Five Past Midnight in Bhopal (6 page)

T
hey looked more like Davis Cup players than laboratory researchers. Thirty-four-year-old Harry Haynes and thirty-six-year-old
Herbert Moorefield, both vigorous and fit-looking men, belonged to a profession that was relatively new. They were doctors
of entomology. In July 1954, Union Carbide’s management had rented an entire wing of the Boyce Thompson Institute in Yonkers
for these two eminent experts. It had further strengthened the team by adding to it one of the most brilliant staff members
of its South Charleston, West Virginia, research center, thirty-eight-year-old chemist Joseph Lambrech. To these three exceptionally
gifted people the company entrusted a mission of the utmost importance: Devise a product capable of exterminating a wide range
of parasites while adhering to prevailing standards for the protection and safety of humans and the environment. That summer,
on the top floor of the multinational’s New York office, no one was in any doubt: the company that managed to reconcile these
two objectives would walk away with the world pesticide market. Lambrech gave the object of his labors a code name: Experimental
Insecticide Seven Seven. For convenience’s sake it would soon become “Sevin.”

Going through all his predecessors’ studies with a fine-tooth comb, the chemist combined new molecules, hoping to find one
that would kill aphids, red spiders and armyworms without leaving too many toxic residues in the vegetation and environment.
For months on end, his entomologist colleagues tested his combinations on leaves, stems and ears of corn infested with all
kinds of insects. In its hundreds of cages and containers, the Boyce Thompson Institute harbored an unimaginably rich zoo
of the infinitely small. It also had acres of glass houses in which all the climates of the planet could be recreated around
a limitless variety of plants. In large glass cases the different molecules could be tested with sprays of varying doses,
directed from every possible angle at samples of every variety of crop. The entomologists Haynes and Moorefield would then
deposit colonies of insects raised in their laboratories on the treated surfaces. Hour by hour they would observe their subjects’
agony. They collected the corpses on glass slides, examined them under the microscope, and subjected the plants and soil to
detailed analysis to find any traces of chemical pollution. Their observations would enable their chemist colleague to hone
the production of an insecticide ever nearer to what was required.

After three years of intense effort the team came up with a combination of a methyl derivative of carbamic acid and alpha
naphthol, in the form of whitish crystals soluble in water. Those three years had been taken up with hundreds of experiments,
not just on all known species of insects, but also on thousands of rats, rabbits, pigeons, fish, bees and even shrimps and
lobsters. Finally, one evening in July 1957, the three zealots in Yonkers, together with their wives, were able to crack open
a bottle of champagne. Although the god DDT had had to be cast down, agriculture would not remain defenseless. Sevin, born
on the banks of the Hudson, would soon put a weapon in the hands of all the farmers of the world.

Carbide was quick to flood America with brochures proclaiming the birth of its miracle product. There was no end to the praises
sung to it. To underline its “low toxicity to humans,” photographs depicted Herbert Moorefield, one of the inventors of Sevin,
in the process of tasting a few granules with all the glee of a child licking his chocolate-coated lips. According to the
publicity, Sevin protected an infinite range of crops: cotton, wheat, lemons, bananas, pineapples, olives, cocoa, coffee,
sunflowers, sorghum, sugar cane and rice. You could spread it on maize, alfalfa, beans, peanuts and soybeans right up until
harvest time, with no danger of any toxic residues. It worked just as well on adult insects as it did on eggs and larvae.
It was so effective that it even poisoned parasites that had developed resistances to other insecticides. Its potency was
not limited to agricultural crops. A few ounces of Sevin spread around the outside of a home, or sprayed on the walls, frame
or roof, exterminated mosquitoes, cockroaches and other bugs harmful to family life. Better still, Sevin controlled the number
of fleas, lice and ticks on dogs, cats and farmyard animals, without putting their lives at risk. In short, Sevin was precisely
the lucrative panacea that Carbide’s new agricultural products division had been waiting for.

No one was more convinced of this fact than a twenty-nine-year-old Argentinian agronomical engineer. Handsome and charming,
Eduardo Muñoz came from a well-to-do Buenos Aires family. He had chosen to pursue agronomy as an act of defiance after he
failed the entrance examination for the diplomatic service. He had married an attractive American girl who worked at the United
States embassy, and so found among his wedding presents the perfect incentive to set off for new pastures, the celebrated
green card. Out of the fifty offers he received when he sent off his curriculum vitae, he chose the first. It came from Union
Carbide. A year’s training on the various company sites and a monthly salary of $485 had turned the handsome Argentinian into
a proper “Carbider.” The invention of Sevin was to provide him with the opportunity to exercise his extraordinary talents
as a salesman. In Mexico, Columbia, Peru, Argentina, Chile, Brazil … soon there was hardly a single farmer who was not aware
of the merits of the American pesticide. Agricultural fairs, harvest competitions, farmers’ meetings—Muñoz was everywhere
with his banners glorifying Sevin, his on-site demonstrations, his handouts and his sponsored lotteries. It was almost inevitable
that Central and South America would one day become too restrictive for the indefatigable traveling salesman. He would have
to find other places in which to satisfy his passion for selling.

H
ere, brother, it is cheaper to sweat a fellow to death than hire a buffalo,” remarked Belram Mukkadam to Padmini’s father
who had just come back from a day’s work on the railway line.

The sturdy date-palm climber from Orissa was reeling with exhaustion. All day long he had carted sleepers and heavy steel
tracks from one place to another. The coolies the railway management had recruited were all immigrants like him, forced into
exile by the poverty of the countryside.

From the outset, this slave labor had been terrible. Ratna Nadar grew weaker by the day, stricken with nausea, cramps, bouts
of sweating and dizziness. His muscles wasted visibly. Soon he had difficulty standing. He suffered from hallucinations and
nightmares. He was the victim of what specialists call “convict syndrome.” The small quantity of rice, lentils and occasional
fish that he bought before leaving for work in the morning was for him. It is a tradition among India’s poor that the family
food be kept for the rice-earner. Even so, the frequent lack of cooking fuel prevented him from eating it. Several weeks passed
before Ratna felt his strength returning. Only then could the whole family eat.

For Padmini and her brother Gopal, the brutal immersion in the overpopulated world of city workers was just as painful. Every
day they saw sights that shocked the sensibilities of children raised in the countryside.

“Gopal, look!” cried Padmini one morning, pointing to a gang of youngsters scaling the back of a stationary train.

“They’re out to pinch bits of coal,” Gopal explained calmly.

“They’re thieves!” Padmini was indignant, furious that her brother did not share her outrage. Her eyes filled with tears.

“Dry your eyes, little one!” a grown-up voice commanded. “You too will pick up coal to make
ladhus.
^*
If you don’t, your mother won’t be able to cook anything for you to eat.”

The man who had just spoken had no fingers left on his right hand. Padmini and her parents would come to know and respect
this prominent figure in Orya Bustee. At thirty-eight, Ganga Ram was a survivor of leprosy, a disease that still afflicts
five million Indians today. Thrown out on the streets by the owner of the garage in Bombay where he used to wash cars, Ram
had ended up in the communal ward of Hamidia Hospital in Bhopal. He had been treated and cured, and had a certificate given
to him by a doctor to prove it. Uncertain where to go and what to do, for seven years he had remained in the wing for contagious
diseases, performing small services for the nurses and patients. He had applied dressings, changed the incontinent, administered
enemas and even given injections. One day, he was called upon to transport an attractive woman of about thirty with luminous
green eyes. A truck had broken both her legs. Her name was Dalima, and it was love at first sight. During her stay in the
communal ward, Dalima had adopted a ten-year-old orphan who had been found half dead on a sidewalk. He had been taken to the
hospital in a police van. His name was Dilip. Lively and alert, this skinny urchin with short-cropped hair was the darling
of the occupants of the communal ward. A few weeks later, the former leper, Dalima and young Dilip left the hospital to settle
in Orya Bustee. There, with the tip of his walking stick, Belram Mukkadam had assigned them a place on which to build a hut.
Some of the neighbors provided bamboo canes, planks and a piece of canvas; others brought cooking utensils, a charpoy and
a little linen. “All we had by way of luggage were Dalima’s crutches,” Ganga Ram recalled.

For months they survived on Dilip’s resourcefulness alone. He was the one who inveigled the neighborhood children into pinching
bits of coal fallen from the locomotives. One morning, he persuaded Padmini to go with him.

“You have to hurry up, little sister. The railway police are on the lookout.”

“Are they nasty?” The little girl was worried.

“Nasty!” The boy burst out laughing. “If they catch you, be prepared to give them a fat
baksheesh.
^*
Otherwise they’ll take you away in a van and there …” Dilip made a gesture that the little peasant girl did not understand.

When they got back from their expedition, the slum midwife, the elderly Prema Bai, who lived in the hut opposite the Nadars,
gave her young neighbor a little straw and some nanny-goat droppings.

“Crumble the coal with the straw and the droppings and knead the whole lot together for a good while,” she instructed. “Then
make little balls out of it and put them to dry.”

An hour later Padmini took the fruits of her harvest triumphantly to her mother.

“Here you are, Mother: ladhus. Now you’ll be able to cook Father’s food.”

For peasants used to the sovereign silence of the countryside, the din of the trains passing in front of their huts was a
painful trial. Their lives revolved around the rhythm of the incessant coming and going of dozens of trains. “I got to know
their timetable, to know whether they were on time or late,” Padmini recalled. “Some of them, like the Mangala Express, made
our huts shake as they roared past in the middle of the night. That was the worst one. The Shatabdi Express to Delhi went
by in the early afternoon and the Jammu Mail just before sunset. The drivers must have had fun, terrifying us with the roar
of their whistles.”

There were some advantages to being so close to the railway tracks. When a red light brought a train to a halt outside the
huts, the engineers would throw a few coins for the children to run and buy them some
pan
, a betel leaf filled with spices that is chewed. There was always some small change left over.

“Watch where you put your feet when you’re walking between the rails,” Dilip advised Padmini. “That’s where people go to take
a crap.”

Fortunately, the tracks were also strewn with a multitude of small treasures that people on the trains had thrown away. There
were bottles, old tubes of toothpaste, dead batteries, empty tins, plastic soles, shreds of clothing and tags to be picked
up. Dilip used to negotiate a price for them with a ragpicker who came around every week. The daily takings could be as much
as three or four rupees, about ten cents. Dilip and Gopal, Padmini’s brother, would cut out the picture of the Taj Mahal from
Magnet cigarette packs and make playing cards, which they sold on the station platforms. “I shall never forget the Orya Bustee
trains,” Padmini would say. “They brought a little excitement and joy into our difficult life.”