Five Past Midnight in Bhopal (15 page)

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.”

A
merican 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.