Five Past Midnight in Bhopal (8 page)

They all understood what she was saying. She had cooked the parrot.

The next morning, Padmini saw Dilip in the doorway to her lodging.

“Come with me and I promise you no one in your hut will ever go hungry again,” he declared.

The little girl surveyed the boy’s torn clothes with concern. His shorts and shirt were stained with blood.

“Where do you want to take me?” she asked, worried.

Dilip pointed to the amulet he wore around his neck. “Don’t be frightened. With this we won’t be in any danger.”

They walked along the railway line in the direction of the station. On the way, Dilip stopped at a pile of garbage and began
to scratch furiously at it.

“Look, Padmini!” he exclaimed, brandishing two small brushes he had just unearthed. “These’ll earn you lots of rupees.”

At the station Dilip met up with the members of his gang.

“Hi there, boss!” called out one of the urchins, who was also armed with a small brush.

“No luck, the Delhi train’s late,” announced another boy.

“And the one from Bombay?” asked Dilip.

“Not announced yet,” replied a third who was wearing a little Muslim round cap on his head. The gang members belonged to all
different faiths.

Dilip introduced Padmini to his companions who nodded their heads in admiration.

“With such a pretty mouse, we’re bound to make a fortune!” laughed the eldest.

The sound of a whistle cut short their conversation and spurred the small group to activity. Dilip dragged Padmini along by
the hand and into the line to the other platform. The man who had blown the whistle was an inspector with the railway police.
He and another policeman were about to launch themselves after the gang when Dilip raised his arm.

“I’m coming!” he called out.

Clambering over the rails with feline agility, he joined the policemen. Padmini saw her friend slip a bill discreetly into
the inspector’s hand. Such bribery was standard practice. As the young man completed his transaction, the Delhi train arrived.
The gang members spread themselves along the platform, dividing the various cars between them. Dilip pushed Padmini toward
the first open door. He pointed out to her the rows of seats onto which the passengers were piling.

“Get down on all fours, crawl along with your brush, and pick up anything you can find,” he told her. “But hurry up! We have
to get off at the next stop to come back to Bhopal!”

Padmini sneaked under the first row of seats, working as frantically as if she were prospecting for gold. Between the feet
of one of the passengers, she noticed a piece of chapati. “I was so hungry I lunged at it and swallowed it,” she admitted.
“Luckily people had also thrown away some banana skins and orange peels.” The little sweeper quickly gathered all this and
more. At the first stop, she and her gang took an inventory of their findings.

“Guess what I’ve got in my hands,” she cried, holding her closed palm in front of the boy’s eyes.

“A diamond the size of a cork!”

“Idiot!” laughed Padmini, opening her hand to reveal two small five-paisa coins. “I’ll be able to buy my father two bidis.”

“Well done!” said Dilip with obvious excitement. He took from his waist a sock, a used battery, a sandal and a newspaper cone
full of peanuts. “I’ll sell all this to my usual ragpicker. He should give me three or four rupees.”

That evening Dalima’s son brought his young accomplice a ten-rupee note. He had generously rounded up the amount he had received
from the ragpicker.

Padmini caressed the note for a long moment. Then she sighed, “We’re saved.”

Soon Padmini had her favorite trains and knew all their conductors. Some of them would give her a rupee or two and sometimes
a biscuit when they came across her during one of her sweeps. But there were also the
big dadas
^*
in Bhopal station. Always out for a fight, they would try and take whatever the sweepers had collected. They were in cahoots
with the police and if Dilip did not give them ten or twenty rupees, out came their clubs.

“Often they would manage to snatch our entire day’s takings,” Padmini would say. “Then I would go home empty-handed and my
mother and brother Gopal would start crying. Sometimes when the trains were running late, I would spend the night with Dilip
and his gang in the station. When it was very cold, Dilip would light a fire on the platform. We would lie down next to the
flames to sleep until the next train came through. There were times too when we slept in other stations, at Nagpur, Itarsi
or Indore, waiting for a train to take us back to Bhopal.”

It was in one of these stations that one night Dilip and his companions would lose their little Adivasi sister.

F
ATAL IF INHALED
! Displayed on labels marked with a skull and crossbones, posters and printed pages in user manuals, the warning was directed
at the manufacturers, transporters and users of MIC. The molecule was so volatile that its combination with only a few drops
of water or a few ounces of metal dust would prompt an uncontrollably violent reaction. No safety system, no matter how sophisticated,
would then be able to stop it from emitting a fatal cloud into the atmosphere. To prevent explosion, MIC had to be kept permanently
at a temperature near 0° C. Provision had to be made for the refrigeration of any drums or tanks that were to hold it. Any
plant that was going to carry stocks of it needed to be equipped with decontamination apparatus and flares to neutralize or
burn it in case of accidental leakage.

Not surprisingly, the transportation of methyl isocyanate was subject to extraordinary safety precautions. Union Carbide’s
internal guidelines, applicable worldwide, required delivery truck drivers to “avoid congested routes, bypass towns and cities,
and stop as infrequently as possible.” In case of a sudden burning sensation in the eyes, they were to rush to the nearest
telephone box and dial the four letters HELP, followed by 744-34-85, Carbide’s emergency number. They were then to evacuate
their vehicle to “an unoccupied area.”

Carbide had decided to play its hand openly, which was not always the case in the chemical industry. A whole chapter of its
manual detailed the horrible effects of inhaling MIC: first severe pains in the chest, then suffocation and, finally, pulmonary
edema and possible death. In case of such an incident, the manual advised that contaminated parts should be rinsed with water,
oxygen should be administered, as well as medication to dilate the bronchia.

All the same, Carbide did not publicly disclose all the information revealed by two secret studies undertaken at its request
in 1963 and 1970 by the Mellon Institute of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. These studies of the toxicity of methyl
isocyanate showed that under the influence of heat it broke down into several molecules, which were also potentially fatal.
Among these molecules was hydrocyanide acid, a gas with a sinister reputation, which when inhaled in strong doses, almost
invariably caused immediate death. The two studies also revealed, however, the existence of an antidote to this fatal gas.
Injection with sodium thiosulfate could, in certain cases, neutralize the deadly effects of the gas. Carbide had not seen
fit to include this information in its documentation for MIC.

It was in its new Institute plant on the banks of the Kanawha, that Carbide intended to make the MIC it needed for its annual
production of thirty thousand tons of Sevin. Known as “Institute 2,” this plant was to operate in conditions so safe and with
such regard for the environment that it would be an industrial model for the entire valley. Anchored in a sea of concrete,
its metal structures were spread over five levels. Each was crammed with reactors, distillation columns, tanks, flares, condensers,
furnaces, exchangers, pumps and a network of dozens of miles of piping of varying sizes and colors, according to what liquid
or gas it conveyed.

“It was a really beautiful plant,” would recount American engineer Warren Woomer. He had joined Carbide at the age of twenty-two
and had become an expert on high-risk plants. “It’s true that you had a sense of danger when you went in there. But I had
gotten used to living among toxic substances. After all, chemical engineers spend their lives in contact with dangerous products.
You have to learn to respect them and, above all, you have to get to know them and learn how to handle them. If you make a
mistake, there’s very little chance they’ll forgive you.”

Warren Woomer knew that the piloting of this high-tech factory had been entrusted to the best professionals in the field.
To belong to the MIC production unit was considered an honor on the Institute site. It also had its advantages as salaries
there reflected the hazardous nature of the substances used: they were the highest in the company.

Carbide had provided the plant with an impressive arsenal of security systems. There were countless decontamination towers
and flares capable of neutralizing and burning off large quantities of gas in case of accidental leakage. Hundreds of valves
enabled any fluid showing an abnormal pressure to be evacuated into diversion circuits. Successions of thermostatic sluice
gates, one-way valves, joints, rupture discs, temperature sensors and pressure gauges watched over all the sensitive equipment
and the piping, which had itself been put together with high resistance welding and checked by X ray. Damping devices prevented
any excessive movement of the metal. As in the most modern airplanes, the electric circuitry had been duplicated and protected
to resist the onslaught of even the most corrosive acids. In the event of electricity failure, superpowerful generators would
immediately cut in. Special double-skinned piping had been installed to conduct the MIC to its storage tanks. Between the
skins a flux of nitrogen was circulated. Every ten yards sensors checked the purity of the gas. The tiniest escape of MIC
into the nitrogen would be detected immediately and trigger an alarm and immediate intervention.

To ensure total reliability, the builders of Institute 2 had their high-performance equipment produced by International Nickel
and Ingersol Rand, among the United States’ most eminent specialists in alloying and mechanical engineering.

No less exceptional precautions had been taken to ensure the safety of the staff. A network of loudspeakers and sirens, modulating
differently according to the nature of the incident, was ready to go into action at the slightest alert. Crews of firemen
specialized in chemical fires and a system of automatic sprinklers could flood the factory with carbonic foam in a matter
of minutes. Dozens of red-painted boxes on every level equipped the workers with protective suits, breathing apparatus, ocular
rinses and decontamination showers. The plant was even equipped with a monitoring system that was constantly analyzing samples
taken from the atmosphere. If the safety level was exceeded, a loud alarm would sound and the location of the anomaly would
appear on a screen.

With its walls studded with pressure gauges, levers and buttons, the control room looked like the flight deck on a Concorde.
Day and night, different colored markers traced the plant’s every breath on rolls of graph paper. Keys, levers and handles
relayed electronic orders to open or close the stop-cocks, shut down or activate a circuit, launch or interrupt a production
or maintenance operation. One of the dials most carefully monitored was a temperature gauge. It was linked to thermometers
located on each of the tanks of methyl isocyanate used in the continuous production of Sevin. Given that the needles on these
instruments must never rise above 0° C, the builders of the American factory had lined the walls of the tanks with a skein
of coils that circulated cooling chloroform.