Five Past Midnight in Bhopal (25 page)

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.

F
ourteen 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.”