The Beautiful and the Damned (3 page)

By the time I quit my job at the call centre, it seemed to me that the sunrise industry was a rather fake world, dressing up its ordinary
routine work in the tinsel of youthfulness. From the Internet terminals scattered along the passageways, to the food courts, the recreation rooms with pool tables and the pictures of workers with American flags painted on their faces, the bigger outsourcing offices gave the impression that they were Western college campuses. But there wasn’t much freedom in these outposts of the free world, with their sanctioned fifteen-minute bathroom breaks for every four hours of work. They were places where along with the monotony and stress of the work, the modernity of India became an ambiguous phenomenon rather than a marker of irreversible progress. It seemed that I was not the only one there with a fake identity.

In April 2004, the BJP, in spite of its vigorous India Shining campaign, lost the elections. A few months later, I found myself in the city of Bhopal, in central India, pursuing a forgotten story. I was there to write a piece on the twentieth anniversary of the disaster that happened on the night of 2 December 1984, when a pesticide factory run by the American multinational Union Carbide spewed out toxic fumes and killed at least 3,000 people in twenty-four hours. In the two decades since then, the death toll had reached at least 20,000, while another 100,000 people were estimated by Amnesty International to be suffering ‘chronic and debilitating’ illnesses caused by the lethal methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas that had leaked out from the factory.

When I arrived in Bhopal in November, I was told that I should meet a man called Abdul Jabbar. Even though no one outside the city had heard of him, he had a reputation in Bhopal as someone who had done the most for victims of the Union Carbide disaster. He ran an organization for women widowed and rendered destitute by the disaster, working from a converted industrial shed in the old quarter of the city. It was a shoddily run place in many ways, with grimy toilets, battered sewing machines, a telephone that was kept, oddly enough, in the kitchen, photographs of Gandhi and lesser-known Indian radicals, an office overflowing with paper, and a verandah where a display case contained hideous stuffed toys that stared at visitors with glassy eyes.

From this strange base quartering an organization with a name that came across as unwieldy whether in full form, acronym or in translation (the Bhopal Gas Peedit Mahila Udyog Sangathan or BGP-MUS or Bhopal Gas-Affected Women’s Enterprise Organization), Jabbar and the women sallied out occasionally to picket government officials, demanding the compensation money that had been promised but not delivered twenty years after the event.

The women were mostly working class and usually illiterate. The older ones had lost their husbands in the disaster or its aftermath, while some of the younger ones had been abandoned by their husbands. Jabbar claimed that the organization, which had about 5,000 members, allowed the women to step beyond their traditional roles as victims. But it was also an organization of women centred around a male figure, a place where the women seemed to find a masculine presence that perhaps compensated for the fathers, husbands and sons absent in their lives.

Many of the women had been raised as orthodox Hindus or Muslims, an upbringing they had to struggle with in order to venture beyond the neighbourhood and become members of Jabbar’s organization. Some of the Muslim women had got rid of their veils. Many of them remained religious without being orthodox, and only Feroza, who described herself as a ‘hard-core Muslim’, continued to have a running argument with Jabbar, who retorted, quietly but firmly, that he had no faith in any faith.

Jabbar also claimed to have no faith in the West. He detested multinationals, especially Dow Chemicals, which had since acquired Union Carbide. But he also disliked organizations like Greenpeace that had tried to draw attention to the conditions in Bhopal so many years after the disaster. He did not take money from Western outfits, a position that set him at odds with a vastly more efficient organization called the Bhopal Group for Information and Action. He did not have a website for his organization, although even the local reporters begged him to set one up so that they could have easier access to information. He claimed, when I was first introduced to him, that he didn’t speak to Western reporters or to urban, upper-class Indians. He refused to speak in English, even though he seemed to have a
working knowledge of the language. For a soft-spoken man of benign, even nondescript, appearance – short, pudgy, with a moustache and thick glasses – he was surprisingly truculent, and I came away from our initial meeting feeling rather disappointed.

A writer visiting a new place and struggling with unfamiliar topics needs sources who are articulate, people who can point him to the key issues quickly and who can present the information in an organized way. And when the writer needs the stories of people’s lives, those narratives that insert recognizable, human shapes into large but abstract conflicts, he or she depends on people who have a sense of their own trajectories and who are willing to impose form on the chaos of their experiences and memories. Neither Jabbar nor his organization seemed to possess such qualities. When I followed my first visit with a few phone calls to Jabbar, I got some incoherent facts and figures and a half-hearted invitation to attend one of his weekly rallies. I began to see why Jabbar and his organization were unknown outside Bhopal, and why their names had never appeared in the well-researched
Guardian
and
Nation
articles I had gone through before coming to Bhopal.

There were, after all, other sources of information in the city, like the Bhopal Group for Information and Action, where activists led me swiftly and efficiently to the principal aspects of the situation in Bhopal. From these people, working in a small office where humming computers and ringing telephones imparted a sense of efficiency and seriousness, I learned that activists from the Bhopal Group, along with people from Greenpeace, had broken into the factory to collect soil samples. These samples had then been analysed by a Boston-based environmental laboratory and found to be full of mercury and arsenic, and the Bhopal Group had the data and reports to show how the groundwater of all the slums around the factory remained contaminated with toxic waste.

In comparison to the people working at the Bhopal Group, Jabbar seemed like a relic of the past, not really a character in a coherent story as much as a local demigod of the sort that proliferates in India. One looked at him in passing, and although a native guide might insist that this was a powerful deity, it was impossible as an outsider
to enter that realm of local mythologies. It was impossible, in other words, to know anything about Jabbar and his activities without some kind of faith in him, and it was impossible to have that faith in him without the local knowledge.

Nevertheless, one afternoon, I turned up to see the last thirty minutes of Jabbar’s Saturday rally. It was a time of the year when both Ramadan and Navratri (a Hindu festival) were being observed, and the audience was thinner than usual. About fifty women and a few men sat on the grass as Jabbar addressed them, standing in front of some ragged and stunted palm trees. He was less rambling as a public speaker, focused but intimate with his audience. When he ended his speech with a slogan, he didn’t raise his voice in a shout as Indian politicians tend to do. Instead, he said softly, ‘Naya Zamana …’ (‘The New Age …’), a phrase that the women closed emphatically and loudly by leaping to their feet and answering, ‘… ayega’ (‘… will come’). The slogan was repeated once – softer and on a downbeat – and even before the response had come, Jabbar had moved away, coiling up the wire trailing from his microphone.

I liked the closing note. It was somehow more effective than a blood-curdling cry would have been. And I liked the way the women had given the slogan both body and soul, with Jabbar no more than a catalyst for their aspirations. I stayed on to talk to some of the women while Jabbar and other organizers ran back and forth among the small crowd. They were planning a trip to Delhi in the coming weeks to lobby the parliament, and it was important to spread the word to get an impressive turnout. At some point, Jabbar came up to me and said that it was a good time to talk, but he had to take care of a small task first.

I accompanied Jabbar across the street to the Ladies’ Hospital. An ambulance packed with passengers stood in the driveway. I caught a glimpse of a woman in the back and what looked like a baby in swaddling clothes in her arms. ‘Go on to the house,’ Jabbar said. ‘Drive safely. I’ll come later.’ Then we walked back to the park, where Jabbar wheeled his Honda scooter out and asked me to climb on. During our ride through the jagged, amorphous quarters of the old city, I discovered that the woman in the ambulance was Jabbar’s wife and
that she had given birth to a boy the night before. The activist had become a father, a first in his life, a fact that in its intimacy and domesticity seemed a little incongruous with the utopian, large-scale issues discussed in the park, but perhaps less incongruous than the fact that I, a stranger, was being taken to Jabbar’s house the same day his wife and son were coming home from the hospital.

As Jabbar negotiated a path through the crowded marketplace, a furniture store caught his eye. He asked me to stay with the scooter while he went into the store, a room open to the street and packed with locally made furniture, most of it cobbled together out of plastic or cheap wood. What had attracted Jabbar’s attention was an infant cradle of pink plastic with a mosquito net attached to it. Jabbar bargained briefly, bought the contraption and handed it to me. The cradle had looked small in the store, but as I sat on the back seat of Jabbar’s scooter, riding up narrow alleyways and under hobbit-sized bridges, it began to assume gargantuan proportions. I had to shout at Jabbar to stop when I thought we were going to scrape against a wall. With frequent halts when I dismounted to cross particularly narrow stretches, we finally arrived at his house.

What kind of man brings a stranger home when his wife has just given birth? In Jabbar’s house, I was introduced to his wife, a Kashmiri woman in her late twenties. She was dressed in a black hijab, her hair covered but her face unveiled, and she looked exhausted from her labour. I saw the baby and encountered a squadron of mosquitoes that made me thankful that the cradle had come with a net. Relatives and neighbours passed in and out so fluidly as to leave little distinction between outdoors and indoors, between sitting room and bedroom. I drank tea and talked to Jabbar’s neighbours. They were working-class people who were proud of him, of the fact that he had become a father, of the trees he had got for them to plant in the neighbourhood, which was poor without being squalid. Then it was time for Jabbar to head out again because he wanted me to meet people in the nearby slums.

But the initial question remained in my mind, if inflected differently. What kind of man takes a Hindu stranger home even when the proprieties of a lower-middle-class Muslim background demand an
observance of the purdah, and especially when his wife seems uncomfortable not following such convention? And if that seems needlessly traditional, what kind of man doesn’t see the necessity, accepted even among modern individuals, of separating the private and the public?

One possible answer – and it was the answer Jabbar gave me when I asked him this – is that the idea of separation, between men and women, Hindus and Muslims, the private and the public, is an artificial one. ‘My mother never observed the purdah,’ he told me. But the disaster of 1984 had broken down other walls, Jabbar said. For some, it had been a temporary erasure of boundaries as they stopped to help the dying and the injured for a few weeks. For Jabbar, who had at the time been a small contractor drilling borewells, the change had been permanent, marking him out for a life as an activist rather than as a businessman.

Another possible answer – and this was one Jabbar didn’t come up with – is that it is an obsessed person, one without a sense of proportion, who doesn’t observe the distinctions between private and public life, between the needs of activism and the demands of domesticity. It was an answer that had some interpretative power when it came to Jabbar’s life, because Yasmeena was his second wife. Jabbar had been married before to a woman called Rehana, a marriage significant enough a decade after its dissolution for Jabbar, his neighbours and his rival at the Bhopal Group for Information and Action to refer to it.

Rehana had been an early member of Jabbar’s organization, a woman from a lower-middle-class Muslim background similar to Jabbar’s. She had been in her twenties, a divorced mother of two children, at the time she began working with Jabbar in the organization. A bad-tempered, arrogant woman was how Jabbar’s neighbours referred to Rehana, as did Usha and Jamila, two of the women in the organization who had known her. Jabbar spoke about Rehana less emphatically, with a touch of despair that was somewhat unusual for him. He had married her because he had been attracted to her ‘radical’ personality, he told me, using the English word to emphasize the quality that he had found appealing.

‘It wasn’t easy for me to convince my family to accept our marriage. Even though she was young and beautiful, you know the kind
of stigma our community has against divorced women. And she had two children from her previous marriage, which prejudiced them against her even more. I was young, a man, and they thought I could do better.’

But Rehana’s radical nature changed into simple querulousness with marriage. Jabbar said that it had made him so unhappy – her fights with neighbours, with small children – that he had wanted to kill himself. But what made him end the marriage was her newly discovered sense of status. She wanted him to rise socially and economically, to become important, to be more than an organizer.

‘I found out – and I found out after a long time, because my comrades kept the fact from me – that if anyone came to see me at home and she answered the door, she would turn them away. She would say, “Come back later, the boss is sleeping.” That was something I couldn’t accept.’