Five Past Midnight in Bhopal

by Dominique Lapierre; Javier Moro

  The stars! Eduardo Muñoz, the magician behind the whole venture, could give thanks to the gods. The pesticide plant he was going to build on the Kali Grounds might not be exactly the one he had dreamed of, but it did promise to be a new star in the Indian sky.

  At the beginning of the summer of 1972, Carbide dispatched all the plans for the factory’s construction and development to India. Unfortunately, this mountain of paperwork was not exactly the finest gift American technology could send to the developing world. The design of Bhopal’s “beautiful plant” would not include all the safety equipment and security systems equipping Carbide’s Institute plant in the U.S. Later, the precise reasons for these money-saving measures would remain obscure. It seems that the sales of the Sevin formulated in Bhopal had not reached the hoped-for level. Disastrous climatic conditions and the appearance on the market of a competing and less costly pesticide may have accounted for this reduction in sales. Because Indian law severely restricted the involvement of foreign companies in their local subsidiaries, Union Carbide India Limited suddenly found itself forced to reduce the factory’s construction budget. American and Indian experts assured, however, that none of the cutbacks were to diminish the overall safety of the plant.

  Four years later, the giant puzzle designed in South Charleston and created piece by piece in Bombay, was finally transported to Bhopal for assembly.

  John Luke Couvaras, a young American engineer, described taking part in the project as “embarking on a crusade. You had to put yourself into it, body and soul. You lived with it every minute of the day and night, even when you were a long way from the works. If, for example, you were installing a distillation tower you’d fussed over lovingly, you were as proud of it as Michelangelo might have been of the ceiling in the Sistine chapel. You kept an eye on it to make sure it went like clockwork. That kind of venture forced you to be vigilant at all times. It exhausted you, emptied you. At the same time you felt happy, triumphant.”

  17

  “They’ll Never Dare Send in Their Bulldozers”

  American or Indian, none of the engineers and technicians working on the Kali Grounds could ever have imagined the suffering, trickery, swindling, love, faith and hope that was life for the mass of humanity who occupied the hundreds of shacks around the factory. As in any impoverished area, the worst existed alongside the best, but the presence of figures like Belram Mukkadam managed to transform these patches of hell into models for humankind. He was a devout Hindu, but when he made his unforgettable stands, he was joined by Muslims, Sikhs, animists, and perhaps most remarkably, an Irani. The Iranis with their light skin and delicate features formed a small community of some five hundred people in Bhopal. Their forefathers had come to Bhopal in the 1920s, after an earthquake destroyed their villages in Baluchistan, on the borders of Iran. Now, their leader was an august old man with honey colored eyes, by the name of Omar Pasha, invariably dressed in a kurta, a long tunic, and cotton trousers. He lived with his sons, his two wives and his henchmen in a modern three-story building on the edge of Orya Bustee. Three times a week, he would tear himself away from his comfortable life to take the sick from the three bustees to Hamidia Hospital. Driving those poor wretches through traffic that terrified them, then steering them along hospital corridors into packed waiting rooms was no small feat. But without an escort the poor had little chance of being examined by a doctor. And even if they were lucky enough to see a physician, they would not have been able to explain what was wrong with them or understand the recommended treatment. The majority of the inhabitants of the bustees spoke neither Hindi nor Urdu but one of the innumerable regional dialects or languages. Omar Pasha demanded that the slum dwellers be treated like human beings and made certain they actually received the medicines they were prescribed. Yet this saint was one of Bhopal’s most notorious godfathers. It was he who controlled the traffic in opium and ganja, the local hashish, as well as the brothels in the Lakshmi Talkies district; he ran the gambling, especially satha, which consisted of betting on the daily share-price of cotton, gold and silver.

  He was also head of a real estate racket that made him one of the richest property owners in the town. To assure himself of the political support necessary to maintain his business interests he gave generously to the Congress party (the political party in power at that time), where he served as one of the district’s most active electoral agents. The ballots of Orya, Chola and Jai Prakash Bustees were in his hands. Good old Omar Pasha! His enormous fingers and powerful biceps testified to the fact that he had been a boxer and wrestler in his youth. With advancing age he had turned to another sport: cockfighting. He bought his champions in Madras and fed them himself, on a mixture of egg yolk, clarified butter, and crushed pistachio and cashew nuts. Before every fight he would rub each one down “like a boxer before a match,” he would say with a hint of nostalgia. His ten cocks roamed freely about the floors of his house, watched over by bodyguards, for each one was worth between twenty and thirty thousand rupees, almost a thousand dollars—a sum Padmini’s father could not hope to earn in ten years of hard labor.

  The area was home to a host of other colorful people. The dairyman Karim Bablubhai distributed a portion of the milk from his seventeen buffalo cows to children with rickets. He dreamed of Boda, the young orphan girl from Bihar whom he had just married, giving him an heir. The yellow-robed sorcerer Nilamber, who exorcized evil spirits by sprinkling those possessed with country liquor, had promised him that this dream would come true provided Boda performed a puja at the sacred tulsi every day. There was also the Muslim shoemaker Mohammed Iqbal, whose hut on alleyway No. 2 smelled unbearably of glue, and his associate Ahmed Bassi, a young tailor of twenty, who was famous for embroidering the marriage saris for the rich brides of Bhopal. The Carbide engineers might have been surprised to discover that in the sheds made out of planks, sheet metal and bamboo, which they could see from the platforms of their giant factory, men in rags were producing masterpieces. The shoemaker and the tailor, like their friend Salar the bicycle repairman in alley No. 4, were always ready to respond to Belram Mukkadam’s call. In the bustee no one ever declined to give him a helping hand.

  Certainly this was true of Hussein, the worthy mullah with the small gray goatee who taught local children suras from the Koran on the porch of his small, mud-walled mosque in Chola. And the old midwife Prema Bai who, crippled by childhood polio, dragged herself from hut to hut in her white widow’s clothing, leaning heavily on a stick. Yet, her luminous smile out-shone her suffering. In one corner of her hut, under the little altar where an oil lamp burned day and night before a statuette of Ganesh, the old woman carefully laid out the instruments that made her an angel of the bustee: a few shreds of sari, a bowl, two buckets of water and the Arabian knife she used to cut the babies’ umbilical cords.

  Who would have believed it? America and all her advanced technology was moving into the middle of a ring of hovels, and she knew nothing about those who washed up against the walls of her installation like the waves of an ocean. Neither an expatriate from South Charleston nor an Indian engineer molded by Carbide’s values knew anything about the universe inhabited by those thousands of men, women and children who lived but a stone’s throw away from the three methyl isocyanate tanks they were in the process of assembling.

  One day, however, Carbide did pay a visit to the terra incognita that bordered on the Kali Grounds. “People thought the end of the world had come,” Padmini’s father would recall. The occupants of the bustees heard a plane roar overhead. The aircraft made several circles, skimming so low that the people below thought it would decapitate the Chola mosque’s small minaret. Then, in a flash, it disappeared into the setting sun. This unusual apparition provided food for furious discussion at the teahouse. The legless cripple Rahul, who always liked to appear well informed, claimed that it was “a Pakistani plane come to pay homage to the fine factory that the Muslim workmen were building in their town of Bhopal.”

  The plane
that appeared over the Kali Grounds was indeed the bearer of an homage, but not the one Rahul had imagined. The twin-engine jet plane Gulf Stream II that put down on January 19, 1976, at Bhopal’s airport, bore the gilded wings and company crest of UCC. Inside, it carried Union Carbide’s chief executive officer, a tall strapping fellow of fifty with white hair and a youthful air. A graduate of Harvard Business School and a former Navy reserve officer, Bill Sneath had climbed every rung of the multinational before becoming its chief in 1971. He was accompanied by his wife, an elegant young woman in a Chanel suit, and an entourage of corporate officials. They had all come from New York to inaugurate the first phytosanitary research and development center built by Carbide in the third world.

  The architecture of this ultramodern edifice, with its facades dripping with glass, was inspired by the American research center in Tarrytown. Built on the site of the palace that Eduardo Muñoz helped Union Carbide buy from the last nawab family, it very nearly never came into being. While digging the foundations, the masons had uncovered the skeleton of a bird and several human skulls. Word had then gone around that they belonged to three workmen who had mysteriously disappeared during the construction of the palace in 1906. In response to this appalling omen the masons abandoned the site. To entice them back, Eduardo Muñoz had had to resort to strong measures. He had tripled their salaries and arranged for a puja to lift the evil spell. When Bill Sneath arrived, the center already comprised several laboratories, in which some thirty researchers were working, and greenhouses, in which many varieties of local plants were being grown.

  The central government minister of science and technology, the highest authorities of the state of Madhya Pradesh and the city of Bhopal, and all the local dignitaries from the chief administrator to the most senior police officer gathered round the Sneaths, the Muñozes and the board of directors of Carbide’s Indian subsidiary for the grandiose ceremony that sealed the marriage between the New York multinational and the City of the Begums. Before his speech, one of the sari-clad hostesses had anointed Bill Sneath with the tilak of welcome, a dot of red powder on the forehead that symbolizes the third eye that can see beyond material reality. The eyes of Carbide’s CEO surveyed with pride the vast concrete and glass block of the magnificent research center. A few moments earlier they had discovered the construction site, where towers, chimneys, tanks and scaffolding were beginning to emerge from the Kali Grounds. Wearing helmets bearing their names, Bill Sneath and his wife had toured the different units, pursued by photographers. In his hand, Sneath triumphantly brandished a package of Sevin formulated on site.

  What the American CEO would not see that winter was the jumble of huts, sheds and hovels that fringed the parade ground and grew like the swelling of a malignant cancer. Most of the men who lived there with their families made up the workforce for Carbide’s various building sites. They had almost all been invited to the inauguration of the research center. The present each had been handed by Carbide’s CEO was not, perhaps, very valuable, but for Padmini’s father and all those living in homes with no electricity, a flashlight and three batteries stamped with the blue-and-white Carbide logo was indeed a royal gift.

  The gift that Sanjay Gandhi, the younger son of India’s prime minister, had in store for several million of his country’s poor that same winter was of a very different nature. Taking advantage of the state of emergency his mother had imposed to establish her power and muzzle the opposition, the impetuous young man had taken it into his head to clean up India’s principal cities by ridding their pavements and suburbs of “encroachments,” in other words “squatters.” It was alleged that one-tenth of vacant land was, in certain towns, taken up by people with no title deeds. This was the case with the bustees on the Kali Grounds. The sanitary conditions there were so abominable and the risk of epidemic so flagrant that the municipal authorities had often considered destroying the neighborhoods. But the local politicians, more concerned about keeping votes in the next election than getting rid of islands of poverty, had always opposed such radical action. Strengthened by the support of the beloved son of the all-powerful Indira, however, Bhopal’s municipal leaders had decided this time to take action.

  One fine morning, two bulldozers and several truckloads of policemen burst onto the esplanade in front of the teahouse. The officer in charge of the operation clambered onto the leading truck, which was equipped with a loudspeaker.

  “People of Orya Bustee, Jai Prakash and Chola! By order of Sanjay Gandhi, central government and the city authorities, I am charged to warn you that you must leave the sites you are occupying illegally,” he declared. “You have one hour in which to vacate the place. After that deadline, your huts will be destroyed and all people remaining will be apprehended and taken by force to a detention camp.”

  “Oddly enough, the appeal didn’t provoke any reaction at first,” Ganga Ram, the former leper, recalled. People formed a silent mob in the alleyways, stunned. Then suddenly, one woman let out a howl. With that all the other women began to shriek as if their entrails were being torn out. The sound was terrifying. Children came running from all sides like crazed sparrows. The men had rushed to the teahouse. Rolling along on his wheeled plank, Rahul, the legless cripple, rounded everyone up. Old women went to take offerings and incense sticks to the statues of the gods in the district’s various shrines. In the distance, the inhabitants of the bustee could hear the bulldozers roaring like wild elephants eager to charge. That was when Belram Mukkadam appeared. When he began to speak outside the teahouse, he seemed very sure of himself.

  “This time the bastards have come with bulldozers,” he thundered. “Even if we lie down in front of their caterpillars, they won’t stop at crushing us to pulp.” He paused after these words, as if thinking. He fiddled with his mustache.

  “You could see things were churning away in his head,” Ganga Ram would say.

  “We do have one way of blocking those scum,” Mukkadam continued, swiping at the air several times with his cane. He seemed to be savoring what he was about to say. “My friends, we’re going to change the names of our three bustees. We’re going to call them after the much-loved son of our high priestess, Indira. We’re going to call them the ‘Sanjay Gandhi Bustees.’ They’ll never dare, yes, I can assure you, that they’ll never dare send in their bulldozers against a neighborhood named after Sanjay!”

  The manager of the teahouse then pointed his stick at a rickshaw waiting outside the entrance to the Carbide worksite.

  “Ganga!” he directed the former leper. “Jump in that rattle-trap and hurry to Spices Square! Get them to paint a big banner marked WELCOME TO THE SANJAY BUSTEES. If you get back in time, we’re saved!”

  Just as the apostle of the Kali Grounds had so magnificently predicted, the banner strung between two bamboo poles at the mouth of the road leading to Orya Bustee caused the tide of policemen and the bulldozers to stop dead in their tracks. The piece of material that bore the first name of Indira Gandhi’s son in imposing red letters was more powerful than any threat. The residents could go back to their huts without fear. Destiny would crush them in a different way.

  18

  Wages of Fear on the Roads of Maharashtra

  The deadly cargo had arrived. As soon as he received the telex, the Hindu engineer Kamal Pareek alerted his assistant, the Muslim supervisor Shekil Qureshi, a chubby, thickset fellow of thirty-six. They packed the protective suits, gloves, boots, masks and helmets provided for special operations into two suitcases, and caught a flight to Bombay. Their mission was to escort two trucks loaded with sixteen drums, each containing forty-four gallons of MIC, over a distance of 530 miles. The Bhopal factory was not yet ready to make the methyl isocyanate required to produce Sevin. So, its management had decided to have several hundred barrels brought over from the Institute plant in the United States.

  “Ships transporting toxic substances had to report to Aji Bunder,” Kamal Pareek recounted. “It was a completely isolated dock at the far en
d of the port of Bombay. People called it ‘the pier of fear.’ ”

  Pareek watched with a certain amount of apprehension as the palette of drums dangled in midair on the end of a rope. The crane was preparing to deposit its load in the bottom of a barge moored alongside the ship, which would then transport the drums to the pier. Suddenly the engineer froze. Bubbles of gas were escaping from the lid of one of the containers.

  The ship’s commander who had spotted the leak, shouted to the crane operator, “Quickly! Dump those drums into the water.”

  “No! Whatever you do, don’t do that!” shouted Pareek, gesticulating frantically for them to stop the maneuver. “One drum of MIC in the water, and the whole lot will go up!” Turning to the skipper of the barge, he ordered, “Scram from here! Otherwise you and your family might blow up to pieces!”

  The skipper, a fragile, bare-chested man, surrounded by half a dozen kids, shook his head. “Sahib, my grandparents and my parents lived and died on this barge,” he replied. “I’m ready to do the same.”

  Pareek and Qureshi swiftly pulled on their protective suits, masks and helmets. Then, armed with several fat syringes full of a special glue, they jumped onto the bridge of the ship where, with infinite caution, the crane had deposited the palette. Clusters of yellow bubbles were still oozing from the damaged cover of one of the containers. The two men carefully injected the glue into the crack. “When we managed to stem the leak, I heaved the biggest sigh of relief of my life,” Pareek later admitted.