Five Past Midnight in Bhopal (2 page)

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

The City of Bhopal

A N
EW
S
TAR IN THE
I
NDIAN
S
KY

M
udilapa. 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?”