Five Past Midnight in Bhopal (3 page)

Ratna Nadar, Padmini’s father, hesitated. “Perhaps she wants to give us a well,” he ventured.

Already, the man in uniform had turned to someone else. “And you?”

“She’s going to make us a proper road.”

“And you?”

“She wants to provide us with electricity.”

“And you? …”

In less than a minute, the government envoy was in a position to assess the state of poverty and neglect in the village. But
he was not concerned with any of these pressing needs. Heightening the suspense with a protracted silence, at last he continued:
“My friends, I’ve come to inform you that our beloved Indira has decided to give every family in Mudilapa a cow.”

“A cow?” repeated several stupefied voices.

“What are we going to feed it on?” someone asked anxiously.

“Don’t you worry about that,” the visitor went on. “Indira Gandhi has thought of everything. Every family is to receive a
plot of land on which you’ll grow the fodder you need for your animal. And the government will pay you for your labors.”

It was too good to be true.

“The gods have visited our village,” marveled Padmini’s mother. She was always ready to thank heaven for the slightest blessing.
“We must offer a
puja
^*
at once.”

The government envoy continued his speech. He spoke with all the grandiloquence of a politician coming to dispense gifts before
an election.

“Don’t go, my friends, I haven’t finished! I have an even more important piece of news for you. The government has made arrangements
for each one of your cows to give you a calf from semen taken from specially selected bulls imported from Great Britain. Their
sperm will be brought to you from Bombay and Poona by government vets who will themselves carry out the insemination. This
program should produce a new breed in your region, capable of yielding eight times more milk than local cattle. But take note
that to achieve this result, you will have to undertake never to mate your cow with a local bull.”

The bewilderment on the faces of the onlookers had been replaced by joy.

“Never before have we had a visit from a benefactor like you,” declared Ratna Nadar, sure that he was relaying the gratitude
of them all.

The day the herd arrived, the women dug out their wedding saris and festival veils from the family coffers as if it were the
Diwali or Dassahra
^†
celebrations. All night long they danced and sang around the animals, who joined in with a concert of mooing.

The Nadars named their cow after Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth to whom the Adivasis were as fervently devoted as Hindus.

Just as the government envoy had announced, a few weeks later, vets arrived in Mudilapa. They came bearing fat syringes to
inseminate the cows with British sperm. Ten moons later, in the yard outside every hut in the village, a calf made its entry
into the world. But the villagers’ joy lasted only one night. Not one of the young calves managed to get to its feet and suckle
from its mother. Sheela tried in vain to induce the starving newborn to drink a little milk out of a coconut shell. One after
another, all the calves died. It was a disaster.

“I’m going to take Lakshmi to a local bull,” Ratna Nadar told his family one morning. “It’s because their fathers aren’t from
around here that our calves died,” he said.

His neighbors decided to do the same but the attempt proved fruitless. The government agents had taken their own precautions.
To prevent the peasants from having their cows inseminated by a local bull, they had had them all castrated.

The inhabitants of Mudilapa took heart once more when they saw the young shoots they had sown for their cows on the half-acre
allotted to them by the government sprouting from the ground. At least they would be able to feed their cattle. Every morning
Ratna Nadar took his family to the field to watch over the welfare of the future harvest. One day, they noticed that the grass
had changed color. It had turned gray. It couldn’t be for want of water; the soil was still damp from the last rains. On careful
examination of the stems, Ratna, and every other farmer in the village, discovered that they were infested with black aphids
that were devouring the stalks’ outer layers and sucking up the sap. Calamity had struck Mudilapa. Was Jagannath angry? The
Nadars and their neighbors went to ask the village priest to offer a puja to the great god in order that their fields might
be restored to health. Without fodder, their cows would die. The old man with his shaven head traced a circle around a few
shoots and began to dance, chanting the ritual prayers. Then he sprinkled them with
ghee
, clarified butter, and set fire to them one by one.

But Jagannath refused to hear. Consumed by aphids, the Nadars’ fodder died in a matter of days. It was September and they
would not be able to sow again until the following spring. Soon their cow was reduced to skin and bone. The region’s cattle
merchants got wind of the catastrophe. Like vultures they descended on Mudilapa, buying the animals dirt cheap while they
were still alive. The Nadars had to resign themselves to letting Lakshmi go for fifty rupees, a little over a dollar.

The sale enabled them to hold out for a few more weeks. When the elderly Shunda, the grandmother who kept the family savings
wrapped up in a handkerchief, had got out her last few coins, Ratna gathered his family around him.

“I’m going to the moneylender,” he declared. “I shall give him our field as security for his lending us something to live
on until next seed-time. This time we’ll sow corn and lentils. And we’ll find a way of preventing those cursed little creatures
from devouring our harvest.”

“Ratna, father of my children,” Sheela interrupted timidly, “I’ve hidden it from you until now so as not to worry you, but
you must know that we no longer have a field. One day when you were away, working in the palm grove, the government people
came and took back all the plots of land they found with no crops on them. I tried to tell them that insects had eaten what
we had planted, but they would not listen. The man in charge shouted ‘You’re useless!’ and tore up the papers they gave us
when they brought us the cows.”

The family fell silent, the despair palpable. Then a child’s voice rang out in the overheated hut.

“I’ll go back to rolling bidis,” declared Padmini.

Her courageous offer would not be accepted. A few days later, an unknown tharagar turned up in Mudilapa. He had been sent
by the Madhya Pradesh Railroad to recruit a workforce to double the railway lines into the station in Bhopal, the state capital.

“You could earn as much as thirty rupees a day,” he told Ratna Nadar, carefully examining the date-palm climber’s muscles
with a professional eye.

“What about my family?” asked Nadar.

The tharagar shrugged his shoulders.

“Take them with you! There’s plenty of room in Bhopal!” He counted the number of people in the hut. “There you go. Six train
tickets for Bhopal,” he said, taking six small squares of pink paper out of his
lunghi
, a long cotton loincloth knotted at the waist. “It’s a two- to three-day journey. And on top of that, here’s a fifty-rupee
advance on your first wages.”

The tharagar was not being generous; the Adivasis were known to be as undemanding as they were exploitable.

The deal was done in five minutes. The Nadar family’s exodus posed hardly any problems. Apart from a few tools, linens and
household utensils and Mangal, the irrepressible parrot with his red and yellow plumage, they had no possessions. The next
monsoon storms would demolish the hut, unless some passing family happened to take possession of it in the meantime.

One morning, just as Surya, the sun god, was casting his first pink rays over the horizon, the Nadars set off, with Ratna
and his father, Prodip, leading the way. They all carried bundles on their heads. The small caravan, to which other Mudilapa
families had attached themselves, left a cloud of dust behind it. Young Gopal, the parrot cage in hand, pranced for joy at
the prospect of adventure. Padmini, however, could not hold back tears. Before the road veered away to the north she looked
back over her shoulder for one last time and bade farewell to the hut that had been her childhood home.

T
he misfortune of the peasants from Mudilapa was just one tiny episode in a tragedy affecting the entire planet. The black
aphids that had driven the Nadars from their land were among eight hundred and fifty thousand varieties of insects—which,
since the dawn of humanity, have been stripping us of our food supply. Many of their names give scant indication of the nature
and magnitude of the disasters they cause. How, after all, would anyone ever suspect the oriental fruit moths, red-banded
leaf rollers, rosy apple aphids, striped stem-borers or indeed white-backed plant-hoppers, of such capacity for destruction?
With their flamboyant carapaces and their elaborate and varied weapons, these parasites are among the most fabulous creatures
in the bestiary of God’s imagination. The dazzling iridescence of some fruit-eating moths is reminiscent of glittering, bejeweled
apparel and quite unlike the hairy coat of the repulsive caterpillars that destroy cotton fields. Every species has its own
method of surviving, to the detriment of its prey. There are insects that suck, like Mudilapa’s Indian aphids. Then there
are pulp-eaters, plant-eaters and wood-eaters. Some grind up their prey with their mandibles, some suck it dry with a long
proboscis, others lick it before sucking it up through a sheath encircling their tongue and yet others stab it with a “dagger,”
then pump out the sap. Some nibble at leaves, gnawing them into crenallated shapes or puncturing them with little holes. Others
invade the leaf canals and spread themselves through the veins. Dense foliage suddenly finds itself riddled with whitish spots
that harbor armadas of assailants the size of pinheads. All at once, healthy, vigorous plants find themselves covered with
brownish powdery pustules, which cause them to wither and die.

The muscular, ballerinalike thighs of Mexican bean beetles enable them to jump from stem to stem like circus acrobats, while
yellow stem-borers haul themselves over leaves as laboriously as tortoises. The beetles that kill grains are threadlike; the
tipulas that destroy vegetables look like mosquitoes engorged with blood. Moths with shimmering, scaly, double wings that
live on lentils, hairy thrips that kill olive trees, scarlet acarus worms that are the terror of the orchard—all form part
of a sinister, infinitely small jungle teeming with life.

Because of their unlimited capacity to adapt, these insects are found in any environment or latitude, from the blazing sands
of the African desert to the Arctic ice floes. Some have been responsible for many of humanity’s worst catastrophes: the grasshoppers
that plagued ancient Egypt; the phylloxera aphid that wiped out the French vineyards at the end of the last century; the Colorado
beetle that caused the Irish potato famine.