Five Past Midnight In Bhopal Part 7

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 quant.i.ty 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 circ.u.mstances 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 quant.i.ty 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 doc.u.ments, 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 northnortheast. 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 m.u.f.fled 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 Ba.s.si.

"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 a.s.sembly. 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 a.s.sure 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.ds 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 b.l.o.o.d.y little ..." His throat constricted with emotion.

"You've got it, brother," confirmed Rahul. Pointing a bejeweled hand at the illuminated factory, he a.s.sumed 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 G.o.d on the small altar at the end of the alleyway. It was then that a potbellied individual with a s.h.a.ggy 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 a.s.sure 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.

26.

"You Will Be Reduced to Dust"

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 coa.r.s.e 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 a.s.sistants 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 lese-majeste; 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 Inst.i.tute 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 Rajk.u.mar Keswani belonged to a family originally from the province of Sind, who had come to Bhopal after the part.i.tion 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 gra.s.s 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 Rajk.u.mar Keswani with the technical arguments he needed to drop his journalistic bombsh.e.l.l. 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 doc.u.ment 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 Rajk.u.mar Keswani in the headline of his first article, published on September 17, 1982. Ill.u.s.trating 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 Ca.s.sandra, he had been given the gift of predicting catastrophe, but not that of persuasion. His first article pa.s.sed 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 ent.i.tled, "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 pet.i.tion requesting the closure of the factory. Neither of the two letters received a reply.

27.

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 pa.s.sage of the years, Ganga Ram had become, like Belram Mukkadam and the G.o.dfather 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.sionate 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 a.s.sembly. 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 a.s.sembly 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 st.u.r.dy young man of eighteen who worked as a painter with his stepfather. He was known to have only one pa.s.sion: 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 c.o.c.kroaches, 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 pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.ses, 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 s.p.a.ce 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, a.s.sistant 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 s.p.a.ce 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, c.o.c.kroaches, 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 pa.s.sages 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 pa.s.sed 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.

28.

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 grat.i.tude.

The American did know, however, that there were only two circ.u.mstances 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 Muoz, 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 quant.i.ty 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 succ.u.mbed to the magic of India. They promised themselves that they would return. The American was not aware of Rajk.u.mar 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 dest.i.tute families on the outskirts of the Bhopal bustees. A ma.s.sive influx of untouchables, the outcasts whom Gandhi had baptized "harijans, children of G.o.d" 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 G.o.dfather Omar Pasha with his two wives and his sons, the sorcerer Nilamber, the shoemaker Iqbal, the tailor Ba.s.si 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 k.u.mar 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 Muoz 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.