Five Past Midnight in Bhopal

by Dominique Lapierre; Javier Moro

  Not having any scientific training, he next paid a visit to the dean of the chemistry department at an important technical college and consulted all the specialists’ works in its library. The conclusions he came to made his blood run cold.

  “Merely appreciating that methyl isocyanate and phosgene are two and a half times heavier than air, and have a tendency to move along at ground level in small clouds, was enough to make me realize at once that a large scale gas leak would be disastrous,” he explained later. “After detailed examination of the safety systems in place in the plant, I knew that tragedy was only a matter of time.”

  An unexpected visit was to provide Rajkumar Keswani with the technical arguments he needed to drop his journalistic bombshell. In May 1982, three American engineers from the technical center for chemical products and household plastics division in South Charleston landed in Bhopal. Their task was to appraise the running of the plant and confirm that everything was functioning according to the standards laid down by Carbide. None of Carbide’s critics outside the plant expected this internal investigation to produce any great revelations. However, the investigators uncovered over sixty breaches of operational and safety regulations.

  With the help of accomplices in the factory, Keswani managed to get hold of the text of the audit. He could not believe his eyes. The document described the surroundings of the site “strewn with oily old drums, used piping, pools of used oil and chemical waste likely to cause fire.” It condemned the shoddy workmanship on certain connections, the warping of equipment, the corrosion of several circuits, the absence of automatic sprinklers in the MIC and phosgene production zones, the risk of explosion in the gas evacuation flares. It cited the poor positioning of certain devices likely to trap their operators in case of fire or toxic leakage. It criticized the lack of pressure gauges and the inadequate identification of innumerable pieces of equipment. It reported leaks of phosgene, MIC and chloroform, ruptures in pipework and sealed joints, the absence of any earth electrical connection on one of the three MIC tanks, the impossibility of isolating many of the circuits because of the deterioration of their valves, the poor adjustment of devices where excessive pressure was in danger of allowing water into the circuits. It revealed the fact that the needle on the pressure gauge of a phosgene tank full of gas was stuck on zero. It expressed alarm at the poor state and inappropriate placement of safety equipment to be used in case of leakage or fire, and at the lack of periodic checks to ensure sophisticated instruments and alarm systems were functioning correctly.

  All the same it was in the area of personnel that the report came up with the most startling revelations. It expressed concern at an alarming turnover of inadequately trained staff, unsatisfactory instruction methods and a lack of rigor in maintenance reports. Three lines in the fifty-one pages described a particularly serious mistake: an engineer had cleaned out a section of pipework without blocking off the two ends of the pipe with discs designed to prevent the rinsing water from seeping into other parts of the installation. One day this same sort of negligence would spark a tragedy.

  “KINDLY SPARE OUR CITY!” exclaimed Rajkumar Keswani in the headline of his first article, published on September 17, 1982. Illustrating the risk the factory represented with numerous examples, the journalist appealed first to those in charge of it. “You are endangering our entire agglomeration, starting with the Orya Bustee, Chola and Jai Prakash districts nestling against the walls of your installations.” Then, addressing his fellow citizens, Keswani urged them to wake up to the danger that Union Carbide represented to their lives. “If one day disaster strikes,” he warned them, “don’t say that you did not know.”

  Unfortunate Keswani! Like Cassandra, he had been given the gift of predicting catastrophe, but not that of persuasion. His first article passed almost unnoticed. Carbide was too firmly planted on its pedestal for a few alarming words in a sensationalist newspaper to topple it.

  Undaunted, the journalist returned to the fray two weeks later. “BHOPAL: WE ARE SITTING ON A VOLCANO,” announced the Rapat Weekly of September 30, 1982, in block letters across the front page. “The day is not far off when Bhopal will be a dead city, when only scattered stones and debris will bear witness to its tragic end,” the author prophesied. The article’s disclosures should have sent the entire city rushing to the Kali Grounds to demand the plant’s immediate closure. They did not. Sadly, the Rapat Weekly was a lone voice crying in the wilderness.

  The following week, a third article entitled, “IF YOU REFUSE TO UNDERSTAND, YOU WILL BE REDUCED TO DUST,” described in detail the leak, which four days earlier had led to the evacuation of the factory in the middle of the night and the general scramble on the part of the residents of Orya Bustee and its adjacent neighborhoods.

  In the end so much indifference and blindness disheartened the journalist. It appeared that the anger over Ashraf’s death and the hunger strikes had been short-lived. If the Bhopalis preferred to believe the protestations of safety issued by Carbide— lies as far as Keswani was concerned—he would leave them to their fate. He scuttled his newspaper, packed his music collection in two suitcases and bought a train ticket for Indore, where a big daily newspaper offered him a golden opportunity. Before he left Bhopal, however, he wanted to respond to a statement made on the parliamentary rostrum of the state of Madhya Pradesh. “There is no cause for concern about the presence of the Carbide factory because the phosgene it produces is not a toxic gas,” the minister of employment had declared. In two long letters Keswani summarized the findings of his investigations. He addressed the first to the state’s highest authority, Chief Minister Arjun Singh, whose links with the Carbide management were common knowledge. The second he sent to the president of the supreme court, along with a petition requesting the closure of the factory. Neither of the two letters received a reply.

  27

  Ali Baba’s Treasure for the Heroes of the Kali Grounds

  Everyone to the teahouse! Ganga has a surprise for us!”

  Rahul sped along like lightning on his wheeled plank, bearing the news from alleyway to alleyway. Orya, Chola and Jai Prakash at once emptied themselves of their occupants. Their vitality and their incredible ability to mobilize were the hallmarks of these disinherited people. With each of her weekly visits, Sister Felicity became more and more convinced that the poor she came to help were stronger than any misfortune.

  The man who was promising them a big surprise was one of the most respected characters in the three bustees. With the passage of the years, Ganga Ram had become, like Belram Mukkadam and the godfather Omar Pasha, one of the Kali Grounds’ influential figures. His rejection by a Carbide tharagar a few years previously had not diminished his spirit of resistance. The same year he tried and failed to be hired at the plant, Ganga found a new trade. A few days before Diwali, the festival of lights and prosperity and the time when all Hindus repaint their houses, Ganga had turned himself into a house painter. In order to buy himself a ladder, a bucket and some brushes, he had paid a visit to another leprosy survivor, whom he had helped during his tenure at Hamidia Hospital. Welcomed as if he were the god Rama himself, Ganga had been able to borrow the money he needed. Two years later his business had six employees. Success had not gone to his head, however. Ganga Ram, together with his wife Dalima and her adopted son, had not left the neighborhood where once four lines drawn with a stick in the dust had provided them with shelter. Dalima was a great favorite in the community. Everyone adored this bright young woman with her green eyes and her tattooed hands, who got about on her crutches without complaining and always with a smile. Modest in the extreme, she never lifted the bottom of her sari to reveal the horrible scars on her legs and the fractured bones that stood out beneath her skin. Frightened by the gangrene that was spreading through her legs, the surgeon at Hamidia Hospital had wanted to amputate. The young woman’s opposition had been so passionate that she had awakened the entire hospital. “I’d rather die than lose my legs!” she told the surge
on. He gave her a metal pin and a bone graft, and though Dalima had managed to keep her legs, they were lifeless. The poor woman would be on crutches for the rest of her life, except when she allowed herself to be carried by the former leper to whose destiny she had been lucky enough to join her own.

  Ganga Ram organized the surprise at the teahouse like a festival. He had exchanged his sandals and old blue painting shirt for gondola-shaped mules and a magnificent kurta of embroidered white cotton. Giving free rein to his comic talents, he had dug out a top hat, which made him look like a ringmaster in the circus. Six musicians, wearing red cardboard shakos on their heads, and yellow waistcoats with Brandenburgs over white trousers, stood around him. Two of them held drumsticks between stumps once eaten away by leprosy, two more held cymbals, and the others, dented trumpets. Santosh, one of the trumpeters, a jolly little man with a face pitted from smallpox, was Dalima’s father. He had arrived from Orissa, where that year a drought—more severe than the ones from which Padmini and her family had often suffered—was raging.

  Just like on the day when the property deeds were handed out, Ganga Ram, Mukkadam, Salar the bicycle repairman and all the other members of the usual team directed arrivals to sit down in a semicircle around the teahouse. When there was no more room, Ganga greeted the crowd and signaled to the musicians to break into the first piece. Music was a necessary part of any Indian public gathering, much to everyone’s delight, and a raucous din immediately enveloped the assembly. After a few minutes, Ganga raised his top hat. The music stopped.

  “My friends!” he exclaimed. “I’ve gathered you together to share in an event so happy I couldn’t keep it to myself. Now you’re all here, I’m going to fetch the surprise I have for you.”

  He signaled to the musicians to clear a way for him. A few moments later, the little procession was back, to a cacophony of trumpets, a roll of drums and the crash of cymbals. Behind the musicians, walked the former leper with all the majesty of a mogul emperor. He was carrying in his arms his wife Dalima who was draped in a blue muslin sari embroidered with gold patterns. With her tattooed wrists and pendant earrings shining in her ears, the young woman was smiling and greeting people with all the grace of a princess. When the procession arrived outside the teahouse, Ganga and the musicians turned to face the crowd. The din of the trumpets and cymbals increased by another few decibels.

  With a nod of his head, Ganga stopped the music. Next, throwing out his chest like a fairground athlete, he held his wife out at arm’s length as if presenting her as a gift to the crowd. Then with a face flushed with pride, he allowed Dalima to slip gently down to the ground. As soon as her feet touched the earth, she straightened up with a thrust of her loins and, cautiously, began to walk. Astonished and completely at a loss, the people of the bustees could not believe their eyes. There stood the woman whose silent torture they had witnessed for so many years. She was fragile and tottering, but on her feet. People stood up to get a closer look at the woman who had been so miraculously healed. Her husband had thought of everything; garlands of sweet-smelling yellow marigolds appeared. Padmini and Dalima’s son, Dilip, strung more flowers around her neck. Soon the young woman disappeared beneath a pile of garlands engulfing her from her shoulders to the top of her head. Ganga was crying like a baby. He brandished his top hat to speak to the assembly again.

  “Brothers and sisters, the celebrations are only just beginning,” he cried in a voice choked with emotion. “I have a second surprise for you.”

  This time, it was young Dilip who went off with the band to fetch Ganga Ram’s latest surprise. Dilip no longer “did” the trains. He was now a sturdy young man of eighteen who worked as a painter with his stepfather. He was known to have only one passion: kite-flying. His paper-and-rags kites were a potent symbol of an immured people’s fantasies for freedom and escape.

  What the former leper would give his companions that day was a rather different means of escape. Preceded by the six musicians bellowing out a triumphal hymn, Dilip returned, carrying on his head a rectangular shape concealed beneath a red silk cloth. Dalima followed her son’s progress with the anxiety of an accomplice. Ganga ordered the young man to put the object down on a table that Mukkadam had prepared for the purpose. His mischievous smile betrayed how much he was enjoying his position. Again he silenced the music and took up his top hat.

  “My friends! Can any one of you tell me what’s under this cloth?” he asked.

  “A chest to keep clothes in,” cried Sheela Nadar, Padmini’s mother.

  Poor Sheela! Like most of the other bustee families, hers had no furniture. A rusty tin trunk, often overrun with cockroaches, was the only place she had in which to keep her wedding sari and her family’s few clothes.

  A little girl went up and pressed her ear to the “surprise.” “I bet you’ve got a bear shut in a cage under your cloth.”

  Ganga burst out laughing. The child’s guess was less preposterous than one might imagine. In Orya Bustee as in all the other neighborhoods, rich and poor alike, animal exhibitors and other showmen were not unusual. Trainers of monkeys, goats, mongooses, rats, parrots and scorpions, viper and cobra charmers … at any moment, a handbell, a gong, a whistle or a voice might announce the passing of some spectacle. More popular were the bear trainers, especially as far as the youngsters were concerned. Giving the children of Orya Bustee a bear would certainly have been a marvelous idea. But Ganga Ram had had an even better one. With all the care of a conjuror about to produce a rabbit, he placed his top hat on the mysterious object. Then, clapping his hands, he gave the band its signal. The drums and cymbals mingled with the trumpets in a deafening cacophony. As if for some ritual, Ganga then invited Dalima to walk three times around the table on which his “surprise” was sitting. Proud and erect under her veil of blue silk bordered with golden fringe, the young woman proceeded cautiously. Her steps were still unsteady but no one could take their eyes off her. They were hypnotized, for, at that instant, she was the embodiment of the determination of the poor to triumph over adversity.

  As soon as Dalima had completed her three passes, Ganga continued. “And now, my friends, Dalima herself is going to unveil my second surprise,” he announced.

  When the young woman tugged at the cloth, an “Oh!” of amazement burst from the throats of all those present. Nearly ten years after their country had sent a satellite into space and six years after they had set off an atomic bomb, tens of millions of Indians did not even know such a device existed. Enthroned on the teahouse table sat the bustees’ first television set.

  Those in charge of the beautiful plant sat down around the teak conference table to examine the crushing report sent in September 1984 by the three investigators from South Charleston. Kamal Pareek, assistant manager of safety, was particularly concerned. “The anomalies the report revealed might well have been part of the usual teething problems of a large plant,” he would say later, “but they were still serious.” The American works manager shared his opinion. Warren Woomer belonged to a breed of engineers for whom one single defective valve was a blight upon the ideal of discipline and morality that ruled his professional life. “Not tightening a bolt properly is as serious an offense as letting a phosgene reactor get out of control,” he would tell his operators. In his quiet, slightly languid voice, he enumerated the report’s observations. Before seeking out the guilty and sanctioning them, all the anomalies had to be rectified. That could take weeks, possibly even months. A schedule for the necessary repairs and modifications to the plant would have to be sent to the technical center in South Charleston and approved by its engineers.

  It would fall to a new captain to bring the Bhopal factory back up to scratch, however. In its desire to proceed with the complete Indianization of all foreign companies in their country, the New Delhi government had declined to renew Woomer’s residence permit. His replacement, a forty-five-year-old Brahmin with the swarthy skin of a southerner and an impressive academic and professional record, was already
sitting opposite him. The chairman of Carbide and his board of directors had unanimously approved the appointment of this exceptionally gifted individual. Yet, in the space of two years, Jagannathan Mukund was to preside over a factory sliding toward disaster.

  Once more the people of the bustees demonstrated their resourcefulness. In less than an hour Ganga Ram’s television set was broadcasting its first pictures. In the absence of any electricity in the neighborhood, Ganga Ram’s friends had run a cable to the line that supplied the factory. Salar the bicycle repairman had rigged up an antenna with a wheel mounted on a bicycle fork. The pirate apparatus had a very superior look to it, like a satellite listening station.

  Suddenly a picture lit up the screen. Hundreds of eyes nearly jumped from their heads as they watched a Hindi newscaster announce the program for Doordarshan, the national television network. At a single stroke that picture banished all the grayness, mud, stench, flies, mosquitoes, cockroaches, rats, hunger, unemployment, sickness and death. And the fear, too, that the great factory with its strings of lightbulbs illuminating the night, would from then on inspire.

  Every evening the program on Indian television’s only channel began with the latest episode in a serial. The epic of the Ramayana is to India what the Arthurian romances are to the West. Thanks to Ganga Ram, the occupants of the Kali Grounds could watch the thousand dramas and enchantments of their popular legend unfold before them. For an hour every evening, they would live out the marvelous love story of Prince Rama and his divine Sita. They would laugh, cry, suffer and rejoice along with them. Many of them knew whole passages of the show by heart.