The begum’s dinners also brought together passing artists, politicians, writers and poets. Another regular was of course Eduardo Muñoz, to whom Bhopal owed the arrival of Carbide. The food at these dinners was reputed to be the best in Bhopal. For young Briley every invitation was a gastronomic experience. It was there that, for the first time in his life, he tasted partridge cooked in coriander and sweets made out of curdled milk in a syrup of cinnamon and ginger.
It had become a tradition: the weddings of the begum’s grandchildren, nephews and nieces were always held at her home under an immense shamiana, a large tent for festivities and ceremonies, erected in the courtyard. They were the occasion for three days of uninterrupted celebrations. The drawing rooms, courtyards and corridors of the palace were littered with divans on which guests reclined to drink and listen to ghazals and other poetic forms. Despite being a Muslim, Selma had been schooled in Hindu dance, and at these family parties she could often be persuaded to perform. Adorning her ankles and wrists with strings of bells, she would appear on the dais and give passionate performances of kathak, a southern Indian dance accompanied by the complex rhythms of tabla and sarod players. During these moments, the scent of patchouli and musk floating beneath the shamiana would become so intoxicating that the American thought he would never again be able to tolerate the smell of phosgene or MIC.
Not all the expatriates from South Charleston in the City of the Begums were lucky enough to have a love affair with a princess. But the attractions of Bhopal were numerous, starting with the uninterrupted succession of religious festivals, celebrations and ceremonies. There was the bujaria, the noisy, colorful procession of thousands of eunuchs that wound through the old town; and the great Hindu festival in honor of the goddess Durga, whose richly decorated statues were immersed in the lake in the presence of tens of thousands of faithful. Then there was the Sikh celebration of the birth of Guru Nanak, the founder of their religion, with firecrackers that woke up the whole city. And there was the Jain festival in honor of their prophet Mahavira and the return of the pilgrimage season. Autumn brought Eid and Ishtema, two Muslim festivals that drew hundreds of thousands of followers to the old part of town, as well as many other religious and secular celebrations that reflected the extraordinary diversity of the people of Bhopal.
20
“Carbide Has Poisoned Our Water!”
One was called Parvati, after the wife of the god Shiva; another Surabhi, “the cow with all gifts” born, according to the Vedas, of the great churning of the sea of milk; a third was Gauri, “the light”; and the last two were Sita and Kamadhenu. So gentle were they that little children were not afraid to stroke their foreheads and gaze into their large eyes surrounded by lashes so long they looked as if they were wearing makeup. These five cows were some of the three hundred million heads that made up the world’s largest stock of cattle. For the five families in Orya Bustee to whom they belonged, they were an enviable asset. Belram Mukkadam, the cripple Rahul, Padmini’s father Ratna Nadar, the former leper Ganga Ram and the shoemaker Iqbal were the lucky owners of this modest herd. The few pints of milk they gave each day provided a little butter and yogurt, the only animal protein available to the hungry people of the bustee apart from goat milk. The dung from these cows was carefully collected and made into cakes that were dried in the sun and used as cooking fuel. Each animal knew its way home and, after a day spent roaming the Kali Grounds in search of greenery, returned to its owner in the evening. On the twelfth day of Asvina’s moon in September, of Kartika’s moon in November, and during the festival of new rice, the owners dyed the cows’ horns blue and red and decorated them with garlands of marigold and jasmine. The animals were then arranged in a semicircle outside Belram Mukkadam’s teahouse, so the sorcerer Nilamber could recite mantras over them. As the neighborhood’s most long-standing resident, it fell to Mukkadam to make the customary speech.
He did so with particular feeling. “Each one of our cows is a celestial animal, a symbol of the mother who gives her milk,” he declared. “She was created on the same day as Brahma, founder of our universe, and every part of her body is inhabited by a god, from the nostrils where Asvin dwells to the fringing of her tail, where Yama resides.”
The sorcerer Nilamber, in his saffron robe, intervened in his turn to emphasize “how sacred everything that comes from the cow is.” Upon these words, Rahul brought a bowl filled with a paste. It was the traditional purée made out of gifts from the precious animal—milk, butter, yogurt, dung and urine. The receptacle was passed from hand to hand so that everyone could take a small ball of the purifying substance. Later, led by Padmini, young girls would spread a little earth and fresh dung mixed with urine over the mud flooring of their huts. This protective layer had the power to repel scorpions, cockroaches and above all, mosquitoes, the persistent scourge of the Bhopalis.
That autumn festival day, Mukkadam had a special mission of his own. As soon as the ceremony was over, he attached a garland of flowers to the horns of his cow Parvati, and led her away to his hut at the end of the first alleyway. Inside the one and only room, Mukkadam’s elderly father lay stretched out on a charpoy, watched over by his two daughters who fanned him and uttered prayers. His halting breath and dull eyes suggested that death was imminent. Mukkadam pushed the cow over to the dying man’s bedside, then took the tip of her tail and tied it with a piece of cord to his father’s hand.
“Lead this holy man from the unreal to the real, from darkness to light, from death to immortality,” he murmured gently, stroking the animal’s forehead.
Four days after the death of Belram Mukkadam’s father, a catastrophe befell the inhabitants of Orya Bustee. Padmini was drawing a bucket of water from the well when she smelled a noxious odor coming from the shaft. The water was a strange whitish color. The old woman Prema Bai plunged her hand into the bucket, scooped up a little of the liquid, and tasted it.
“This water is contaminated!” she announced.
All the other women present confirmed her verdict. Looking up at the steel structures that loomed on the horizon, Padmini’s mother shouted, “Come on everyone! Come and see! Carbide has poisoned our water!”
A few hours later, Rahul and several of the neighborhood’s young men burst into the teahouse.
“Belram, come quickly!” cried the cripple. “Your cow Parvati and all the other cows are dead. The crows and vultures that ate them are dead, too.”
Mukkadam set off at a run for the place the boys had indicated. The animals lay stretched out beside a pool fed by a rubber pipe that issued from the factory. “It’s water from Carbide that’s killed them,” he said angrily. “The same water that has poisoned our well. Let’s all go to Carbide, quickly!”
A cortege of three or four hundred people promptly set off on a march to the factory. The old man Omar Pasha and his sons, the former leper Ganga Ram, the shoemaker Iqbal, his friend Bassi the tailor and the bicycle repairman Salar marched at the head. Even the dairyman Bablubhai and the sorcerer Nilamber went. “Pay us compensation for the cows! Stop poisoning our well!” they yelled in chorus. In the second row came six men, bent beneath the weight of the charpoy they were carrying on their shoulders. On this string bed they had placed the body of the American multinational’s first victim. The painted horns, visible between the folds of the shroud, revealed that it was a cow. “Today it’s our cows. Tomorrow it will be us!” shouted the angriest members of the cortege. Hope of employment and the prestige of the uniform with the Carbide logo continued to feature in people’s dreams, but these deaths shattered any illusion they had of living in neighborly harmony.
The plant management appointed one of the engineers to settle the matter as quickly as possible. The American stood in front of the demonstrators.
“Friends, set your minds at rest!” he shouted into the megaphone. “Union Carbide will compensate you generously for your loss. If the owners of the cows that have died will just put up their hands!” The engineer was astonished
to see a forest of hands spring up. He took a bundle of bills out of his pocket. “Union Carbide is offering five thousand rupees for the loss of each animal,” he announced. “That’s more than ten times the price of each of your cattle. Here are twenty-five thousand rupees. Share them between you!”
He held out the wad of bills to Mukkadam.
“And the water in our well?” insisted Ganga Ram.
“Don’t worry. We’ll have it analyzed and take whatever steps are necessary.”
The results of the tests were so horrific that the factory management never released them. In addition, soil samples taken from outside the periphery of the Sevin formulation unit revealed high levels of mercury, chromium, copper, nickel and lead. Chloroform, carbon tetrachloride and benzene were detected in the water from the wells to the south and southeast of the factory. The experts’ report was explicit: this was a case of potentially deadly contamination. Yet, for all the promises of Carbide’s representative, nothing was done to stop the pollution.
The envelope bore the stamp of the Indian Revenue Service. It contained the government’s official tribute to the man who, for nine years, had been fighting to give Indian agriculture the means to defend itself against the microscopic hordes that ravaged its crops. Eduardo Muñoz started when he read the letter inside the envelope. Becoming a tax payer in the Indian republic was not exactly one of his greatest aspirations, especially when, as the fiscal services informed him, he owed almost a 100 percent tax on his salary. He decided to pack his bags.
“Leaving India after all those thrilling years was heartbreaking,” Muñoz would recount. “But I left feeling confident. The Indian government had confirmed that Carbide was authorized to make all the ingredients for the production of Sevin on the Bhopal site. The document was numbered ‘C/11/409/75.’ After a long and difficult struggle, my beautiful plant was soon, in the words of our advertising slogan, to bring the people of India, ‘the promise of a bright future.’ ”
Muñoz’s optimism was, at the very least, ill founded. He was probably not aware that the people of the Kali Grounds’ bustees had made their first stand against the harmful effects of his beautiful plant. The state of the country he was leaving was even more worrisome. India was once again suffering from drought. All through the month of June, millions of men, women and children watched the sky for the first signs of the monsoon. Usually, it begins with a few days of buffeting wind. Then, suddenly, the sky darkens. Huge clouds roll in upon each other, scudding along at a fantastic rate. Other clouds succeed them, enormous, as if trimmed with gold. A few moments later, a mighty gust of wind brings a hurricane of dust. Finally a new bank of black clouds plunges the sky into darkness, an interminable roll of thunder rends the air, and the monsoon has begun. Agni, the fire god of the Vedas, protector of humanity and the hearth, hurls his thunderbolts. The great warm drops turn into cataracts of water. Children throw themselves, stark naked, shrieking for joy, into the deluge. Men are exultant and, under the verandas, women sing hymns of thanksgiving.
That year, however, in several regions, water, life and rebirth failed to keep their appointment. Their seedlings were parched and, in the stranglehold of debt, millions of ruined peasants had been unable to buy fertilizers or pesticides. In 1976, the sales figures for Sevin had dropped by half. Another severe blow after the drought of the previous year.
Nonetheless a pleasant surprise awaited Eduardo Muñoz on his return to New York. In recognition of his faithful services, the company had made him president of the international division of agricultural products. The appointment ceremony took place at the new head office Carbide had just opened after selling its Park Avenue headquarters to Manufacturer’s Hanover Trust Bank. A decision that so distressed the municipal government that the governor of New York, Hugh Carey, and two senators had tried to dissuade Bill Sneath from moving the prestigious multinational out of Manhattan. They offered him subsidies and tax shelters. In ten years the city had lost the headquarters of forty-four of the largest American companies and with them some five hundred thousand jobs. All the promises in the world could not persuade Carbide’s CEO to change his mind. He had systematically enumerated the disadvantages of New York, a city that both he and his colleagues judged to be overpopulated, expensive and unsafe. Moreover, standards of education were execrable, transportation was inadequate and taxes were exorbitant. The company had chosen, instead, a particularly imposing site set in the middle of a hundred-acre estate that was home to deer and other wildlife. It was situated near Danbury, a charming little town in Connecticut whose hat factory had been supplying sheriffs, senators, gangsters and America’s middle class for two centuries. The new headquarters were shaped in the form of an airport terminal with satellite wings, underground parking, auditoriums, lecture rooms, libraries, a bank, five restaurants, a fitness center, a hospital, a hairdresser, a gift shop, a newspaper stand, a travel agent and car rental, a television studio, a printer, an information center, acres of air-conditioned offices and even a one-and-a-quarter-mile jogging track. All the evidence suggested that the proud manufacturers of methyl isocyanate had found a headquarters to suit the company’s renown, importance and ambitions for the planet. It was said to have cost a mere eight hundred million dollars.
In the peaceful suburbs of West Virginia, in the vicinity of the Institute’s industrial site, the smell was an unfamiliar one. It was not MIC’s boiled cabbage, but the aroma of the small, fiery, red chilies so essential to spicy Indian cooking. “They rustled up their food in the rooms we’d rented for them,” engineer Warren Woomer would explain. On his return from India, he had been assigned to supervise the twenty or so Indian technicians and engineers sent over by the Bhopal factory. At the end of 1978, they were undergoing a six-month intensive training period in the various units of the American plant. Woomer remembered the amazement of the enthusiastic group as they discovered America. “The Indian government had only authorized them to bring five hundred dollars per person, but you can’t begin to imagine what an Indian can do with five hundred dollars! In the evenings and at weekends they would descend upon the local camera or electronics shops like locusts and set about haggling Oriental-style, extracting astronomical reductions that we Americans would never have managed to get.”
But the trainees from Bhopal had not come halfway around the world to shop. For each one of them Woomer had prepared a rigorous work program designed to train them for the imminent launch of their factory. “It was an invaluable experience,” said Kamal Pareek, “even if our factory was only a child’s toy compared with the Institute monster that, day and night, went on producing seven times more Sevin than ours would ever make.” Realizing that a ship of a hundred tons poses the same navigational and maintenance problems as a fifty-thousand-ton battleship, Woomer assigned each visitor to the department of their specialty, whether it was handling gases, working the reactors, operating electrical circuits and control systems, producing MIC, maintaining and repairing the installations, manufacturing phosgene, formulating Sevin, preventing corrosion, gestating toxic waste, protecting the environment or even running the company. With on-site instruction sessions, audio-visual shows, training periods in laboratories, and visits to the equipment suppliers and manufacturers, Woomer and his team made every effort to bring about what the American engineer called “an appropriate transfer of knowledge.” Each visitor was instructed to keep detailed notes on what he learned, so that when he returned to Bhopal he would be able to compile an instruction manual for his fellow employees.
One of the most significant transfers of knowledge from which the Indian trainees would benefit was not technical in nature; it was a message of a rather different order. In a curious doctrine that combined realism with what could be read as cynicism, the company’s managers had defined the principles of a methodology they called “Corporate Safety.” “Human beings are our most precious asset,” affirmed the preamble to the doctrine’s manifesto, “and their health and safety are therefore our number o
ne priority.” Some of Carbide’s own employees saw more than a little tension, if not hypocrisy, in such a declaration.
“How could we not enthusiastically applaud such a profession of faith,” Pareek would ask, “when we were responsible for assuring the safety of the first plant to produce methyl isocyanate outside America?”
Carbide’s manifesto set down certain truths, the first being that “all accidents are avoidable provided the measures necessary to avoid them are defined and implemented.” But it was on another more subtle argument that the multinational’s management depended to impress upon their visitors the importance of safety. The formula they came up with was simple: “Good safety and good accident prevention practices are good business.”
“At Institute, Union Carbide’s real emblem was not the blue-and-white logo, but a green triangle inscribed with the words ‘SAFETY FIRST,’ ” stated Kamal Pareek, the future assistant manager for safety at the Bhopal factory.
This obsession with safety manifested itself primarily through the study of a voluminous four-hundred-page manual outlining in minute detail the instructions for emergency procedures to be carried out in case of an accident. It contained information on how to keep personnel continuously informed, on the constant checking of all apparatus, regular practices for safety crews and equipment, as well as the immediate identification of toxic agents, evacuation procedures and a thousand other extreme situations.
Five Past Midnight in Bhopal Page 12