Five Past Midnight in Bhopal (35 page)

While other marriage ceremonies were taking place in all four corners of the city, several hundred people were preparing to
pay tribute to the goddess of poetry in Spices Square.

The organizers of that Sunday evening’s mushaira had given their program particular luster by inviting one of the most famous
Urdu language poets. Jigar Akbar Khan was a legend in his own lifetime. In Bhopal he had such a following that a taxi driver
had once abducted him to force him, at gun point, to give a private recital. Jigar could declaim more than fifty ghazals in
a single evening. Whenever he appeared, his audience went into a frenzy. His sublime incantations, his sonorous voice— sometimes
caressing, sometimes imploring—were magical. It was common knowledge that the elderly bearded poet enveloped in his shawl,
was a hopeless drunkard, but what did that matter? Bhopal was indebted to him for too many nights of exaltation not to forgive
him. It was said that one of his disciples had actually left his wife on their wedding night in order to accompany the master
poet back to the railway station and put him on his train. Just as the train was pulling away, the waggish Jigar had grabbed
hold of his admirer and prevented him from jumping back onto the platform. The newlywed had not returned to Bhopal for a year,
a year spent following his idol from festivals to mushairas across India.

With their hands outstretched toward the speaker in a gesture of offering, eyes closed upon some vision of ecstasy, gently
shaking their heads in approval, the audience greeted each verse with an enthusiastic “
Vah
!”, or “Marvelous!” A slight chilly breeze blowing from the north nipped at their flesh, but exaltation warmed bodies as well
as souls.

Was it a premonition? The elderly poet began his recital with a verse about the suddenness of death:

Death which appears

Like a silent dragonfly

Like the dew on the mountain

Like the foam on the river

Like the bubble on the spring.

T
HREE
S
ARCOPHAGI
U
NDER THE
M
OON

I
n their reinforced concrete tomb, the three tanks, two yards high and thirteen long, looked like enormous sarcophagi left
behind by some pharaoh. They lay, half buried, side by side, at the foot of the metal structures on view to Dilip and Padmini’s
wedding guests. They had no names on them, only numbers: 610, 611, 619. These tanks were masterpieces of the most advanced
metallurgy. No acid, liquid or corrosive gas could eat into their shells, which were made out of SS14 stainless steel. At
least, that was the theory: methyl isocyanate had not yet revealed all of its secrets. A complex network of pipes, stopcocks
and valves linked the tanks to each other and to the reactors that produced the MIC and Sevin. To prevent any accidental leakage
of their contents into the atmosphere, each tank was connected to three specific safety systems. The first was a network of
fine piping contained in the tank’s lining. When freon gas flowed through it, the MIC would be constantly refrigerated to
a temperature close to 0° C. The second was a monumental cylindrical tank called a “decontamination tower.” It contained caustic
soda to absorb and neutralize any escaping gas. The third was a 120-foot-high flare. Its role was to burn off any effluents
that might have escaped the barrage of caustic soda.

That December 2, 1984, there were sixty-three tons of methyl isocyanate in the tanks—a “real atomic bomb right in the middle
of the plant” as the German chemist from Bayer had described it to Eduardo Muñoz—and not one of the three safety systems was
operational. The refrigeration had been off for a month and a half and the MIC was being kept at the ambient temperature,
about 20° C in a winter month. The alarm that was supposed to go off in case of any abnormal rise in temperature in the tanks
had been disconnected. As for the decontamination tower and the flare to incinerate the gases, several of their components
had been dismantled the preceding week for maintenance.

No mention was made of it in the technical handbooks, but there was a fourth safety device. Neither corrosion nor cutbacks
could put this one out of commission because the only power source this funnel-shaped piece of material needed was the breath
of the winds. The wind sock fluttering over the factory supplied the plant workers with an essential piece of information:
the wind direction. Lit up at nightfall, it was visible from all workstations. The occupants of the surrounding neighborhoods,
however, could not see it. No one had thought to fly another one over their bustees.

There were further grounds for concern. With forty-two tons of MIC inside, tank 610 was almost full, and that was in absolute
violation of Carbide’s safety regulations. The tanks were never meant to be filled to more than half their capacity, just
in case a solvent had to be injected to stop a chemical reaction. Tank 611, next to it, contained twenty tons of MIC. As for
the third tank, 619, which was supposed to remain empty to act as an emergency tank in case the other two suffered an accident,
it contained one ton of MIC.

Since October 26, the day on which the factory stopped production, the contents of these tanks had not been analyzed. That
was another serious breach of regulations. Methyl isocyanate is not an inert substance. Because it is made up of multiple
gases, it has a life of its own and is constantly changing and reacting. Was the MIC inside the three tanks still the “pure,
clear mineral water” Shekil Qureshi, Pareek’s young assistant, had admired? Or had it been polluted by impurities likely to
cause a reaction? Broken down by heat, the MIC could then emit all kinds of gases, including the deadly hydrocyanic acid.
In the event of a leak, these gases of varying densities would form toxic clouds that would spread at different speeds and
on several levels, saturating a vast area in one fell swoop.

With the level of deterioration the plant had reached, someone should have been anticipating the worst. Moreover, there were
indications that strange things were going on in tank 610 as well as in the apparatus next to it. Twice in succession, on
November 30 and December 1, operators had tried to transfer some of the forty-two tons of MIC to the unit that was still manufacturing
Sevin on a batch basis. In an operation of this kind, the contents of the tank had first to be pressurized by introducing
nitrogen, a routine process in a properly maintained factory. But the beautiful plant was no longer in very good shape. Because
of a defective valve, the nitrogen escaped as fast as it was put in. The valve was not replaced, and the forty-two tons of
MIC were left in a tank that had not been properly pressurized. This meant that potential contaminants could get into the
tank without meeting any resistance, and thus trigger an uncontrollable chemical reaction.

Rehman Khan was a twenty-nine-year-old Muslim who seldom parted from his embroidered skullcap, even when wearing his safety
helmet. Originally from Bombay, he had moved to Bhopal to get married. His wife worked as a seamstress in the workshop that
made Carbide’s coveralls. It was thanks to her that, after a brief training period, he had joined the MIC production unit
as an operator. He had been working there for four months and earned a monthly salary of 1,400 rupees, a comfortable amount,
given his lack of experience and qualifications. Like most of the 120 workers also on the site that evening, he had practically
nothing to do. The factory’s production of MIC had been stopped. Khan was part of the second shift, and was on duty until
twenty-three hundred hours. A passionate lover of poetry, as soon as his shift was over he intended to go to Spices Square
for the grand mushaira being held in honor of the festival of Ishtema. To kill time that dreary winter’s evening, he had been
playing cards with some of his comrades in the canteen when an urgent telephone call summoned him to the duty supervisor,
Gauri Shankar, a tall bald Bengali who seemed extremely irritated.

“That lazy maintenance team hasn’t even managed to flush out the pipes!” he grumbled.

Shankar was referring to the pipework that carried the liquid MIC produced by the plant’s reactors to the tanks. Highly corrosive
in nature, methyl isocyanate attacks pipes, leaving scoria deposits on their lining. High pressure jets of water had constantly
to be sent into the piping to get rid of these impurities, not just because they would eventually block the flow, but above
all because they could get into the storage tanks and contaminate the MIC.

Shankar brandished the logbook for the MIC production unit. “Here are the instructions left by A.V. Venugopal,” he explained.
“The production supervisor wants us to flush the pipes.”

Khan knitted his thick eyebrows. “Is it absolutely necessary to do it this evening? The plant’s stopped. I would have thought
it could wait till tomorrow. Don’t you think?”

Shankar shrugged his shoulders. He had no idea. In truth neither he nor Venugopal the supervisor were knowledgeable about
the factory’s very complex maintenance procedures. They had both only just arrived there, one from Calcutta, the other from
Madras. They knew virtually nothing about MIC or phosgene apart from their very distinctive smells. Like the former superdirector
Chakravarty, the only industry they were familiar with was the one that produced Carbide’s fortune in India: batteries.

In his note, the supervisor had given succinct instructions as to how the requisite washing operation should be carried out.
He stipulated that it should begin with the cleaning of the four filters and the circuit valves. He went on to supply a list
of stopcocks to be turned off to prevent the rinse water from entering the tanks containing the MIC. But he had forgotten
to recommend one crucial precaution: the placing of solid metal discs at each end of the pipes connected to the tanks. Two
segments of the pipework had only to be disconnected and the discs slid into the housings provided for the purpose, then the
whole thing bolted up again. The process required a little less than an hour. Only the presence of these “slipbinds” as the
engineers called them, could guarantee that the tanks were hermetically sealed. The valves and stopcocks under attack from
corrosion could not, alone, ensure their insulation.

Rehman Khan set to work by closing the main stopcock. It was a complicated process because the stopcock was located three
yards off the ground, at the center of a tangle of pipes that were difficult to get to. Bracing himself against two girders,
he put all his weight on the handle that closed the stopcock, yet he still could not be sure that he had managed to seal it
completely, so rusted and corroded were the metal parts. After that, he climbed back down to turn off the other stopcock and
start flushing. He had only then to connect a hosepipe to one of the draincocks on the pipework and turn on the tap. For a
few seconds he listened to the water rushing vigorously into the pipes and noted the time in the logbook: it was eight-thirty.

The young operator quickly realized that something unusual was going on: the injected water was not, as it should have been,
coming out of the four draincocks provided for the purpose. Khan tapped them lightly with a hammer and discovered that the
filters in two of them were blocked with metal debris. He immediately cut off the water supply and alerted his supervisor
by telephone. The latter did not arrive for quite a while, and when he did, his lack of experience meant he was not much help.

He simply instructed Khan to clean the filters on the evacuation draincocks well, and turn the water back on. “With the pressure
of the flow, they’ll let the water out eventually.”

The young Muslim agreed, with some reservations. “But if the water doesn’t come out through the draincocks, it’ll go somewhere
else,” he suggested.

The supervisor failed to grasp the vital implications of this remark. “We’ll just have to see!” he replied, clearly irritated
that he had been disturbed for something so trivial.