Five Past Midnight in Bhopal (7 page)

One of these joys came from an unexpected source. Every morning, Padmini’s mother and her neighbors would take up their positions
along the railway line to wait for the arrival of the Punjab Express. On their heads they carried buckets, bowls and basins.
As soon as the train stopped, they would rush to the engine.

“May the great god bless you!” they would call out in a chorus to the engineer. “Will you turn on your tap for us?”

If he was kindly disposed, the driver would undo the valve on his boiler and fill their containers with a few gallons of a
commodity to which few of Bhopal’s poor had access: hot water.

D
ilip had an eye for these things. He saw at once that the hut built by Ratna Nadar and his family would never survive the
onslaughts of the monsoon.

“You should double the roof supports,” he advised Padmini.

The little girl gave a gesture of helplessness.

“We haven’t even the money to buy incense sticks for the god,” she sighed. “It’s three days since Grandpa and Grandma have
eaten. They refuse to sacrifice the parrot.”

Dilip took a five-rupee note out of his shorts.

“There,” he said, “that’s an advance on our next treasure hunt along the railway track. Your father will be able to buy two
bamboo poles.”

That same year, on the other side of the world, in a lush valley in West Virginia, a team of Union Carbide engineers and workmen
were putting in the girders for a new factory destined to be the multinational’s flagship. The Kanawha Valley had long served
as a fief of the company with the blue-and-white logo. Curiously enough, it owed its nickname of “Magic Valley” to the most
ordinary of resources: its salt beds. With reserves of almost a billion tons, the area had attracted people and animals since
prehistoric times. Salt had made wild animals carve pathways through the forest to the saline pools along the river. It had
sent Indians along the same routes in pursuit of game, then provided them with the brine in which to preserve their kill.
In the seventeenth century, it had drawn a few intrepid explorers to an otherwise inhospitable region, for white gold was
not the magic valley’s only trump. The ancient forests that covered it had provided the material necessary to build houses,
as well as boats and barges in which to transport the salt, carts, bridges and mill wheels. An entire lumber industry had
grown up along the Kanawha. Connecting directly with the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, the river gave the valley’s merchandise
and travelers access to the center and the south of the country.

At the beginning of the first world war, the valley was also found to contain prodigious energy resources. The discovery of
oil, coal and natural gas had precipitated the Kanawha into the world of the chemical industry. The 1920s had seen the region’s
woodlands replaced by forests of metal chimneys, towers, flares, reservoirs, platforms, and pipe and tube work. These new
factories belonged to giants like Du Pont de Nemours, Monsanto and Union Carbide. It was there, on its Institute site, and
in its research center a few miles away from the peaceful little town of South Charleston, that Carbide’s chemical engineers
had come up with the innumerable innovative products that were to transform the lives of millions. Turning chemistry into
the Mr. Fix-it of everyday life, they had helped to revolutionize products as varied as fertilizers, medicines, textiles,
detergents, paints, film … The list was endless but, because the chemical industry is not quite like any other, the revolution
had its price. Many of the substances that go into these workaday goods are as dangerous as the radiation produced by the
nuclear industry. Ethylene oxide, involved in the manufacture of automobile antifreeze, is potentially as deadly as plutonium
dust. Phosgene, one of the components currently used in the production of fertilizers, killed thousands of World War I soldiers.
Hydrogen cyanide, a gas with a pleasant almond smell and used in medicines, was adopted by a number of American prisons to
execute those condemned to death. In its Kanawha Valley factories, Carbide alone produced two hundred chemical substances,
many of which, like chloroform, acrylonitrile, benzene and vinyl chloride, are known or suspected carcinogens.

Like its competitors, Carbide devoted substantial sums to maintaining the safety of its staff and a strict policy of environmental
safeguards. Chemical companies operating in the Kanawha Valley did not hesitate to award themselves certificates of good conduct,
even as their toxic wastes were insidiously poisoning the lush countryside. Although their policy to protect the environment
was widely reported by complacent medias, it didn’t always keep them out of court. Carbide was fined several times for pouring
highly carcinogenic substances into the Kanawha River and the atmosphere. An inquiry conducted in the beginning of the 1970s
revealed that the number of cancers diagnosed among the occupants of the valley was 21 percent higher than the national average.
The incidences of lung and endocrine cancer, and leukemia in particular, were among the highest in the country. One study
carried out by the state of West Virginia’s health department found that people living in areas downwind of the South Charleston
and Institute factories presented twice as many cancerous tumors as the national average. Such concerns would not, however,
prevent Carbide from constructing on its Institute site a completely innovative factory to facilitate the manufacture of the
revolutionary insecticide the company wanted to distribute throughout the world—Sevin.

This high-tech project modified the procedure that the three researchers at the Boyce Thompson Institute had used to invent
Sevin. It introduced a chemical process that would both substantially reduce production costs and eliminate waste. The manufacturing
process involved making phosgene gas react with another gas called monomethylamine. The reaction of these two gases produced
a new molecule, methyl isocyanate. In a second stage the methyl isocyanate was combined with alpha naphthol to produce Sevin.
More commonly known by its three initials, MIC, methyl isocyanate is without any doubt one of the most dangerous compounds
ever conceived by the sorcerer’s apprentices of the chemical industry. When toxicologists had tested it on rats, the results
were so terrifying that the company banned their publication. Other experiments had shown that animals exposed to MIC vapors
alone died almost instantaneously. Once inhaled, MIC destroys the respiratory system with lightning speed, causes irreversible
blindness and burns the pigment of the skin.

German toxicologists had dared to conduct further tests by subjecting voluntary human guinea pigs to minute doses of MIC.
Although disapproved of by the scientific community, these experiments did make it possible to determine the threshold of
tolerance of exposure to MIC, in the same way that the level of tolerance to nuclear radiation had been established. The research
was all the more helpful because thousands of workers making synthetic foam products, such as insulation paneling, mattresses
and car seats, found themselves in daily contact with other isocyanates, cousins of MIC. Thanks to its new factory, Carbide
could conceivably sell MIC to all those manufacturers who used isocyanates, but who were reluctant to take on the dangers
involved in their production. Most important of all, with a more affordable supply, the American company could consider selling
Sevin all over the world.

T
HE BHOPAL TEA HOUSE
. There was something faintly comical about the sign. Its faded letters were displayed across the facade of a booth made out
of planks, and stood opposite the entrance to Orya Bustee. There, amid the nauseating smell of frying fat, the traditional
sweet tea with milk, millet flour fritters, minced chilies and onions, rice and dhal, chapatis and other kinds of griddle
cakes were served. Its main trade, however, was in “country liquor,” or
bangla
, a local rotgut made out of fermented animal intestines, of which the teahouse sold gallons every day. A notice in English
warned clients that the establishment did not give credit: YOU EAT, YOU DRINK, YOU PAY, YOU GO. The proprietor, a potbellied
Sikh with bushy eyebrows, rarely showed himself. Although he was an important local figure, forty-five-year-old Pulpul Singh
made his presence felt elsewhere. As the local moneylender for the three bustees, he practiced his trade from behind the heavy
metal grilles of his two-story modern house at the entrance to Chola. Enthroned like a Buddha in front of his Godrej-stamped
safe and two immense chromos of the Golden Temple of Amritsar and a portrait of Guru Nanak, the venerable founder of the Sikh
community, Pulpul Singh exploited the economic misfortunes of the poor. To recover his debts, he had hired a convict on the
run from a Punjabi prison. With a filthy turban on his head and his dagger ever at the ready, this villain was the terror
of small borrowers. He had the protection of the police, whom he bribed on behalf of his master. So hated was he that his
master could no longer allow him to run his drinks stall. Instead he employed the man most respected by the local people,
Belram Mukkadam, whose walking stick had marked out the site for all the residents’ huts.

Founder of the Committee for Mutual Aid, which combated injustice and fought to relieve the worst cases of distress, Mukkadam
was a legend in his own lifetime. For thirty years he had battled ceaselessly with corrupt officials, shady politicians, property
agents and all those who wanted to get rid of the ghettos on the belt of land north of town. Because of him the date August
18, 1978, would become famous in the history of Bhopal. On that day, Mukkadam would lead two thousand poverty-stricken people
to invade the local parliament and demand the cancellation of an eviction operation planned for the next day. He would encourage
the poor to hold their heads high to strengthen their spirit of resistance, and he gathered around him men united regardless
of religion, caste or background, who formed a sort of informal government for the bustees.

Despite the fact that a yawning divide separated this local hero from the sordid activities of his employer, Mukkadam had
agreed to take on the management of the Bhopal Tea House because it provided him with a forum. Around its handful of tables
reeking with alcohol, people could publicly discuss their affairs and better organize their response to any imminent danger.

The little girl bounded toward the disheveled looking man who had just appeared at the end of the alleyway, staggering like
a drunk.

“Daddy, Daddy!” she cried as she ran toward her father.

Clearly, he had stopped at Belram Mukkadam’s teahouse. Although he was not a drinker, Padmini’s father had downed a few glasses
of country liquor. It was an indication that something serious had happened. Padmini threw herself at his feet.

“The railway work is finished.” Ratna Nadar spoke with difficulty. “They’ve thrown us out.”

On that winter’s day more than three hundred coolies had suffered the same fate. There were no employment laws to protect
temporary workers. They could be laid off at any time without notice or indemnity. For the Nadars, as for all the other families,
it was a terrible blow.

“My father tried desperately to find another job,” Padmini would recount. “Every morning, he would set off in the direction
of Berasia Road in the hope of meeting a tharagar who would take him on for a few hours or a few days to pull carts or carry
materials. But there wasn’t any building work going on that winter. Once again our stomachs began to rumble.”

One evening when the whole family was preparing to go to bed without food, Sheela surprised them. She lined up all their bowls
on the beaten earth floor and filled them with a glutinous gruel, generously sprinkled with aromatic curry powder.

“Be careful not to swallow the little bones,” she cautioned.