Five Past Midnight in Bhopal (5 page)

As soon as he saw the little caravan approaching, the man seized his walking stick and went out to meet it. He was a hefty
fellow of about fifty with a curly mop of hair and sideburns that joined the drooping ends of his mustache.

“Welcome, friends!” His soft voice belied his imposing appearance. “I guess it’s a roof that you’re after here!”

“A roof would be a lot to hope for,” stammered Ratna Nadar apologetically, “but perhaps just somewhere for me and my family
to camp.”

“My name is Belram Mukkadam,” the stranger announced, pressing his hands together in front of his chest to greet the little
group. “I run the Committee for Mutual Aid for neighborhoods on the Kali Grounds.” He pointed in the direction of the string
of sheds and huts on the edge of a vast empty expanse along the railway line. “I’ll show you where you can settle and build
yourself a hut.”

Mukkadam was not an Adivasi, but he spoke the language of the people of Orissa. Thirty years earlier he had been the very
first person to settle on the wasteland on the northern side of the city, bordering on what had once been the immense parade
ground of the Victoria lancers, the cavalry regiment of the nawabs of Bhopal. The hut he had built with the help of his wife
Tulsabai and their son Pratap had been the first of the hundreds that now made up three neighborhoods of improvised homes,
in which several thousand immigrants from different Indian regions lived. Apart from the Orya Bustee, there was the Chola
Bustee and the Jai Prakash Bustee. Chola means “chickpea.” It was by planting chickpeas that the first occupants of the Chola
Bustee had escaped starvation. As for Jai Prakash, it was named after a famous disciple of Mahatma Gandhi who had taken up
the cause of the country’s poor.

His position as dean of the three bustees had earned Belram Mukkadam a special prerogative, one never contested by the various
godfathers of the local mafia who controlled those poor neighborhoods. And since there was no municipal authority to intervene,
Mukkadam was the one who allocated newcomers the plots on which to make their homes.

Leading the Nadar family along a path that ran beside the railway track, he pointed to an empty space at the end of a row
of huts.

“There’s your bit of ground,” he said, tracing a square three yards by three yards in the dark earth with his tamarind stick.
“The Committee for Mutual Aid will bring you materials, a char-poy and some utensils.”

Once more Ratna Nadar prostrated himself on the ground to thank this new benefactor. Then he turned to his family.

“The great god’s anger is spent,” he declared. “Our
chakra
^*
is turning again.”

Orya Bustee, which Padmini and her family would now call home, was the poorest of the three poverty-stricken neighborhoods
that had grown up along the parade ground. In the labyrinth of its alleyways, one sound singled itself out from all the others:
that of coughing. Here, tuberculosis was endemic.

There was no electricity. There was no drinking water, no drainage and not even the most rudimentary hospital or clinic. There
were scarcely even any vendors, except for a traveling vegetable salesman and two small tea stalls. The sweet milky tea sold
in clay beakers was an important source of energy for many of the local residents. Apart from four skeletal cows and several
mangy dogs, the only other animals were goats. Their milk provided precious protein for their owners, who, in winter, had
no reservations about swaddling their animals in old rags to prevent them from catching cold.

Yet for all its poverty, Orya Bustee was unlike any of the other slums. Firstly, it had managed to maintain a rural feel,
which contrasted with the jumble of huts made out of planks and sheet metal in the other neighborhoods. Here all the dwellings
were made out of bamboo and mud. These
katcha,
or “crude earth,” houses were decorated with geometric designs drawn in rice paste to attract prosperity, just as they were
in the villages of Orissa. These houses gave this area of concentration-camplike congestion an unexpected rural charm. The
former peasants who had taken refuge there were not marginalized people. In their exile they had managed to reconstruct their
village life. They had built a small temple out of bamboo and baked mud to house an image of the god Jagannath. Next to it,
they had planted a sacred
tulsi
, a variety of arborescent basil with the power to repel reptiles, especially cobras with their deadly venomous bite. The
neighborhood women were particularly devoted to Jagannath: those suffering from sterility would make offerings to him in the
hope to be cured. Here, as elsewhere in India, faith manifested itself in an uninterrupted succession of ritual festivities.
A boy’s first tooth, his first hair cut; a girl’s first period, engagement, marriage, mourning; Diwali, the festival of lights,
the Muslims’ Eid and even Christmas—all of life’s events, all festivals secular or religious, were publicly marked. For all
their lack of education and material poverty, the Adivasis of Orya Bustee had managed to maintain the rites and expressions
of the social and religious life that made up the rich and varied texture of their homeland.

T
he crime committed by the infamous aphids in the Mudilapa fields would not go unpunished. All over the world armies of scientists
and researchers were working relentlessly to destroy the miniature monsters. One of the chief temples dedicated to the crusade
against the insects was an agronomical research center in Yonkers, a residential suburb of New York City on the banks of the
Hudson River. It was called the Boyce Thompson Institute.

The man who founded this institute was a billionaire with a messianic desire to commit his wealth to some great humanitarian
cause. William Boyce Thompson (1869–1930) had amassed a huge fortune from copper mining in the mountains of Montana. In October
1917 the American Red Cross had made him a colonel and placed him in charge of an aid mission to Russia, then in the throes
of the Bolshevik revolution. The generous industrialist had swapped his bow tie and top hat for a military uniform, and added
a million dollars of his own money to the funds produced by the American government for the victims of the Russian famine.
He came back from his journey convinced that world peace depended on the equitable distribution of food, a conviction that
was reinforced by his ardent faith in science and which led to the formulation of a spectacular philanthropic project. Because
population growth was going to increase the need for food, it was vitally urgent to understand “why and how plants grow, why
they flourish or decline, how their diseases can be stemmed, how their development can be stimulated by better control of
the elements that enable them to live.” The study of plants, so the generous patron claimed, could make a decisive contribution
to humanity’s well-being.

Out of this conviction was born, in 1924, the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research, an ultramodern agronomical research
center, built on several acres of land less than an hour from downtown New York City. Endowed by its founder with $10 million—a
considerable sum at the time—the institute incorporated chemistry and biology laboratories, experimental greenhouses and insect
vivaria.

It was on the front line of the battle against plant-eating species that the Boyce Thompson Institute researchers achieved
their first significant victories: they eradicated the beetles killing Californian pines by inventing a subtle, sweet-smelling
substance that lured the destructive little creatures into fatal traps.

At the beginning of the 1950s the
Aphis fabae
wrought havoc on the farmlands of the United States, Mexico, Central and South America. Found also in Malaysia, Japan and
southern Europe, the
Aphis fabae
attacked potatoes, cereals, beetroot and fruit trees, as well as vegetables, animal fodder and garden plants. This tiny predator
has a beak equipped with two very fine piercing stylets with which it sucks the sap from plants. As the Indian farmer Ratna
Nadar would so painfully discover, plants abruptly deprived of their vital substance wither and perish in days. Before going
in for the kill, this aphid, scarcely bigger than a pinhead, injects its victim with toxic saliva, causing hideous deformation
of the stalks and leaves. To finish off the job, it exudes from its rectum honeydew to attract ants. These ants deposit a
sootlike residue on the leaves, which stifles any growth.

This was not the only nightmare parasite to afflict American and Asian farmers at that time. The red vine spider, a species
of armyworm and the striped stem-borer joined forces with other destructive insect species to deprive humanity of a large
part of its agricultural resources. Only the chemical industry could come up with a means of eradicating such a scourge. Conscious
of all that was at stake, a number of companies went into action. One of them was American. Its name was Union Carbide.

Born at the beginning of the century of a marriage of four companies that produced batteries and arc lamps for acetylene street
lights and headlights for the first cars, Carbide—as it was affectionately known by its staff—owed its first glorious hour
to World War I. It was helium from its stills that enabled tethered balloons to rise into the skies above France and spot
German artillery fire; it was iron- and zirconium-based armor-plating of its invention that thwarted the Kaiser’s shells on
the first Allied tanks; it was Carbide’s active carbon granules in gas masks that protected the lungs of thousands of infantrymen
in the trenches of the Somme and Champagne. Twenty-five years later, another world war was to enlist Carbide’s services for
America. Out of its collaboration with the scientists of the Manhattan Project, the first atomic bomb was born.

In less than a generation the absorption of dozens of other businesses propelled the company to the forefront of America’s
multinationals. By the second half of the century it was among the mightiest of U.S. companies, with 130 subsidiaries in some
40 countries, approximately 500 production sites and 120,000 employees. In 1976 it was to announce a revenue of $615 billion.
The products that emerged from its laboratories, factories, pits and mines were innumerable. Carbide was the great provider
of industrial gases such as nitrogen, oxygen, carbon, methane, ethylene and propane used in the petrochemical industry, as
well as chemical substances like the ammonia and urea used in the manufacture of fertilizers, among other things. It also
produced sophisticated metallurgical items based on alloys of cobalt, chrome and tungsten that were used in high-tensile equipment
such as airplane turbines. Finally, it made a whole range of plastic goods for general use. Eight out of ten American housewives
did their shopping with plastic bags stamped with the blue-and-white logo of Union Carbide. The logo also appeared on millions
of plastic bottles, food packaging, photographic film and many other everyday items. The intercontinental telephone conversations
of half the planet’s inhabitants were conducted via underwater cables protected with sheathing made by Carbide. The antifreeze
for one in every two cars, 60 percent of batteries, 60 percent of silicone implants used in cosmetic surgery, the rubber for
one in every five tires, most aerosol fly and mosquito sprays, and even synthetic diamonds issued from the factories of a
giant whose shares were among the safest investments on Wall Street.

From its imposing fifty-two-story aluminum and glass skyscraper at 270 Park Avenue in the heart of Manhattan, Carbide determined
the habits and dictated the choices of millions of men, women and children across the five continents. No other industrial
company enjoyed the same degree of respectability. After all, didn’t people say that what was good for Carbide was good for
America—and therefore the world?

The production of pesticides was in line with its past and its experience. The objective—to rid humanity of the insects that
were stealing its food—could only enhance its international prestige.