear on equipment subject to extreme temperatures.
“In a matter of weeks, I saw everything I’d learned on the banks of the Kanawha River go out the window,” Pareek would say. “My beautiful plant was losing its soul.”
Unfortunate Kamal Pareek! Like so many other young Indians whom science had wrested from the ancestral constraints of their country and projected into the twentieth century, he had put his faith in the new values preached by the prestigious American multinational. He was suddenly discovering that that magnificent edifice was founded on one religion alone: the religion of profit. The blue-and-white hexagon was not a symbol of progress; it was just a commercial logo.
No ceremony was held to mark the departure of D.N. Chakravarty in June 1983. He left Bhopal satisfied that he had been able, in part, to stem the factory’s hemorrhaging finances.
Jagannathan Mukund was left in charge, but with a mission to continue the policy of cutbacks initiated by the envoy from Calcutta. He rarely left the air-conditioned ivory tower of his office. His June 1983 reply to the three inspectors from South Charleston claimed that many of the defects had been corrected, but critical items remained to be addressed. Some of the faulty valves in the phosgene and MIC units would not be able to be replaced for several more months. As for the automatic fire detection system in the carbon monoxide production unit, it could not be installed for a year at the earliest. These grave infractions of the sacrosanct safety principles would soon provoke another cry of alarm from the journalist Rajkumar Keswani. The factory was continuing to go downhill. The maintenance men had no replacement valves, clamps, flanges, rivets, bolts or even nuts. They were reduced to replacing defective gauges with substandard instruments. Small leaks from the circuits were not stopped until they were really dangerous. Many of the maintenance procedures were gradually phased out. Quality control checks on the substances produced became less and less frequent, as did the checks on the most sensitive equipment.
Soon the factory only went into operation when the sales team needed supplies of Sevin. This was precisely the method that Eduardo Muñoz had tried, ten years earlier, to convince the engineers in South Charleston to adopt, in order to avoid stocking enormous quantities of MIC. Now that the plant was operating at a reduced pace, Mukund stopped MIC production in order to gradually empty the tanks. Soon they held only about sixty tons. It was a trivial quantity by the Institute’s American standards but enough, if there were an accident, to fulfill Raj-kumar Keswani’s apocalyptic predictions.
In the autumn of 1983, Mukund made a decision that was to have far-reaching consequences. Ignoring his predecessor’s warning, he shut down the principal safety systems. In his view, because the factory was no longer active, these systems were no longer needed. No accident could occur in an installation that was not operating. His reasoning failed to take into account the sixty tons of methyl isocyanate sitting in the tanks. Interrupting the refrigeration of these tanks might possibly save a few hundred rupees worth of electricity a day, and possibly the same amount in freon gas. But it violated a fundamental rule laid down by Carbide’s chemists, which stipulated that methyl isocyanate must, in all circumstances, be kept at a temperature close to 0° C. In Bhopal, the temperature never drops below 15 or 20° C, even in winter. Furthermore, in order to save a few pounds of coal, the flame that burned day and night at the top of the flare was extinguished. In the event of an accident this flame would burn off any toxic gases that spilled into the atmosphere. Other pieces of essential equipment were subsequently deactivated, in particular the enormous scrubber cylinder, which was supposed to decontaminate any gas leaks in a bath of caustic soda.
There were many engineers who were unable to bear the degradation of the high-tech temple they had watched being built. By the end of 1983, half of them had left the factory. On December 13, it was time for the one who had been there the longest to go. For the man who had so often risked his life escorting trucks full of MIC from Bombay to Bhopal, the departure was both heartrending and liberating.
Before leaving his beautiful factory, Kamal Pareek wanted to show his comrades that in case of danger, the safety systems so imprudently shut down could be started up again. Like a sailor climbing to the top of his ship’s main mast to light the signal lamp, he scaled the ladder to the immense flare and relit the flame. Then he headed for the three tanks containing the methyl isocyanate and unbolted the valves that supplied the freon to the coils that kept them refrigerated. He waited for the needle of the temperature gauge to drop back down to 0° C. Turning then to K.D. Ballal, the duty engineer for the unit that night, he gave a military salute and announced, “Temperature is at zero Celcius, sir! Goodbye and good luck! Now let me run to my farewell party!”
The Fiancés of the Orya Bustee
Don’t cry, my friend. I’ll take you to the Bihari’s place. He already has a herd of about a hundred. He might like to take on one more.”
After Belram Mukkadam, Satish Lal, a thin, bent, good-natured little man with bulging muscles, was one of the bustee’s longest-standing occupants. He lived in the hut opposite Padmini’s family. He had left his village in Orissa to find work in the city in order to pay back the debts he had incurred for his father’s cremation. A childhood friend, who had come back to the village for the festival of Durga, had enticed him to Bhopal where he was a porter at the main train station. “Come with me,” he had said, “I’ll get you a coolie badge and you’ll buy yourself a uniform. You’ll make fifteen to twenty rupees a day.” So Satish Lal had worked at Bhopal station for thirty years. His seniority gave him a certain prestige in the porters’ union, which was led by a man from the state of Bihar who was known simply as “the Bihari.” Now Satish Lal hoped that his standing in the union would enable him to help his neighbor, Ratna Nadar, find work. Padmini’s father, along with three hundred other unskilled workers, had been laid off by Carbide.
“You never actually see the Bihari,” Satish Lal explained. “No one even knows where he crashes. He’s a gang leader. He couldn’t give a damn whether it’s you or Indira Gandhi carrying the luggage along the platforms, just so long as every evening you pay him his whack—in other words a share of your tips. One of his employees takes care of that. He’s the only one who can get you the badge authorizing you to work as a coolie. But don’t think he’s any easier to approach than his boss. You have to be introduced to him by someone he trusts. Someone who’ll tell him who you are, where you come from, what caste, what line of descendants, what clan you belong to. And it’s in your interests to greet him with your sweetest namaste and throw in plenty of sadarjis, * as many as ever you like. And invoke upon his person the blessing of Jagannath and all the deities.”
“Shouldn’t I also give him something?” asked the former Carbide worker anxiously. He had always had to grease the tharagars’ palms to get himself taken on.
“You’re right, my friend! You’d better have fifty rupees ready, some pan and a good dozen packs of bidis. Once he’s accepted you, the police will look into whether you’ve been in any trouble in the past. There again you’d better have some baksheesh on to hand.” Ratna Nadar’s eyes widened as the amount he would have to lay out grew. “And then there’s the stationmaster’s P.A. He passes on the green light from the police to his boss, who is the guy who gives you your badge. Your badge is a talisman. When your bones ache too much for you to carry bags and suitcases, you can pass it on to your son. But be careful, if you refuse to take a minister’s or some other big shot’s baggage because they never tip, the stationmaster can take it away from you.”
In the time he had been working at the station, Satish Lal had done it all. He even claimed to have carried on his head the enormous trunks of Hamdullah Khan, the last nawab. They were very heavy; the locks on them were solid silver.
With his lunghi bulging at the waist with rupees for the various intermediaries, Nadar set out for the station in the company of his neighbor. Before entering the small office next to the cloakroom occupied by the coolies’ union, the two men stopped before an altar, which harbored, beside a tulsi, an orange statue of the god Ganesh. Ratna Nadar rang the small bell in front of the divinity to ask for his protection and placed a banana and a few jasmine petals in the offering bowl.
Ganesh fulfilled Padmini’s father’s wishes. A few days later, Satish burst into Ratna’s hut.
“You did it, my friend!” he announced triumphantly. “You’re Bhopal station’s one hundredth and first coolie. Go quickly and buy yourself a red tunic and turban. And a supply of tidbits and sweets. The stationmaster’s waiting to give you your badge.”
It was a ritual. At each full moon, the elders of the Kali Grounds took their places on sisal mats laid end to end, men on one side, women on the other, to discuss the affairs of their community. The men would exchange pan and bidis, the women sweets. One of the purposes of these meetings was to review the young people of the neighborhood who had reached marriageable age. Their names were listed and a debate ensued at once. Soon certain boys’ and certain girls’ names would be linked together. Comment on the merits and disadvantages of these hypothetical marriages would redouble. So seriously did the inhabitants of the bustees take their family lineage that the process was sometimes carried over to the next meeting.
One day old Prema Bai spoke up. “We have to find a good husband for Padmini,” she said emphatically.
“Prema Bai’s right,” said the lovely Dalima.
There followed some discussion. Several boys were mentioned, among them Dilip, Dalima’s adopted son. For that reason Dalima followed the conversation with rapt attention. As usual, Belram Mukkadam tried to calm things down.
“There’s no rush,” he declared. “As I understand it, Padmini Nadar is still too young.”
“You’ve been misinformed, brother,” the girl’s mother immediately replied, “she’s reached marriageable age. And we want to find the best possible husband for her.”
“You couldn’t find a better husband for your daughter than my son Dilip,” Dalima said proudly. “He’s an exceptional boy and I want a wife for him who is no less so.”
The real meaning of this statement was lost to no one. Its purpose was less to extol the boy’s virtues than it was to make certain that Sheela’s expectations regarding a dowry were realistic.
“My daughter is just as exceptional as your son,” Sheela countered. “And if your son is such a treasure, you will of course have anticipated giving him a generous dowry.”
“I have anticipated doing my duty,” Dalima responded, anxious to avoid confrontation at this stage in negotiations.
The discussion continued within the framework of a very precise ritual, which neither of the two parties could breach. It would take two more assemblies under the full moon and a lot of debate to reach agreement over the union of Dilip and Padmini. The transaction could then proceed to the manguni, the official request for the girl in marriage. Out of respect for tradition, the boy’s parents invited several of the neighborhood’s elders to represent them in this traditional formality. But, as always in India, no ceremony could take place without first consulting a jyotiji, an astrologer who was to examine the stars to see whether the proposed couple were compatible and determine the most propitious date for the manguni. In the neighboring Chola Bustee lived an old man with a white beard named Joga, who, for forty years, had been a fortune-teller on the streets of the old city of Bhopal. His was not always an easy task, especially when, as was the case with Dalima and the Nadars, the parents of the prospective marriage partners did not know the exact date on which their children had been born. Old Joga confined himself to suggesting that the marriage request should take place during a month under the benign influence of the planet Venus, and on a day of the week that was not Friday, Saturday or Sunday, the three inauspicious days of the Indian lunar-solar calendar.
A procession as elaborate as that of the three magi kings came to a halt outside the Nadars’ hut. In the recollection of Orya Bustee, there had never before been such a manguni. Ganga Ram had arranged for a young goat to be cooked, and the elders accompanying him arrived with their arms full of delicacies, sweets, bottles of beer and country liquor.
It was a real barakanna, a great banquet such as the occupants of the bustees had never previously known. Ganga Ram, who had conquered leprosy, put his crippled wife back on her feet and given the community a television set had also shown himself to be the most generous of stepfathers. On behalf of her daughter, Padmini’s mother accepted the pindhuni, the silk outfit decorated with gold thread that he brought as an official and tangible expression of the promise of matrimony. The engaged couple did not take part in this ceremony. All the preparations for their marriage occurred without them. It was customary that they not meet until the wedding night, when, as a symbol of their marriage, Dilip would lift the veil from his fiancée’s face to place red sindur powder on the parting of her hair. However, Dilip and Padmini had clearly known each other for a long time.
Once the banquet was over, it was time to move on to the most serious issue: the dowry. It was to old Prema Bai that Padmini’s mother had entrusted the role of negotiating this important ritual payment. With the help of some of the other women, she had drawn up a list of the items Dilip’s family would be expected to give his future wife. The list included two cotton saris, two blouses, a shawl and various household utensils. It also included jewels: some imitation, others real, in this instance two rings, a nose stud and a matthika, an ornament worn on the forehead. As for gifts for the bride’s family, they were to include two dhotis for her father, two vests and two punjabis, the long tunic buttoned from the neck to the knees. Her mother was to receive two silk saris and a pair of sandals encrusted with small ornamental stones. They were poor people’s requirements, certainly, but they were worth some three thousand rupees, a fabulous sum even for the proprietor of a small painting firm.
Belram Mukkadam, Iqbal and Rahul, who represented Dilip’s family, had listened unflinchingly, as the croaky voice of the elderly midwife laid out her demands. As marriage negotiations were traditionally long-winded affairs, custom had it that the groom’s clan consulted together before giving its consent. Dalima was so keen for her son to marry Padmini, however, that the three envoys wagged their heads at the same time, indicating that they accepted all the girl’s family’s conditions.
It was then that old Joga, the white-bearded astrologer who had silently witnessed all these exchanges, cut in. “Before you conclude your haggling, I would appreciate it if you would agree on the remuneration for my services,” he declared vehemently.
“We thought of two dhotis for you and a sari for your wife,” replied Mukkadam.
“Two dhotis and a sari!” exclaimed the jyotiji, beside himself. “You’ve got to be joking!”
From the recesses of their huts, the entire alleyway followed this unexpected turn of events with avid interest.
“If you’re not satisfied, we’ll find another jyotiji,” Rahul threatened.
The astrologer burst out laughing. “I’m the one who drew up the horoscopes! No one else will agree to choose the marriage date instead of me!”
This reply was greeted with much chortling from the onlookers. Some of the women heckled him. “He’s a real son of a bitch, that jyotiji!” sneered one of them. “More than that, he’s devious,” said another.
Suddenly, Dalima’s voice erupted like thunder. Her beautiful green eyes were bloodshot. She was fuming. “You piece of shit!” she shouted. “If you spoil my boy’s marriage, I’ll skin you alive!”
The astrologer made as if to get up and go. The shoemaker Iqbal held him by the arm. “Stay,” he begged.
“Only if you pay me a hundred-rupee deposit immediately.”
The participants looked at each other helplessly. All of a sudden, however, there was the stocky figure of Ganga Ram. He was holding a bundle of notes between the stumps of his right hand.
“There you are,” he said dryly, dropping the notes into the little man’s lap. “Now tell us on what day we should celebrate our children’s marriage.”
The astrologer went through the motions of thinking. He had already done his calculations. He had eliminated all the days when the sun entered the ninth and twelfth signs of the zodiac, and chosen one when the sun was favorable for the groom while the planet Jupiter was most beneficent for the bride-tobe.
“December second, between ten o’clock and midnight, will be the most propitious time for your children’s union,” he announced.
The End of a Young Indian’s Dream
The document was stamped “BUSINESS: CONFIDENTIAL” and dated September 11, 1984. Addressed to the person in charge of Union Carbide’s engineering and safety department in South Charleston, it was signed J.M. Poulson, the engineer who, two years previously, had headed the safety audit of the Bhopal factory. This time Poulson and the five members of his team had just finished inspecting the storage conditions of several hundred tons of methyl isocyanate at Institute 2, deep in the Kanawha Valley, home to more than two hundred and fifty thousand Americans.
The document revealed that the Institute plant was suffering from a number of defects and malfunctions: vibrations likely to rupture sensitive piping; potentially dangerous leakage from various pumps and other apparatus; corrosion of electric cable sheathing; poor positioning of several automatic fire extinguishers in sectors of prime importance; faults in the filling systems to the MIC tanks, etc. In short, deficiencies that proved that safety at the flagship factory left a lot to be desired. The document also claimed that the actual health of personnel working in Institute was at risk. Poulson and his team had in fact discovered that workers in the MIC unit were often subjected to chloroform vapors, especially during maintenance operations. There was no monitoring system to measure the duration of their exposure, despite the fact that chloroform was a highly carcinogenic substance. The report stipulated that an interval of fifteen minutes would constitute dangerous overexposure. All the same, the investigators considered these risks relatively minor in comparison with the danger “of an uncontrollable exothermic reaction in one of the MIC tanks and of the response to this situation not being rapid or effective enough to prevent a catastrophe.” The document gave a detailed list of the circumstances that could make such a tragedy possible. The fact that the tanks were used for prolonged storage was conducive to internal contamination, which was likely to pass unnoticed until precisely such a sudden and devastating chemical reaction occurred. The investigators had actually found that the tank’s refrigeration system introduced minuscule impurities, which could become the catalysts for such a reaction. They had discovered that these impurities could also come from the flare meant to burn off the toxic gases at a height of 120 feet. In short, the most modern plant, one that Carbide had counted among the safest in the whole of the United States’ chemical industry, appeared to be at the mercy of a few drops of water or metal filings. “The potential hazard leads the team to conclude that a real potential for a serious incident exists,” declared the document. In his accompanying letter, Poulson gave the names of sixteen Carbide executives who should receive copies of his report. Strangely, this list made no mention of the man to whom it was a matter of primary concern. Jagannathan Mukund, managing director of the Bhopal plant, with three tanks permanently holding sixty tons of MIC, would remain ignorant of the concerns expressed by the American engineers and, in particular, of their recommendations to counteract a possible catastrophe.
The plant on the Kali Grounds was a little like his baby. It was he who had set down the plans for the first formulation unit. It was he who had bought the splendid palace from the nawab’s brother to turn it into an agronomical research center. Together with Eduardo Muñoz and several other fanatical pioneers, Ranjit Dutta had laid the foundations for the beautiful plant right in the heart of the City of the Begums. As far as this engineer with the physique of a football player was concerned, his time spent in Bhopal had been a magical period in a richly successful career. After leaving India in 1976 to work in Carbide’s American agricultural products division, Dutta had repeatedly returned to the site of his first love. Every year he vacationed there with his family, boating on the waters of the Upper Lake, listening to poets during the mushairas in Spices Square, and dreaming beside the illuminated outline of the factory whose funnels he had designed. *
Now, at the age of fifty-four, he was vice-president in charge of the agricultural products division at the company’s headquarters. And that summer of 1984, at the time when the team of investigators led by Poulson was compiling its report, the Indian engineer had just come back from a pilgrimage to Bhopal. This time, however, the man who loved the city so much returned sad and disappointed.
“I didn’t like what I saw during that visit,” he later recounted. “I saw the approaches to the factory overrun with rubbish and weeds. I saw unoccupied workers chatting for hours over cups of tea. I saw mountains of files strewn about the management’s offices. I saw pieces of dismantled equipment lying about the place. I saw disorientated, unmotivated people. Even if the factory had temporarily stopped production, everyone should have been at their workstations getting on with maintenance work… . It’s strange but I sensed an atmosphere of neglect.”
As soon as he got back to Danbury, Dutta tried to relay this impression to his superiors but, oddly, it seemed none of them wanted to listen. “They probably thought I was harboring some sort of grievance against the local management,” he would say, “or that I wanted to take over the running of the factory again. But I only wanted to warn them that strange things were going on in Bhopal, and that people there were not doing their jobs as they should.”
It would not be long before Dutta had an explanation for this apparent indifference. If no one at the top of Union Carbide seemed interested in the neglect to which the factory had fallen prey, it was for a reason: in Danbury the Bhopal plant had already been written off. Dutta would have formal confirmation of the fact at the conference, which, every year, assembled the heads of the company’s agricultural divisions in the Connecticut countryside. At this meeting, in August 1984, marketing strategies for products made by Carbide throughout the world—sales prices, methods of beating the competition and acquiring new clients—were discussed and agreed upon. The topics included the Bhopal factory. As early as 1979, the economic viability of the plant had been subjected to extensive debate. One of the various options management considered was simply stopping its construction but because of the late stage in the building process, this idea had been abandoned. Five years later, the situation had further deteriorated. The plant was now losing millions of dollars. The sales prospects for Sevin in 1984 did not exceed a thousand tons, half the amount for the preceding year and only a fifth of the plant’s total production capacity. It was a financial disaster. At the August 1984 meeting, therefore, approval was given for a liquidation program. In fact, the multinational was counting on getting rid of its costly Indian factory by moving its installations to other third world countries. Brazil, for example, could accommodate the phosgene, carbon-monoxide and methyl-isocyanate units. As for the Sevin formulation and packaging works, Indonesia seemed the ideal place for them to be relocated.
In the autumn of 1984, Carbide’s vice president for Asia sent a top-secret message to Bhopal. He wanted to know the financial and practical feasibility of dismantling and moving the plant, “taking into account the moderate price of Indian labor.”
The task of gathering the necessary information was entrusted to the Hindu engineer Umesh Nanda. Nine years earlier, a brief advertisement in the Times of India had enabled this son of a modest industrialist in the Punjab to fulfill the dream of all young Indian scientists of his generation: that of joining a renowned multinational. Now, he was charged with shattering his own dream. “Dismantling and shipping the Sevin production unit should not pose any problem,” he responded in a telex to his superiors on November 10. “The same would not appear to be true of the MIC unit, however, because of extensive corrosion damage.” Nanda warned that the unit could be reassembled only after repair work involving considerable expense was completed. The Indian’s telex provided the answers to Carbide’s queries. It also confirmed what had been Rajkumar Keswani’s worst fears. The beautiful plant had been abandoned.
After a two-year absence, Rajkumar Keswani was back in Bhopal. He was not yet aware that Carbide had decided to write the factory off and was preparing to transfer parts of it to other third world countries. Ever more alarming information from his contacts inside the plant prompted him to sound a fourth alarm, entitled “BHOPAL ON THE BRINK OF DISASTER.” This time he really believed that his article would rouse public opinion and convince the authorities. Jansatta, the regional daily that ran his piece, was not a local journal but one of India’s biggest newspapers, and a part of the prestigious Indian Express group. Once again, however, Keswani was a voice crying alone in the wilderness. His latest apocalyptic predictions provoked not the slightest interest in the public, any more than they incited the municipal authorities to take any safety measures. The journalist sought an explanation for this latest failure. “Wasn’t I convincing enough?” he asked himself. “Do we live in a society where people mistrust those interested in the public good? Or do they just think I’m putting pressure on Carbide to fill my own pockets?”
The wheel of destiny was turning. In a few weeks’ time, Keswani’s round face would appear on all the world’s television screens. He would become the youngest reporter ever to receive the Press Award of India, the highest possible distinction accorded to a journalist of the subcontinent.
The Vengeance of the People of the Kali Grounds
Not for the world would she have missed her meeting with the ordinary people of India. Every morning before leaving to perform her onerous duties as prime minister of the world’s most populous democracy, Indira Gandhi received those who came to seek a darshan, a visual contact, with the woman who embodied supreme authority. The encounter took place in the rose- and bougainvillea-laden garden of her residence on Safdarjang Road, New Delhi. For the sixty-seven-year-old patrician who for seventeen years had ruled over a fifth of humanity, such morning gatherings were an opportunity to immerse herself in the multifaceted reality of her country. Draped in a sari, she would move from group to group, speaking first to peasants from the extreme south, next to a delegation of railway workers from Bengal, then to a group of young schoolgirls with long braids, and thereafter to a squad of barefoot sweepers who had come from their distant province of Bihar. The mother of the nation had a few words to say to each group. She read the petitions presented to her, responded with a promise and posed graciously for souvenir photographs. As in the days of the Mogul emperors, the most humble parts of India had, for a moment’s interlude, daily access to the seat of power.
That morning of Wednesday October 31, 1984, promised to be a splendidly clear, bright autumn day. A soft breeze rustled the leaves of the neem trees in the vast garden where a privileged few waited to receive their morning darshan. They were joined by a British television crew who had come to interview the prime minister. On the previous evening, Indira had returned from an exhausting electoral tour of Orissa, the native state of most of the refugees in Orya Bustee. In the presence of the thousands of followers who had come to hear her, she had concluded her speech with surprising words. “I don’t have the ambition to live a long life, but I am proud to live it serving the nation,” she had said. “If I were to die today, each drop of my blood would make India stronger.”
At eight minutes past nine, she walked down the three steps from her residence into the garden. She was wearing an orange sari, one of the three colors of the national flag. On passing the two sentries on either side of the path, she pressed her hands together at her heart in a cordial namaste. The two men wore traditional Sikh beards and turbans. One of them, forty-year-old Beant Singh, was well known to her; for ten years he had formed part of her closest bodyguard. The other, twenty-one-year-old Satwant Singh, had been in her service only four months.
A few weeks earlier, Ashwini Kumar, former director general of the Border Security Force of India, had come to see Indira Gandhi to express his concern. “Madam, do not keep Sikhs in your security service,” he had urged her. He had reminded her that Sikh extremists had sworn to get back at her for the army’s bombardment and bloody seizure of the Sikhs’ most sacred sanctuary, the Golden Temple of Amritsar. On June 6 of the previous year, the attack had killed 650 Sikhs. Indira Gandhi had smiled and reassured her visitor. Indicating the figure of Beant Singh in the garden, she had replied, “While I’m fortunate enough to have Sikhs like him about me, I have nothing to fear.” Skeptical, the former police executive had insisted. Irritated, she ended their meeting. “How can we claim to be secular if we go communal?” she demanded.
On that thirty-first of October, she had scarcely finished greeting the two guards when the elder pulled out his P-38 and fired three bullets point blank into her chest. His young accomplice promptly emptied the thirty rounds in the magazine of his Sten gun into her body. At least seven shots punctured her abdomen, ten her chest, several her heart. The mother of India did not even have time to cry out. She died on the spot.
Just as the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi thirty-six years previously had done, the news plunged the nation into painful stupor. By the middle of the afternoon, every city in India had become a ghost town. In Bhopal, a twelve-day period of mourning was decreed. All ceremonies, celebrations and festivities were canceled, while cinemas, schools, offices and businesses closed their doors. Flags were flown at half-mast. Newspapers published special editions in which they invited readers to express their despair. “INDIA HAS BEEN ORPHANED,” proclaimed one of the headlines. Another paper wrote, “In a country as diversified as ours, only Indira could guarantee our unity.”
“We will no longer hear the irresistible music of her eloquence …” lamented Bhopal’s people recalling her recent visit for the inauguration of the Arts and Culture building. “The realization of this project will make Bhopal the cultural capital of the country,” she had announced to applause and cheers of “Indira Ki Jai!” The city’s companies, businesses and organizations filled the newspapers with notices expressing their grief and offering their condolences. One of the messages was signed Union Carbide, whose entire staff, so it declared, wept for the death of India’s prime minister.
That afternoon, the shattered voice of the governor of Madhya Pradesh resounded over the airwaves of All India Radio. “The light that guided us has gone out,” he declared. “Let us pray God to grant us the strength to remain united in this time of crisis.” A little later the inhabitants of the bustees gathered around the transistor belonging to Salar the bicycle repairman. Arjun Singh, chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, who had made them property owners by granting them their patta, was also expressing his sorrow. “She was the hope of millions of poor people in this country. Whether they were Adivasis, harijans, inhabitants of the bustees or rickshaw-pullers, she always had time for them and a solution to offer to their problems… . May her sacrifice inspire us to continue to go forward …”
It was not until the next day, however, when the funeral was held, that the residents of Bhopal along with all the people of India really became conscious of the tragedy that had befallen their country. For the first time in history, television was going to broadcast the event all over the nation. Anyone who had access to a set, whether through some zamindar, * organization or club would see the images relayed live. All at once an entire nation was to be joined together by media communion. At daybreak, at the behest of Ganga Ram, owner of the only TV in the bustees, Kali Grounds huts were empty of all occupants. Belram Mukkadam and the shoemaker Iqbal had stacked several of the teahouse tables on top of one another and covered them with a large white sheet, a symbol of purity and mourning, and then decorated their makeshift altar with garlands of yellow marigold and jasmine flowers. Then they had positioned the set high enough for everyone to see the screen.
Since the early hours of the morning, the crowd had been gathering in silence outside the teahouse: men on one side, women and children on the other. Before the ceremony started, they watched silently as representatives of the country’s different religions succeeded one another, reciting prayers and appealing for forgiveness and tolerance.
Suddenly, a murmur rose from the assembly. Wide-eyed, the residents of the Kali Grounds were witnessing an historic event: the transportation to the funeral pyre of the woman, who, only the previous day, had ruled the country. The litter, covered with a bed of rose petals, jasmine flowers and garlands of marigolds, filled the screen. Indira Gandhi’s face, with the veil of her red cotton sari set like a halo around it, emerged from an ocean of flowers. With her eyes closed and her features relaxed, she radiated an unusual serenity. The screen showed hundreds of thousands of Indians massed along the funeral route leading to the sacred banks of the Yamuna River, where the cremation would take place. The cameras lingered on tearful faces, on people clinging to street lamps and branches of trees or perched on rooftops. Like waters coming together again in the wake of a ship, the crowd rushed in behind the funeral carriage—ministers, coolies, office workers, businessmen, Hindus, Muslims, even Sikhs in their turbans, representatives of all the castes, religions, races and colors of India, all united in shared grief. For three hours this endless river swelled with fresh waves of humanity. When, finally, the procession reached the place where a pyre had been built on a brick platform, the residents of the Kali Grounds watched as a groundswell surged through the hundreds of thousands of people gathered around their fallen leader. To Padmini, all those people looked like millions of ants in a nest. To old Prema Bai, who remembered seeing photographs of Mahatma Gandhi’s funeral, it was the finest tribute to any servant of India since the death of the nation’s liberator. Among the crowd of television viewers, a woman with short hair said her rosary. Sister Felicity had wanted to share the sorrow of her brothers and sisters in the bustees.
As soon as the funeral carriage stopped, a squad of soldiers carried the mortal remains of Indira Gandhi to the pyre. The people of the Kali Grounds saw a man dressed in white, wearing the legendary white cap of the Congress party and a white shawl lined in red over his shoulders. They all recognized Rajiv, Indira’s elder son, her heir, the man the country had chosen to succeed her. According to tradition, it was his responsibility to carry out the last rites. The cameras showed him spreading a mixture of ghee, coconut milk, camphor essence and ritual powders over his mother’s corpse. While the television set flooded the esplanade with Vedic mantras recited by a group of priests in saffron robes, Rajiv took hold of the cup containing the sacrificial fire. Five times India’s new leader circled the pyre, from left to right, the direction in which the Earth revolves around the sun. The crowd saw his son Rahul appear next to him, together with his wife Sonia and their daughter Priyanka. Although traditionally women did not take part in cremations, they helped place firewood around the body. A camera focused next on the flaming cup, which Rajiv raised for a moment above the surrounding heads before plunging it into the pyre. When the first flames began to lick at the blocks of sandalwood, a voice intoned the same Vedic prayer that Belram Mukkadam had recited on the death of his father.
Lead me from the unreal to the real,
From darkness to light
From death to immortality …
At that instant, a mighty howl broke forth from the crowd. The cry uttered over six hundred miles away acted like a detonator. Suddenly, the voice of Rahul drowned out the sound of the television. “We must avenge Indira!” he yelled. His usually smiling mouth was twisted with fury. “Rahul is right, Indira should be avenged!” numerous other voices took up the cry. “This city’s full of Sikhs. Let’s go and burn down their houses!” someone shouted. At this cry, the entire group leaped to their feet, ready to rush to Hamidia Road and the area around Bhopal’s main gurdwara, or Sikh temple.
Climbing onto the platform, Ganga Ram addressed the multitude. “No need to go to Hamidia. It would be enough …”
He had no time to finish his sentence. Ratna Nadar had jumped on the platform. “Friends, Nilamber has just been found dead. He hung himself from a beam of his hut. On his charpoy, there is a picture of Indira and a garland of flowers.”
Nilamber, the sorcerer whom everybody loved because he only predicted good fortune! The news of his suicide bewildered all those present. Death was a familiar enough event in the bustees but this time it was different. Nilamber had been overcome by grief. It was Belram Mukkadam’s turn to mount the stage.
“Ganga’s right,” he cried. “It isn’t worth going all the way to Hamidia Road to set fire to the Sikh houses, it would be enough to set fire to the moneylender’s, the man who sucks us dry. Everyone to Pulpul Singh’s house!”
By setting fire to Pulpul Singh’s house they would be making a Sikh pay for the horrible murder perpetrated by two of his brothers in religion, but they would also be avenging all the crimes committed by the loan shark who had, at one time or another, humiliated each and every one of them. His safe already contained several property deeds mortgaged against pitiful loans. Pulpul Singh was the ideal scapegoat. By setting fire to his house, obliging him to flee, perhaps even killing him, they would be avenging Indira, avenging Nilamber, avenging all the injustices of life.
At the first cry for vengeance Sister Felicity slipped away from the crowd. She felt it was her duty to prevent her brothers’ and sisters’ anger from ending in tragedy. Spotting the dark silhouette hurrying away, Padmini joined her. Preempting her question, the nun took the young Indian girl by the arm and swept her along with her.
“Come with me quickly to Pulpul Singh’s. We must warn him so he has time to get away.”
Together they ran to the two-story house at the entrance to Chola.
Pulpul Singh was surprised by the arrival of the two women. Neither the nun nor young Padmini belonged to his usual clientele.
“What wind of good fortune blows you this way?” he asked.
“Get out of here! For the love of God, leave immediately with your family!” the nun begged him. “They want to take vengeance on you for Indira Gandhi’s assassination.”
She had scarcely finished speaking when the front-runners of the crowd arrived. They were armed with iron bars, pickaxes, bricks, bolts and even Molotov cocktails.
“For the first time I saw a sentiment on their faces that I had thought not to find in the poor,” Sister Felicity later remembered. “I saw hatred. The women were among the most over-wrought. I recognized some whose children I’d nursed, even though their contorted features made them almost unrecognizable. The residents of the Kali Grounds had lost all reason. I realized then what might happen one day if the poor from here were to march on the rich quarters of New Bhopal.”
Terrified, Pulpul Singh and his family fled out of the back of their house but, not before wasting precious time trying to push the safe to the back of the veranda and hide it with a cloth. In the meantime, the rioters had thrown their first bottle of flaming petrol. It hit the ground just behind Sister Felicity and Padmini who had remained outside. The explosion was so powerful that they were thrown toward each other. Dense smoke enveloped them. When the cloud cleared, they found themselves in the middle of the rampaging crowd. The shoemaker Iqbal had brought a crowbar to force open the gate. Suddenly someone shouted, “Get them! They’ve escaped out the back!” A group took off in pursuit of the fugitives. Their Ambassador automobile had failed to start, so they were trying to get away on foot. Restricted by their saris, the women had difficulty running. Soon the family was caught and brought roughly back to the house. In his flight Pulpul Singh had lost his turban.
“We’re going to kill you,” Ganga Ram declared, caressing the man’s throat with the point of his dagger. “You’re scum. All Sikhs are scum. They killed our Indira. You’re going to pay for that.” With his shoulder, he shoved the moneylender up against the bars on the terrace. “And you can open up your shit hole of a house at once, otherwise we’ll set fire to it and you.”
Scared, the Sikh took a key from his waist and unlocked the padlock to the grille. Cowering together, Sister Felicity and Padmini observed the scene. The nun recalled something an old man from Orya Bustee had explained to her one day: “You keep your head down, you wear yourself to a frazzle, you put up with everything, you bottle up your bitterness against the factory that’s poisoning your well, the moneylender who’s bleeding you dry, the speculators who are pushing up the price of rice, the neighbors’ kids who stop you sleeping by spewing up their lungs all night, the political parties that suck up to you and do damn all, the bosses that refuse you work, the astrologer who asks you for a hundred rupees to tell you whether your daughter can get married. You put up with the mud, the shit, the stench, the heat, the mosquitoes, the rats and the hunger. And then one day, bang! You find some pretext and the opportunity’s given to you to shout, destroy, hit back. It’s stronger than you are: you go for it!” Sister Felicity had often marveled that in such conditions, there were not more frequent and more murderous outbreaks of violence. How many times in the alleyways had she seen potentially bloody altercations suddenly defused into streams of verbal insults, as if everyone wanted to avoid the worst.
A series of explosions shook the Sikh’s house. Immediately afterward the veranda went up in flames. There were shouts of, “Death to Pulpul Singh!” And others of, “We’re avenging you, Indira!”
Salar appeared, brandishing a knife. “Prepare to die!” he shouted, and advanced toward the terror-crazed Sikh. Another second and Salar would have lunged at Singh. But the moment he raised his arm, someone intervened.
“Put down your knife, brother,” ordered Sister Felicity, seizing the young man firmly by the wrist.
Stunned, Salar’s friends did not dare interfere. Ganga Ram stepped forward, accompanied by his wife Dalima. She still walked unsteadily. Nevertheless she had managed to catch up with the crowd. She had just seen the nun throw herself between Salar and the moneylender.
“Killing that bastard wouldn’t do any good!” Dalima cried, turning on the rioters. “I’ve a better idea!” She pulled from her sari a small pair of scissors. “Let’s chop this Sikh’s beard off! That’s a far worse form of vengeance than death!”
Ganga flashed his wife a smile of admiration. “Dalima’s right, let’s cut the shit’s beard off and throw it on the flames of his house.”
Salar, the tailor Bassi and Iqbal grabbed the usurer and pinned him against the trunk of a palm tree. Dalima handed the scissors to Belram Mukkadam. After all, it was only right that the manager of the teahouse should have the honor of humiliating the man who had exploited him for so many years. Resigned to his fate, the usurer did not protest. The process took a while. Everyone held their breath. The scene was both pathetic and sublime. When there was not a trace of hair left on Singh’s cheeks, neck or skull, a joyful ovation went up into a sky obscured by the smoke from his flaming house.
Then Mukkadam’s deep voice was heard to say, “Indira, rest in peace! The poor of the Kali Grounds have avenged you.”
The vengeance wrought by the occupants of the slums on the Sikh moneylender was a tiny spark in a terrible explosion that erupted throughout India against the followers of Guru Nanak. The flames of Indira Gandhi’s funeral pyre had scarcely gone out before violence was unleashed in the country’s principal cities. Everywhere Sikhs were brutally attacked, their houses, schools and temples were set on fire. Soon the fire department, hospitals and emergency services were overwhelmed by the flare-up of violence, which reminded many people of the horrors that surrounded the country’s partition in 1947. Despite a rigorous curfew and the intervention of the army, more than three thousand Sikhs were immolated on the altar of vengeance.
On the morning of November 2, this murderous frenzy hit the City of the Begums in a particularly horrible fashion. Forty-five-year-old Gurcharan Singh Khanuja, the Sikh officer in command of the electrical and mechanical engineering corps stationed in Bhopal, came out of his barracks accompanied by an escort to go to the train station. Several members of his family—his two brothers, his brother-in-law and nephews—were returning from a pilgrimage to the Golden Temple of Amritsar. When Khanuja opened the door to the compartment reserved for his family, he found nothing but charred corpses. Assassins had stopped the train between Amritsar and Bhopal, slit the throats of all the Sikh passengers and set fire to their corpses.
Five days later, a special train decorated with flags and garlands of flowers pulled in at the same platform in Bhopal station. It was bringing the population one of the thirty-two urns with the ashes of the dead prime minister that were making their way around the country. An honor guard of uniformed soldiers carrying inverted rifles, and a brass band playing a funeral march, waited to take the precious relic to an altar that had been erected in the middle of the parade ground where the city’s poetry evenings were usually held.
The entire city had gathered along the route. Belram Mukkadam, Ganga Ram, Dalima and Dilip, Padmini and her parents, Salar, all the occupants of the Kali Grounds, including old Prema Bai and the legless cripple Rahul on his wheeled plank, were there to pay their respects to the woman who had one day proclaimed that the eradication of poverty should be India’s first priority. For two days thousands of Bhopalis of all castes, religions and origins came to throw flowers at the foot of the altar decorated with the flags of the country and of Madhya Pradesh. Banners identified the various groups: Congress party members, associations for businessmen, or the unemployed.
After its sojourn in Bhopal, followed by a pilgrimage through the cities of Madhya Pradesh, the urn was taken back to New Delhi. There, a military aircraft escorted by two MiG-23s, carried it, with the other urns, over the highest peaks of the Himalayas. On board the aircraft was Rajiv Gandhi. He emptied all the urns into a basket, which he covered with a red satin veil. As the plane flew over the eternal snows of the river Ganges’s birthplace, India’s new leader cast the basket into the crystal clear air. Indira Gandhi’s ashes were returned to the high valleys of Kashmir, the land of the gods and the cradle of her family.
Festivities That Set Hearts Ablaze
November, the month for festivities. While Union Carbide abandoned its Indian industrial jewel to its sad fate, the unconcerned City of the Begums gave itself up to all the joy and celebration of the world’s most festive calendar. Nowhere did this taste for rejoicing manifest itself with as much intensity as in the Kali Grounds bustees. There, festivals wrested the poor from the harsh realities of their dayto-day lives. A more effective vehicle for religion than any catechism, these festivals set hearts and senses ablaze with the charm of their songs and the rituals of their long and sumptuous ceremonies.
The Hindus opened the festivities with a frenzied four-day celebration in honor of Durga, the conqueror-goddess of the buffalo demon that rampaged through the world a hundred thousand years ago. The entire city was filled with splendid pandals, temporary altars built to hold the statues of the goddess, all dressed up and magnificently bejeweled. Two such altars brightened up the otherwise gloomy Chola and Jai Prakesh Bustees. For four days, people processed past them, regardless of any distinctions of faith. The men wore woolen sherwanis over their trousers; the women silk kurtas and dangling earrings that made them look like royalty.
At twilight on the fourth day, the statues of the goddess were hoisted onto a luggage cart that Ratna Nadar had borrowed from the train station. His wife and Dalima had draped it with a piece of shimmering cloth and decorated it with flowers. Ganga Ram’s musicians were there again to provide accompaniment. At the same time, in other parts of Bhopal, similar processions were setting out. They made for the shores of the Upper Lake in the heart of the city, where the statues crowned with their gilded diadems were immersed in the sacred waters, bearing with them all the joys and afflictions of the Bhopalis.
A little while later, it was the anniversary of the birth of the prophet Muhammad and the Muslims’ turn to celebrate. The Kali Grounds’ families painted their homes, outside and in, with whitewash tinged with green, the color of Islam. Chains of multicolored garlands were strung across the alleyways. Prostrate in the direction of the mystical and distant Kaaba, Salar, Bassi and Iqbal, spent a night of devotion, squeezed with hundreds of other faithful, into the two small mosques built beside the railway line in Chola and Jai Prakash. The next day a human tide, vibrant with faith and reciting suras at the tops of their voices, poured through the neighborhood alleyways. “Allah ho Akbar! God alone is great!” recited the multitude from beneath banners representing the domes of the sacred mosques of Jerusalem, Medina and Mecca, symbols that imbued the bustee with faith, piety and fantasy.
The Muslims had barely finished commemorating the birth of Muhammad before a myriad luminous snakes streaked across the sky above the Kali Grounds. Celebrated during one of the longest nights of the year, Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, marks the official arrival of winter. The illuminations were to celebrate one of the most beautiful episodes in the Ramayana, the return of the goddess Sita to the arms of her divine husband Rama after her abduction by the demon Ravana. That night in their huts, Hindu families played cards like mad, for the festival also commemorated the famous dice game in which the god Shiva won back the fortune he had lost to Parvati, his unfaithful wife. To achieve this victory, Shiva appealed to his divine colleague Vishnu, who very opportunely assumed the form of a pair of dice. Diwali was thus a homage to luck. The residents gambled with ten-, five- or one-rupee notes, or even with small coins. The poorest would gamble a banana, a handful of puffed rice or some sweets. Every alleyway had its big gambler, often it was a woman. The most compulsive was Sheela Nadar. Padmini would look on bewildered as her mother shamelessly fleeced old Prema Bai.
“It’s a good omen, my girl!” Sheela would explain after every winning hand. “The god of luck is with us. Rest assured that your marriage will be as beautiful an occasion as Diwali.”
In exactly one week’s time, on Sunday, December 2, the happy conjunction of Jupiter and the sun would transform Padmini into a princess out of A Thousand and One Nights. On that day, Jagannath, the glorious avatar of Vishnu worshipped by the Adivasis from Orissa, would bless her marriage to Dilip.
The ritual for an Adivasi marriage is as strict as any that unites high-caste Hindus. Nine days before the ceremony, Padmini and Dilip had to submit themselves to all kinds of ablutions in the homes of neighborhood families, before a meal and the presentation of gifts to equip their household. Four days later, the married women took charge of the young couple for a purification ceremony, in which they were rubbed down with castor oil and other ointments that smelled strongly of saffron and musk. Once this oiling had been completed, they proceeded to the interminable trying on of the wedding outfits made by the tailor Bassi. The cost of these outfits had been subject to keen negotiation. For a humble coolie working at the train station, marrying his daughter off meant substantial sacrifices.
Three days before the wedding, Ratna Nadar and several of his neighbors built the mandap, the platform on which the union would be celebrated. This was a dais about ten yards wide, raised about twenty inches from the ground and made out of mud coated with a smooth, dry mixture of cow dung and clay. Branches from two of India’s seven sacred trees covered the sides of the platform and in the middle, on an altar decorated with flowers, stood the image of the god Jagannath. Strings of lightbulbs provided the finishing touch to the decorations. On the evening of the ceremony, they would be lit by a generator hired for the occasion. Belram Mukkadam had chosen a prime position for the celebration. Padmini and Dilip would be married where all the community’s great events took place—on the teahouse esplanade—looking out at the tanks and pipework of the plant that represented the hope of a better life.
The dawn prayer. Every morning Bhopal awoke to the call of the muezzins from high up in the minarets. Sunday December 2, 1984, however, was no ordinary day. In a few hours time the City of the Begums was due to celebrate Ishtema, the great prayer gathering that, once a year, brought thousands of pilgrims from all over the country, as well as Pakistan and Afghanistan, to the heartland of India. Ratna Nadar had been obliged to temporarily abandon preparations for his daughter’s wedding and go with the other station porters to meet the special trains overflowing with the faithful. There would never be more people in Bhopal than on that Sunday. The excitement had already come to a head in the Taj ul-Masajid, the great mosque where teams of electricians were installing the floodlighting that would illuminate the splendid building for a week. Volunteers were unrolling hundreds of prayer mats and hooking up loudspeakers that, for three days and three nights, would broadcast the celebration of the greatness of Allah.
All around the city’s mosques and outside the hotels on Hamidia Road, the bus station and the railway station, hundreds of street vendors were taking up their positions. Ishtema was a lucrative time for any business in Bhopal. Jolly and rubicund, his lip accentuated by a thin mustache and his forehead decorated with Vishnu’s trident, Shyam Babu, a forty-five-year-old Hindu, was the proprietor of the city’s largest restaurant. Muslim, Hindu or secular, the many festivals in the Indian calendar made his fortune. Situated in the old part of the city, his establishment, the Agarwal Poori Bhandar, could serve up to eight hundred patrons a day and never closed. “Our meals are the best and the cheapest in town,” he assured people. And it was true; for ten rupees, the equivalent of less than fifty cents, one could eat one’s fill of vegetables, chicken or fish curry and samosas. But Shyam Babu was not just a businessman; he was also a kind man. The lepers and beggars who hauled themselves up the steps of the great mosque, and the penniless pilgrims who camped out in the ruins of the palace of Begum Shah Jahan knew that they would always find a bowl of rice and vegetables if they went to him.
Shyam had started that Sunday as he began every day, with a morning prayer in the small temple to Lakshmi, goddess of wealth. He had brought her baskets of fruit and flowers, for he was going to have particular need of her support that day. For him, the eve of any festival was always difficult. The massive arrival of visitors meant that many police reinforcements had to be brought in. The municipal government counted on Shyam to feed these men. It had become a tradition. The restaurateur had ordered up an extra 650 pounds of potatoes, the same quantity of flour, and doubled the stocks of fuel to supply his fifteen ovens. “Don’t you worry, I could feed the whole city,” he informed the police chief who had come to make sure that his men would be adequately nourished.
Not far from Shyam Babu’s restaurant, a notice board drew attention to another, rather quaint business, which had sprung into action for this Sunday unlike any other. For three generations the Bhopal Tent and Glass Store had been renting out equipment and accessories for the city’s weddings and public celebrations. The grandson of its founder, fifty-two-year-old Mahmoud Parvez, a Muslim who looked like a mullah with his little goatee and his embroidered skullcap, ran his business by telephone from a worktable set up in the street. The warehouse behind him was a veritable Ali Baba’s cave whose secrets he alone knew. In it were piles of plates, crates of glassware, drawers full of cutlery, candlesticks of all sizes, old gramophones, antique generators, elephant bells, flintlock guns and harquebuses. Parvez’s pride and joy was a gleaming Italian percolator. “I’m the only one in town, in the whole of Madhya Pradesh even, who can serve espresso coffee!” he boasted. What had earned him the most renown, however, was his impressive collection of carpets and shamianas, the multicolored tents used for public and private ceremonies. He had them to suit all tastes and all budgets; some could even hold up to two thousand guests. Others, by virtue of the refinement of their patterns, were real museum pieces. Parvez only hired them out on very special occasions and then only to friends or people of prominence. That Sunday, his staff was preparing the most beautiful shamiana for the wedding of the daughter of the controller-in-chief of the Bhopal railway, the Hindu Ashwini Diwedi, whose brother Sharda was managing director of the city’s power station, two people of standing whom Mahmoud was eager to please. The remaining rugs and shamianas would be used in the day’s numerous other weddings, the Ishtema festival on the following day, as well as the mushaira, the poetry recital arranged for ten o’clock that night in Spices Square. For this event, Parvez would also be providing small cushions so that the poets could relax between recitations, accessories all the more necessary because a number of these men of letters were members of the celebrated Lazy Poets’ Circle.
Mahmoud Parvez rubbed his hands as he watched his storehouse empty. That Sunday was going to be an auspicious one for the Bhopal Tent and Glass Store.
The feverish preparations had spread as far as the workshops of Kali Grounds’ two main artisans. The shoemaker Mohammed Iqbal had been working since dawn to finish the shoes made of Agra leather and sandals encrusted with precious stones that several of the wedding guests had ordered. With the help of his young apprentice Sunil Kumar, the son of poor peasants newly arrived in the bustee, he cut, trimmed and sewed away, surrounded by the suffocating smell of glue and varnish that filled the hut where his wife and three children were still sleeping. Across the way, in hut No. 240, his friend Ahmed Bassi had also been up since dawn, finishing embroidering the saris and veils ordered by the wealthy families of Arera Colony for their daughters’ weddings. Bassi had such fine silk fabrics brought from Benares that his shop attracted Bhopal’s smart set, despite its location in the poor quarter. Five times a day, he thanked Allah for all the benefits He had bestowed upon him. His order book was overflowing. In two weeks’ time, it would be Eid, the most important festival in the Muslim year. The treadle of his sewing machine would not stop, as he made kurtas out of satin and sherwanis in Lucknow brocade.
At the other end of town, in a church with a slate-covered steeple in the Jehangirabad district, on that same December 2, Bhopal’s Christian minority gathered to celebrate Advent. The first Sunday in Advent was the beginning of a time of prayer and recollection leading up to the year’s most important Christian festival: Christmas. A life-size crèche commemorated the birth of the Messiah in a Bethlehem stable. A noisy and colorful congregation of women in superb saris with the embroidered ends covering their heads, and sumptuously dressed men and children filled the nave, cooled by a battery of fans. Majestic in his immaculate alb and red silk vestments, Eugene de Souza, the Roman Catholic archbishop, originally from Goa, read the first psalm with fervor. “Awake thy glory, O Lord, and deliver us, for our transgressions have led us into imminent danger.”
That morning one pew remained unoccupied. Sister Felicity had called the prelate to ask him to excuse her, and to request that his vicar, Father Lulu, come to Ashanitekan, the House of Hope, to give mass for the handicapped children in the building’s small chapel. There, to the right of the altar stood a large picture of Jesus, under which were inscribed the simple words: I AM WITH YOU ALWAYS.
A dozen children were kneeling on jute sacks sewn end to end. Among them was Raina, the little girl with spina bifida, whom the nun had put in her own bedroom in order to better care for her. For much of the time, especially at night, her illness plunged her into a comalike state, almost as if she were dead. The previous night, however, Raina had suddenly woken up, screaming.
“People with this kind of illness have a very special sensitivity,” Sister Felicity explained. “Raina never woke up in the night unless something unusual was going to happen, like a storm, or the beginning of the monsoon. But the weather was so beautiful in Bhopal that second day of December that I couldn’t understand why all at once she started to yell.”
The nun was to find her answer in the gospel that Father Lulu read that day. “The sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken …”
In the northern part of the immense city, in the Railway Colony, the Anglican incumbent of the small white church of the Holy Redeemer was also meditating with his flock upon the somber predictions of the holy scriptures. Short and stocky with a round smiling face, the thirty-one-year-old vicar Timothy Wankhede had come originally from Maharashtra. Together with his wife and ten-month-old baby named Anuradh, the Hindi word meaning “joy,” he lived in a modest red-brick vicarage next to the church. Like Archbishop de Souza, he poured endless energy into keeping the flame of Christian faith alight in a city inhabited by an overwhelming majority of Muslims and Hindus. Timothy had become a Christian one day while listening to the radio. He was twenty years old when an announcement in Marathi, his mother tongue, suddenly came over the airwaves. “He who chooses and believes in Jesus Christ will be saved and all his kinfolk with him,” said the voice on the radio. “I was overwhelmed,” Timothy would recount. “I rushed to the only public telephone in the village and called the radio station, wanting to know more about Jesus Christ.” After being baptized, on what he described as “the most wonderful day” of his life, he had traveled India for three years, preaching the Gospel. Then he had spent four years at theological college studying for the ordination that would throw open the doors of the Bhopal parish.
The Reverend Wankhede’s ministry was not confined to leading worship. That first Sunday of Advent, he was preparing to take his parishioners to visit the city’s various hospitals. “It’s our duty to comfort our suffering brethren,” he said, “and tell them that Jesus’ hands can heal, if only we believe in him.” In his shoulder bag he carried editions of the Bible in a dozen different languages. For that Advent Sunday, he had chosen to read a verse from St. Paul to the sick, which in a few hours’ time would prove to be tragically relevant. “O God, forgive your children who were missed by those who had lured them with the promise of wealth.”
The two men were practitioners of a medical specialty of which crime writers are particularly fond. Sixty-two-year-old Prof. Heeresh Chandra and his young assistant, thirty-four-year-old Ashu Satpathy, performed autopsies on the corpses that sundry incidents throughout the year—accidents, crimes or suicide—dispatched to the examination tables of the Department of Forensic Medicine at the Gandhi Medical College. In a city with six hundred thousand inhabitants, there were plenty of violent deaths, even on Sundays and holidays. In the absence of a suitably refrigerated morgue, the two pathologists had to be constantly available to perform autopsies as soon as the corpses came in.
With his dignified air and imposing white mustache, Professor Chandra looked like a maharajah from a Rajput kingdom. Despite his unusual profession, he was best known for his hobbies: dogs and vintage cars. He owned three sand-colored Labradors and a 1930 National, known throughout the city for the way it backfired. On December 2, the eccentric professor was getting ready to take his venerable vehicle and his Labradors out for a drive, as he did every Sunday, to Delawari National Park, a favorite resort of the Bhopalis.
Meanwhile, his young colleague Ashu Satpathy spent his leisure time indulging his passion for roses. Because the garden of his Idgah Hills cottage was not big enough, he had transformed the corridors and terraces of the Department of Forensic Medicine into a rose garden. Dozens of jardinières and pots of flowers stood alongside the rows of jars containing the livers, kidneys, hearts, spleens and brains that enabled him to extract information from the bodies brought in by the police. Satpathy spent any free time he had watering, pruning and feeding his dwarf bushes and climbing roses. The same fingers that immersed themselves in human entrails carried out delicate grafts to produce new varieties, the secrets of which he alone knew. He had given them such lyrical names as “Black Diamond,” “Moschata,” “Chinensis,” “Odorata” and “Golden Chrysler.” In two days’ time the doctor was going to exhibit these wonders in the greenhouses at the monumental floral show that, for one week, would turn Bhopal into India’s rose capital.
Alas the events of that Sunday were to thwart the two doctors’ plans. Toward midday a telephone call from police headquarters informed them that two bodies, those of a man and a woman, were on their way to the morgue. It was a matter of urgency that the doctors establish the cause of death.
Before starting work, the two medical examiners enlisted the help of the accomplice who was party to all their dissections. With his beige cap eternally crammed down over his long hair, the twenty-eight-year-old photographer Subashe Godane looked more like an artist than an accessory to a postmortem examination. He dreamed of making his mark on the world of fashion and advertising photography and had assembled an impressive portfolio of women’s portraits that he was preparing to show at the New Delhi biennial exhibition. In the meantime, he and his Pentax K-1000 supported his wife and three children by photographing corpses riddled with stab wounds, decapitated children and women who had been slashed to ribbons. Godane was absolutely convinced that his films had registered every conceivable horror humanity could inflict. He was wrong.
The autopsies on the two bodies took three hours. The absence of any signs of violence on the couple, who were both in their forties, suggested a double suicide by poisoning. Analysis of the internal organs confirmed Doctors Chandra and Satpathy’s hypothesis. In the victims’ stomachs they found copious quantities of a whitish powder that had caused extensive damage to the digestive and respiratory organs. Although the two practitioners were unable to determine the precise nature of the substance, they were probably dealing with a strong pesticide in the DDT family. Returning to the village where the bodies had been found, the police discovered that the victims were peasants whom the latest drought had reduced to ruin. Unable to pay back the loans they had taken out to buy seed, fertilizer and insecticides for their next crop, they had decided to end their lives. Such cases were by no means unusual in India, nor was the method used. That Sunday, December 2, Carbide’s beautiful factory had started to sow its seeds of death. In the peasants’ hut, the police found an empty package of Sevin.
A Sunday of prayer and mourning but a Sunday of folly, too. Around a circle of dust in an old hangar attached to the Lakshmi Talkies, the city’s oldest and largest cinema, clustered three hundred overexcited gamblers. The building shook with all the shouting and heckling and the din from the loudspeakers. Men in shirts and lunghis, their fingers clutching bundles of rupees, pushed their way through the onlookers to pick up the bets. In the front row of the arena a light complexioned man, whose elegant kurta was out of keeping with the general scruffiness, was silently massaging the claws of a cock. Omar Pasha, the godfather of the bustees, never talked before a fight.
Pressed around him like a bodyguard were his friends from the Kali Grounds led by Belram Mukkadam, Ganga Ram and Rahul. All had bet on Yagu, Omar Pasha’s champion, the creature with the murderous spurs that the old man was holding on his belly. A victory that afternoon would open the way to the championships in Ahmadabad in January, then Bangalore in March and finally New Delhi in April. The creature relaxed, clucking with pleasure as his master gently massaged its thighs, joints and claws. Then, with the help of a file, Omar Pasha sharpened its spurs and beak into deadly daggers.
The sound of a gong announced the beginning of the fight. The godfather stood up and carefully placed Yagu in front of his opponent. The two cocks immediately hurled themselves at one another with a fury that roused the fever of their audience. Beaks and spurs spun in the light like steel-tipped arrows. The blood spurting in all directions did nothing to diminish the fury of the two combatants. The crowd yelled their names, clapped and stamped their feet. When one of the birds rolled over in the dust, the audience was nearly delirious. Omar Pasha followed the ferocious battle with the detachment of a Buddha. Yagu bled, staggered and fell but each time he got up to strike again. With a final blow of his spurs he managed to put out an eye of his adversary, who collapsed, mortally wounded. Another sound of the gong signaled the end of the fight. The godfather stood up and retrieved his bloody but victorious cockerel. Parading the creature above his head like a trophy, he greeted the crowd.
A Sunday of frivolity and freedom from care. Usually closed on Sundays, the stores in the Chowk Bazaar, scattered around the minarets and golden-spired cupolas of the Jama Masjid, were doing a record trade. That December 2 was, above all else, a day for marriages blessed by the stars. Elegant ladies from the smart neighborhoods came rushing in to make last-minute purchases. Necklaces, earrings, bracelets, all kinds of jewelry that were a specialty of Bhopal, were snatched up. Perfumers sold out their inventories of sandalwood, essence of roses and patchouli. Vendors were plundered of their silks, ribbons and sandals. It was as if the end of the world were at hand.
On the other side of town, the Arera Club, a splendid institution inherited from the British, was doing the sort of business it did on all festival Sundays. Its members thronged around an abundantly laden buffet table, the tennis courts, and immaculately manicured lawns, and the Olympic-size swimming pool and the reading rooms.
Executives from Carbide and other Bhopal companies were entitled to membership in this club that nestled in an oasis of mauve, bloodred, orange and white bougainvilleas, palm, frangipani and neem trees. With its gala evenings, balls, tennis and bridge tournaments, and games of bingo, the Arera Club had at one time given the South Charleston expatriates and their young Indian colleagues a glimpse of the life led by its British administrators in the great days of the empire. Recently things had changed somewhat. On that Sunday December 2, 1984, there were no longer any American Carbiders sampling the pots of chicken curry and other Indian delicacies on the buffet. There were hardly even any Indian engineers left; the factory had been deserted by so many of its local senior staff. One of their few remaining representatives, Works Manager Jagannathan Mukund, had brought his wife and son, who was on break from university, to lunch there. That evening, Mukund and his wife planned to take their son to several marriage celebrations. And next day, they were going to show him some of the picturesque sites surrounding the City of the Begums. The plant had ceased operations, so there was no reason its captain could not be gone for a day or two.
Not far from the Mukunds’ table, a heated game of bridge was going on. One of the players was a young doctor in white trousers and a sports shirt. Both a swimming and a bridge champion, the athletic, thirty-two-year-old doctor L.S. Loya had been recruited in March by classified advertisement to take over the running of Carbide’s on-site clinic. For the son of a Rajasthani corn chandler who had struggled hard to get his degree in toxicology, landing a job for an international company making chemical products was an achievement. In eight months, Loya had not had to deal with a single serious medical emergency, which was just as well because the management had not provided him with any detailed information about the composition of the principal and most dangerous gas produced by the plant, and even less about how to treat the effects of it in case of accident.
He was the man who probably would have the most onerous responsibilities on that remarkable Sunday. Fifty-two-year-old Sharda Diwedi was the managing director of Bhopal’s power station. That evening, his turbines would have to supply enough current to light up the many feasts and wedding celebrations. The grandest was to take place in the Railway Colony. It was to mark the nuptials of Rinu, youngest daughter of the chief controller of the Bhopal railroad.
The Railway Colony was typical of the neighborhoods built by the British to house railway employees close to the stations in which they worked. A small town within a town, not too unlike the villages of Sussex or Surrey, with its lawns, its cottages, its cricket pitch, tearoom, bank and a church with a Victorian gothic bell tower. And one of those institutions that seem to crop up whenever two Englishmen get together: a club. On that particular Sunday, the colonial-style railway employees’ club accommodated the parents and at least two hundred guests of the groom’s family. Later that evening, over a thousand people were due to squeeze themselves under Mahmoud Parvez’s huge shamianas erected on lawns illuminated with strings of multicolored bulbs and floodlights. The managing director of the power station had just one worry: that one of the power cuts to which India was accustomed might plunge the festivities into darkness. To cover that eventuality, he had a powerful emergency generator set up behind one of the shamianas.
A cool, bright winter’s night had just fallen upon the City of the Begums. While preparations were going on in the Railway Colony and elsewhere across the city, the married women in Orya Bustee had just finished dressing Padmini in her ceremonial clothes. Her father appeared at the entrance to the hut.
“Sister Felicity, look how beautiful my daughter is,” whispered Ratna Nadar proudly. The nun had come to be with Padmini during the last moments of her adolescence.
“Oh yes, your daughter is very beautiful,” the Scotswoman replied, “because God’s loving hand created her.”
In a scarlet sari dotted in gold thread, her face concealed behind a muslin veil, her bare feet painted red, her toes, ankles and wrists glittering with jewels from the dowry brought by her future husband’s emissaries, Padmini, escorted by her mother, was preparing to take her place on the straw mat in the center of the mandap. It was there, beside the sacred fire burning in a small brazier, that she would await the arrival of the man whom destiny had given her as a husband.
Eyes shining with happiness, lips parted in a gratified smile, Ratna Nadar could not take his eyes off his child. It was the most beautiful sight of his life, a fairy-tale scene, obliterating at a single stroke so many nightmare images: Padmini crying of hunger and cold on the Bhopal station platform, foraging with her little hands through the piles of rubbish in between the rails, begging a few scraps of coal from the engine drivers … For this child of poverty-stricken parents there had been no play or schooling, only the supervision of her brother, the drudgery of carrying water, doing laundry and household chores. It had been a life of slavery that only her meeting with Sister Felicity had relieved. Today, dressed like a princess, Padmini savored her happiness, her triumph, her revenge on a cursed karma.
A piercing cry, then the sound of moaning suddenly rent the night. A neighbor came running: “Come quickly! Boda’s having her baby.” Without a thought for her wedding clothes, Padmini dragged Sister Felicity to the hut where the wife of the dairyman Bablubhai was writhing in pain. Old Prema Bai was already there. Padmini held a candle over the thin, agonized face of the woman in labor. She was soaked in blood. Sister Felicity could see the child’s skull showing between Boda’s thighs. The young woman could not manage to expel it.
“Push!” urged the nun. “Push as hard as you can.”
Boda made such an effort that the tears poured down her cheeks.
“No, not like that, little sister! Push downwards. First try and breathe deeply, then push as you force the air out of your lungs. Quickly!”
Padmini lit a second candle to shed more light on Boda’s lower belly.
“For the love of God, push harder!” begged the nun.
The dairyman’s wife bore down with all her strength. Sister Felicity, who had assisted with dozens of births among the destitute, knew that this was their last chance of bringing a living child into the world.
“Stand opposite me!” she ordered the old midwife, who seemed overwhelmed by the situation. “While I try and straighten the baby, you massage her stomach from top to bottom.”
As soon as the old woman started rubbing, the nun gently slid her hand behind the nape of the infant’s neck. Boda let out a wail.
“Breathe deeply,” ordered the nun, “and push regularly, without jerking.”
All the young woman’s muscles grew taut. With her head thrust back and her teeth clenched, she made a desperate effort.
The nun would never be able to explain what happened next. Her hand had just reached the baby’s shoulders when two rats fell off the roof and passed in front of her eyes before landing on the stomach of the laboring woman. Taken by surprise, she withdrew her hand. Was it the suddenness of her movement or the shock occasioned by the creatures’ fall? One thing was sure: all at once the child emerged.
Prema Bai cut the cord with her knife and tied it off with a strand of jute. The newborn baby was a fine boy. Sister Felicity guessed he must have weighed nearly six pounds. Padmini watched as he filled his lungs, opened his mouth and let out a cry that was greeted with a tremendous echo of joy inside the hut and out into the alleyway.
“Big sister, you’ve given me a son!” The dairyman Bablubhai was overjoyed. He brought a bowl full of rice, which he held out to Sister Felicity. “Put this rice next to my boy, so that the goddess may grant him a long and prosperous life.”
Then he called for an oil lamp. According to tradition, it had to burn without interruption until the next day. If it went out, it would be a sign that the child born on this Sunday blessed by the stars would not live.
The magic moment in Padmini’s life had at last arrived. A brass band burst into play, accompanied by singing. Preceded by a troupe of dancers outrageously made up with kohl, the groom’s procession made its entry onto the parade ground outside the teahouse. When she saw the boy astride his white horse, Sister Felicity thought she was witnessing “the appearance of a prince from some Eastern legend.” Indeed, with his cardboard crown sparkling with spangles, a brocade tunic over white silk jodhpurs and mules encrusted with glass beads, the former little ragpicker and train scavenger looked like one of those Indian rulers popularized in engravings. Before climbing onto the mandap, where his bride awaited him beside the sacrificial fire, Dilip had to submit to the ritual of purdah: the imposition of a veil so that his betrothed’s eyes might not see him before the appointed moment in the liturgy. He was then invited by the master of the ceremonies to sit down beside Padmini. Belram Mukkadam had put on an elegant brand-new white punjabi for the occasion. Before the ceremony he had secretly conducted his own private celebration. He had tied his bull Nandi, bought with Carbide’s compensation money, to the trunk of an acacia tree, and again painted his horns red and decorated his forehead with a trident, the emblem of the god Shiva. With this tribute, Mukkadam sought to invoke the sacred animal’s blessing on the union of Dilip and Padmini.
“In the kingdom of heaven, theirs will be the most beautiful faces,” thought Sister Felicity as she looked at the men, women and children, in their festival clothes, encircling the bride and groom. With her bowed head partially concealed by her veil, Padmini seemed deep in meditation. This was the moment in which the nun chose to do something close to her heart. Sister Felicity got up and walked to Padmini.
“This little gold cross was given to me by my mother when I consecrated my life to God,” she said, fastening the chain around Padmini’s neck. “It has protected me. Now I’m giving it to you so that it may protect you.”
“Thank you, big sister, I shall wear it always in remembrance of you,” whispered Padmini, her eyes bright with emotion.
Then began the long ritual of an Adivasi marriage, punctuated with mantras in Sanskrit, the language of the sacred texts. Mukkadam had learned them by heart for the occasion, although neither he nor anyone else there understood them. He began by asking the couple to plunge their right hands into a baked clay jar filled with a paste made of sandalwood and tuber. In it two rings were hidden. The first to find a ring had the right to extract a forfeit from the other. After this preamble came the panigrahan. For the Adivasis as for Hindus, this was an essential part of the marriage rite. The officiant took from the pocket of his punjabi a small piece of mauve cord and, taking hold of the couple’s right hands, tied them together as he repeated their names aloud. The culminating moment had arrived. The band and the congregation fell silent. Now Mukkadam invited the married couple to officially make each other’s acquaintance. Slowly, timidly, each parted the other’s veil with their free hand. Dilip’s delighted face appeared before Padmini’s big, slanting eyes. Her heart was pounding. Her mother, father and brother watched her with barely contained emotion. Dalima, for her part, could no longer hold back tears. Already Mukkadam was asking the pair to complete the last part of the ceremony: with their right hands still bound together by the piece of cord, husband and wife walked seven times around the sacrificial fire.
It was ten o’clock at night and the celebrations were only just beginning. Helped by a group of women, Dalima started laying out plates made out of banana leaves on the sisal mats that had been rolled out near the teahouse. All the guests from Orya Bustee would soon sample the wedding banquet, looking out over the strange towers and pipework of the Carbide factory, lit up with strings of lights like an oceanliner.
While other marriage ceremonies were taking place in all four corners of the city, several hundred people were preparing to pay tribute to the goddess of poetry in Spices Square.
The organizers of that Sunday evening’s mushaira had given their program particular luster by inviting one of the most famous Urdu language poets. Jigar Akbar Khan was a legend in his own lifetime. In Bhopal he had such a following that a taxi driver had once abducted him to force him, at gun point, to give a private recital. Jigar could declaim more than fifty ghazals in a single evening. Whenever he appeared, his audience went into a frenzy. His sublime incantations, his sonorous voice— sometimes caressing, sometimes imploring—were magical. It was common knowledge that the elderly bearded poet enveloped in his shawl, was a hopeless drunkard, but what did that matter? Bhopal was indebted to him for too many nights of exaltation not to forgive him. It was said that one of his disciples had actually left his wife on their wedding night in order to accompany the master poet back to the railway station and put him on his train. Just as the train was pulling away, the waggish Jigar had grabbed hold of his admirer and prevented him from jumping back onto the platform. The newlywed had not returned to Bhopal for a year, a year spent following his idol from festivals to mushairas across India.
With their hands outstretched toward the speaker in a gesture of offering, eyes closed upon some vision of ecstasy, gently shaking their heads in approval, the audience greeted each verse with an enthusiastic “Vah!”, or “Marvelous!” A slight chilly breeze blowing from the north nipped at their flesh, but exaltation warmed bodies as well as souls.
Was it a premonition? The elderly poet began his recital with a verse about the suddenness of death:
Death which appears
Like a silent dragonfly
Like the dew on the mountain
Like the foam on the river
Like the bubble on the spring.
THREE SARCOPHAGI UNDER THE MOON
Three Sarcophagi under the Moon
In their reinforced concrete tomb, the three tanks, two yards high and thirteen long, looked like enormous sarcophagi left behind by some pharaoh. They lay, half buried, side by side, at the foot of the metal structures on view to Dilip and Padmini’s wedding guests. They had no names on them, only numbers: 610, 611, 619. These tanks were masterpieces of the most advanced metallurgy. No acid, liquid or corrosive gas could eat into their shells, which were made out of SS14 stainless steel. At least, that was the theory: methyl isocyanate had not yet revealed all of its secrets. A complex network of pipes, stopcocks and valves linked the tanks to each other and to the reactors that produced the MIC and Sevin. To prevent any accidental leakage of their contents into the atmosphere, each tank was connected to three specific safety systems. The first was a network of fine piping contained in the tank’s lining. When freon gas flowed through it, the MIC would be constantly refrigerated to a temperature close to 0° C. The second was a monumental cylindrical tank called a “decontamination tower.” It contained caustic soda to absorb and neutralize any escaping gas. The third was a 120-foot-high flare. Its role was to burn off any effluents that might have escaped the barrage of caustic soda.
That December 2, 1984, there were sixty-three tons of methyl isocyanate in the tanks—a “real atomic bomb right in the middle of the plant” as the German chemist from Bayer had described it to Eduardo Muñoz—and not one of the three safety systems was operational. The refrigeration had been off for a month and a half and the MIC was being kept at the ambient temperature, about 20° C in a winter month. The alarm that was supposed to go off in case of any abnormal rise in temperature in the tanks had been disconnected. As for the decontamination tower and the flare to incinerate the gases, several of their components had been dismantled the preceding week for maintenance.
No mention was made of it in the technical handbooks, but there was a fourth safety device. Neither corrosion nor cutbacks could put this one out of commission because the only power source this funnel-shaped piece of material needed was the breath of the winds. The wind sock fluttering over the factory supplied the plant workers with an essential piece of information: the wind direction. Lit up at nightfall, it was visible from all workstations. The occupants of the surrounding neighborhoods, however, could not see it. No one had thought to fly another one over their bustees.
There were further grounds for concern. With forty-two tons of MIC inside, tank 610 was almost full, and that was in absolute violation of Carbide’s safety regulations. The tanks were never meant to be filled to more than half their capacity, just in case a solvent had to be injected to stop a chemical reaction. Tank 611, next to it, contained twenty tons of MIC. As for the third tank, 619, which was supposed to remain empty to act as an emergency tank in case the other two suffered an accident, it contained one ton of MIC.
Since October 26, the day on which the factory stopped production, the contents of these tanks had not been analyzed. That was another serious breach of regulations. Methyl isocyanate is not an inert substance. Because it is made up of multiple gases, it has a life of its own and is constantly changing and reacting. Was the MIC inside the three tanks still the “pure, clear mineral water” Shekil Qureshi, Pareek’s young assistant, had admired? Or had it been polluted by impurities likely to cause a reaction? Broken down by heat, the MIC could then emit all kinds of gases, including the deadly hydrocyanic acid. In the event of a leak, these gases of varying densities would form toxic clouds that would spread at different speeds and on several levels, saturating a vast area in one fell swoop.
With the level of deterioration the plant had reached, someone should have been anticipating the worst. Moreover, there were indications that strange things were going on in tank 610 as well as in the apparatus next to it. Twice in succession, on November 30 and December 1, operators had tried to transfer some of the forty-two tons of MIC to the unit that was still manufacturing Sevin on a batch basis. In an operation of this kind, the contents of the tank had first to be pressurized by introducing nitrogen, a routine process in a properly maintained factory. But the beautiful plant was no longer in very good shape. Because of a defective valve, the nitrogen escaped as fast as it was put in. The valve was not replaced, and the forty-two tons of MIC were left in a tank that had not been properly pressurized. This meant that potential contaminants could get into the tank without meeting any resistance, and thus trigger an uncontrollable chemical reaction.
Rehman Khan was a twenty-nine-year-old Muslim who seldom parted from his embroidered skullcap, even when wearing his safety helmet. Originally from Bombay, he had moved to Bhopal to get married. His wife worked as a seamstress in the workshop that made Carbide’s coveralls. It was thanks to her that, after a brief training period, he had joined the MIC production unit as an operator. He had been working there for four months and earned a monthly salary of 1,400 rupees, a comfortable amount, given his lack of experience and qualifications. Like most of the 120 workers also on the site that evening, he had practically nothing to do. The factory’s production of MIC had been stopped. Khan was part of the second shift, and was on duty until twenty-three hundred hours. A passionate lover of poetry, as soon as his shift was over he intended to go to Spices Square for the grand mushaira being held in honor of the festival of Ishtema. To kill time that dreary winter’s evening, he had been playing cards with some of his comrades in the canteen when an urgent telephone call summoned him to the duty supervisor, Gauri Shankar, a tall bald Bengali who seemed extremely irritated.
“That lazy maintenance team hasn’t even managed to flush out the pipes!” he grumbled.
Shankar was referring to the pipework that carried the liquid MIC produced by the plant’s reactors to the tanks. Highly corrosive in nature, methyl isocyanate attacks pipes, leaving scoria deposits on their lining. High pressure jets of water had constantly to be sent into the piping to get rid of these impurities, not just because they would eventually block the flow, but above all because they could get into the storage tanks and contaminate the MIC.
Shankar brandished the logbook for the MIC production unit. “Here are the instructions left by A.V. Venugopal,” he explained. “The production supervisor wants us to flush the pipes.”
Khan knitted his thick eyebrows. “Is it absolutely necessary to do it this evening? The plant’s stopped. I would have thought it could wait till tomorrow. Don’t you think?”
Shankar shrugged his shoulders. He had no idea. In truth neither he nor Venugopal the supervisor were knowledgeable about the factory’s very complex maintenance procedures. They had both only just arrived there, one from Calcutta, the other from Madras. They knew virtually nothing about MIC or phosgene apart from their very distinctive smells. Like the former superdirector Chakravarty, the only industry they were familiar with was the one that produced Carbide’s fortune in India: batteries.
In his note, the supervisor had given succinct instructions as to how the requisite washing operation should be carried out. He stipulated that it should begin with the cleaning of the four filters and the circuit valves. He went on to supply a list of stopcocks to be turned off to prevent the rinse water from entering the tanks containing the MIC. But he had forgotten to recommend one crucial precaution: the placing of solid metal discs at each end of the pipes connected to the tanks. Two segments of the pipework had only to be disconnected and the discs slid into the housings provided for the purpose, then the whole thing bolted up again. The process required a little less than an hour. Only the presence of these “slipbinds” as the engineers called them, could guarantee that the tanks were hermetically sealed. The valves and stopcocks under attack from corrosion could not, alone, ensure their insulation.
Rehman Khan set to work by closing the main stopcock. It was a complicated process because the stopcock was located three yards off the ground, at the center of a tangle of pipes that were difficult to get to. Bracing himself against two girders, he put all his weight on the handle that closed the stopcock, yet he still could not be sure that he had managed to seal it completely, so rusted and corroded were the metal parts. After that, he climbed back down to turn off the other stopcock and start flushing. He had only then to connect a hosepipe to one of the draincocks on the pipework and turn on the tap. For a few seconds he listened to the water rushing vigorously into the pipes and noted the time in the logbook: it was eight-thirty.
The young operator quickly realized that something unusual was going on: the injected water was not, as it should have been, coming out of the four draincocks provided for the purpose. Khan tapped them lightly with a hammer and discovered that the filters in two of them were blocked with metal debris. He immediately cut off the water supply and alerted his supervisor by telephone. The latter did not arrive for quite a while, and when he did, his lack of experience meant he was not much help.
He simply instructed Khan to clean the filters on the evacuation draincocks well, and turn the water back on. “With the pressure of the flow, they’ll let the water out eventually.”
The young Muslim agreed, with some reservations. “But if the water doesn’t come out through the draincocks, it’ll go somewhere else,” he suggested.
The supervisor failed to grasp the vital implications of this remark. “We’ll just have to see!” he replied, clearly irritated that he had been disturbed for something so trivial.
As soon as his superior had gone, Khan began cleaning the filters, then turned the wash tap back on. Shankar was right: the water flowed out normally through the first two draincocks and, after a moment, through the third one, too. But the fourth seemed to be permanently blocked. Khan was not unduly worried. As his boss had said, the system would eventually clear itself. He went on flushing the pipes, using all the pressure in his hose. Several hundred gallons poured into the pipes. Two hours later, at ten-thirty, half an hour before the changeover of shifts, he knocked on the door to his superior’s cabin.
“What shall I do?” he asked. “Shall I keep the water running, or should I turn it off?”
Shankar looked doubtful. He rubbed his chin.
“Keep it running,” he said eventually. “The insides of those bloody pipes are supposed to be completely spotless. The night shift will turn the tap off.”
At these words, Rehman Khan penciled in a brief report of the operation in progress in the logbook.
“Good night, sir. See you tomorrow!” he then said. He was in a hurry to shower and dress for the evening’s big event, the mushaira in Spices Square.
It was now eleven o’clock at night. Spices Square was humming with poetry lovers impatient to hear their favorite poets. On the other side of the city, the reception rooms and lawns of the Arera Club were teeming with guests, as were the sumptuously decorated tents set up for the marriages in the affluent neighborhoods of New Bhopal and Shamla Hills. On the Kali Grounds, strings of bulbs lit up Dilip and Padmini’s wedding celebrations. The whole of Bhopal had given itself up to rejoicing on that night blessed by the stars. It was in the Railway Colony beneath a shower of fireworks, that the festivities were most splendid. The one thousand guests at the wedding of Rinu Diwedi, younger daughter of the chief controller of the Bhopal railway to the son of a Vidisha merchant, watched with wonder the ritual procession of the Barat. Perched on a white mare covered with a velvet cloth embroidered with gold, wearing a span-gled turban on his head, young Rajiv caracoled toward his fiancée who was waiting for him under Parvez’s most beautiful shamiana. Before he straddled his mount, his father had marked his forehead with the red and black spots that would banish the evil eye forever and guarantee Rajiv a propitious future. He had also been given a coconut with red stripes scratched onto it, a traditional token of good luck. In front of the white mare walked a woman taking tiny steps: his mother. She was dressed in the double silk and gold sari she kept for special occasions. Fervently she strewed the ground with handfuls of salt, to eliminate all of life’s pitfalls from her son’s path.
“What if the Stars Were to Go on Strike?”
Twenty-three hundred hours—11 P.M. It was time for a change of watch on the bridge of the vessel Rehman Khan and his comrades from the previous shift had just left. The man who took over command of the control room was a Bengali Hindu named Suman Dey. Twenty-six years old, with a degree in science from the University of California, he was both competent and respected. The seventy-five dials lit up in front of him made up the factory’s control panel. Every needle, every luminous indicator supplied information, showed the state of activity in each section, signaled an eventual anomaly. Temperatures, pressures, levels, outputs—in his capacity as officer of the watch, Suman Dey was kept constantly apprised of the condition of the plant. At least that was the theory, because, for some time now, some of the apparatus had been breaking down. Dey was therefore obliged to go and get his information on site. He was not always able to. For the past several days, because of a fault in the transmission circuit, there had been no temperature reading coming through from tank 610. To calm his own frustration, he meditated on the words of a large notice hanging on the wall above the dials: “SAFETY IS EVERYBODY’S BUSINESS.” There was nothing definite, however, to make the young Bengali believe that the safety of the factory was not assured.
Certainly, the faces of the six night-shift operators betrayed no sign of disquiet. They settled in for the night around the brazier in the small room adjoining the control room used as the site canteen because those in it could be mobilized immediately in case of alert. The men on duty that night were a perfect reflection of India’s enormous diversity. Next to the Muslim supervisor Shekil Qureshi, the man who had escorted the MIC trucks, sat the Sikh V.N. Singh whose parents had been so thrilled to see him join Carbide. Next to him was a tall, twenty-nine-year-old Hindu with a melancholy face. Mohan Lal Varma was in the midst of a dispute with the management who, for six months, had been refusing to give him his classification and salary as a sixth-grade operator. There was also a Jain, originally from Bombay and as thin as a wire, a son of a railway employee from Jabalpur and a former trader from Bihar.
Apart from Qureshi, Singh and Varma, who were to continue the cleaning operation that the previous shift had started, the men had nothing specific to do that night because their production units had been stopped. They chatted about the plant’s gloomy future, smoked bidis, chewed betel and drank tea.
“Apparently the Sevin sales aren’t going too well anymore,” said the Jain from Bombay.
“They’re going so badly that they’ve decided to dismantle the factory and send it in bits to some other country,” added the merchant from Bihar who had become a specialist in alpha naphthol.
“Which country?” the Jain asked anxiously.
“Venezuela!” replied the Muslim from Jabalpur.
“Not Venezuela!” corrected Qureshi who had sources in the management offices. “Brazil.”
“Meanwhile, we’re the ones Carbide drops in the shit,” Varma said angrily. His struggles with his superiors had made him aggressive.
Qureshi tried to allay his colleagues’ fears. They all liked this tall, slightly clumsy fellow, who was always ready to share his inexhaustible repertoire of ghazals. Listening to him sing his poems, the nights did not seem quite so long. They had been pleasantly surprised to find him there that evening, because the roster had not shown him on duty until the next day. At the last minute, however, he had agreed to stand in for a colleague who had been invited to one of the weddings—a very noble gesture on his part on a night when there was a mushaira.
While still carrying on with the discussion, Qureshi cast an eye over the logbook, brought up to date by the previous shift. On the page for tank 610, for the pressure reading for twenty hundred hours, he read, “2 psig.” He gave a smile of satisfaction. Two pounds per square inch of pressure! That meant that all was well inside the tank. The Muslim’s expression darkened, however, when he realized that this information was three hours old. Three hours!
“Before half the technicians were laid off, we used to take pressure and temperature readings every two hours. Now it’s every …”
“Eight hours,” specified Suman Dey who had just emerged from the control room.
An atmosphere of extreme depression prevailed for some time over the metal structures of the factory. Ever since the departure of the men who had given it its soul—Woomer, Dutta, Pareek, Ballal—morale had plummeted, discipline had lapsed and, worst of all, the safety culture had gone out the window. It was rare now for those handling toxic substances to wear their helmets, goggles, masks, boots and gloves. It was even rarer for anyone to go spontaneously in the middle of the night to check the welding on the pipework. Eventually, and insidiously, the most dangerous of ideas had crept in, namely that nothing serious could happen in a factory when all the installations were turned off. As a result, plant workers preferred card games in the site canteen to tours of inspection around the dormant volcano.
“Hey guys! Can you smell it? Hey, can you smell it?” Mohan Lal Varma had sprung to his feet. He sniffed noisily. “Have a sniff, go on! I swear there’s MIC in the air!”
This sudden excitement on the part of the quiet young Hindu provoked much amusement all around.
“Sort out your snoot! Idiot!” cried the Jain from Bombay. “There can’t be any smell of MIC in a factory that’s stopped!”
“It’s not MIC you can smell, it’s Flytox!” interrupted the factory worker from Bihar. “They sprayed a whole canister of it about before we got here!”
“That’s why we haven’t been eaten up by mosquitoes yet!” confirmed the Muslim from Jabalpur.
Everyone in Bhopal agreed: Flytox was a godsend. It was, after all, the miracle insecticide that provided protection against the City of the Begums’ worst scourge: its mosquitoes.
Amid all the hullabaloo of the festivities taking place on the other side of the Kali Grounds, no one noticed a frail young girl dressed in a simple blouse and blue cotton skirt. She threaded her way through the guests preparing to dine on the sisal mats. She approached several of the guests, apparently looking for someone.
“Do you know where Sister Felicity is?” she asked, clearly agitated.
Dalima, who had overheard the question, joined the stranger and scrutinized the faces by the light of the strings of bulbs. The banquet had begun. The men were on one side, the women on the other. Only the bride was missing from the feast. She had momentarily withdrawn to a neighbor’s hut to open her wedding presents. Eventually, Dalima spotted the missionary sitting among a group of women. The young messenger rushed over to her.
“Anita, what are you doing here?” the nun asked, surprised. “Sister, you must come at once! There’s been an accident at home.”
The Scotswoman led Anita to an autorickshaw parked outside the teahouse.
“What is it?” she asked, concerned.
“The little one you have in your room …”
“Nadia?”
“Yes. She had a terrible fit. She started smashing everything up. She yelled far more loudly than last night, louder than any of the nights before the monsoon. She yelled like a madwoman. She called for you. Three of us tried to calm her down, restrain her, but …”
“But?”
“She got away from us. She threw herself out of the window.”
“Oh my God!” The nun felt her heart pound. For a few seconds she remained silent, then slowly crossing herself, she said softly, “Lord Jesus, receive your innocent child into your Paradise.”
“She’s not dead, sister!” Anita said quickly. “An ambulance has taken her to Hamidia Hospital.”
Fifteen minutes later, Anita and Sister Felicity ran through the emergency entrance to the building where the air was thick with the smell of disinfectant and ether. The floor was spotted with red stains left where people chewing betel had spat. The wards were almost empty. Sunday was not a day for too many accidents. Under the inscription DOCTORS ON DUTY, two doctors were settling down for a quiet night in their small office. Tall and lanky, with his black shock of hair carefully combed, the thirty-five-year-old Hindu Deepak Gandhe, and his young Muslim colleague Mohammed Sheikh had been students together at the Gandhi Medical College, the enormous building on the other side of the road. Since then they had been inseparable. One was a general practitioner; the other a surgeon. That was the usual combination for a tour of duty. The arrival of Sister Felicity and the young Indian girl caught them right in the middle of a game of dominoes. They stood up.
“Doctors, we’ve come about Nadia,” said Sister Felicity.
Dr. Sheikh’s face froze. He played nervously with his mustache. The two women prepared themselves for the worst. Dr. Gandhe, however, gave the faintest of smiles.
“Little Nadia has undergone an operation,” he said softly. “For the moment she has survived her injuries. We hope to be able to save her. She’s in intensive care.”
The Scotswoman’s eyes filled with tears. “May I see her?”
“Yes, Sister, you can even spend the night with her. You’ll have the whole ward to yourself. There’s no one else in intensive care this evening.”
While Sister Felicity and young Anita began a prayer and vigil night beside little Nadia’s injured body, the thousand guests at the wedding in the Railway Colony tucked into petits fours, kebabs, prawns, diced chicken in ginger and pieces of cheese wrapped in spinach delivered by an army of turbaned servants. Despite the fact that his cardiologist had forbidden him alcohol because of his coronary problems, Harish Dhurve, the stationmaster, tested his luck with the glasses of “English liquor,” the imported British whisky being served. Suddenly he found himself nose to nose with his doctor.
“Indulge me, doctor, this evening is exceptional, a night blessed by the stars!” he apologized.
Dr. Sarkar was the official doctor for the residents of the Railway Colony and the station staff. His Bengali sense of humor meant that he was never at a loss for repartee. Looking pointedly at his patient’s glass, he asked, “And what if the stars decided to go on strike?”
This reply brought a slightly forced smile to the stationmaster’s face. More than anyone else in Bhopal that night he needed the blessing of the stars. Like most of the other railway employees invited to the festivities, he would have to slip away a little before midnight to attend to his duties at the station. In fact that night was expected to be extremely busy because of the pilgrims arriving to celebrate Ishtema. Dhurve had had all the station staff requisitioned, including the 101 coolies. His station was one of the country’s principal railway junctions. He had promised himself that he would control the excess traffic with punctuality and suppleness, and provide the thousands of visitors with a welcome befitting Bhopali hospitality.
Midnight. In the factory, unknown to anyone, a bomb had just been primed. After the night-shift operators had tried vainly to drain the system of the rinse water that had been injected into it for the last three hours, it had started to blow back into tank 610. It went rushing in, carrying with it metal debris, sodium chloride crystals and all the other impurities it had dislodged from the lining of the pipes. This massive influx of contaminants promptly set off the exothermic reaction the chemists always dreaded. In a matter of minutes, the forty-two tons of methyl isocyanate disintegrated in an explosion of heat, which would very quickly transform the liquid into a hurricane of gas.
When their eyes began to smart, the six men sitting less than forty yards from the tanks, finally conceded that their colleague Varma was right. It was not the smell of Flytox he had detected, but indeed the characteristic boiled cabbage odor of methyl isocyanate. They still did not know, however, what was going on in tank 610.
Qureshi turned to V.N. Singh and Varma. “Guys, you’d better go and do a tour around the rinsing area,” he suggested.
The two technicians picked up their torches, put on their helmets and stood up.
“Don’t forget your masks!” said Qureshi.
“It’s not worth it! It’s not the first time this factory’s smelled of MIC,” replied V.N. Singh. “Have the tea ready for us in a minute!”
“Of course!” Qureshi called.
“And if you’re not back in time we’ll send out a search party with a bottle of oxygen!” joked the Jain from Bombay, provoking general laughter.
In a few minutes, the two men reached the pipework being cleaned. The smell was getting stronger and stronger. They listened to the rushing of the water still circulating at full force through the piping, and directed the beams of their flashlights onto the network of pipes. They scrutinized every stopcock, valve and flange. All of a sudden Singh noticed, at a draincock some eight yards off the ground, a bubble of brownish water surmounted by a small cloud.
“There’s some gas escaping up there!” he shouted.
Varma pointed the beam of his flashlight at the cloud. “You’re right. And it’s not Flytox!”
The two men ran back to the control room.
“Shekil! There’s a pipe pissing MIC!” Singh said. “You should come and take a look.”
Qureshi looked at his colleague in disbelief. “Stop fooling about!” he protested. Then emphasizing each word, he insisted, “Get it into your heads once and for all that there can’t be a leak in a factory where production has been stopped. Any idiot knows that.”
“But it really is pissing out, and it smells very strong!” Singh insisted, rubbing his eyes.
Qureshi shrugged his shoulders. “Perhaps it’s a drop of residual MIC escaping from the drainage cocks with the rinse water,” he conceded. “All we have to do is turn the water taps off. We’ll see if we can still smell it after that.” With these words he looked at his watch and added, “For now, guys, it’s midnight and time for tea!”
The sacrosanct tea break! Thirty-six years after their colonizers had departed, no Indian, not even the six Carbide men perched atop an erupting volcano, would forego a ritual that had entered their culture as surely as the game of cricket. Qureshi led the team to the building a hundred or so yards away that housed the staff cafeteria. Shortly after midnight, a young Nepalese lad with small, laughing eyes made his appearance. He was the tea boy. In his basket he carried a kettle full of scalding milky tea, some glasses and a plateful of chocolate cookies.
Qureshi and his workmates settled down comfortably to sip the delicious brew steeped in the rich perfume of the distant hills of Assam. Suddenly, a worried face appeared in the doorway. It was Suman Dey, the duty head of the control room.
“Shekil,” he called out to the Muslim supervisor, “the pressure needle for tank 610 has shot up from two to thirty psig!”
Qureshi shrugged his shoulders, then gave his colleague a smile. “Suman, you’re getting in a sweat about nothing! It is your dial that’s gone mad.”
Stations along the world’s second largest rail network knew nothing about closing for the night. In Bhopal, platform No. 1, the same platform that, a hundred years previously, had greeted the kingdom of the Begums’ first train with a double line of mounted lancers and turbaned sepoys, was seething with activity. That night it was swarming with hundreds of passengers waiting for the Gorakhpur Express. As a precaution against thieves, many of them had chained their luggage to their ankles. Tormented by mosquitoes, hordes of children were running about in all directions, playing hide-and-seek among the suitcases and squabbling among themselves. Dozens of street vendors, porters in red tunics, lepers shaking their bowls and ringing their bells, beggars, and policemen in blue caps were wandering among the travelers and their luggage in an acrid atmosphere of bidi smoke, betel and incense sticks.
Midnight was the time for the shifts to change. Deputy Stationmaster V.K. Sherma, his assistant, Madan Lal Paridar, and their young aid, the traffic regulator Rehman Patel, had just settled themselves in front of the control board in their office at the end of the platform. With its Victorian gothic architecture it looked like a Sussex cottage. The room was equipped with two powerful air-conditioning units, which in the summertime made it possible to forget the heat and pollution outside. Now, however, it was winter, and the machines were switched off. Cool air from outside came in through the wide open doors and windows. Inside, the office was equipped with a long board on which moveable pegs of different colors and lights marked the location of trains on their way to Bhopal and the position of the signals and switches. On the table in the middle of the room stood several telephones, one of which was an old-fashioned crank phone that they used to call other stations to check what time the trains went through. Because of a thick fog over part of Madhya Pradesh that night, and the unusual amount of activity, most of the trains due to arrive before midnight showed significant delays. None of them was expected before two or three in the morning.
Such was the case with the Gorakhpur Express, in which Sajda Bano, the widow of Mohammed Ashraf, Carbide’s first gas victim, was traveling. Together with her two sons, three-year-old Soeb and five-year-old Arshad, she had meant to catch the train on the previous day. At the last minute, however, a neighboring Hindu woman had begged the young Muslim not to travel on Saturday, because it was considered by followers of her religion to be the most ill-omened day of the week.
In their office, the station staff prepared for one of the long waits to which Indian railway employees and their twelve million daily passengers are well accustomed.
Suddenly, the deputy stationmaster picked up one of the phones. “I’m calling the boss,” he informed his assistant. “There’s no need for him to come for a good two hours yet.”
“You’re right,” his colleague agreed, “that way he’ll be able to down a few more glasses of English liquor!”
The three men laughed. They were well aware of Harish Dhurve’s weakness for alcohol. It was at this point that a coolie in a red tunic appeared at the door.
“Quickly, come and see! Arjuna and his chariot are here with presents for you.”
The porter Satish Lal was in a state of extreme excitement. His reference to the mythological Pandava prince and his celestial chariot was not wholly inaccurate. Ratna Nadar, whom he had introduced to his team of porters two years previously, had just arrived, pushing a rickshaw full of small cardboard boxes.
“There are a hundred and five, one for each coolie, four others for the bosses and the last is for good old Gautam behind his ticket office window,” Padmini’s father announced.
Each box contained a hard-boiled egg, a kebab on a stick, a small bowl of rice with dal on it, a vegetable samosa, a chapati and two balls of rossigola, a very sweet confection made out of pastry steeped in syrup. In India every feast is shared. Ratna Nadar had been eager for his workmates and superiors to have their share of the banquet held that night to mark the most important event in his life: his daughter’s marriage. Toward eleven o’clock, he had slipped away from the festivities to change from his ceremonial clothes into his red tunic. That night he, too, had been requisitioned to assist the expected passengers.
“Ratna Nadar Ki Jai! Ratna Nadar Zindabad!” * A rousing ovation in Hindi and Urdu acclaimed the father of the bride and his cartload of delicacies.
“Thank you, friends! Thank you, my friends!” he repeated over and over again as he handed out his little boxes.
Drawn by the unusual cluster of red tunics right in the middle of the platform, some of the passengers gathered around. Ratna Nadar cast an emotional eye over the dilapidated facades of the vast station where once he had disembarked with all his family, driven from his village by the curse of aphids; the same station that today incorporated all his hopes. Thanks to it, to its passengers’ mountains of bags and packages and to the heavy crates in its cargo bays, he was going to be able to pay back the twelve thousand rupees borrowed from Pulpul Singh for his daughter’s wedding. Every train would bring him nearer to that blessed day when he would be able to recover the property deed he had pawned to the moneylender.
Less than half a mile away, the curtain was rising on the tragedy of which the journalist Rajkumar Keswani had forewarned the people of Bhopal. The supervisor Shekil Qureshi showed no signs of hurrying his cup of tea. In his opinion the man in charge of the control room was overreacting. He knew that thirty pounds of pressure per square inch were not really grounds for alarm. The South Charleston engineers had designed the MIC tanks with special steel and walls thick enough to resist pressures five or six times greater. But the needle on the dial in the control room had now leaped up again and, at 55 psig, was at the upper end of the scale on the dial. More important, it was twice the limit the engineers referred to as the “permitted maximum working pressure.” Was the instrument malfunctioning as Qureshi supposed, or was the pressure it was showing real? For Suman Dey, there was only one way to find out: by going into the zone where the three tanks were, to look at the pressure gauge directly attached to tank 610. If it confirmed the figures on the control room dial, then something out of the ordinary was going on.
“Let’s go, Chandra!” said Dey to one of the operators on duty.
“Are we taking the masks?”
“You bet! Masks and bottles!” insisted Dey, who had a visceral fear of chemical substances.
Each bottle was guaranteed to last half an hour. When it was down to just five minutes’ worth of oxygen, an alarm went off.
It took less than three minutes for the two men to get to tank 610 and establish that the needle on the pressure gauge was also indicating 55 psig. Dey climbed onto the concrete sarcophagus in which the tank was imbedded, knelt down on the top, took off his glove and palpated the metal casing meticulously.
“There’s a hell of a lot of movement going on in there!” he shouted through his mask.
The stirring he had felt was the now gaseous methyl isocyanate sweeping into the pipes leading to the decontamination tower. That was where it was supposed to go in such circumstances. But, that night, the stopcocks controlling access to the safety device were turned off because the factory was not in service. Under pressure that was mounting by the minute, the column of gas was popping bolts like champagne corks. Some of the gas then escaped, giving rise to the sort of small brownish cloud that operators Singh and Varma had spotted before their tea break. Both had returned hastily to the zone where the pipes were being cleaned, this time equipped with masks and oxygen bottles. The first thing they did was turn off the water tap, turned on four hours earlier by their colleague Rehman Khan. Even with their masks on, they could smell powerful gas emissions.
“It stinks of MIC and phosgene too,” grunted V.N. Singh, who had recognized the characteristic smell of freshly mown grass.
“And of MMA!” added Varma, picking up the suffocating smell of monomythylamine ammonia.
A hissing noise like that of a jet stream was suddenly heard overhead. Instantly they looked up at the network of pipes. A geyser had just burst from the spot where they had first detected the gas leak. Despite his terror V.N. Singh managed to keep a cool head. There was only one thing to do in such circumstances. He had done it before at the time of the great fire in the alpha-naphthol unit. He hurled himself at the nearest alarm point, broke the glass, and pressed the button that set off the general alarm siren.
The howl wrested Shekil Qureshi from his cup of tea. He ran out of the cafeteria and rushed to the control room where he met V.N. Singh, who had just come back up from the pipe-cleaning zone. Singh took off his mask. He was livid.
“The worst has happened. There’s nothing we can do,” he muttered, shaking his head, overwhelmed.
Qureshi protested fiercely, “It must be possible to contain this bloody reaction. I’m going quickly to see what’s going on.”
Singh called after his disappearing figure, “Your mask!”
“Can’t give orders with that thing over my face!” replied the Muslim, who was already scrambling down the stairway.
When he reached the erupting geyser, he stopped dead in his tracks. He could not believe his eyes. “It’s not true …” he murmured. There he was, the man who had been so convinced that no accident could happen in a factory that was not running, witnessing precisely the catastrophe of which all Carbide’s manuals, all its safety exercises, and all its security campaigns had persistently warned against: a terrifying, uncontrollable, cataclysmic exothermic reaction of methyl isocyanate. A massive reaction of a whole tank full, not just a few drops left in a pipe. How had such an accident come about, despite all the safety regulations? Qureshi beat a retreat and made for the zone where the tanks were. He had an idea. Even if it was too late to stem the eruption of tank 610, at least the contamination could be prevented from reaching the twenty tons stored in tank 611. His eyes were beginning to burn painfully. He was having progressively more difficulty breathing. In a blur he saw Suman Dey and his companion descending from the sarcophagus onto which they had courageously climbed to check the pressure indicator. The tank and its concrete casing were trembling, cracking and creaking as if shaken by an earthquake. The voice of the Muslim supervisor was faintly audible through the chaos.
“We must isolate 610! We must isolate 610!” He shouted himself out of breath.
Suman Dey did not agree. By turning off the valves and stopcocks connecting the reacting tank to its neighbor, they would risk increasing the pressure and possibly set off an explosion. But Qureshi had faith in the tank’s capacity to resist anything. How could this technological masterpiece that he had once witnessed arrive from Bombay, this precious jewel, the connections to which he had lovingly maintained, repaired and nurtured for so many years, possibly disintegrate like some common petrol tank? Dragging his two companions with him, he threw himself at the pipework. The ground was cracking beneath their feet. There was a noise as if the end of the world were coming. In ten minutes, they managed to shut off all communication between the two tanks. The twenty tons stored in the tank 611 would not be caught up in the gaseous apocalypse.
Their task completed, they immediately retreated at a run. Before disappearing into the stairway leading to the control room, they turned around. Tank 610’s concrete carapace had just shattered, releasing an enormous steel tank that emerged from its sarcophagus like a rocket, stood vertically, toppled, fell and stood up again before tumbling heavily onto the concrete and metal debris. But it had not burst. From a ruptured pipe at ground level a second geyser then erupted, more powerful and even fiercer than the first.
Before entering the control room Qureshi glanced at the wind sock flying from the top of its mast. He grimaced. Filled by an unremitting wind, the white material cone pointed clearly south, toward the neighborhoods of the Kali Grounds, the station and the old part of the city. That night, however, true Carbider that he was, he felt most responsible for the safety of his men. He turned to the chief of the watch.
“Suman! Turn your siren on and yell into the loudspeakers. Get everyone to assemble in the formulation zone on the north side, except the operators in our unit who should remain available with their masks. We may need them later.”
Lungs Bursting in the Heart of the Night
For the supervisor Shekil Qureshi, the young Muslim who, at his wedding in Bhopal’s great mosque, had thought he could wear no finer clothing than “the linen coverall with the blue-and-white logo,” all was not yet lost. He wanted to attempt the impossible.
“Suman! Try and get the decontamination tower up and running,” he ordered the man in charge of the control room. “You never know, perhaps the maintenance team has finished its repairs.”
Suman Dey tried the control lever, but there was no reaction on the dial on the control panel. The indicator did not light up and the pressure needle remained at zero.
The telephone rang. Qureshi picked it up. It was S.P. Chowdhary, the production manager, calling from his villa in Arera Colony on the other side of Bhopal. He had just been woken by one of the night-shift operators.
“I’ll be there as quickly as I can!” he shouted into the phone. “In the meantime try and get the flare going!”
Qureshi could not believe his ears. What? The man in charge of production at the factory did not know that the emergency flare was undergoing repairs?
“The flare?” he repeated. “But there are five or six yards of pipe missing from it! They were rotten.”
“Replace them!” the production manager insisted.
Qureshi held the telephone receiver outside the window. “Do you hear that? That’s gas pouring out. Even if we were to manage to replace the pipes, we’d have to be out of our minds to light the flare. We’d all be blown up and the factory and the entire city with us!”
Furious, Qureshi hung up, but he still refused to admit defeat. “Get me the fire squad!” he told Suman Dey.
Qureshi begged Carbide’s fire chief to send men as fast as possible to douse the geyser spurting out from under the decontamination tower. He knew that water, which could cause the methyl isocyanate to explode in an enclosed environment could also neutralize it in the open air—a chemical contradiction that had induced the three American engineers who came to inspect the factory in 1982 to call for the installation of an automatic sprinkler system in the sensitive MIC production zone. Their recommendation had not been implemented, and as a result, men would have to risk their lives trying to act as human sprinklers.
In less than five minutes, the firemen were on the scene. Almost immediately, their chief’s voice came over the radio speaker.
“Impossible to reach the leak! Our hose jets won’t go that high!”
This time Qureshi realized that there was nothing more he could do.
“Give the order for everyone to evacuate, directly to the north,” he ordered Suman Dey, “and let’s get out of here!”
The proud Muslim rushed to the cloakroom to pick up his mask. But his locker was empty and his mask was gone. He had to escape with his face exposed. With his eyes burning, his throat on fire and gasping for breath, he ran like a madman. He thought of his wife and children. “I was so afraid of dying, I felt capable of anything,” he said later. In fact, he did scale the six-foot-high perimeter wall of the factory and the coils of barbed wire on top and drop down on the other side. In his fall, he tore his chest and broke an ankle. Fortunately for him, the wind was driving the bulk of the deadly cloud in the opposite direction.
Blissfully unaware of the tragedy occurring a few hundred yards from the Kali Grounds, Dilip and Padmini’s wedding guests were having a marvelous time. Padmini had kept a surprise in store for them. No feast took place in India without homage also being paid to the gods. That night the young woman was going to give thanks to Jagannath for all his blessings by dancing for him and for all the occupants of Orya Bustee. Discreetly she had gone to her hut to change from her wedding sari into the costume worn by performers of Odissi, the traditional Orissan dance. True, it was not made out of silk embroidered with gold thread, like those of the temple dancers, but of simple cotton material. But what did that matter? Dalima and Sheela adjusted her bodice and draped the material around her thighs before spreading it out like a fan from her waist to her knees. They caught the young woman’s long tresses up in a bun and adorned it with a braid of jasmine flowers, then fastened imitation jewelry around her neck, in her ears, round her arms, wrists and waist. Finally they put anklets with bells on her ankles. The god would be pleased. The blood of Orissa definitely flowed through the veins of the former peasant girl from Mudilapa. And it was the thousand-year-old culture of her distant home that carried the young newlywed along, as her bare feet began to pound the mandap on which she had sealed her marriage but a short time previously.
Dalima’s singing and Dilip’s staccato beating of two tambourines accompanied her dance. The crowd of enthralled guests cried out in delight with “Vah! Vahs!” that fired their poverty-stricken neighborhood with triumphal fervor. Suddenly, however, Belram Mukkadam raised his stick above the audience. He had just heard the distant howl of Carbide’s siren. Padmini’s feet stood still, the bells on her ankles fell silent. Everyone strained their ears anxiously in the direction of the metal structure, which still appeared so peaceful in the distant halo of its thousand lightbulbs.
“Don’t say we’re going to have to go through what we did the other evening,” the midwife Prema Bai protested vehemently. “Because I, for one, am staying at home this time.”
Yet again it was Rahul who allayed their fears. “You’re getting uptight about nothing, friends,” he assured them. “Since the last alert, they’ve decided to demolish their factory. But apparently it’s so rotten they’re frightened they won’t be able to dismantle it. It’s riddled with holes.”
“Perhaps that’s why the siren’s going, like the other evening when there was a gas leak,” suggested the dairyman Bablubhai.
His remark went unanswered; the howl of the siren had suddenly stopped. Padmini started to dance again, Dalima resumed her singing and Dilip his tambourine playing. The show went on even more enchantingly than before. The god was being really indulged. And the guests, too. But why could they no longer hear the siren? None of them knew that those in charge of the factory had recently modified it. In order to make it easier to broadcast instructions to the workers during an emergency, and to prevent the neighbors from panicking at the least little incident, the siren stopped automatically after ten minutes. A quieter alarm, which could not be heard outside the factory boundaries, took over.
Soon, however, there were other indications to arouse the anxious curiosity of the revelers. First it was a pungent odor.
“Little mischief-makers have thrown chilies on the chula again!” said Ganga Ram who, as a former leper, had a particularly keen sense of smell.
“Bah!” replied the shoemaker Iqbal, “you know very well that it’s tradition …”
He was interrupted by an ear-splitting bellow. Out of the darkness surged Nandi the bull with his painted horns, followed by the five cows Mukkadam and his friends had bought with Carbide’s compensation money, staggering as if they were drunk. They were vomiting yellow froth, their pupils had swollen up like balloons and tears poured from their eyes. The animals took a few more steps, then sank to the ground with a last rattle. It was one-thirty in the morning. On the Kali Grounds, the apocalypse had begun.
The two geysers of gas had merged to form an enormous cloud about a hundred yards wide. Twice as heavy as air, the MIC made up the base of the gaseous ball that was formed by the chemical reaction in tank 610. Above it, in several successive layers, were other gases, among them phosgene that had escaped from a nearby reactor, hydrocyanic acid and monomethylamine with its suffocating smell of ammonia. Because these gases were less dense that MIC, the cloud would spread rapidly, widely and farther. At the same time the movement of the noxious bank of fog was not homogenous. It progressed in fits and starts, striking or sparing according to the temperature of the location, the degree of humidity and the strength of the wind.
The vapors that reached the areas closest to the factory poisoned at random along the way, but the smell of boiled cabbage, freshly cut grass and ammonia covered the entire area in a matter of seconds. No sooner had Belram Mukkadam spotted the cloud, than he felt its effects. Realizing that death was about to strike, he yelled, “Bachao! Bachao! Get out of here!” The wedding guests were immediately seized with panic and ran off in all directions.
For Bablubhai, it was already too late. Orya Bustee’s dairyman would never again bring milk to children suffering from rickets. When Nandi the bull died, he rushed from the banquet to his stable where he could hear his buffalo cows bellowing to him. The seventeen beasts were lying down when they were hit head-on by a small blanket of gas moving along at ground level. Several had already succumbed. Devastated, Bablubhai ran to his hut to check on his newborn son and wife Boda.
“The oil lamp has gone out,” murmured the young woman tearfully.
Bablubhai bent over to grab his child. A gust of vapor caught him there. It paralyzed the dairyman’s breathing instantaneously and he was struck down in a faint over the body of his lifeless baby.
Similar respiratory paralysis overtook several of the other guests in midflight. Another small greenish cloud laden with hydrocyanic acid drifted into old Prema Bai’s hut. It killed the midwife outright, as she lay on her charpoy. She and many of the other guests had sought refuge in their homes. In the hut next door, Prodip and Shunda, Padmini’s grandparents, also succumbed in seconds. Of all the gases making up the toxic mass, hydrocyanic acid was one of the deadliest. It blocked the action of the enzymes carrying oxygen from the blood to the brain, causing immediate death.
One of the first victims of this creeping layer of gas was the cripple Rahul on his wheeled plank. Because of his robust constitution, he did not die right away but only after several minutes of agony. He coughed, choked and spewed up blackish clots. His muscles shook with spasms, his features contorted, he tore off his necklaces and his shirt, groaning and gasping for something to drink, then finally toppled from his board and dragged himself along the ground in a last effort to breathe. The man who had always been such a tireless source of moral support to the community, who had so frequently appeased the fears of his companions in misfortune, was dead.
Awakened with a start by all the yelling and shouting, those who had been asleep rushed panic-stricken out of their huts. For the first time Muslim women emerged with their faces uncovered. From out of all the alleyways came small carts laden with old people and children. Very soon, however, the men pulling them suffocated and collapsed. Unable to get back on their feet, they lay sprawled in their own vomit. Little girls and boys who were lost, fastened on to passing fugitives and bicycles. Many of the residents of Chola and Jai Prakash bustees took refuge in the small temple to the monkey god Hanuman, or in the little mosque that was soon overflowing with distressed people. In their panic, men and women left other family members behind in their huts. Ironically, their activity was often their own undoing, while those left behind were in many instances recovered alive. The gas claimed more victims among those obliged to breathe deeply because they were moving, than those who kept still.
Others, such as the shoemaker Iqbal and the tailor Bassi made sure, before they fled, that no one was left behind in any of the homes in their alleyway. That was how they came to find the old mullah with the goatee. Persuaded that Allah had decreed that the world should end that night, the holy man had knelt down on his prayer mat and was reading suras from the Koran by the light of a Carbide flashlight.
“You are My creature, and you will not rise up against My will,” he repeated as his neighbors scooped him up to carry him away. As he emerged from the hovel, into which the deadly vapors were about to pour, he asked his rescuers, “Are you quite sure that the end of the world is tonight?”
In the fetid, stinking darkness people called for their spouses, children or parents. For those blinded by the gas, shouting a name became the only way of making contact with their loved ones again. Time and again Padmini’s name resounded through the night. In the stampede, the heroine of the evening had found herself brutally separated from her husband, mother and brother. She, too, was almost blind. Carried along by the human torrent, with her bells jangling around her ankles, coughing blood, Padmini did not hear the voices calling out to her. And soon the calling stopped; people’s throats had constricted from the gas and no one could utter a sound. In an effort to relieve the dreadful pains in their chests, people were squeezing their thorax with all their strength. Stricken with pulmonary edema, many of them coughed up a frothy liquid streaked with blood. Some of the worst affected spewed up reddish streams. With their eyes bulging out of their heads, their nasal membranes perforated, their ears whistling and their cyanotic faces dripping sweat, most of them collapsed after a few paces. Others, overcome with heart palpitations, dizziness and unconsciousness fell right there in the doorways of the huts they had tried to leave. Yet others suddenly turned violet and coughed dreadfully. The sound of coughing resounded through the night in sinister harmony.
Amid all this chaos, one man and one woman walked, with difficulty, against the tide. Having given the signal for everyone to escape, Belram Mukkadam had decided to go in the opposite direction. He was taking his wife Tulsabai back to their hut. The mother of his three children wanted to die at home. Suffering from awful stomach pains, unable to breathe anymore, the poor woman stumbled over the corpses that lay outstretched in the alleyways. On arriving outside her hut, she turned around to look for her husband. It was then that she realized that the last body she had tripped over was Belram’s. Half-blinded, she had not seen him fall. The pioneer of Orya Bustee, the man who had drawn out the plot for each of its huts with the tip of his stick, who for twenty-five years had protected the poor, restored their dignity and fought for their rights, the legendary figure of the teahouse, had been brought down by Carbide’s gas.
Many of the bustee dwellers believed doors and windows could keep out the gases. They tried to take refuge in brick houses. The nearest one was the godfather Omar Pasha’s. Its two stout stories rose out of the disaster area like a fortress. Persuaded that the blanket of gas moved along the ground, the old man had retreated to the second floor with his family and his best fighting cocks. In the panic, Yagu, winner of that Sunday’s duel, had been forgotten. Brought down by the toxic gases, he lay with burst lungs in the living room on the ground floor.
The godfather had his servants and bodyguards take in the refugees. Their arrival was greeted with acts of extraordinary generosity. Omar Pasha’s eldest son took a little girl who was hardly breathing in his arms and laid her gently on the charpoy in his room. The women of the house tore off their muslin veils, dipped the pieces of material in a bowl of water and applied them as cooling compresses to eyes that were on fire. One of the godfather’s wives, a plump matron whose arms jangled with bracelets, sponged away the blood flowing from people’s lips, handed out glasses of water, and comforted one and all. Even Omar Pasha himself helped. With gold-ringed fingers he handed around plates of biscuits and sweets in a kindness that the survivors of that apocalyptic night would never forget.
Not all the brick built houses bordering on the slums were as welcoming. Ganga Ram and Dalima chose to flee along the railway line leading to Bhopal station. Ganga was convinced that he would find refuge a little farther on in one of the villas occupied by the railway workers. He knocked on the door of the first but received no response. Afraid that the wave of gas would catch up with him again, he did not hesitate before breaking a window and climbing inside. A moment later came the sound of gunshots. Believing he was the victim of a break-in and still unaware of the accident at the factory, the owner of the property had fired his revolver. Fortunately, in the darkness, he missed his target.
The unspeakable was happening. Driven by the wind, the wave of gas was catching up with the flood of humanity trying to escape. Out of their minds with terror, people with shredded clothes and torn veils ran in all directions, trying to find a pocket of breathable air. Some, whose lungs were bursting, rolled on the ground in awful convulsions. Everywhere the dead with their greenish skins lay side by side with the dying, still wracked with spasms and with yellowish fluid coming out of their mouths.
Amid this hell, the bicycle repairman Salar came upon a vision that would haunt him. As he reached the corner of Chola Road, he narrowly escaped being knocked over by a white horse, bridled and saddled as if for some celebration. Through the veil of gas burning his eyes, he recognized the white mare that only a few hours earlier, Dilip, Padmini’s bridegroom, had ridden to his wedding ceremony. With its eyes bloodshot, its nostrils steaming with burning vapors and its mouth foaming with greenish vomit, the animal bolted away, came back at a gallop, stopped sharp, gave a heartrending whinny and collapsed.
Of all the extraordinary scenes that marked that night of horror, one in particular would leave an impression on the few survivors: the frantic flight of a fat man in his underpants and vest, gasping his lungs out pushing a heavily loaded cart. Nothing could have prevented the moneylender Pulpul Singh from taking with him something more precious than life itself: his safe full of bank notes, jewels, watches, transistors, gold teeth, and, above all, the property deeds pawned by the wretched residents of Orya Bustee.
“Something Beyond All Comprehension”
Less than four hundred yards from the apocalypse taking place on the Kali Grounds, a stout man fiddled happily with his mustache. Sharda Diwedi had won. None of his power station turbines had failed. Bathed in an ocean of light, his niece Rinu’s marriage ceremony was coming off with all the brightness hoped for. The final part of the ritual was reaching its conclusion. At a signal from the officiating priest, the girl’s father would address his future son-in-law with the words that would officially seal the union of bride and groom. “I give you my daughter, in order that my one hundred and one families may be exalted for as long as the sun and the moon continue to shine, and with a view to having an heir.” The guests assembled under Parvez’s beautiful shamiana held their breath. In a few seconds’ time, these words would bind the two young people together forever. But they were never to be uttered. The ceremony was rudely interrupted by shouting. “There’s been an accident at Carbide’s! Bachao! Get out of here!” frantic voices yelled from all directions.
Already a suffocating smell was invading the center of the Railway Colony. Moving in small pockets at different heights, the cloud seeped around the buffet tables, the dance floor, the swimming pool, the musicians’ stand and the cooks’ braziers that immediately flared up in a chemical reaction. As dozens of guests collapsed, the stationmaster, Harish Dhurve, was hit by deadly vapors. Letting go of his last glass of English liquor, he fell to the ground. Dr. Sarkar, who had forbidden him any alcohol, braved the blanket of toxic gas and tried to resuscitate him, to no avail. A few minutes before Bhopal station was hit, it lost its stationmaster.
Panicked, Sharda Diwedi tried to telephone the only person he believed was in a position to explain what was going on. But Jagannathan Mukund’s telephone line was busy. In between two attempts, Diwedi’s own telephone rang. He recognized the voice of the man in charge of the electricity substation in Chola.
“Sir, we’re surrounded by a suffocating cloud of gas. We’re requesting permission to leave. Otherwise we’re all going to die.”
Diwedi thought briefly. “Whatever you do, stay right where you are!” he urged. “Put on the masks Carbide gave you and block up all doors and windows.”
“Sir,” replied the voice, “there’s just one problem: there are four of us and only one mask.”
Disconcerted, Diwedi searched for the right thing to say. “You’ll just have to take it in turns,” he eventually advised. At the other end of the line there was a derisive laugh and then a click. His employee had hung up. The head of Bhopal’s power station had no idea that he had just saved four men’s lives. Next day when the military gathered up the dozens of corpses sprawled around the grounds of the substation, they would be surprised to discover four workers inside, still breathing.
“Bachao! Bachao!” Coughing, spitting, suffocating and with burning eyes, Rinu and her fiancé found themselves trapped in a nightmare, along with all those who had come to celebrate with them. They were scrambling about in all directions, desperate for something to drink, fleeing toward the railway station, seeking refuge in the local houses. Realizing that the panic-stricken crowd must be evacuated before the cloud killed everybody, Diwedi overcame the bout of coughing that was setting his throat on fire and ran to the garages to requisition the trucks that belonged to the shamiana rental and the caterer. But the garages were empty. Even his car had disappeared. At the first cries of “Bachao!” the cooks, servants, the men who put up the tents, the electricians and musicians had all jumped in the vehicles and driven off. The four men in charge of the generator set had decamped on their scooters. The indomitable little man decided then to go on foot to his home, seven or eight hundred yards away, where he would at least find his old Willis Jeep. On his way back he was intercepted by a frenzied crowd. People stormed his old jalopy, throwing themselves onto the seats, hood and bumpers. There were twenty, thirty, fifty of them, struggling with the last vestiges of their strength to climb on-board. These were the survivors from the Kali Grounds’ neighborhoods. They were weeping, pleading, threatening. Many of them, exhausted by this final effort, collapsed unconscious. Others coughed up the last blood from their lungs and keeled over. Just then, a truck roared like a rocket through the crowd of dying people. Diwedi heard skulls cracking against the fenders. The driver left a pulp of crushed bodies in his wake before disappearing. A moment later, through vapor-burned eyes, Diwedi could see a woman throwing her baby over the guard rail of the bridge on the railway line, before jumping into the void herself. “I realized then that something awful was going on,” Sharda Diwedi would say, “something beyond all comprehension.”
The Rev. Timothy Wankhede had spent Sunday afternoon preaching to hospital patients on the epistle of St. Paul, imploring the mercy of the Lord upon his children, who in the pursuit of riches had “fallen into temptation and a snare, and into many hurtful and foolish lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition.” The young priest and his wife Sobha had just been woken with a start by the cries of Anuradh, their ten-month-old son. The toxic vapors had entered the modest red-brick vicarage they occupied in the Railway Colony, next door to the Holy Redeemer’s Church. In a few seconds they too were overtaken by the same symptoms of gas inhalation. They struggled to understand what was going on.
“Perhaps it’s an atomic bomb,” Father Timothy spoke through the pain in his throat.
“But why in Bhopal?” asked Sobha, discovering, to her horror, that blood was trickling from her baby’s lips.
Her husband shrugged his shoulders. He knew that he was going to die and was resigned to it. But as a man of God and despite his pain, he wanted to prepare himself and his family for death.
“Let’s pray before we leave this world,” he said calmly to his wife.
“I’m ready,” the young woman replied.
Although standing required great effort, Father Timothy took his child in his arms and led his wife over to the other side of the courtyard. He wanted to spend his last moments in his church. Placing the infant on a cushion at the foot of the altar, he went and got the bulky copy of the New Testament from which he read to his parishioners each week, and came back to kneel beside his wife and child. He opened to chapter twenty-four of the Gospel of Matthew and recited as loudly as his burning throat would permit. “Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come …” Then they drew consolation from the words of the psalmist. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil,” Timothy read with feeling.
Suddenly, through the stained glass of the small church, there appeared the figure of a savior. With a damp towel plastered over his nose and mouth, Dr. Sarkar signaled to the reverend and his wife to protect themselves in the same way, and come out immediately. There were already five people piled into the doctor’s Ambassador waiting outside the church, but in India there was nothing unusual about that. Timothy Wankhede, who had found Jesus Christ while listening to the radio one day, could put a bookmark at the page of chapter twenty-four of St. Matthew’s gospel. Despite the agony he had endured, which would leave both him and his family with serious aftereffects, his hour had not come yet.
“Your samosas are great!” said Satish Lal, the luggage porter. He and his friend Ratna Nadar were waiting at the end of platform No. 1 for the Gorakhpur Express. Like the ninety-nine other coolies, Lal had polished off the contents of the small cardboard box brought by Padmini’s father.
“They certainly all seemed to have tucked in,” said Nadar, proud to have been able to give his friends a treat.
“I’ll bet you’re going to have to tighten your belt a bit now,” observed Lal. “I can’t imagine Pulpul Singh giving anything away.”
“You can say that again!” confirmed Nadar.
All of a sudden the two men felt a violent irritation in their throats and eyes. A strange smell had just invaded the station. The hundreds of passengers waiting for their trains also felt their throats and eyes become inflamed.
“It’s probably an acid leak from one of the goods wagons,” said Lal, who knew that there were containers of toxic material waiting to be unloaded. “It wouldn’t be the first time!”
Lal was wrong. The toxic cloud from the factory had arrived. It would turn the station into a deathtrap for thousands of travelers.
The two coolies rushed to the stationmaster’s office at the end of the platform. The deputy stationmaster V.K. Sherma was just moving one of the pins on the traffic indicator board. The Gorakhpur Express was approaching Bhopal. It was due to arrive in twenty minutes.
Lal could scarcely speak. “Boss,” he croaked, “something’s going on … people on the platform are coughing their guts out. Come and see!”
The deputy stationmaster and his assistant Paridar left the office but were immediately hit in the face by a pocket of poisonous gas moving at head height. Two or three inhalations were enough to stop any air reaching their lungs. With their ears whistling and their throats and faces on fire, they beat a retreat, gasping for breath.
Witnessing the scene, the young traffic regulator Rehman Patel had the presence of mind to do the only useful thing possible. He closed all apertures and turned on the air-conditioning. The gusts of fresh air it emitted brought immediate relief to the two railway employees who slowly regained their senses. That was when the internal line telephone rang. Sherma recognized the voice of the man in charge of the Nichadpura Center, a fuel depot a few hundred yards from the Carbide factory.
“There’s been an explosion at Carbide,” announced the panic-stricken speaker. “The whole area is covered with a toxic cloud. People are scrambling about in all directions. Get ready. You’ll be hit next. The wind is blowing the cloud in your direction …”
“It’s already here,” replied Sherma.
A vision of horror passed through the deputy stationmaster’s mind at that moment: the Gorakhpur Express was speeding toward Bhopal with hundreds of passengers onboard.
“Whatever happens we’ve got to make sure the train doesn’t stop here!” he cried to his two assistants.
No sooner had he spoken, however, than he shook his head. He knew what Indian railway bureaucracy was like. An order like that could not be given at his level. Only the chief stationmaster could issue such a directive. Sherma immediately dialed Harish Dhurve’s home. No one answered.
“He must be downing a last whisky at the Railway Colony wedding,” he said, frustrated.
There was little point in trying again. He could never receive the necessary authorization to prevent a holocaust in his station. His boss had been dead for half an hour.
There were no vendors, lepers, beggars, coolies, children or travelers left. Platform No. 1 was nothing more than a charnel house of entangled bodies, stinking unbearably of vomit, urine and defecation. Weighed down by the gas, the toxic blanket had draped itself like a shroud over the people chained to their baggage. Here and there, an odd survivor tried to get up. But the deadly vapors very quickly entered his lungs and he fell back with mouth contorted like a fish out of water. The beggars and leprosy sufferers, whose tubercular lungs were already weak, had been the first to die.
Thanks to the air-conditioning filtering the air, the three men in the stationmaster’s office and a few coolies who had taken refuge in their cloakroom had so far managed to escape the noxious fumes. In vain V.K. Sherma frantically cranked his telephones to call for help. All the lines were busy. At last he managed to speak to Dr. Sarkar. After evacuating the priest and his family, the railway workers’ doctor had gone back to his office in the Railway Colony. From behind the damp compresses over his mouth and nose, he sounded confused. He had just spoken to Dr. Nagu, director of the Madhya Pradesh Health Service.
“The minister was furious,” said Sarkar. “He told me the people at Carbide didn’t want to reveal the composition of the toxic cloud. He tried to insist and asked whether they were dealing with chlorine, phosgene, aniline or I don’t know what else. It was no use. He wasn’t able to find out anything. He was told the gases were not toxic and that all anyone had to do to protect himself was put a damp handkerchief over their nose and mouth. I’ve tried it and it seems to work. Oh! I was forgetting … Carbide people also told the director to ‘breathe as little as possible’! My poor Sherma, pass that advice on to your travelers while they’re waiting for help to arrive.”
Help! In his station strewn with the dead and the dying, the deputy stationmaster felt like the commander of a ship about to be engulfed by the ocean. Even if he could do nothing for the passengers on platform No. 1, however, he must still try to save those due to arrive. Unable to contact his superior to prevent the Gorakhpur Express from stopping at Bhopal station, he would still do all he could to impede it from running into the trap. The only way was to halt it at the previous stop. His assistant immediately called the station at Vidisha, a small town less than twelve miles away.
“The train has just left,” the stationmaster informed him. “Curses on the god,” groaned Sherma. “Is there at least a signal we could switch to red?” asked Patel, the young traffic regulator.
The three men looked at the luminous indicators on the large board on the wall.
“There isn’t a single point or signal box between Vidisha and Bhopal,” Sherma established.
“In that case, we’ll just have to run out in front of the train and signal the engine driver to stop,” declared Patel.
The idea appeared to stupefy his two elder colleagues. “And how are you going to signal the engineer to stop a train going at full speed in the middle of the night?” asked Sherma’s assistant.
“By waving a lamp about in the middle of the track!” Sherma nearly swallowed his quid of betel. The whole idea seemed outrageously dangerous. But after a few seconds he changed his mind.
“Yes, you’re right. We could stop the train with lanterns. Go and fetch some able-bodied coolies!”
“I’m volunteering,” announced Patel. “So am I,” Sherma’s assistant, Paridar, said. “Okay, but it will take at least four or five of you. Four or five lanterns will be easier to see in the dark.”
Patel rushed to the sink at the far end of the room to soak his gamcha. After wringing it out, he plastered it over his face and went out. Two minutes later he came back with Padmini’s father and Satish Lal who had escaped the gas by taking refuge in a first-class waiting room and shutting the windows. Sherma explained their mission to them, emphasizing how vital it was.
“If you can stop the Gorakhpur, you may save hundreds of lives,” he told them. Then he added, “You’ll be heroes and be decorated for it.”
The prospect brought only the faintest of smiles to the four men’s faces. Sherma pressed his hands together over his chest.
“May the god protect you,” he said, inclining his head. “You’ll find some lanterns in the maintenance store. Good luck!”
The deputy stationmaster was overcome with emotion. Those men, he thought, are real heroes.
Guided by Padmini’s father who knew every turn of the track by heart, the little procession moved off into a murky darkness filled with invisible dangers. Every five minutes Ratna Nadar would raise one arm to stop his comrades, kneel down between two sleepers and, for a long moment, press his ear to one of the rails. There was as yet no vibration from the approaching train.
Huddled with her two sons on the seat of one of the forty-four train cars, Sajda Bano was counting off the last minutes of her interminable journey back to the city where her husband had been Carbide’s first victim. When she felt the train slow down, she moved nearer to the window in order to gaze out at the illuminated outline of the factory that had put an end to her happiness. She had dreaded returning to Bhopal but she had little choice. Her in-laws were determined to get their hands on the fifty thousand rupees’ compensation the factory had given her. Sajda had experienced all the hardship of being an Indian widow. No sooner had her husband been buried than her father-in-law had thrown her out of the house, on the pretext that she was refusing to renounce her inheritance. Out of her mind with grief and despair, the young widow had responded with her first act as an independent woman. She had torn off the veil she had worn since she was nine years old and rushed to the bazaar to sell it. The one hundred and twenty rupees she received in return were the first money she had ever earned. Since then she had never again worn a veil. Overcoming the triple handicap of being a woman, a Muslim and a widow in a country where, despite all the progress, customs could still be medieval, she embarked on a struggle for justice. She knew that she could count on the support of the kindly H.S. Khan, a colleague of her husband’s, who had taken her and her children in after her in-laws had put her out on the street. She had stayed with him while she looked for lodgings and hired a lawyer. Now she very much hoped that Khan would be on the platform to greet her. Poor Sajda! Having killed her husband, Carbide’s gas had just struck down her benefactor on his way to the station.
Holding their lanterns at arms’ length, the four men progressed with difficulty. Without realizing it, they were passing through a multitude of small residual clouds that were still lurking between the rails and along the ballast. They stumbled over corpses twisted into horrible attitudes of pain. Here and there, they could hear death rattles, but there was no time to stop. Then a great roar rent the darkness, accompanied by the same shrill whistle that made the occupants of the Kali Grounds tremble in their sleep. The train! Brandishing their lanterns, the four men ran to meet it. Very swiftly, however, they ran out of breath. In the end the toxic vapors had penetrated their damp cotton compresses. Hyperventilating with the effort, their lungs craved more and more air, the same air that was poisoned with deadly molecules. The weight of their lanterns became unbearable. And yet they kept on going. Staggering between the sleepers, suffocating and vomiting, the four men desperately waved their lights. The engineer of the Gorakhpur Express did not understand the signal. Thinking they were revelers fooling around the railway track, he kept on going. By the time, in a horrifying flash, he saw the men yelling at him from the middle of the rails, it was too late. With its engine cowling spattered with flesh and blood, the Gorakhpur Express was entering the station.
The headlights of the locomotive surging out of the mist made the deputy stationmaster jump. V.K. Sherma realized that his men had failed. The train glided smoothly along the rails of platform No. 1 before stopping with a deafening grinding noise. There was still one last chance to prevent the worst.
Like all large stations in India, Bhopal was equipped with a public address system. V.K. Sherma dashed to his console at the far end of the office, turned on the system and grabbed the microphone. “Attention! Attention!” he announced in Hindi with as calm and professional a voice as he could. “Because of a leak of dangerous chemical substances, we invite all passengers due to get out at Bhopal to remain in their carriages. The train will depart again immediately. Passengers may get out at the next station, from where buses will transport them to Bhopal.” He repeated his message in Urdu. All too quickly, he was able to gauge the success of his announcement. Doors were opening, people were getting out. Nothing could threaten the lives of pilgrims coming to celebrate Ishtema. They were secure in the knowledge that Allah would protect them.
With a wet towel over his mouth, Sherma left his post to run to the head of the train and order the engine driver to leave. He knew that this order was illegal. All trains stopping in Bhopal were required to undergo routine mechanical checks. Curtailing a stop meant preventing these checks. That night, however, there were no maintenance teams or parts supervisors left. There were only hundreds of people who might yet be saved. Terrified that the vapors might already have reached the engineer, that he might have passed out or be dead at the controls of his locomotive, Sherma hurried as fast as he could. Recognizing his uniform, dying people clung to him in a last desperate effort. Others threatened him and tried to block his way, demanding help. Stepping over bodies and slipping in vomit, he at last reached the front of the train. There, his railway worker’s reflexes came back to him. He took his little flag out of his pocket and banged on the window of the locomotive’s cab.
“All clear. Depart immediately!” he announced.
That was the ritual formula. The engine driver responded with a nod of his head, took the brakes off and leaned hard on the regulator of his diesel engine. To the accompaniment of grinding noises and whistle blasts, the Gorakhpur Express extricated itself from the dreadful necropolis. Drenched in sweat, breathing painfully and with a pounding heart, but proud of his achievement, the deputy stationmaster picked his way back through the carnage to his office at the other end of the platform. But Bhopal’s stationmaster’s office was no longer recognizable.
The small notice “A/C OFFICE” displayed over the door had attracted some of the passengers driven frantic by the toxic cloud. In the conviction that the gases would be unable to get into an air-conditioned room, they had rushed in, destroying everything in their path, breaking up the train indicator board, tearing out the telephones. Disaster reigned. Even the appearance of the tall figure of Dr. Sarkar failed to calm the plunderers’ fury. The railway doctor had managed to get to the station on foot. He was carrying a bag with a red cross on it, a derisory symbol in this setting of agony and death. He had filled his bag with bottles of eye lotion, cough lozenges, bronchodilators, cardiac stimulants and anything else he could find in his medicine cabinet. But what use were such remedies? The doctor bent over the first body. Then, on the platform, he came across a scene that would haunt him for the rest of his life: a baby suckling at the breast of its dead mother.
Like many other passengers on the Gorakhpur Express, Sajda Bano had not heard the deputy stationmaster’s announcement. She got out with her two children and her suitcases. In the yellowish mist enveloping the platform, she tried to look for the figure of the good Mr. Khan, her husband’s friend. But with her eyes smarting from the vapors, she could only make out a confusion of corpses in a deathly silence. “It was as if the train had stopped in a cemetery,” she was to say. Three-year-old Soeb and five-year-old Arshad were immediately assailed by the gases and racked with coughing. Sajda herself felt her throat and trachea become inflamed. She could not breathe. Stepping over the corpses, she dragged her sons toward the waiting room in the middle of the platform. The room was filled to overflowing with people on the verge of death, coughing, vomiting, urinating, defecating and delirious. Sajda stretched the two boys out in a corner of a seat, put a teddy bear, a gift from their grandmother, in the youngest’s arms, and placed two wet handkerchiefs over their little livid faces. “Don’t worry,” she told them, “I’m going to get help and I’ll be back straightaway.” As she went out, she passed the window to the ticket sales and reservations office. With his lifeless head propped on a pile of registers, the portly Mr. Gautam looked as if he was sleeping.
All night long Sajda Bano wandered about among thousands of Bhopalis, looking for a vehicle to come and take her children to a hospital. The panic in the station and surrounding area was such that she did not get back to them until the early hours of the morning. She found her two boys where she had left them. Little Soeb was still clutching his teddy bear to his chest and breathing weakly, but clotted blood had formed a red ring around the motionless lips of his brother Arshad. Sajda knelt down and put her ear to the frail, lifeless chest. Carbide’s gas had taken her husband. Now it had stolen one of her children, too.
“All Hell Has Broken Loose Here!”
It was a silent, insidious, and almost discreet massacre. No explosion had shaken the city, no fire had set its sky ablaze. Most Bhopalis were sleeping peacefully. Those still reveling in the reception rooms of the Arera Club, under the wedding shamianas of the rich villas in New Bhopal, or in the smoke-hung rooms of Shyam Babu’s restaurant, overrun that night, as every Sunday night, with the medical college students—all those people suspected nothing. In Spices Square in the old city, an exultant crowd went on acclaiming the mushaira’s poets. Salvos of ecstatic “Vah! Vahs!” shook nearby window panes. Even the eunuchs had turned out in force, a rare occurrence, because it was one of their rules to be home by sunset. The presence of the legendary Jigar Akbar Khan, however, and of several other masters of poetry from all four corners of the country, had persuaded the gurus of the various eunuch “families” to give their protégés free reign. There was just one condition: they must travel in groups of four. The audience contained some of the more famous members of their unusual community: the plump Nagma, for example, the ravishing Baby and the disconcerting Shakuntual with his large, dark, kohl-encircled eyes.
In keeping with tradition, the mushaira also gave a few unknown amateurs the opportunity to recite their poetry. The Muslim workman who, until twenty-three hundred hours, had been busy flushing out the pipes in the Carbide factory, was among those privileged few. When his turn arrived, however, Rehman Khan froze with fright. His young son Salem took his hand and led him onto the stage. The crowd held its breath. The hands that had just set off an inevitable tragic sequence gripped the microphone.
Oh my friend, I cannot tell you
Whether she was near or far,
Real or a dream …
The worker-poet spoke fervently, his eyes half-closed.
It was like a river flowing through my heart.
Like a moon lit up, I devoured her face
And felt the stars dance about my head …
Jagannathan Mukund would not go picnicking with his son beside the Narmada’s sacred waters the next day. The sound of his telephone ringing had just rudely awoken the works manager of the factory where Rehman Khan worked. S.P. Chowdhary, his production manager, informed him that a gas leak had occurred in the MIC storage zone. Mukund refused to believe it. He simply could not let go of the idea an accident could happen in a dormant factory.
“Come and get me,” he ordered Chowdhary. “I want to go and look at the site.”
While he was getting dressed, the telephone rang again. It was Swaraj Puri, the city’s police chief, to inform him that panic-stricken residents were fleeing from the Kali Grounds. Many of them showed signs of poisoning. Mukund decided to call his friend, Professor N.P. Mishra, dean of the Gandhi Medical College and chief of internal medicine at Hamidia Hospital. The doctor had just come back from a wedding.
“N.P.!” he warned. “Get ready for some emergency admissions at the hospital. It seems there’s been an accident at the plant.”
“Is it serious?” asked Mishra anxiously.
“I’m sure not, the factory’s out of production. A few inconsequential poisonings, I imagine.”
“A gas leak?”
“So they tell me. I’ll know more when I’ve visited the scene.”
The doctor pressed his friend. “Phosgene?” he asked, remembering the death of Mohammed Ashraf.
“No, methyl isocyanate.”
This answer left the professor at a loss. Carbide had never supplied Bhopal’s medical teams with any detailed information about the substance.
“What are the symptoms?”
“Oh, nausea, sometimes vomiting and difficulty in breathing. But with damp compresses and a little oxygen everything should be all right. Nothing really serious …”
Was this reputable engineer, chosen by Carbide to succeed the plant’s last American manager, acting a part? Or was he simply ignorant? Did he really not know that MIC was a deadly substance? When, a few minutes later, he reached Hamidia Road, his white Ambassador was suddenly swamped by a throng of people coughing their lungs out, vomiting, groping their way about. Fists banged on the body of his car.
“Where are you going?” shouted a man who was frothing at the mouth.
“To the factory!” answered Mukund through the closed window.
“To the factory! You’re mad! Turn back or you’re dead!”
At these words, the engineer wound down his window. A powerful smell of chemicals overwhelmed the interior. Mukund’s driver immediately started to choke. Crumpled over his steering wheel, he began to turn the car around.
“We’ve had it, sir,” he wailed.
Mukund grabbed him by the arm. “Carry straight on,” he ordered, pointing to the avenue leading up to Carbide’s site. “That’s where we’re going.”
Fortunately, Mukund had taken the precaution of bringing some handkerchiefs and a bottle of water. He handed out compresses to the production manager and the driver while the car carved its way through the middle of the fleeing crowd.
In a matter of minutes the emergency rooms of Hamidia Hospital looked like a morgue. The two doctors on duty, Deepak Gandhe and Mohammed Sheikh, had thought they were going to have a quiet night after Sister Felicity’s visit. All at once the department was invaded. People were dropping like flies. Their bodies lay strewn about the wards, corridors, offices, verandas and the approaches to the building. The admissions nurse closed her register. How could she begin to record the names of so many people? The spasms and convulsions that racked most of the victims, the way they gasped for breath like fish out of water, reminded Dr. Gandhe of Mohammed Ashraf’s death two years earlier. The little information he could glean confirmed that the refugees came from areas close to the Carbide factory. So all of them had been poisoned by some toxic agent. But which one? While Sheikh and a nurse tried to revive the weakest with oxygen masks, Gandhe picked up the telephone. He wanted to speak to his colleague Loya, Carbide’s official doctor in Bhopal. He was the only one who would be able to suggest an effective antidote to the gas these dying people had inhaled. It was nearing two in the morning when he finally got hold of Loya. “That was the first time I heard the cruel name of methyl isocyanate,” Dr. Gandhe was to say later. But just as Mukund had been earlier, Dr. Loya turned out to be most reassuring.
“It’s not a deadly gas,” he claimed, “just irritating, a sort of tear gas.”
“You are joking! My hospital’s overrun with people dying like flies.” Gandhe was running out of patience.
“Breathing in a strong dose may eventually cause pulmonary edema,” Dr. Loya finally conceded.
“What antidote should we administer?” pressed Gandhe. “There is no known antidote for this gas,” replied the factory’s spokesperson, without any apparent embarrassment. “In any case, there’s no need for an antidote,” he added. “Get your patients to drink a lot and rinse their eyes with compresses steeped in water. Methyl isocyanate has the advantage of being soluble in water.”
Gandhe made an effort to stay calm. “Water? Is that all you suggest I use to save people coughing their lungs out!” he protested before hanging up.
He and Sheikh decided nonetheless to follow Dr. Loya’s advice. Water, they found, did ease the irritation to the eyes and the coughing fits temporarily.
The situation in which the two doctors found themselves was more horrific than any war story or tragedy they might have read about. “What I liked more than anything else about my profession was being able to relieve suffering,” Gandhe would say, “and there I was unable to do that. It was unbearable.”
Unbearable was the fetid, foul breath from mouths oozing blood-streaked froth. Unbearable was the stupor in people’s expressions, their inflamed eyes about to burst, their drawn features, their quivering nostrils, the cyanosis in their lips, ears and cheeks. Many of their faces were livid. Their discolored lips already heralded death. Through their stethoscopes the two doctors picked up only the faintest, irregular sounds of hearts and lungs, or sputtering, grating, gurgling rattles. What struck them most was the state of torpor, bewilderment, exhaustion and amnesia in which they found most of the victims, which suggested that the nervous system had been profoundly affected.
The doctors would never forget the scenes of terror. A man and a woman broke through the crowd and laid their two children, aged two and four, on the examination table. Their heartbeats were scarcely perceptible and both were frothing at the mouth. Gandhe at once injected them with Derryfilin, a powerful bronchodilator, bathed their eyes with salve and gave each an oxygen mask. The children stirred. Their parents were overjoyed, convinced their children were reviving. Then the little bodies went rigid. Gandhe listened with his stethoscope and shook his head. “Heart failure,” he mumbled angrily.
This was only the beginning of his night of horror. Quite apart from hemorrhaging of the lungs and cataclysmic suffocation, he found himself confronted with symptoms that were unfamiliar to him: cyanosis of the fingers and toes, spasms in the esophagus and intestines, attacks of blindness, muscular convulsions, fevers and sweating so intense that victims wanted to tear off their clothes. Worst of all was the incalculable number of living dead making for the hospital as if it were a lifeboat in a shipwreck. This onslaught gave rise to particularly distressing scenes. Going out briefly into the street to assess the situation, Gandhe saw screaming youngsters clinging to their mothers’ burkahs, men who had gone mad tearing about in all directions, rolling on the ground, dragging themselves along on their hands and knees in the hope of getting to the hospital. He saw women abandon some of their children, those they could no longer carry, in order to save just one—a choice that would haunt them for the rest of their lives. In desperation, the young doctor decided to appeal to his old mentor, the man whom, a few minutes earlier, Mukund had awakened and informed that an accident was likely to give rise to “some emergency admissions” at the hospital.
“Professor Mishra,” he begged after describing the situation, “come quickly! All hell has broken loose here!”
His appeal mobilized a chain of events marked by remarkable efficiency and extraordinary self-sacrifice. Two of the principal people involved would remain unknown. Santosh Vinobad and Jamil Ishaq were the operators on duty at the city’s central switchboard, located on the second floor of the main post office, just opposite the Taj ul-Masajid. Decaying and antiquated, it reflected India’s backwardness when it came to telecommunications. Madhya Pradesh had only two circuits that could carry international calls, and only a dozen lines to handle all domestic communications. Those Bhopalis fortunate enough to have a telephone had to go through the switchboard operators to make any intercity calls. The bell jangled and Jamil Ishaq plugged in his connection. As soon as he heard the person on the other end of the line say “Hello” he exclaimed, “Professor Mishra! I can hear you.”
The doctor, who had just set up his command post in his office opposite the Hamidia emergency room, was too disconcerted to speak.
“I recognized your voice, professor. Allah be with you! I’ll give all your calls priority.”
Mishra thought to himself that the whole city must know about the catastrophe. He expressed his gratitude.
“Whatever you do, don’t thank me, professor. This is the very least I owe you. You operated on my gall bladder a few weeks ago!”
Resisting the temptation to laugh, Mishra blessed his former patient’s gall bladder and at once gave him a series of numbers in Europe and the United States. Since the Carbide representatives had proven so uninformative, he would ask the World Health Organization in Geneva and Medilas in Washington for any information they might have on treating MIC poisoning. But it was still Sunday in Europe and America. It would be another ten hours before offices opened and Mishra could obtain his information. In the meantime he decided to alert the local pharmacists and have them immediately bring all their stocks of bronchodilators, antispasmodics, eye salves, heart medication and cough syrup and drops. After that he set to work getting his colleagues, the deans of the medical schools in Indore and Gwalior, out of bed. He asked them to gather up all available medicines in their sectors and dispatch them by plane to Bhopal. Finally, he called those in charge of the various firms in Bhopal that used oxygen bottles. “Bring us all your stocks,” he told them. “The lives of twenty, thirty, possibly even fifty thousand people are at stake.”
Once he had finished this telephone offensive, Mishra decided to rally all the medical students. Most were asleep in their hostel behind the medical college, in the wake of their celebration in Shyam Babu’s restaurant. Mishra would wake them himself. He climbed the stairs, and went along the corridors, banging on their doors.
“On your feet, kids!” he cried. “Don’t waste time getting dressed! Come just as you are, but come quickly! Thousands of people are going to die if you don’t get there in time.”
Mishra would never forget the sight of those boys and girls scrambling wordlessly out of bed and running almost in their sleep across the street to the hospital. Some demonstrated their heroism almost immediately. One of them bent over a child suffocating from the gaseous vapors. Without any hesitation, he began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. This shock treatment revived the little boy. But when the medical student stood up, Deepak Gandhe saw him turn suddenly livid and stagger. In snatching the child from death, he had inhaled the toxic gas from his lungs. It was he who was to die.
It was not enough that the dreadful fog had burned people’s bronchia, eyes and throats. It had also impregnated their clothes, hair, beards and mustaches with toxic emissions so persistent that the medics themselves ended up experiencing symptoms of suffocation. A swift injection with Derryfilin mixed with ten cubic centimeters of Decadron was usually enough to prevent any complications. The courage generally displayed, however, did not mean that there were not moments of weakness: one panic-stricken young doctor tore the oxygen mask off a dying man, clamped it to his own face and greedily took a few gasps before fleeing. Yet he came back at daybreak and for three days and three nights was one of the mainstays of the emergency wards.
Suddenly, in the midst of all the chaos, Sister Felicity appeared. She had left little Nadia momentarily to rush to the carnage of the wards and corridors. There were so many bodies all over the place that she could not move without bumping into an arm or a leg. It was almost impossible to distinguish between the living and the dead. People’s faces were so swollen that their eyes had disappeared. She volunteered her help and Deepak Gandhe put her in charge of one of the rooms where an attempt was being made to regroup the scattered victims’ families. Felicity bent over an old man who lay unconscious beside the body of a woman in a mauve sweater. Gently she stroked his forehead. “Wake up, Granddad! Tell me whether your wife was wearing a mauve sweater,” she insisted. The poor man did not answer and Sister Felicity turned to another woman stretched out between two young children. Were they hers? Or did they belong to the third woman a little farther on, the one with cotton pads on her eyes?
In that terrible place of death, the living had lost the power of speech.
Professor Mishra knew that the invasion was only just beginning. The toxic cloud would continue to wreak havoc. Thousands, possibly even tens of thousands of fresh victims would keep on coming. It was urgent that the campus between the medical college and Hamidia be turned into a gigantic field hospital. How were they going to achieve so mammoth a task in the middle of the night? Mishra had an idea. Once again, he picked up the telephone and woke Mahmoud Parvez, the man who rented out shamianas, who was fast asleep in his recently built house in New Bhopal, safe from the toxic gases.
Mishra told him about the tragedy that had struck the city, then added, “I need your help. You must go and get all the shamianas, all the carpets, covers, furniture and crockery you hired out for yesterday evening’s weddings and bring them outside Hamidia Hospital as fast as possible.”
Parvez showed no trace of surprise. “You can count on me, professor! Tonight, those in need can have anything I own.”
The little man then woke his three sons, called all his employees to arms, sent his trucks out to every site where he had delivered the accessories and trappings for wedding celebrations. He had the two enormous shamianas set up in the courtyard of the great mosque taken down. Never mind Ishtema! That night Bhopal was suffering and his duty as a good Muslim was to help relieve it. He directed one of his sons to empty his warehouses of any armchairs, settees, chairs and beds, not forgetting the famous percolator because “a good Italian coffee, can do a fellow a power of good.”
Marvelous Mahmoud Parvez! As his staff and sons brought his wares to the afflicted, he kept one mission for himself. It was he, and he alone, who would dismantle the jewel of his collection, the magnificent, venerable shamiana embroidered with gold thread that he had rented to his friend, the director of Bhopal’s electric power station, for his niece’s wedding. The task came very close to killing him. Asphyxiated by a pocket of gas floating along the ground, Mahmoud collapsed, unable to breathe. By some miracle, a rescue team picked him up. He was among the first to receive emergency treatment under one of his own tents.
Barely five hundred yards from the improvised hospital into which the gas victims were pouring by the hundreds, a man in a red pullover, his face protected by a damp towel and motorcycle goggles, came out of a small house in the old part of town, in the company of his young wife and her fifteen-year-old sister. All three straddled the scooter that was waiting, propped against the door. The journalist Rajkumar Keswani had been woken a few moments earlier by a strange smell of ammonia. He had closed the window without ever for one moment imagining that the smell might be an indication of the very catastrophe he had warned the city against. He had called the police headquarters.
“What’s going on?” he asked. “An accident at Carbide,” answered a voice strangled with anxiety. “A gas tank explosion. We’re all going to die.”
From his window Keswani then saw people fleeing in all directions, and understood. Settling his two passengers on the scooter, he gripped the handlebars and set off like the wind toward the distant neighborhoods of New Bhopal, out of reach of the gases from the cursed factory.
A Half-Naked Holy Man in the Heart of a Deadly Cloud
An act of barbarity had broken him; the Carbide catastrophe would make him a hero. One month after discovering six members of his family burned alive in reprisal for the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the Sikh colonel Gurcharan Singh Khanuja, commanding officer of the electrical and mechanical engineering corps in Bhopal, found himself confronted with yet another tragedy. That night, with nothing to protect him but fireman’s goggles and a wet towel over his face, the officer had sprung to the head of a column of trucks to rescue four hundred cardboard factory workers and their families, all of whom were surprised by the gas as they slept.
Having completed that rescue operation, the colonel and his men returned to the danger zone, this time to search the Kali Grounds neighborhoods for any survivors. The corpse of the white horse from Padmini’s wedding was blocking the entrance to Chola Road. With its hooves in the air, its body swollen with gas and its eyes bloodshot, the animal was still in its harness. The soldiers tied a rope around its front legs and pulled it to one side. A little farther on, the officer came across other vestiges of the festivities: on the small mandap stage, the flames of the sacrificial fire were still flickering, gilded armchairs, the musicians’ drums and dented trumpets, saucepans full of curry and rice, and even the generator hired to light up what should have been the greatest moment in Dilip and Padmini’s lives. Abandoned outside a hut, Khanuja now found the wedding presents: some cooking utensils, clothing and pieces of material. He picked up the parasol the groom had carried as he proceeded on his white mare. With military discipline he took the time to jot down an inventory of all the debris in a notebook. Then, stepping over the corpses littering the alleyways, he systematically inspected every dwelling. He had given his men the order to move in total silence. “We were on the alert for the slightest sign of life,” he would say. Now and then they would hear a moan, a groan, a cough or a child crying. “Bodies had to be shaken to ascertain which ones were still alive,” the officer would recount, “but often we were too late. The crying had stopped. There was nothing left but the dreadful, frightening silence of death.”
In one hut, Khanuja found an elderly couple sitting calmly on the edge of a charpoy. They smiled at the officer as if they had been expecting him for a visit. In the shack next door an entire family had been wiped out: the parents and their six children lay sprawled on the beaten earth floor, their eyes bulging, and foam and blood frothing out of their mouths. The youngest had died sucking their thumbs. Khanuja had the elderly couple taken away by truck and went off in search of other survivors. On Berasia Road where men came to beg Carbide’s tharagars for jobs, the ground was scattered with bodies, struck down in midflight. Suddenly the colonel’s attention was drawn to that of a very young woman whose ankles sparkled in the moonlight. He turned on his flashlight and saw that she was wearing anklets with bells on them. With her hands and feet decorated in henna, her close-fitting bodice and cotton loincloth that fell in a fan shape over her hips and thighs, the officer thought she looked like one of the sacred dancers he’d seen on television. A braid of white jasmine flowers had been tucked in her bun. The Sikh also noticed a small cross on a chain around her neck. From all indications, the girl was dead. Just as he was about to switch off his flashlight, the officer glimpsed a trembling of the corner of her mouth. Was he mistaken? He knelt down, cleared one ear of the folds of his turban and pressed it to the young woman’s chest, but her heart seemed to have stopped beating. Just in case, however, he called for a stretcher.
“Hamidia Hospital, quickly!” he shouted to the driver.
After Mahmoud Parvez’s staff had returned with his wedding shamianas, the approaches to the great hospital looked like the encampment of some tribe struck down by a curse from above. In each tent Parvez, who had recovered from gas inhalation, unrolled mats, and set up tables and benches, toward which the medical college students tried to channel the hordes of dying people who kept on pouring in. Picking out from this tide those who would benefit from a few blasts of oxygen or a cardiac massage was impossible. The white-smocked student who felt for Padmini’s pulse was quite sure that his patient was a hopeless case. As in wartime, it was better to work on those who had some chance of pulling through. He had her stretcher taken to the morgue where hundreds of corpses were already piled up.
In addition to pulmonary and gastric attacks, most arrivals were suffering from serious ocular lesions: burned corneas, burst crystalline lenses, paralysis of the optic nerve, collapsed pupils. A few drops of atropine and a cotton pad for each eye was all the medical teams could offer their tortured patients. Seeing the cohorts of blind people stumbling over the bodies of the dying, Professor Mishra said to himself, “Tonight the Bhopalis are going through their Hiroshima.”
Forty-eight-year-old commissioner Ranjit Singh was the highest civil authority for the city of Bhopal and the surrounding region. As soon as he heard about the catastrophe, he jumped in his car and sped to the police headquarters in the heart of the old town. It was from this nerve center that he intended to mobilize evacuation and rescue operations. Ranjit Singh would never forget his first glimpse of that hellish night. On the bridge running along the Lower Lake, he saw “tens, hundreds, thousands of sandals and shoes lost by people running away in their scramble to escape death.”
The commissioner found the police headquarters in total disarray: gas had infiltrated the old building, burning the eyes and lungs of many of the officers. Yet calls were coming in, one after another without interruption, in the command room on the second floor. One of them was from Arjun Singh, chief minister of Madhya Pradesh. Rumor had it that he had fled his official residence and taken refuge outside the city. Arjun Singh was calling in by radio to speak to the police chief Swaraj Puri.
“You must stop people leaving,” the head of the government insisted. “Put barricades across all roads leading out of the city and make people go back to their homes.”
The chief minister, it seemed, had no idea of the chaos that ruled Bhopal that night. In any case Puri had a good rebuttal.
“Sir,” he answered, “how can I stop people leaving when my own policemen have disappeared along with the other fugitives?”
The commissioner decided to speak to the head of the government himself. He took over the microphone. “Mr. Chief Minister, no one can stop the human tidal wave trying to escape the blanket of gas. It’s every man for himself. What’s more, in the name of what do you want to stop these poor people from trying to save their lives?”
The senior official was suspicious of Singh’s motives for stopping the exodus. With one month to go to the general election, it was conceivable that the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh was afraid of losing votes. After all, he’d already won the support of the bustees by giving them the property deeds that legalized their squats beside the high-risk factory. This had been a decision the commissioner had tried in vain to oppose for reasons of safety, and because it encouraged random settlement, the nightmare of any municipal authority. And now, when tragedy was striking the beneficiaries of Singh’s largesse, the chief minister wanted to keep survivors in their homes. Indignant, the commissioner cut short their conversation and called his subordinates to ask them to send all available vehicles to help evacuate the areas affected by the toxic cloud that was still spreading through a whole section of the city. Then, putting a damp towel over his face, he started up his Ambassador and headed for the factory.
The spectacle he encountered at the entrance to the erst-while pride of Bhopal was terrifying. Hundreds of people from districts to the north and east were banging on the doors of the dispensary where Dr. Loya, Carbide’s appointed doctor, and three overstretched nurses were trying to give a few breaths of oxygen to those most affected. On one of the four beds, with his face protected by a mask, lay the only victim of the catastrophe on the factory’s staff. Shekil Qureshi, who had believed as deeply in Carbide as he did in Allah, had been found sprawled at the foot of the boundary wall over which he had leapt after tank 610 exploded.
The commissioner was immediately brought to the office where Jagannathan Mukund had shut himself away. The first thing that caught his eye was a framed certificate on the wall, an award congratulating Mukund on his factory’s excellent safety standards. “But that night,” the commissioner would recount, “the recipient of that diploma was just a haggard man, annihilated by the magnitude of the disaster and by fear of a popular uprising.”
Ranjit Singh tried to reassure him. “I’ll have armed guards posted at the entrance to the factory, as well as outside your residence.”
Suddenly, however, the commissioner could no longer contain one burning question. “I really wanted to know whether, for years, without my being aware of it, a plant located less than two miles from the center of my capital had been producing a pesticide made out of one of the most dangerous substances in the whole of the chemical industry,” he would later explain. He recalled having read that in the United States, people were put to death using cyanide gas. “Did the gas that escaped from your plant tonight contain cyanide?” he asked.
According to the commissioner, Jagannathan Mukund grimaced before revealing the awful truth. “In the context of a reaction at very high temperature, MIC can, in fact, break down into several gases, among them hydrocyanide acid.”
All that night people called out for each other and searched for one another: in Hamidia Hospital, in the streets and in the courtyard of Bhopal’s great mosque. The water in the ablution tanks, diverted in bygone days from the Upper Lake by a British engineer, was a godsend. Victims rinsed their burning eyes and drank deeply in order to purge themselves of deadly molecules.
The tailor Ahmed Bassi, the bicycle repairman Salar and the worker-poet Rehman Khan all availed themselves of the healing waters. Then they set off together in search of their families who had been scattered by the disaster. In Spices Square, strewn with the bodies of poetry lovers and hundred of pigeons and parrots, they met Ganga Ram carrying Dalima in her festival sari. After escaping the gunfire from the owner of the house in which they had sought refuge, they had miraculously avoided the gases. They had headed directly south toward the great mosque rather than toward the station. Such reunions lightened an otherwise devastating night.
In all this turmoil of suffering, fear and death, Sister Felicity did her best to save abandoned children in the corridors and wards of the hospital. There were dozens of them wandering about, almost blind, or lying groaning in their own vomit on the bare floor. The first thing the nun did was regroup them at the far end of the ground floor of the hospital where she had set up her help center. Word traveled quickly, and other children were brought to her. Most of them had got lost during the night when their panic-stricken parents entrusted them to passengers in some truck or car.
With the help of two medical students, the nun carefully cleaned their eyes. Sometimes the effect was instantaneous. Her own eyes filled with tears when one of her protégés cried, “I can see!” Then she would guide those who had been miraculously cured to the aid center and give her attention to other young victims, whom she bombarded with questions.
“Do you know this little girl?”
“Yes, she’s my sister,” answered one child. “And this boy?”
“He goes to my school,” answered another. “What’s his name?”
“Arvind,” a third told her.
Thus, little by little, the links between these suffering people were reestablished, and sometimes a distressed father or mother was reunited with a much loved child.
A tall young man dressed in a festive sherwani, his feet shod in spangled mules, paced ceaselessly through the corridors and wards of that same hospital. He was looking for someone. Sometimes he would stop and gently turn a body over to look at a face. Dilip was sure that he would find Padmini somewhere in this charnel house. He did not know that his young wife had just been carried away to the morgue on a stretcher.
The potbellied little man, who had promised the police chief that he was prepared “to feed the whole city” if necessary, never imagined that he would have to keep his promise so soon. Shyam Babu, the proprietor of the Agarwal Poori Bhandar, the most famous restaurant in Bhopal, had just gone to bed, when two men rang his doorbell. He recognized the president and the secretary of the Vishram Ghat Trust, a Hindu charitable organization of which he was a founding member.
“There’s been an accident at Carbide,” announced the president before being overtaken by a coughing fit that sent him reeling.
His companion continued. “Thousands of people have been killed,” he said. “But, more important, there are thousands of injured who have nothing to drink or eat at Hamidia Hospital and under Parvez shamianas. You, and you alone, can come to their aid.”
Shyam Babu stroked his mustache. His blue eyes lit up. May the goddess Lakshmi be blessed. At last he was going to fulfill his lifelong dream of feeding the whole city.
“How many are there of them?” he asked.
The president tried to overcome his bout of coughing. “Twenty thousand, thirty thousand, fifty thousand, maybe more …”
Shyam stood at attention. “You can count on me, no matter how many there are.”
As soon as his visitors had gone, he mobilized all his employees and enlisted the support of the staff of several other restaurants. Even before daybreak, some fifty cooks, assistants and bakers were at work making rations of potatoes, rice, dhal, curry and chapatis, which they wrapped in newspaper. Stacked into Babu’s Land Rover, these makeshift meals were taken at once and distributed to the survivors. This was not to be the only good deed done by the restaurateur. Having taken care of the living, Shyam Babu would have to see to the dead.
Under the great tamarind tree in Kamla Park on the narrow strip of garden separating the Upper Lake from the Lower, a sadhu looked on impassively as people fled the deadly cloud. All through that night of panic, the Naga Baba, or naked holy man, as the Bhopalis called him, remained cross-legged in the lotus position. For thirty-five years he had lived there ever since a five-day samadhi, a spiritual exercise in which he was buried alive, had turned him into a holy man. Half-naked, with his body covered in ashes and his long mop of hair divided into a hundred tresses, a pilgrim’s stick topped with Shiva’s trident and a bowl in which he collected food provided by the faithful as his only possessions, the Naga Baba, detached from all desires, material things, appearances and aversions, spent his days meditating, in quest of the absolute. With prayer beads in his fingers, and his gaze seemingly vacant behind his half-closed lids, he seemed indifferent to the chaos that surrounded him. Overtaken by small, eye-level pockets of monomethylamine and phosgene borne along by the breeze, dozens of men and women whose lungs were dilated from running, collapsed around him. Trained to breathe only once every three or four minutes by his ascetic exercises, the Naga Baba did not inhale the vapors from the passing cloud. He was the only person to survive in Kamla Park.
The dead were everywhere. In the corridors, in the consulting rooms, in the operating theaters, in the general wards, even in the kitchens and the nurses’ canteen. Laid out on stretchers or on the bare floor, some looked as if they were sleeping peacefully; others had faces deformed by suffering. Strangely, they gave off no smell of decomposition. It was as if the MIC had sterilized anything in them that might rot. Removing these corpses became as pressing a problem as caring for the living. Already the vultures had arrived. Not the carrion birds, but the professional body riflers for whom the catastrophe was a godsend. Dr. Mohammed Sheikh, one of the two doctors on duty, surprised a pillager with a pair of pliers in his hands, preparing to yank gold teeth from the mouths of the dead. One of his accomplices was stripping the women of their jewels, including those embedded in their noses. Another was recovering watches. Their harvest was likely to be a thin one, however; Carbide’s gases had primarily killed the poor.
Once alerted, Professor Mishra sent some students to stand guard over the corpses and telephoned the two forensic pathologists at the medical college. The collector of vintage cars, Heeresh Chandra and his young colleague who loved roses, Ashu Satpathy, were already on their way to the hospital. Chandra knew that the autopsies he and Satpathy would perform that night could save thousands of lives; the bodies of the dead could yield definitive information about the nature of the killer gases and might enable them to find an antidote.
What the two doctors saw on their arrival chilled them to the bone. “We were used to death, but not to suffering,” Satpathy would later recount. The hundreds of bodies they had to step over to gain access to the medical college looked as if they had been tortured.
“What chemical substances could be capable of doing that kind of damage?” wondered Chandra as he hurried first to the faculty library. His colleague Mishra had mentioned methyl isocyanate. The pathologist leafed frantically through a toxicology textbook. The entry on the molecule did not contain much information, but Chandra suspected that it was capable of breaking down into highly toxic substances like hydrocyanide acid. Only hydrocyanic acid would be likely to inflict such deadly marks.
As for Dr. Satpathy, he went first to the terraces, to make sure that his roses had not been damaged by the toxic cloud. After examining every pot, plant, leaf and bud with all the concern and tenderness of a lover at his endangered mistress’s bedside, he heaved a sigh of relief. The Black Diamonds and Golden Chryslers he had so lovingly grafted appeared to have survived the passing of the deadly fog. In two days’ time, Satpathy would be able to exhibit them as planned at the Bhopal Flower Show. Before returning to the inferno on the ground floor, he telephoned the third member of his medical team, the photographer Subashe Godane.
“Get over here quickly, and bring a whole suitcase full of film with you. You’re going to have hundreds of photos to take.”
The young man who had dreamed of making his name photographing glamorously dressed women, hurriedly threw on his clothes, loaded his Pentax and hopped on his scooter.
Before beginning the autopsies, it was essential that the two forensic pathologists devise a system for identifying the victims. Nearly all of them had been caught in their sleep and had fled their homes half naked. Satpathy enlisted the help of a squad of medical college students.
“Examine each corpse,” he told them, “and jot down its description in a notebook. For example, ‘circumcised male, approximately forty, scar on chin, striped underpants.’ Or again, ‘little girl aged about ten, three metal bracelets on right wrist, etc.’ Make a note of any deformities, tattoos and any distinctive features likely to facilitate identification of the victim by their next of kin. Then place a card with a number on it on each body.”
The doctor turned then to Godane. “You photograph the numbered bodies. As soon as you’ve developed your negatives, we’ll put them on display. In that way families will be able to try and find anyone they’ve lost.”
Next, addressing himself to everyone, he added, “Get a move on! They’ll be coming for the bodies!”
Soon the shutter on the Pentax was firing like a tommy gun over the stiffened bodies. Although he had spent years immortalizing the victims of minor accidents on glossy paper, Subashe Godane was suddenly face to face with a wholly different form of death: industrial death, death on a huge scale. While he was working, he found himself wondering whether he had not photographed a particular young woman in a multicolored sari, or a particular little girl whose long braids were adorned with yellow marigolds, on a previous occasion. Perhaps on Hamidia Road, or in the jewelry market at the great mosque, or near the fountain in Spices Square. But that night his models’ eyes had rolled back into their skulls, the amber tint of their skin had turned the color of ashes and their mouths had set into dreadful rictuses. Godane had difficulty continuing with his macabre documentary. All at once he thought he was seeing things. By the light of his flash, he saw the features of a face twitch. Two eyes opened. “This man isn’t dead!” he yelled to Satpathy who came running with his stethoscope. Sure enough, the man was still alive. The doctor called for a stretcher and had him taken to a recovery ward where he regained consciousness. He was wearing a railway worker’s tunic. It was V.K. Sherma, the deputy stationmaster who had saved hundreds of passengers by risking his life to get the Gorakhpur Express to leave.
There were other shocks in store on that tragic night. Two female corpses were brought in by unknown persons. When Satpathy examined them, he realized that they had not been killed by gas but murdered. One had a deep wound to the throat, the other had burns to a substantial part of her body. The catastrophe had provided the killers with the perfect alibi. The doctor also saw the corpse of the same little boy three times, labeled with three different numbers. It was a fraudulent act that would enable his family to claim three times the insurance compensation the American multinational might pay.
Other parents refused to accept the awful reality. A young father placed his son’s corpse in the arms of Dr. Deepak Gandhe, one of the doctors on duty.
“Save him!” the stranger pleaded. “Your child is dead!” replied Gandhe, trying to give the little body back to his father.
“No! No! You can save him!”
“He’s dead, I tell you!” insisted the doctor. “There’s nothing I can do for him.”
“Then the man ran off, leaving the child in my arms,” Deepak Gandhe would recount. “In his heart of hearts he was convinced that I could bring him back to life.”
On dissecting the first corpses, the two forensic pathologists could hardly believe what they found. The blood of a gray-goateed Muslim, into which Satpathy dipped his finger, was as viscous as currant jelly. His lungs were ash-colored, and a multitude of little bluish-red lesions appeared in a grayish frothy liquid. The man must have died by drowning in his own secretions. Hearts, livers and spleens had tripled in size, windpipes were full of purulent clots. Without exception, all the organs seemed to have been ravaged by the gas, including the brains, which were covered with a gelatinous, opalescent film. The extent of the damage was terrifying even to specialists as hardened as old Chandra and his young colleague. A smell confirmed their suspicions as to the nature of the agent responsible—a smell that was unmistakable. All the bodies they autopsied gave off the same smell of bitter almonds, the smell of hydrocyanide acid. Here was the confirmation of what Jagannathan Mukund had let slip to Bhopal’s commissioner. When it broke down, MIC released hydrocyanide acid, which instantly destroyed the cells’ ability to transport oxygen. It was hydrocyanide acid that had killed the great majority of Bhopalis who died that infernal night.
The pathologists’ discovery was vitally important, because hydrocyanide acid poisoning had an antidote: a commonplace substance, sodium thiosulfate or hyposulfate, well known to photographers who use it to fix their negatives. Mass injecting with hyposulfate might possibly save thousands of victims. Chandra and Satpathy rushed to Professor Mishra who was coordinating the medical aid with his team. Strangely, the professor refused to believe his colleagues’ findings and follow their recommendations. As far as he was concerned, the presence of hydrocyanide acid was an invention of the forensic pathologists’ overactive imaginations.
“You take care of the dead and let me take care of the living!” he told them.
No one would really be able to account for this reaction on the part of the illustrious professor. It would deprive the victims of a treatment that might have saved their lives.
Dawn broke at last on that apocalyptic night: a crystal clear sunrise. The minarets, cupolas and palaces were lit up by the sun’s rays and life asserted itself once more in the entanglement of alleyways in the old part of town. Everything seemed the same. And yet some places looked like war zones on the morning after a battle. Hundreds of corpses of men, women and children, cows, buffaloes, dogs and goats were all over the place. Deeply alarmed by the situation, Commissioner Ranjit Singh went to the nearby colleges in areas that had been spared and enlisted students to pick up bodies. At the Maulana Azad Technical College, he found dozens of volunteers.
“Divide yourselves up into two teams,” he told them. “Muslims in one, Hindus in the other, and each can look after their own dead.”
His suggestion provoked a vehement reaction. “Is there any difference between Hindus and Muslims at a tragic time like this?” objected one student.
“Is there even a god when such a catastrophe is allowed to happen?” said another.
“I made myself very small,” the commissioner said afterward. “I was trying to think of the strongest possible terms in which to thank them.”
With bandannas over their mouths and noses, the students set off on scooters for the slums that Colonel Khanuja and his trucks had partially evacuated during the night. There were still a few survivors left among the mass of bodies. Student Santosh Katiyar was party to a scene that touched him deeply. While he was preparing to remove the body of a Muslim woman from one of the huts in Chola, a hand stopped him. A woman, whom he recognized by the red dot on her forehead as a Hindu, slipped all her bracelets off her wrist and slid them onto her dead neighbor’s arm.
“She was my friend,” she explained, “she must look beautiful to meet her god.”
A little farther on, Santosh noticed four veiled Muslim women, sitting under the porch roof to a small Hindu temple. They were consoling a woman who had lost her entire family. In such extreme distress, distinctions of religion, caste or background vanished. Very swiftly, however, the sordid took its place alongside the sublime. No sooner had Rajiv Gandhi announced over the radio that all families would be compensated for the loss of their loved ones, than people began to squabble over the corpses. Outside the medical college Colonel Khanuja saw two women pulling the body of a man by his arms and legs in opposite directions. One was a Hindu; the other Muslim. Both were claiming that the deceased was her relative. They were pulling so hard that the poor man’s body was in danger of being torn in two. The colonel decided to intervene.
“Undress him! Then you’ll see whether or not he’s circumcised.”
The two women tore off his lunghi and underpants and examined his penis. The man was circumcised. Furious, the Hindu woman got up and set off in search of another corpse.
The number of expressions of solidarity multiplied. Never before had the India of a thousand castes and twenty million divinities shown itself so united in adversity. Tens of organizations, institutions, associations, hundreds of entrepreneurs and businessmen, thousands of private individuals of all social classes, the Rotarians, the Lions, the Kiwanis and the scouts, all came rushing to the rescue of the survivors. Many towns in Madhya Pradesh sent truckloads of medicines, blankets and clothing. Volunteers of different religious faiths spread out cloths on the corners of avenues, in squares, all over the place, onto which people threw mountains of rupees.
That day after the catastrophe was also a time for anger. A policeman came to warn Mukund, who had remained closeted in his office, that thousands of rioters were heading for the factory, yelling, “Death to Carbide!” After trying all night to get hold of his superiors in Bombay, the works manager finally got through by telephone to one of them.
“There’s been an accident,” he informed his boss K.S. Kamdar. “An MIC leak. I don’t know yet how or why.”
“Any fatalities?” Kamdar asked anxiously. “Yes.”
“Many?”
“Alas! Yes.”
“Two figures?”
“More.”
“Three?”
“More like four, Kamdar.”
There was a long silence at the other end of the line. Kamdar was stunned. At last he inquired, “Do you have the situation in hand?”
“Until the crowd invades the factory. Or the police come and arrest me.”
Just then, they were interrupted by several uniformed policemen and two plainclothes inspectors from the Criminal Bureau of Investigation. They carried a warrant to detain Mukund and his assistants.
Outside the situation was growing worse. Police chief Swaraj Puri, who had seen so many of his men disappear the previous night, feared violent action. With no means to oppose it, he decided to resort to a stratagem. He summoned the driver of the only vehicle left to him with a loudspeaker.
“Drive all over town,” he ordered the officer, “and announce that there’s been another gas leak at Carbide.”
The effect of the ruse was miraculous. The rioters who had been about to overrun the factory scattered instantly. In a matter of minutes the city was empty. Only the dead remained.
The fatal cloud had spared the vast enclosure at the end of Hamidia Road where, in the shade of century-old mango and tamarind trees, generations of Muslims had been laid to rest. The man in charge of the place was a frail little individual with dark skin and a chin studded with a small salt-and-pepper goatee. Abdul Hamid had been born in that cemetery. He had grown up there and become its master. It was a position that enabled him to live in comfort; for every burial he received a hundred rupees and he oversaw two or three each day. Abdul Hamid was a central and familiar figure in the Muslim community. They all, at one time or another, had to deal with him. Although he was no stranger to death, the poor man could never have anticipated the spectacle that awaited him that morning at the entrance to his cemetery. Dozens of bodies wrapped in shrouds were piled up like parcels outside the fence. “It was the first time I’d ever seen so many corpses at once,” he said later.
Hamid called his sons and set to work digging graves. Volunteers came to help him. But how was he to give so many dead a decent burial? How was he to receive their families appropriately? In the absence of any members of the clergy, it was Abdul himself or one of his grave diggers who recited a namaz, or prayer, for the dead. In a few hours there was nowhere left to dig fresh holes and the men had to stop for fear of disturbing the remains of earlier burials. “I was the guardian of the dead,” Abdul Hamid was to say. “I had no right to violate tombs. If I did no one would trust me anymore.”
In the two other Muslim cemeteries, the congestion was even worse, a fact that forced the city’s grand mufti, the venerable Kazi Wazid ul-Hussein, to issue an urgent fatwa authorizing the disturbance of old tombs in order to make room for Carbide’s victims. The fatwa stipulated that some ten bodies could be buried in the same grave. Soon a flood of trucks, cars and handcarts turned up with their macabre loads. The deceased were deposited at the entrance to Abdul Hamid’s cemetery in the columned building set aside for preparation of the dead. In the absence of relatives, this ritual was carried out by volunteers, who undressed the bodies and washed them in tepid water. Men and women were dealt with separately. The elderly Iftekar Begum, the eighty-year-old dowager who directed operations, marveled that so many of the deceased were wearing embroidered burkahs and flowers in their hair.
“Last night was Sunday,” a friend explained to her, “they died while they were celebrating.”
Other surprises awaited those dealing with the burial of the dead. Under pressure from the gases produced by the chemical decomposition of MIC, the corpses were subject to strange twitches. Here an arm stretched itself out, there a leg. Some bodies buried near the surface of the earth seemed to want to stand up. Terrified by these extraordinary “resurrections,” some people fainted, others shouted at the ghostly apparitions and yet others ran away screaming. Abdul Hamid was struck dumb; his cemetery had become a theater of ghosts.
Bhopal’s most celebrated restaurateur had been obliged to hand over control of his ovens to his two sons and two sisters while he arranged for the Hindu funeral pyres. His associates from the Vishram Ghat Trust, the group in charge of cremations, were overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task. The Hindu religion ordains that, with the exception of children, the bodies of the deceased must be burned. For that they needed firewood, but how were they to find enough for thousands of corpses? Shyam Babu worked a miracle. In the space of a few hours, he managed to fill fifteen trucks with enough wood to incinerate several hundred bodies. Cloth-makers brought him miles of linen with which to make shrouds.
While he prepared to set light to the first pyre, two envoys of the mufti appeared. They had come to make certain that no Muslims would be burned by mistake. It was almost impossible to confuse men from the two communities; the followers of Allah wore a characteristic goatee, amulets around their necks, and bore marks left on their foreheads by their repeated prostrations. Not to mention the fact that they were circumcised. Unless they were veiled with their burkahs, women were more difficult to distinguish. Nevertheless, the mufti’s envoys left reassured. Shyam Babu was just about to plunge his torch into the pile of wood when someone grabbed his arm. The student Piyush Chawla had spotted a little gold cross around one young woman’s neck.
“This woman isn’t a Hindu!” he cried. He extricated the body and placed it to one side of the pyre.
Then he noticed an almost imperceptible quivering of her eyelids. Intrigued, he bent over the body. The hands and feet were neither rigid nor cold. This woman with bells on her ankles was not dead, he was sure of it. He put her on one of the trucks that was going to bring back more corpses from Hamidia Hospital and climbed up beside her. Frothy bubbles were coming out of her half-open mouth. Piyush Chawla could not help wondering whether he was witnessing some supernatural phenomenon.
It was exactly two in the afternoon by the clock in Spices Square on that Monday the third of December when the smoke from the first funeral pyre rose into the sky over Bhopal, reducing to ashes those people whom Carbide’s beautiful plant had promised happiness and prosperity. Blowing now from the south, a light breeze carried away the last traces of deadly gas and replaced them with a smell even more appalling: the aroma of burning flesh.
“Death to the Killer Anderson!”
Tuesday December 4, eight-thirty A.M. The athletic figure of the CEO of Union Carbide made his entrance into the boardroom at the company headquarters in Danbury, Connecticut. Since the previous day, Warren Anderson had been given hourly reports on the situation in Bhopal. For a son of immigrants who had managed to haul himself up to the top of the world’s third largest chemical giant, the tragedy was as much a personal disaster as a professional one. Anderson had set his sights on making Union Carbide an enterprise with a human face. Of his 700 industrial plants, employing 117,000 people in 38 countries, the Bhopal factory had been his favorite. It was he who had inaugurated it on May 4, 1980. The first drops of MIC that emerged from its distillation columns that day had been his victory. Thanks to the Sevin thus produced, tens of thousands of Indian peasants would be able to conquer the menace of famine.
As soon as he heard about the tragedy, he had set up a special team to deal with events in total transparency. He had arranged for the media to maintain a constant link to the company spokespeople. Then he had shut himself away in his home office in Greenwich to think about what his initial reaction should be. Having made his decision, he called his closest assistants. Despite the terrified entreaties of his wife Lilian, he would leave immediately for Bhopal. His place was there, among the victims. He wanted to see for himself that everything that could be done was being done. His gesture would help underline the fact that the company he controlled was not a faceless, soulless giant, and that the recent tragedy was just one accident along a path intended to create a better, more just world. In short, his presence at the scene of the catastrophe would be an expression of the ideal that inspired him.
In addition to a sense of moral obligation toward the victims, he also felt a responsibility to the company’s shareholders. Doubtless Carbide had the financial means to survive the worst possible disaster. But if the terrible news he had received was accurate, his duty was to do everything in his power to prevent his company from appearing cruel or irresponsible to its shareholders.
By the somber faces that greeted him that Tuesday morning in the presidential boardroom at Danbury, Warren Anderson could tell that his colleagues were hostile to his plan. There was no shortage of arguments against it. First, he would be risking his life: India was an unpredictable country. One month earlier, Indira Gandhi had been assassinated because her army had killed far fewer people than had died at Bhopal. Some grief-crazed survivor might make an attempt on his life. Then again, under pressure from outraged public opinion, the Indian government might imprison him on arrival. Either way, his journey risked giving the unnecessary impression that the multinational was directly responsible for the tragedy, when it would be better to let its Indian subsidiary take all the blame. There was also the fact that there was every likelihood that the visit would be perceived as a provocation. Finally, it would expose the company’s chairman to dangerous confrontations with India’s new political authorities, and with the press, lawyers, judges, diplomats… . Even those in charge of the Indian subsidiary who had been consulted over the telephone showed little enthusiasm for the idea of having their top man arrive at the scene of the accident. Anderson, however, had made up his mind.
“I’ve weighed all the risks,” he declared, “and I’m going.”
On Thursday December 6 at five o’clock in the morning, a Gulfstream II twin-engine jet plane landed at Bombay’s Santa Cruz airport. No one took any notice of the three initials engraved on its crest, yet they belonged to the American company that had just inflicted death upon the country. Suffering from the flu, exhausted after the twenty-hour flight, Warren Anderson traveled discreetly to the luxurious Hotel Taj Mahal opposite the symbolic arch of the Gateway of India, where a suite had been reserved for him. The two Indian gentlemen there to welcome him, Keshub Mahindra, President of Union Carbide India Limited, and V.P. Gokhale, its managing director, brought him up to date with the latest figures from the accident. By then people were talking about three thousand dead and two hundred thousand people affected. Fortunately, the two Indians also had some good news: Arjun Singh, the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, and Rajiv Gandhi, head of the country’s government, had agreed to see Carbide’s chairman. That was one source of satisfaction for Anderson; he could at least convince them that his company was ready to compensate the victims,
starting with at least five million dollars’ worth of emergency medical aid.
In an effort to be discreet, Anderson and his two partners flew to Bhopal the next day in the Boeing 737 of a regular Indian Airlines flight. The company jet would rejoin the chairman in Delhi to take him back to the United States.
On landing, the American noticed a small group of policemen on the tarmac. “How tactful of the local authorities to have sent us an escort,” he thought. As soon as the staircase was in position, two officers climbed on board and a voice came over the cabin address system. “Mr. Anderson, Mr. Mahindra and Mr. Gokhale are invited to leave the aircraft first.”
Ah, the wonders of Indian hospitality! Police Chief Swaraj Puri, who on the night of the tragedy had watched his policemen flee, was at the foot of the plane in the company of the city’s collector to welcome the visitors with warm handshakes. All that was missing was the traditional garland of flowers and a pretty hostess to give them a welcoming tilak. Anderson and his companions took their seats in an official Ambassador brought to the foot of the steps. The car took off like the wind and left the airport via a service gate to avoid the pack of journalists waiting in the arrivals hall. The police chief and the collector followed in a second car.
“Thank you for having gone to the trouble of fetching us,” Anderson said to the uniformed inspector sitting beside the driver.
“It’s standard procedure, sir. There’s considerable tension in the city. It’s our duty to look after your safety.”
Despite the tragic circumstances, the American took pleasure in being back in the city, the beauty of which he had so admired when the factory was inaugurated four years earlier. The minarets of the mosques casting their reflections in the waters of the lake, the numerous parks brimming with flowers, the picturesque old streets bustling with activity; everything seemed so normal that he found it difficult to believe that the city had just been through so dreadful a nightmare.
The car climbed toward the Shamla Hills, entered the grounds of the research center and stopped in front of the company’s splendid guest house. Anderson was astonished to find two squads of policemen assembled on either side of the door to the establishment. An officer was waiting on the steps. As soon as the three visitors got out of the car, he stepped forward, came to attention and saluted. Then he announced, “I regret to inform you that you are all three under arrest.”
Anderson and his partners started with surprise. The policeman continued, “Of course, this is a measure primarily for your own protection. You are free to come and go about your rooms, but not to go out or use the telephone, nor to receive visitors.”
At that moment the police chief and the collector arrived. They were accompanied by a magistrate in his distinctive black robe. The American felt reassured; certainly there had been some misunderstanding. The officials were coming to set them free. In fact, the magistrate had been summoned to notify the three visitors of the reasons for their arrest. He informed them that by virtue of articles 92, 120B, 278, 304, 426 and 429 of the Indian penal code, they were accused of “culpable homicide causing death by negligence, making the atmosphere noxious to health, negligent conduct with respect to poisonous substances and mischief in the killing of livestock.” The first charge was punishable with life imprisonment, the others carried sentences of between three and six months.
“Naturally, all those charges carry the right to bail,” intervened Keshub Mahindra, president of Carbide’s Indian subsidiary.
“I’m afraid that is, unfortunately, not the case,” the magistrate replied.
“So what about our meeting with Chief Minister Arjun Singh?” asked the American anxiously.
“You will be notified about that as soon as possible,” the police chief informed him.
The likely instigator of this brutal reception was absent from Bhopal. He had left the capital of Madhya Pradesh that very morning to join Rajiv Gandhi on an electoral tour. He had, however, left instructions with his spokesman. As soon as the three visitors had been arrested, the latter was to muster the press and deliver the news with maximum impact. Arjun Singh, though a long-standing friend of Carbide, expected to make the most of his audacity. By having the American company’s chairman and his Indian partners arrested, he was setting himself up as the avenger of the catastrophe’s victims, a move that could only help him in the next parliamentary election. “The government of Madhya Pradesh could not stand passively by and watch the tragedy,” his spokesman told journalists on his boss’s behalf. “It knows its duty to the thousands of citizens whose lives have been devastated by the criminal negligence of Carbide’s directors.”
News of Warren Anderson’s arrest created a sensation from one end of the planet to another. This was the first time that a third world country had dared to imprison one of the West’s most powerful industrial leaders, even if his prison was a five-star guest house. In New Delhi there was great consternation. The Indian foreign affairs minister had promised the U.S. state department that nothing would impede Anderson’s journey. Quite apart from wishing to avoid an overt clash with the United States, Indian leaders were afraid that the incident would dissuade large foreign firms from setting up in India forever. The chief minister of Madhya Pradesh would have to release his prisoners immediately. Never mind justice; matters of state required it.
Three hours later, Bhopal’s chief of police, assisted by several inspectors came to announce the release of the American prisoner. His Indian colleagues would be set free some time later.
“A government airplane is waiting to take you to Delhi, from where you will be able to return to the United States,” he informed him.
He then presented him with a document. To his stupefaction Anderson discovered that the sum of 25,000 rupees, about $2,000 at the time, had been posted by his company’s local office as bail. He had only to declare his civil status and give his signature and he would be free.
“Twenty-five thousand rupees for the release of the head of a multinational responsible for the deaths of three thousand innocent people and poisoning two hundred thousand others! What does that make an Indian life worth?” inquired the Indian press the next day.
The news created an immediate uproar in the pack of reporters jostling with each other at the entrance to the guest house. The most significant reaction, however, came from a crowd of demonstrators pressed to the railings of the research center. From the car bearing him away to the airport, Warren Anderson could see a forest of placards above their heads. The sight of the few words inscribed on the pieces of cardboard would haunt him for the remainder of his days. “Death to the killer Anderson!” shouted the people of Bhopal.
The chairman of Union Carbide would never meet Rajiv Gandhi or any of his ministers. Only an official in the foreign office would agree to give him a brief audience, provided the press was not informed. The man who had hoped to change the living conditions of India’s peasants and who had wanted, as he had stated, to retire “in a blaze of glory,” left India broken, humiliated and despondent. He still did not know exactly what had happened on the night that spanned the second and third of December in India’s beautiful plant. As for his desire to provide the victims with aid, he had not even been able to discuss it. His journey had been a fiasco.
A few minutes before he climbed into his Gulfstream II and took off for the United States, a journalist called out to him, “Mr. Anderson, are you prepared to come back to India to answer any legal charges?”
Anderson turned pale. Then in a steady voice, he replied, “I will come back to India whenever the law requires it.”
In the meantime, other Americans had been landing in Bhopal. Danbury had rapidly dispatched a group of engineers whose mission it was to shed light on the catastrophe. Naturally the factory’s last American works manager was part of that delegation. For Warren Woomer, this return was a painful trial. “My wife Betty and I had spent two of the best years of our lives here. But now I’d come back to examine the remains of a factory, which had in a sense been my baby,” the engineer would later say. He had difficulty recognizing it. The ship he had left in good working order was now a spectacle of desolation that tore at his heartstrings. He made an effort to stay calm during his first encounter with Mukund. “Why was there so much MIC in the tanks? Why were all the safety systems deactivated?” Woomer fumed to himself. The inquiry team had agreed that they would avoid any confrontation. The important thing was to gather as much information as possible, not to create controversy.
The task threatened to be impossible, however, because officers from India’s Criminal Bureau of Investigation had taken over the inquiry. Their chief, V.N. Shukla, a stiff-necked unsmiling man, began by prohibiting the Americans access to the plant.
Then he told Woomer, “If I catch you, or any of your colleagues, interrogating any of the workmen, I’ll throw you in prison.”
Worse yet the CBI was also in the process of moving the factory’s archives to a secret location. What were the American investigators supposed to do, given that they could not examine the site, question witnesses or refer to such crucial documents as reports of procedures carried out on the fatal night? Woomer felt overwhelmed. Especially as the situation was further complicated by the arrival of a team of Indian investigators headed by a leading national scientist, Professor Vardarajan, president of the Indian Academy of Science. How could they cope with this competition and the police restrictions? Woomer soon passed from feeling overwhelmed to despair.
Once again, however, the good fairy of chemistry came to the rescue of its disciples. One thing upon which they were all in agreement was that before beginning their investigation, they needed to be certain that no further accidents could occur. It was this concern that haunted Woomer. There were still twenty tons of MIC in the second tank and one ton in the third. At any moment, those deadly substances could start to boil and escape in the atmosphere. On this, Americans and Indians were in accord. Should they repair the flare and burn the gases off at altitude? Should they get the scrubber back in order and decontaminate them with caustic soda? Should they try and decant them into drums and evacuate them to a safe place? In the end it was Woomer who came up with the solution.
“Listen!” he said, in his nonchalant but reassuring voice. “The best way to get rid of the remaining MIC is to use it to make Sevin.”
“But how?” asked the Indian professor, stupefied. “By getting the plant running,” replied Woomer. “After all, that was what it was built for.”
Making Sevin meant cleaning all the pipework, pressurizing the tanks, repairing the faulty stopcocks and valves, reactivating the scrubber and the flare, lighting the alpha-naphthol reactor again… . It meant reengaging all the systems of a plant, the wreckage of which had just caused a catastrophe unprecedented in history.
“How long would it take you to attempt such an operation?” asked the Indian professor.
“No more than five or six days,” answered Woomer. “And what about the local people? How are they going to react when they hear the factory’s going into operation again?”
The American engineer could not answer that question. Someone else was going to do it for him.
“Carbide Has Made Us the Center of the World”
The chief minister of Madhya Pradesh was exultant. Warren Woomer’s idea would enable him to erase the memory of his surprising absence on the night of the tragedy and win back his electorate. This time he would be seen right there on the battlefield. To ensure that his heroism paid off, he would need to convince the people of Bhopal that restarting the factory would be extremely dangerous. He therefore promulgated several safety measures with the purpose of creating an atmosphere of panic. He ordered all the schools closed, despite the fact that they were in the middle of exams and most were situated outside the risk zone. Next he called in eight hundred buses to evacuate all those living within a two-and-a-half-mile radius of the factory. Once people were well and truly terrified, he revealed the plan from which he would emerge a great man. He dispatched an army of motorized rickshaws equipped with loudspeakers across the city. The whole of Bhopal then heard, in his steady, reassuring voice, “I have decided to be present in person in the Carbide factory on the day when its engineers start it running again to remove the last drops of any toxic substances. This moment of truth will be a token of your humble servant’s dedication to your cause. This is not an act of courage, but an act of faith, and that is why I am calling this challenge to get rid of any residual dangers at the cursed factory, ‘Operation Faith.’”
As the fateful day for restarting the factory approached, businesses closed, streets emptied and life came to a halt. The chief minister encouraged the exodus to become a torrential flood. Driven by the fear that he had so adroitly stirred up, people threw themselves into his eight hundred buses and into any other means of transport. They abandoned their homes in buffalo carts, rickshaws, scooters, bicycles, trucks, cars and even on foot. The railway station was taken by storm. Afraid that their homes would be pillaged, people took with them anything they could. One woman left with her nine-month-old goat in her arms. For the oldest Bhopalis, the sight of trains covered with people piled on the roofs, hanging from the doors and steps, brought back sinister memories of India’s partition. “This spontaneous migration,” wrote the Times of India, “defies all reason.”
The newspaper was right: Bhopal had lost all reason. Yet, as Ganga Ram and Dalima were to find to their astonishment on their return to Orya Bustee, it was not in the place worst affected by the gases that the terror raged most intensely. If anything, the reverse was true. Their neighbors might look like ghosts with their cotton wool pads on their eyes, but they were no longer afraid. Although the deaths of Belram Mukkadam, Rahul, Bablubhai, Ratna Nadar, old Prema Bai and so many others had created an irreparable void in their small community, the joy of being reunited with friends was stronger than the fear of another disaster. The reunions of Ganga and Dalima with Sheela and Gopal, Padmini’s mother and brother; with Iqbal, Salar and Bassi, to name but a few, were occasions for celebration. What a joy it was to discover that Padmini was still alive in Hamidia Hospital and that Dilip was with her! What a relief to find one’s hut intact when so many others had been looted!
Ganga and Dalima realized at once that the priority for people in their area was not to flee from a fresh threat but to preserve the fragile thread that attached them to the world of the living. Most had been seriously affected by the gases. They were in urgent need of medication. The hospital supplies had been exhausted, so costly treatment would have to be brought in from pharmacies. But with what? Ganga would never forget the sight of his neighbors rushing to the only person now in a position to help them. Since the catastrophe, the moneylender Pulpul Singh’s house had been besieged by survivors clutching the deeds for their huts, transistor radios, watches, jewels or anything else they had, in the hope of exchanging them for a few rupees. People jostled with each other outside the fence, threw themselves at the Sikh’s feet, pleaded and paid him every conceivable compliment. As impassive as a Buddha, he made a clean sweep of all that he was offered. His wife and son recorded names, took a thumbprint on the receipts by way of signature and arranged a most unusual array of objects all over their house. Even chickens that had survived the fateful night could bring in a few notes. That evening, a large box carefully wrapped in a blanket also found its way into the moneylender’s treasure trove: Ganga Ram had pawned his television. With the money he received he would be able to help his neighbors get medicine to relieve their suffering. The magic box that had brought his brothers and sisters so many dreams would have to wait for better days to foster other fantasies.
By December 16, the day of Operation Faith, Bhopal was a ghost town, but television cameras were going to broadcast an event that had become larger than life. Since dawn, fire trucks had been spraying the streets to neutralize any suspect emanations. More than five thousand gas masks had been stored at the city’s main crossroads. A cordon of ambulances and fire engines isolated the factory, while several hundred policemen posted at the various gates allowed only those with special permits to pass. Among them were the chief minister and his wife. They would both be in the front line. Under the photographers’ flashes they took their places in the control room, where Shekil Qureshi and his team had been on watch on the night of December 2. Three military helicopters equipped with water tanks and piloted by men in gas masks, circled continuously over the metal structures, ready to intervene should the need arise. “To think that it took the death of thousands of people for our government to finally take an interest in our factory,” said one disillusioned workman as he listened to reports of the operation on his transistor.
Warren Woomer was satisfied; the equipment necessary to get things running again had been repaired in record time. At eight o’clock precisely, Jagannathan Mukund, surrounded by a police escort, was able to open the stopcock and allow hydrogen to flow into tank 611. A few minutes later, a supervisor announced that the tank had reached the correct pressure, which meant that they could start evacuating the first gallons of the twenty tons of MIC into the reactor to make Sevin. At one P.M., Professor Vardarajan let the chief minister know that one ton of methyl isocyanate had been turned into pesticide.
Arjun Singh was triumphant. Operation Faith had made a totally successful start. Draining the tanks to the last drop of MIC would take three days and three nights. Beaming happily, the intrepid politician clattered down the metal staircase of the beautiful plant with his wife. Already his fellow citizens were preparing to return to their homes. Now he was sure of it: in two months time they would turn out en masse to vote for him.
“Everyone to the teahouse! There’s a sahib there who wants to talk to us!”
Since Rahul’s death, young Sunil Kumar had taken over as messenger in the alleyways of Orya Bustee. He had lost five of his brothers and sisters, as well as his parents, in the catastrophe. Bhopal had offered scant asylum to the family who had arrived so recently from the blighted countryside. The news he spread from hut to hut that morning brought a throng of survivors to the meeting place.
The ambulance chasers had arrived. They had come from New York, Chicago and even California, people such as the celebrated and formidable San Francisco lawyer Melvin Belli, who announced that he was lodging a writ for compensation against Carbide for a mere $15 billion, more than twice the amount of international aid India was to receive that year.
The tragedy made fine pickings for that special breed of American lawyer who lives off other people’s misfortunes and specializes in obtaining damages and compensation for the victims of accidents. The four or five hundred thousand Bhopalis affected by the multinational’s disaster represented tens, possibly even hundreds, of millions of dollars in various claims for compensation. Under American law, lawyers could collect almost a third of that sum in professional fees, a colossal bounty that transformed the office of Bhopal’s mayor and that of the chief minister into battlegrounds for vested interests. Like big game hunters, the Americans fought over clients in the various neighborhoods. The Kali Grounds bustees fell to the representative of a New York law firm. Chaperoned by Omar Pasha, accompanied by an escort of Indian associates and two interpreters, forty-two-year-old lawyer Frank Davolta Jr., a half-bald colossus of a man, entered Orya Bustee in a swarm of policemen and reporters. The escorts took up their position around the wobbly teahouse tables. Aides brought baskets full of snacks, sweets and bottles of Campa Cola for the American to hand out. After the horror of the last few days, Orya Bustee was rediscovering an occasion for celebration.
When the first survivors appeared, the American had difficulty in repressing a feeling of nausea. Many of them were blind, others dragged themselves along on sticks or lay sprawled out on stretchers. They all gathered in a semicircle on the sisal mats that had been used for Padmini’s wedding feast. The lawyer looked up with incredulity at the source of all this horror. In the winter sunshine, the Carbide plant stood glinting at a stone’s throw like one of Calder’s mobiles.
Ganga Ram surveyed the sahib with suspicion. This was the first American ever to come into Orya Bustee. Why was he there? What did he want? Was he some envoy from Carbide come to convey the company’s apologies? Was he the representative of some sect or religion wanting to say prayers for the dead and those who had survived? It would not be long before the survivors learned the purpose of his visit.
The American lawyer stood up. “Dear friends,” he said warmly. “I’ve come from America to help you. The gas killed people who were dear to you. It ruined the health of those close to you forever, possibly yours, too.” He pointed to the factory on the other side of the parade ground. “The Union Carbide company owes you reparation. If you agree to entrust the defense of your interests to me, I will fight for you to receive the highest possible compensation in my country’s courts.” The lawyer paused to allow his interpreters to translate his words into Hindi, then into Urdu and Orya.
A turbaned man wagged his head, relishing every word. Not for anything in the world would Pulpul Singh have missed this event. He was already contriving ways of diverting this prospective manna into his safe.
Yet the American was surprised at what little reaction his proposal seemed to engender. The faces before him remained set, as if paralyzed. Omar Pasha tried to reassure him, “Be patient, the gas damaged many of the survivors’ mental faculties.” This explanation further engaged the lawyer’s interest. He decided to question some of the victims. He wanted them to tell him about the dreadful night, to describe the suffering to him. He invited everyone to talk about those they had lost. Sheela Nadar, Iqbal, Dalima and Ganga Ram spoke in turn. Suddenly the ice was broken. Calamity found a face and a voice. Frank Davolta took notes and photographs. He felt his file taking shape, assuming a life, gaining weight. Each testimony moved him a little more. By now, he was breathing so heavily that he had to undo his tie and open his collar. Moved to pity, Dalima came to his rescue. She brought him a glass of water, which the American downed gratefully. He did not know that the water came from the well in Orya Bustee that had been poisoned by Carbide’s waste with lead, mercury, copper and nickel, and that the condemned of the Kali Grounds had been drinking it for twelve years.
While the baskets of snacks were passed around, the lawyer resumed his speech. “My friends,” he explained, “if you agree to my representing your interests, we must draw up a contract.”
Upon these words, an assistant passed him a file full of forms that he brandished at arm’s length. “These are powers of attorney,” he explained, “authorizing counsel to act in lieu of his client.” The residents of Orya Bustee who had never seen such documents, got up and thronged around the American’s table. Like thousands of other Bhopalis from whom American lawyers extracted signatures that day, they could not make out the words printed on those sheets. They were content just to touch the paper respectfully. Then Ganga Ram’s voice rose above the crowd. The former leper asked the question that was on every-one’s lips.
“Sahib, how much money will you be able to get for each of us?”
The lawyer’s features froze. He paused as if thinking, then blurted out, “No less than a million rupees!”
This unheard of figure struck the assembly dumb. “A million rupees!” repeated Ganga Ram, unable to hold back his tears.
The television lenses closed in on him as if he were Shashi Kapoor, star of the big screen. Cameras flashed.
“Are you surprised at the sum?” asked one reporter. “No, not really,” stammered the former leper. “Why not?” pressed the reporter.
Ganga pointed a fingerless hand at the pack of journalists jostling around him. “Because Carbide has made us the center of the world.”
No one will ever know exactly how many people perished in the catastrophe. Concerned with limiting the amount of compensation that would eventually have to be handed out, the authorities stopped the reckoning quite arbitrarily at 1,754 deaths. Reliable independent organizations recorded at least 8,000 dead for the night of the accident and the two following days.
In fact, a very large number of victims were not accounted for. Among them were many immigrant workers with no fixed address. Sister Felicity and several survivors from the neighborhoods on the Kali Grounds reported having seen army trucks on the morning of December 3 picking up piles of unidentified corpses and taking them away to some unknown destination. Over the next few days, numerous bodies were seen floating on the sacred Narmada River, whose sandy shores had helped to produce the first sacks of Sevin. Some of them drifted as far as the Arabian Sea, more than six hundred miles away; others fell prey to crocodiles.
In the absence of official death certificates, large numbers of corpses were incinerated or buried anonymously. Per the mufti’s order, grave digger Abdul Hamid found himself having to bury up to ten Muslims in the same grave. According to the restaurateur Shyam Babu, who supplied the wood for Hindu cremations, more than seven thousand corpses were burned on the Vishram Ghat Trust’s five funeral pyres. The Cloth Merchant Association, for its part, stated that it had supplied enough material to make at least ten thousand shrouds for the Hindu victims alone.
The authorities contested the accuracy of these figures on the grounds that they exceeded the number of claims filed for compensation. This official reaction did not, however, take into account the fact that in many instances the catastrophe had wiped out whole families and there was no one left to apply for damages. Over four hundred dead, whose photographs remained posted on the walls of Hamidia Hospital and elsewhere for several weeks, were never reclaimed by their families. Number 435 was a young woman with tattoos on her cheeks; 213 was an emaciated old man with long white hair; 611 was an adolescent with a bandaged forehead; 612 a baby only a few months old. Who were these people? We will never know.
Some groups now estimate that the gas from the beautiful plant killed as many as between sixteen and thirty thousand people.
More than half a million Bhopalis suffered from the effects of the toxic cloud, in other words, three in every four inhabitants of the city. * After the eyes and lungs, the organs most affected were the brain, muscles, joints, liver, kidneys and the reproductive, nervous and immune systems. Many of the victims sank into such a state of exhaustion that movement became impossible. Many suffered from cramps, unbearable itching or repeated migraines. In the bustees, women could not light their chulas to cook food without risk of the smoke setting off pulmonary hemorrhaging. Two weeks after the accident, a jaundice epidemic struck thousands of survivors who had lost their immune system defenses. In many instances neurological attacks caused convulsions, paralysis and sometimes coma and death.
More difficult to assess, but just as severe, were the psychological consequences. In the months that followed the disaster, a new symptom made its appearance. The doctors called it “compensatory neurosis.” A number of Bhopalis developed imaginary illnesses, but some neuroses were very real. The most serious psychological effect was ghabrahat, a panic syndrome that plunged patients into a state of uncontrollable anxiety with an accelerated heartbeat, sweating and shaking. Those suffering from it lived in a permanent nightmare state. People with a tendency toward vertigo suddenly saw themselves on the edge of a precipice; those who were frightened of water thought they were drowning. With its associated depression, impotence and anorexia, ghabrahat brought desolation to a large number of survivors, sometimes making them view the catastrophe as a divine punishment, or as a curse inflicted on them by some member of their family. Ghabrahat drove many to despair and suicide.
Today Bhopal has some one hundred and fifty thousand people chronically affected by the tragedy, which still kills ten to fifteen patients a month. Breathing difficulties, persistent coughs, ulcerations of the cornea, early-onset cataracts, anorexia, recurrent fevers, burning of the skin, weakness and depression are still manifesting themselves, not to mention constant outbreaks of cancer and tuberculosis. Chronic gynecological disorders such as the absence of menstrual periods or, alternatively, an increase to four or five times a month, are common. Finally, retarded growth has been noted in young people aged between fourteen and eighteen, who look scarcely ten. Because Carbide never revealed the exact composition of the toxic cloud, to this day medical authorities have been unable to come up with an effective course of treatment. Thus far, all treatments have produced only temporary relief. Often overuse of steroids, antibiotics and anxiolytics serves only to exacerbate the damage done by the gases. Today Bhopal has as many hospital beds as a large American city. Without enough qualified doctors and technicians to use and repair the ultramodern equipment, however, the vast hospitals built since the disaster remain largely unused. An inquiry carried out in July 2000 revealed that a quarter of the medicines dispensed by the Bhopal Memorial Hospital Trust, recently established with Carbide funds, were either harmful or ineffective, and that 7.6 percent were both harmful and ineffective.
So much official negligence has produced a rush of private medical practices. According to victims’ advocacy groups, however, two-thirds of these doctors lack the necessary skills. In light of this, several of these groups set up their own care centers such as the Sambhavna Clinic, with which the authors of this book are now associated. This unique institution, founded by a former engineer (see the Letter to the Reader) by the name of Satinath Sarangi, is staffed by four doctors and some twenty medical and welfare experts. Together, they monitor more than ten thousand economically disadvantaged patients, and see that they all receive effective treatment. The team at Sambhavna Clinic has discovered that certain yoga exercises can dramatically improve chronic respiratory problems. Half the patients thus treated have regained the ability to breathe almost normally and have been able to give up the drugs they had been taking for many years. The clinic also manufactures some sixty plant-based Ayurvedic medicines, which have already enabled hundreds of patients to resume some form of activity—a spectacular achievement that has wrested from poverty some of the fifty thousand men and women once too weak to do manual work.
So many years after the catastrophe, five thousand families in Chola, Shakti Nagar, Jai Prakash Nagar and other bustees are still drinking water from wells polluted by the toxic waste left by the factory. Samples taken by a Greenpeace team in December 1999 from the vicinity of the former installation showed a carbon tetrachloride level 682 times higher than the acceptable maximum, a chloroform level 260 times higher, and a trichloroethylene level 50 times higher.
No court of law ever passed judgment on Union Carbide for the crime it committed in Bhopal. Neither the Indian government, claiming to represent the victims, nor the American lawyers who had extracted thousands of powers of attorney from poor people like Ganga Ram, managed to induce a court on the other side of the Atlantic to declare itself competent to try a catastrophe that had occurred outside the United States. One of the American lawyers representing the Indian government had taken young Sunil Kumar, one of three survivors of a family of ten, to New York to try and persuade the judge before whom the case had been brought, to agree to try Carbide. It was the ambulance chaser’s view that only an American court could require the multinational to pay an amount commensurate to the enormity of the wrong. They sought damages of up to $15 billion. Carbide’s defense lawyers argued that an American court was not competent to assess the value of a human life in the third world. “How can one determine the damage inflicted on people who live in shacks?” asked one member of the legal team. One newspaper took it upon itself to do the arithmetic. “An American life is worth approximately five hundred thousand dollars,” wrote the Wall Street Journal. “Taking into account the fact that India’s gross national product is 1.7 percent of that of the United States, the court should compensate for the decease of each Indian victim proportionately, that is to say with eight thousand five hundred dollars.” * One year after the catastrophe, no substantial help from the multinational had reached the victims, despite the fact that Carbide had given $5 million in emergency aid. It took four long years of haggling before, in the absence of a proper trial, a settlement was drawn up between the American company and the Indian government. In February 1989, Union Carbide offered to pay $470 million in compensation, in full and final settlement and provided the Indian government undertook not to pursue any further legal proceedings against the company or its chairman. This was over six times less than the compensation initially claimed by the Indian government. The lawyers for the government nevertheless accepted the proposal without consulting the victims.
This very favorable settlement from Union Carbide’s perspective sent the company’s stock up two dollars on Wall Street, a rise that enabled Chairman Warren Anderson to inform his shareholders that in the final analysis, the Bhopal disaster only meant “a loss of forty-three cents a share” to the company. One week after the fateful night, Union Carbide shares had dropped fifteen points, reducing the multinational’s value by $600 million.
Most surprising was the psychological shockwave that the disaster triggered throughout every level of the company, from engineers like Warren Woomer or Ranjit Dutta, to ordinary workers, office employees or elevator boys in the various subsidiaries. At the head office in Danbury, secretaries burst into tears over telexes from Bhopal. Engineers, unable to comprehend what could possibly have happened, shut themselves away in their offices to pray. Local psychiatrists had employees of one of the world’s largest industrial companies come pouring in, in a pitiful state of depression and bewilderment. Many admitted to having lost confidence in “Carbide’s strong corporate identity.” There were similar reactions in Great Britain, Ghana and Puerto Rico, wherever, in fact, the flag with the blue-and-white logo was flying. Four days after the catastrophe, at midday on December 6, over 110,000 employees at the 700 factories and laboratories stopped work for ten minutes “to express our grief and solidarity with the victims of the accident in Bhopal.”
Anderson was so concerned by the crisis in morale of Carbiders the world over that he recorded a series of video messages intended to restore their confidence. These messages featured much discussion of ethics, morality, duty and compassion. The best way of getting things back on track, however, was still to show that the company was not guilty. On March 15, 1985, the vice president of the agricultural division of the Indian subsidiary, K.S. Kamdar, called a press conference in Bombay to announce that the tragedy had not been due to an accident but to sabotage. Kamdar based his statement on the inquiry carried out by the team of engineers sent to Bhopal the day after the disaster. According to this inquiry, a worker had deliberately introduced a large quantity of water into the piping connected to the tank full of MIC. This worker, who remained nameless, had supposedly acted out of vengeance after a disagreement with his superiors. To support this theory, the investigators had relied on the discovery of a hose close to tank 610 and, in particular, upon the doctoring of logbook entries made by the shift on duty that night. The report that supposedly incriminated a saboteur made no mention of the fact that none of the factory’s safety systems were activated at the time of the accident.
The authors of this book were able to identify and meet the man Union Carbide had accused. They talked to him at length. The man in question is Mohan Lal Varma, the young operator who, on the night of the disaster, identified the smell of MIC while his companions attributed it to an insecticide sprayed in the canteen. It is their deep-seated conviction that this father of three children, who was well aware of the dangers of methyl isocyanate, could not have perpetrated an act to which he himself and a large number of Carbide’s workers were likely to fall victim. His colleague T.R. Chouhan, wrote a book called Bhopal—The Inside Story, in which he points out large technical holes in Carbide’s sabotage story. Mohan Lal Varma’s innocence was, moreover, immediately recognized. No legal proceedings were ever instituted against him. Today he lives, quite openly, two hours outside Bhopal. If the survivors of the tragedy had had the slightest suspicion about him, would they not have sought vengeance? As it was, no one in Bhopal or elsewhere took the charge seriously.
Events would further conspire to refute it. Four months after the accident in Bhopal, on March 28, 1985, a methyl oxide leak at the Institute site in the United States poisoned eight workers. On the following August 11, another leak, this time from a tank holding aldicarb oxime, injured 135 victims in the Kanawha Valley. One of them was Pamela Nixon, the laboratory assistant at Saint Francis Hospital in South Charleston, who had noticed the smell of boiled cabbage years before. “I was among those who believed Union Carbide when they claimed that accidents like the one in Bhopal could not occur in America,” she told the press when she came out of the hospital. The incident had changed her life. She went back to college and joined the organization People Concerned About MIC, created by residents in her area. After which, armed with a degree in environmental sciences, she set out to take on the executives of the various chemical factories in the Kanawha Valley and compel them to tighten their safety measures. This was something that no one had done in Bhopal. The tragedy was bearing its first positive fruits.
In Bhopal, too, the victims organized themselves to defend their rights. Activists’ organizations rallied thousands of survivors to ransack Carbide’s offices in New Delhi and demand the immediate payment of the promised indemnities. Five years after the tragedy, its victims had still not laid hands on a single one of the $470 million they had been awarded.
Not surprisingly, so large a sum of money, even though placed in a special account administered by the supreme court, was a magnet for the greedy. Sheela Nadar, Padmini’s mother, had to pay out 1,400 rupees for a dossier establishing her husband’s death. Payment of baksheesh became obligatory in order to obtain access to the compensation desks or to the often very distant offices that handed out the first allocations of provisions and medical aid. In the final analysis, according to official figures, 548,519 survivors would eventually receive what was left of the money paid by Carbide: a little less than 60,000 rupees or approximately $1,400 for the death of a parent, and about half that in cases of serious personal injury. It was a far cry from the million rupees the New York lawyer had promised Ganga Ram and the Orya Bustee survivors.
Because the wind had been blowing in the direction of the bustees that night, it was the poorest of the poor who were most affected by the tragedy. Left to suffer, exploited by predators on all sides, the survivors soon found themselves subject to further persecution. Under the guise of a “beautification program” the new authorities used part of the moneys meant for the victims to empty the bustees of their Muslim population. Flanked by police, bulldozers razed several neighborhoods to the ground. Only the determination of about fifty Muslim women threatening to burn themselves to death succeeded in putting a temporary halt to the eviction of Muslims. But after a few days, they were all moved to Gandhinagar, outside the city. Iqbal, Ahmed Bassi and Salar, who had escaped the scourge of MIC, were driven out by the madness of men. Like most of the other Muslims living in the Kali Grounds neighborhood, they had to abandon their homes again—this time for good.
In 1991, the Bhopal court summoned Warren Anderson, Union Carbide’s chairman, to appear on a charge of “homicide in a criminal case.” But the man who was enjoying peaceful retirement in his villa in Vero Beach, Florida, did not keep the promise he had made to a journalist as he left Indian soil on December 11, 1984. Not only was he not returning to the country where his company’s factory had wrought disaster, but he actually managed to lower his profile within his own country. Anderson left Vero Beach, and his whereabouts are not publicly known. The international warrant for his arrest issued under Indian law remained unserved by Interpol. In March 2000, in response to a class-action suit by victims’ organizations in the federal court of the southern district of New York, Union Carbide’s lawyer William Krohley said the company will accept process served in the name of Anderson but will not disclose his whereabouts. These organizations remain undaunted, however, and do not intend to give up. The graffiti “HANG ANDERSON,”
which the survivors never tire of repainting on their city walls, are a reminder that justice has not yet been done.
If the Indian people believe Warren Anderson is a fugitive, the prospects of bringing Union Carbide to justice are just as unlikely, for the very good reason—albeit one of small consolation to the victims—that the multinational no longer exists. Despite all its chairman’s efforts, the tragedy on December 2, 1984, was the death of the proud company with the blue-and-white logo. The purchase of its agricultural division by the French company Rhône-Poulenc, now the proprietor of the institute’s Sevin factory, and the takeover in August 1999 of all of its assets, for the sum of $9.3 billion, by the Dow Chemical Group, meant that Union Carbide disappeared forever from the world’s industrial horizon. The initiators of the various legal proceedings launched against the Danbury multinational let it be known that they would hold Dow Chemical responsible for the charges levied against Carbide. Their claim was given short shrift. “It is not in my power,” declared Frank Popoff, Dow’s CEO, “to take responsibility for an event which happened fifteen years ago, with a product we never developed, at a location where we never operated.”
And what of the beautiful plant? One day in January 1985, shortly after Operation Faith, a tharagar turned up outside the teahouse in Orya Bustee.
“I’m looking for hands to dismantle the rails from the railway line leading to the factory,” he said.
The stretch of track linking the factory to the main railway line had never been used. It was a testimony to the megalomania of the South Charleston engineers who had arranged for the purchase of both a locomotive and freight cars to transport the enormous quantities of Sevin the factory was supposed to produce. Timidly, Ganga Ram, who had lost most of the customers of his painting business in the catastrophe, put up his hand.
“I’m looking for work,” he said, convinced that the tharagar would reject him when he saw his mutilated fingers.
But that day Carbide was taking on any available hands. The former leprosy sufferer would at last be able to have his revenge by helping to dismantle the monster that had once refused him employment.
For one year, Jagannathan Mukund headed the team assigned to closing down the factory, a Herculean task that involved cleaning every piece of equipment, every pipe, every drum and tank, first with water and then with a chemical decontaminant. These cleaned and scrubbed parts of the factory were sold off to small local entrepreneurs. In 1986, when the job was done, the last workmen wearing the once prestigious coverall with the blue-and-white logo left the site forever.
Today, the abandoned factory looks like the vestige of some lost civilization. Its metal structures rust in the open air. In the rough grass lie pieces of the sarcophagi that protected the tanks. On the control room walls, the seventy dials rest in eternal peace, including the pressure gauge for tank 610, with its needle stuck on the extreme left of the instrument, lasting testament to the fury of the MIC. The notices with the inscription “SAFETY FIRST” add a touch of irony to a scene of industrial devastation.
What was to be done with this mute but powerful witness? In 1997, India’s minister for culture suggested turning the whole of the Kali Grounds site into an amusement park. But the indignant outcry the proposal provoked caused the authorities to withdraw it. The accursed factory must remain there always, as a place of remembrance.
Fortunately, a privileged few managed to escape the misfortune that befell most of the tragedy’s victims. Orya Bustee’s bride and groom were among them. Miraculously resurrected after her rescue from the funeral pyre, Padmini was able to rejoin her loved ones after a long and painful recovery in Hamidia Hospital. She returned to Orya Bustee and set up home with her husband Dilip in her parents’ hut. Very soon, however, the nightmare of that tragic night began to haunt her to the point where she could no longer bear the place in which she had spent her adolescence. The mere sight of the metal structures mocking her from a few hundred yards away very nearly drove her insane. That was when an opportunity presented itself in the form of a plot of land for sale, about forty miles from Bhopal, near the banks of the Narmada River. The idea of returning along the trail that had once brought her family from Orissa to Bhopal filled the young Adivasi with enthusiasm. She persuaded her husband that they could make their home in the country, have a small farm and live on what they produced. Her mother and brother were prepared to go with them. The indemnity they had just received for the death of the head of their family made the relocation just about feasible.
Dilip and Padmini built a hut, planted soy, lentils, vegetables and fruit trees. Little by little they dug out an irrigation system. Like all the farmers in the area, they bought “medicines” from traveling salesmen to protect their crops from insects, especially from the weevils that liked to attack potatoes. These door-to-door salesmen did not, of course, offer Sevin. Instead they had pyrethrum-based pesticides, which had the advantage of being both cheap and generally effective, except when it came to soya bean caterpillars, which were a real nightmare.
One day in the autumn of 1998, Dilip and Padmini received a visit from a pesticide salesman they had never seen before. He was wearing a blue linen coverall with a badge on it. Padmini, who thanks to Sister Felicity had learned to read, had no difficulty in making out the name on the badge. It was that of one of the giants of the world’s chemical industry.
“I’m a Monsanto rep,” he declared, “and I’ve come to give you a present.”
With these words, the man took out of his motorized three-wheeler a small bagful of black seeds that he proceeded to place in Dilip’s hands. “These soya seeds have been specially modified,” he explained. “They contain proteins that enable them to defend themselves against all kinds of insects, including caterpillars …” Seeing that his audience was wide-eyed with interest, the man seized his opportunity: “I can also offer you sweet pepper seeds that are immunized against plant lice, alfalfa seeds treated against diseases affecting cows, sweet potatoes that …”
Their benefactor had brought the Indian peasant couple a whole catalog of miraculous products. All the same, there was nothing charitable about his visit. It was the result of a marketing campaign thought up some thirteen thousand miles away, in California, where Monsanto, leader in the latest biotechnical revolution, had its headquarters. Thirty years after Eduardo Muñoz and his Sevin, it was Monsanto’s turn to take an interest in the Indian market.
Padmini took the bag of seeds and went and placed them on the small altar with its image of the god Jagannath she had set up in the entrance to the hut, just next to a tulsi tree. Dilip and she would wait for the end of the monsoon to plant the little black granules. Of course, neither of them was aware that these marvelous little seeds had been genetically engineered not to reproduce. The soya beans they harvested would not supply the seeds for another crop. As to the health risks this transgenic engineering might represent, neither the Monsanto sales representative nor his new customers would even begin to think about them. Wasn’t India the perfect place for a new generation of sorcerer’s apprentices to conduct their experiments? If everything the salesman had told them was true, Padmini and Dilip were quite sure that their lives were going to change forever. They could burn incense to thank their god, for the future belonged to them.
WARREN ANDERSON—Chairman of Union Carbide at the time of the tragedy, he left the company in 1986 and retired to Vero Beach, Florida. Following complaints filed against him by the victims’ organizations and an Interpol warrant, he moved from his last home address and his whereabouts are not publicly known.
SHYAM BABU—The restaurateur who had promised to “feed the whole city” and who supplied the wood for the cremations, still presides over the till in his restaurant. His business has expanded with the opening of a four-story hotel above the Agarwa Poori Bhandar. At thirty rupees a room, Shyam Babu’s rates are still unbeatable.
SAJDA BANO—The widow of Mohammed Ashraf, the beautiful factory’s first victim, is yet to receive compensation for her husband’s death. She is fighting to collect what is still due to her for the death of her eldest son Arshad. Soeb, the younger son, is suffering from serious neurological and other disorders as a consequence of the catastrophe. Both live on the ground floor of a small cottage next to the “widows’ colony.” Sajda Bano and Soeb are treated in the Sambhavna institute that houses the gynecology clinic set up by Dominique Lapierre.
JOHN LUKE COUVARAS—The engineer whose wife was massaged by eunuchs, has nostalgic memories of those splendid days when he helped to build the beautiful plant. He is now living in Greece but dreams of building a house on the sacred banks of the Narmada River, near Bhopal.
SUMAN DEY—The operator on duty in the MIC control room on the night of December 2, 1984, set up a motorbikes workshop with the severance pay he received from Carbide. His unit is on the verge of closing down owing to business losses.
SHARDA DIWEDI—The managing director of the power station that supplied the lighting for the weddings on the fateful night retired and lives in Bhopal. He suffers from chronic shortness of breath, which he attributes to his efforts to save the guests at the wedding of his niece Rinu, whose marriage could only be celebrated several days after the catastrophe. Ten years later, her husband died of a cancer that the Diwedis see as a consequence of poisoning by the toxic cloud. As for Rinu, she suffers from recurrent bouts of depression. The catastrophe destroyed her life.
RANJIT DUTTA—The Indian engineer who, along with Eduardo Muñoz, built the first Sevin formulation factory and who tried, four months before the accident, to alert his superiors to the dilapidated state of the plant, retired to Bhopal. He works as a pesticide consultant for several chemical manufacturers.
DR. DEEPAK GANDHE—The doctor on duty at Hamidia Hospital on the night of the disaster left Bhopal to open a practice in the small town of Khandwa, on the route to Bombay. He devotes part of his time to humanitarian work in the poor areas of Bihar.
RAJKUMAR KESWANI—The Cassandra who predicted the catastrophe in his newspaper now works as a reporter for a New Delhi television network. He did not profit from the far-sighted articles that for a while made him India’s most famous journalist.
REHMAN KHAN—The poetry-loving factory worker, who became an instrument of destiny, still lives in Bhopal. He works for Madhya Pradesh’s forestry department.
COLONEL GURCHARAN SINGH KANUJA—The Sikh officer whose family was murdered while returning from a pilgrimage to Amritsar, and who, on the night of the disaster, saved hundreds of inhabitants of the poor neighborhoods near the Carbide factory from the gas, is now living in Jaipur. Ever since the fateful night, he has had breathing difficulties and is gradually losing his sight. In 1996, he tried to obtain financial assistance from Carbide to go to the United States for an eye operation that Indian specialists are unable to perform. Despondent at the prospect of becoming completely blind, this hero of that tragic night is still waiting for a response.
PROFESSOR N.P. MISHRA—The dean of the medical college who roused all the faculty students from their beds, telephoned all Madhya Pradesh’s pharmacists and arranged for emergency aid, is still Bhopal’s leading medical authority. He sees patients in his superb villa in Shamla Hills, plastered with diplomas and distinctions awarded by medical institutions all over the world. A notice displays the price of a consultation: one hundred and fifty rupees, approximately three dollars.
JAGANNATHAN MUKUND—Following the closure of the Kali Grounds plant, the factory’s last works manager left Bhopal to live in Bombay where, for several years, he went on working for Union Carbide. He retired to Karnataka, a southern state. He is still under indictment by an Indian court to stand trial for his role in the tragedy.
EDUARDO MUÑOZ—After running Union Carbide’s agricultural products division for several years, the flamboyant Argentinian engineer who fathered the Bhopal factory, moved to San Francisco where he now sells wine refrigeration cabinets.
PADMINI NADAR AND HER HUSBAND DILIP—see the Epilogue.
KAMAL PAREEK—The Indian engineer who left his beautiful plant because he could not bear to see its safety standards declining, now lives in New Delhi where he works as an independent consultant to the chemical industry.
SHEKIL QURESHI—The Muslim supervisor who was the last to leave the factory on the night of the catastrophe now runs a factory for production of alum used in purifying water. He is suffering from serious respiratory aftereffects. Like Mukund, he too is under indictment to stand trial for his role in the tragedy.
GANGA RAM—The leprosy and gas survivor has his small house-painting business running again. The Bhopal municipal government gave the occupants of Orya Bustee a plot of land less than a mile north of the Kali Grounds. The community settled there and has reconstructed a small, typically Orya village with mud huts decorated with geometric designs. Dalima is still very active, although she complains more and more about the effects of the severe fractures to her legs.
DR. SARKAR—The heroic doctor of the Railway Colony was found at death’s door in the stationmaster’s office. Since then he has suffered from a chronic cough and frequent attacks of suffocation. For years, he was convinced that pockets of gas left behind by the toxic cloud were still poisoning people. He retired in Bhopal, where he lives surrounded by his children.
DR. ASHU SATPATHY—The rose enthusiast and pathologist, who performed the first autopsies on the victims on the night of the tragedy, is now head of the department of forensic medicine at the Gandhi Medical College in Bhopal. He still grows roses, which he sends to all the Indian flower shows. Affected by the gases that had impregnated the clothing on the corpses, he now suffers from breathing difficulties. Because he did not live in the area hit by the toxic cloud, he never received any compensation.
V.K. SHERMA—The courageous deputy stationmaster who saved hundreds of passengers by making the Gorakhpur Express leave the Bhopal station, now lives in the suburbs of Bhopal. His injuries have turned him into an almost total invalid. His breathing is so labored that he can scarcely speak. The slightest physical effort causes terrible attacks of suffocation. The government paid him 35,000 rupees, a little over $740.
ARJUN SINGH—The chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, who dispensed property deeds to the occupants of the poor neighborhoods bordering on the Union Carbide factory, won the elections in February 1985 and became one of India’s most powerful politicians. Appointed vice president of the Congress party by Rajiv Gandhi, he was made a central government minister several times. He has lost his seat in the New Delhi parliament. He now divides his time between the capital and Bhopal where he has had a sumptuous residence built on the shores of the Upper Lake.
MOHAN LAL VARMA—The operator, accused of sabotage by Union Carbide, was never charged. Today he lives some sixty miles from Bhopal and works for Madhya Pradesh’s industries department.
WARREN WOOMER—The American engineer who supervised the training of the beautiful plant’s Indian engineers at Institute, is now living with his wife Betty in South Charleston. His house overlooks the Kanawha Valley. When Woomer goes out for a walk, he can see the outline of the Institute factory, where the tanks invariably contain several dozen tons of methyl isocyanate. Woomer has just written a history of Union Carbide’s industrial presence at Institute. He has remained a consultant for the factory, which now belongs to the Franco-German chemical company Aventis.
“All That Is Not Given Is Lost”
Solidarity Work that Dominique Lapierre
has Undertaken in Calcutta, Rural Bengal,
Ganges Delta, Madras and Bhopal
Thanks to royalties and my fees as a writer, journalist and lecturer, and thanks to the generosity of my readers and friends who support the organization I founded in 1982, it has been possible to initiate or maintain the following humanitarian work:
1. The assumption of complete and continuing financial responsibility for taking care, at the Udayan-Resurrection home in Barrachpore near Calcutta, of three hundred young boys and girls who have suffered from leprosy.
2. The assumption of total and continuing financial responsibility for 125 handicapped children in the Mohitnagar and Maria Basti homes, near Jalpaiguri.
3. The construction and equipment of the Backwabari home for severely mentally and physically disabled children.
4. The extension and reorganization of the Ekprantanagar home in a destitute suburb of Calcutta, which provides shelter for 140 children of seasonal workers at the brick kilns. The installation of a source of clean drinking water has transformed the living conditions in this home.
5. The creation of a school near the Ekprantanagar home to educate both the 140 children who live there and 350 very poor children from the nearby slums.
6. The reconstruction of several hundred huts for families who have lost everything in the cyclones that have hit the Ganges Delta.
7. The assumption of total financial responsibility for the Banghar SHIS medical center and its program to eradicate tuberculosis, which reaches out to more than two thousand villages. (Program staff holds nearly 100,000 consultations annually.) The installation of X-ray equipment in the main dispensary and the creation of several subsidiary medical centers and mobile units providing diagnostic X-rays, vaccinations, medical treatment and nutritional care.
8. The establishment of four medical units in the isolated villages of the Ganges Delta, which provide vaccinations, treatment for tuberculosis, programs in preventative medicine, patient education and family planning, as well as “eye camps” to restore sight to patients with cataracts.
9. The sinking of tube wells for drinking water and the construction of latrines in several hundred villages in the Ganges Delta.
10. The launching of four floating dispensary-boats in the Ganges Delta to bring medical aid to the one million isolated inhabitants of fifty-four islands.
11. In Belari, the assumption of financial responsibility for a rural medical center that serves more than 90,000 patients a year from hamlets devoid of any medical care; the construction and assumption of responsibility for the ABC center for physically and mentally handicapped children; the construction of a village for 100 destitute or abandoned mothers and children; with a home where mentally sick women are taken care of.
12. The creation of several schools and medical (allopathic and homeopathic) in two particularly poverty-stricken slums on the outskirts of Calcutta.
13. The construction of a “City of Joy” village to house homeless tribal families.
14. The installation of solar-powered water pumps in ten very poor villages in the states of Bihar, Haryana, Rajasthan and Orissa, to enable the inhabitants to grow their crops even in the dry season.
15. The assumption of financial responsibility for a job-training workshop for leprosy sufferers in Orissa.
16. The provision of medicines as well as 70,000 high-protein meals for the children who live at the Udayan Resurrection home.
17. Various undertakings for the underprivileged and leprosy patients in the state of Mysore; abandoned children in Bombay, in Palsunda, near Bangladesh and in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; as well as the occupants of a village in Guinea, Africa, and abandoned and seriously ill children in a hospital in Lublin, Poland.
18. The creation and financing of a gynecology clinic in Bhopal to treat underprivileged women who are survivors and victims of the 1984 chemical disaster. The purchase of a colposcope to detect and treat cervical cancers.
19. The dispatching of emergency teams and aid to victims of the terrible floods in Orissa and Bengal; an ongoing program to house thousands of families who lost everything.
20. Since 1998, the assumption of financial responsibility for part of Pierre Ceyrac’s education program for 25,000 children in the Madras region.
How You Can Help to Continue the
Work among Some of the World’s Most
Underprivileged Men, Women and Children
Because of lack of resources, the association Action Aid for Lepers’ Children in Calcutta, which I founded in 1982, can no longer meet all the urgent needs, which the various Indian organizations that we have been supporting for the last twenty years, have to provide for.
In order to continue financing the homes, schools, clinics and development programs run by the admirable men and women who have devoted their lives to serving the poorest of the poor, we need to find fresh support.
We have, furthermore, an ongoing serious worry. What would happen if tomorrow we were to have an accident or if illness were to prevent us from meeting the budgets for the centers that depend on us?
There is only one way to address this danger, and that is to turn our association into a foundation.
The capital from this foundation would have to be able to provide the annual revenue necessary to finance the various humanitarian projects that we support. To generate the 500,000 dollars needed each year, we would need an initial capital sum of at least 10 million dollars.
How are we to raise that sort of capital if not through the contributions of a multitude of individuals?
Ten million is ten thousand times a thousand dollars. For some people it is relatively easy to give a thousand dollars to a good cause. Some people could probably give even more.
But for the vast majority of friends who have already spontaneously given us a donation after reading The City of Joy, Beyond Love or A Thousand Suns or after hearing one of my talks and who often faithfully keep up their generous support, it is much too large a sum.
One thousand dollars, however, is also twice five hundred dollars or four times two hundred and fifty, or five times two hundred dollars, or ten times a hundred dollars, or even a hundred times ten dollars.
Such a sum can be raised from several people at one person’s initiative. By photocopying this message, by spreading the word, by joining with other family members, friends or colleagues, by setting up a chain of compassion and sharing, anyone can help to keep this world alive and bring a little justice and love to the poorest of the poor. Alone we can do nothing, but together all things are possible.
The smallest gifts count for just as much as the largest. Isn’t the ocean made up of drops of water?
A big thank you in advance from the bottom of my heart, for everyone’s support, whatever their means.
P.S. We would like to remind readers that the association Action Aid for the Lepers’ Children in Calcutta has no administration costs. The totality of the money from the authors’ royalties and of the donations received from readers is sent to the centers for which it is donated.
Donations to support Dominique Lapierre’s humanitarian
action can be sent to: “ACTION POUR LES ENFANTS DES LÉPREUX DE CALCUTTA” (Action Aid for Lepers’ Children of Calcutta) Care of: Dominique & Dominique Lapierre «Les Bignoles», Val de Rian, F-83350 Ramatuelle, France website: www.cityofjoyaid.org
Banking transfers can be made directly to:
Banque Nationale de Paris (BNP), Agency Paris Kléber 51, Avenue Kléber, F-75116 Paris, France Bank Code: 30004 — Agency Code: 00892 Account Number: 00001393127 — Clé Rib: 21 IBAN: FR76 3000 4008 9200 0013 9312 721
For taxpayers in the USA, tax-deductible contributions can be sent to:
“CITY OF JOY AID, Inc.”
Taxpayer Identification Number: 54-1566941 Care of Marie B. Allizon 7419 Lisle Avenue, Falls Church, VA. 22043, USA Telefax: +1 (703) 734.69.56
Dominique Lapierre’s organization has NO overhead costs. Each donation received goes entirely to serve a priority action.
Photo credits
All photos are from the authors’ collection except: p. 4–5: coll. Eduardo Muñoz; p. 6 (top): coll. Zahir Ul Islam; p. 6 (bottom)–7: coll. Niloufar Khan; p. 8 (top): coll. John Luke Couvaras; p. 13–14 (up)–15–16 (top; left bottom): coll. Jamaini.
* A lentil purée that is the main source of vegetable protein in India.
† Wheat pancakes.
‡ A small, rudimentary oven.
* Literally “four legs,” a bed made out of rope strung across a wooden frame.
* A ceremonial offering in front of the altar of a god.
† Diwali, the festival of lights celebrated with an explosion of fireworks and firecrackers, is the most joyous festival in the Hindu calendar. Dassahra, the tenth day of the festival of Durga celebrating the goddess’s victory over the buffalo demon of ignorance.
* A long garment worn by Muslim women, completely concealing the body and face.
* Pieces of material draped around the thighs and between the legs.
* A bustee is a poor neighborhood of makeshift shacks.
* Wheel of destiny.
* Small balls of coal and straw used as fuel for cooking food.
* A bribe.
* Literally “big arms,” ruffians.
* This smell of boiled cabbage was to take hold in the magic valley. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) revealed that, between January 1, 1980, and the end of 1984, at least sixty-one leakages of methyl isocyanate occurred at the Institute factory. The management of the factory had not brought most of these leaks to the attention of the people living in the valley, on the grounds that they did not pose a real health threat or exceed the legally accepted standards for toxic emissions in the atmosphere.
* Namaste or namaskar, literally “to prostrate oneself.” A salutation involving pressing the hands together at the level of one’s heart or face. The degree of respect shown is measured by the height at which the hands, which may be raised as high as the forehead, are held.
* Canonical law.
* A wise or learned man.
* The elephant-headed god of prosperity.
* According to the magazine India Today of April 15, 1989, more than three thousand little girls a year are delivered into prostitution on the occasion of the festival of Makara Sankrauti in the state of Karnataka alone.
* When the palace was demolished, the magnificent Venetian crystal chandeliers that illuminated the feasts held by the nawab were taken down and stored in packing cases. The authors of this book have never been able to recover any trace of them.
* Hindu ascetics.
* Horse-drawn carts.
* Niche indicating the direction of Mecca and, therefore, of prayer.
* Poetic couplets.
* Muslim law, which obliges women to conceal their faces and bodies from the eyes of men.
* Affectionate abbreviation of “sahib.”
* Property title deeds.
* A term of respect; from “sardar,” or “chief.”
* Although originally from the region that was to become Bangladesh, and despite having spent part of his life in the United States, Europe and the largest cities of India, it was to Bhopal that Ranjit Dutta returned to retire.
* A large land owner.
* “Long live!” in Hindi and Urdu.
* Exactly 521,262 people according to the Indian Medical Research Counsel. This figure does not include victims who were not permanent residents of Bhopal, all those of “no fixed abode” or members of nomadic communities. Nor does it include those victims indirectly affected by the tragedy, such as children still in their mothers’ wombs, or those subsequently born to parents poisoned by the gas.
* “Averting a Bhopal Legal Disaster,” Wall Street Journal, May 16, 1985.
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