Five Past Midnight in Bhopal (16 page)

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.

T
he 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.”