Five Past Midnight in Bhopal

by Dominique Lapierre; Javier Moro

  Padmini could remember how, when she was little, her mother used to sing to her the mythical adventures of the monkey general. Later, whenever storytellers passed through her village, all the inhabitants would gather in the square to listen to the fantastic stories that had, since the dawn of time, imbued everyday life with a sense of the sacred. No baby went to sleep without hearing its elder sister intone some episode from the great epic poem. Children’s games were inspired by its clashes between good and evil, schoolbooks exalted the exploits of its heroes, marriage ceremonies cited Sita’s fidelity as an example to the newlyweds. Bless you, Ganga Ram, for thanks to you it was possible to dream once more. Seated before your magic lamp, the men and women of the Kali Grounds’ bustees would be able to draw new strength to surmount the tribulations of their karma.

  28

  The Sudden Arrival of a Cost-Cutting Gentleman

  Fourteen years, six months and seventeen days after an Indian mason had laid the first brick of the Bhopal Carbide factory on its concrete foundations, its last American captain left. “That December 6, 1982, will always be one of the most nostalgic days of my life,” Warren Woomer later said. The week prior to their departure the Woomers were caught up in a whirlwind of receptions. Everyone wanted to bid farewell to the “quiet American” who had known how to marry the different cultures in his Indian work-force with the requirements of a highly technological industrial plant. It was true that the death of Mohammed Ashraf, the trade union unrest earlier that year and the worrying conclusions of the summer audit had revealed some cracks in the ship. But Sahb, as the Indian workers affectionately called him, left with his head held high. All the problems would be resolved, the bad workmanship would be rectified, the gaps filled. He was convinced that no serious accident would ever tarnish the reputation of the beautiful plant in the heart of the subcontinent. It would continue to produce, in total safety, the precious white powder that was indispensable to India’s peasants. Woomer accepted the gifts engraved with his name in gratitude.

  The American did know, however, that there were only two circumstances under which the factory could have a trouble-free future. The first was the favorable disposition of the Indian sky. Without generous monsoons to produce abundant harvests, the peasants would be unable to buy Sevin, in which case production would have to be slowed down and possibly even stopped. The financial consequences of such events would be grave. The other condition was compliance with the safety regulations. Woomer discussed this at length with his successor. Throughout his long career dealing with some of the most toxic chemical substances, he had expounded a philosophy based on one essential principle: only keep a strict minimum of dangerous materials on site. By maintaining this credo, the engineer was indirectly criticizing those who, against the advice of Eduardo Muñoz, had decided to install three enormous tanks capable of containing more than 120 tons of methyl isocyanate. “I left with the hope that those tanks would never be filled,” he would say later, “and that the small quantity of gas stored to meet the immediate needs of Sevin production would always be rigorously refrigerated as prescribed by the manual compiled by the MIC specialists.”

  Like all lovers of culture, art and beauty, Warren Woomer and his wife Betty had succumbed to the magic of India. They promised themselves that they would return. The American was not aware of Rajkumar Keswani’s articles. None of the Indians who worked for him had mentioned them. Looking back for one last time at his beautiful plant through the rear window of the car taking him to the airport, Woomer wished it good luck.

  The first sign that drought had once again struck the countryside of Madhya Pradesh and its bordering states was the sudden appearance of destitute families on the outskirts of the Bhopal bustees. A massive influx of untouchables, the outcasts whom Gandhi had baptized “harijans, children of god” was the first hint that not a single grain of rice or ear of corn could be gleaned from the fields that year.

  Belram Mukkadam, the members of the Committee for Mutual Aid and all the other residents set about making the newcomers welcome. One person would bring a cover, someone else an item of clothing, a candle, some rice, oil, sugar, a bottle of paraffin, a few matches. Ganga Ram, Dalima and her son Dilip, Padmini and her parents, the old midwife Prema Bai, the godfather Omar Pasha with his two wives and his sons, the sorcerer Nilamber, the shoemaker Iqbal, the tailor Bassi and the legless cripple Rahul were, as always, the first to show their solidarity. Even the sons of the moneylender Pulpul Singh brought food for the refugees. Seeing all these people sharing what they had, Sister Felicity, who had rushed to the Orya Bustee with her first-aid kit, thought “A country capable of so much generosity is an example to the world.” But she was struck by the appearance of the arriving children: although their stomachs were empty, their abdomens were swollen like balloons due to acute vitamin deficiencies and the presence of worms.

  A few days after the arrival of the landless untouchables, the farmers themselves came to seek refuge in Bhopal. The Kumar family, originally from a small village on the Indore road, had eight children. All of them had swollen stomachs, except Sunil, who at twelve was the eldest. Tales of this kind of famine were part of everyday life in India. Rice was invariably the protagonist. The rice they had planted, then lovingly replanted; the rice they had caressed and palpated; the emerald green rice that had soon turned the color of verdigris, then yellow for want of water; the rice that had drooped, shriveled up, dried out and finally died. Nearly all the residents of the Kali Grounds were former peasants. Almost all of them had suffered through the same tragedy as the refugees who had sought asylum among them.

  For the giant factory that stood several hundred yards away, this exodus was a bad omen. Warren Woomer’s hopes were not to be fulfilled. Ten years earlier, Eduardo Muñoz had tried to make Carbide’s directors appreciate a fundamental aspect of Indian existence: the vagaries of the monsoon. The people to whom the Argentianian had spoken had swept aside his warnings and responded with a figure. To a pesticide manufacturer, India meant half a billion potential customers! In light of India’s economic crisis at the beginning of 1983, that figure had become meaningless.

  The failure of the publicity campaign Muñoz had launched compounded these unfavorable conditions. In vain, Carbide flooded the countryside with posters depicting a Sikh holding a packet of Sevin and explaining to a peasant, “My role is to teach you how to make five rupees out of every rupee you spend on Sevin.” Farmers devoted most of their resources to buying seed and fertilizer. It had proven more difficult than anticipated to induce peasants to change their traditional practices and adopt farming methods involving the intensive use of pesticides. Many farmers had come to realize that it was impossible to fight the onslaught of predatory insects in isolation. The insects migrated from treated areas to untreated fields then returned to where they started as soon as the pesticide that had driven them away had lost its efficacy. These frustrating comings and goings had contributed strongly to the decline in pesticide sales. In 1982, Carbide’s salesmen had only been able to sell 2,308 tons of their white powder. That was less than half the production capacity of the industrial gem designed by the ambitious young men of South Charleston. The forecasts for 1983 were even more pessimistic.

  While storm clouds gathered over the future of the proud plant, a small trivial event took place one day in a hut in Orya Bustee that was to change Padmini’s life completely. One morning, when she awoke on the charpoy she shared with her parents and brother, she found a bloodstain in her underwear. She had started her first period. For a young girl in India this intimate progression is a momentous occasion. It means that she is ready for the one great event in her life: marriage. Custom may have it that a girl is married while she is still a child, but that is only a formality; the real union takes place after puberty. Like all the other little girls of her age, even those from the humblest Adivasi families, Padmini had been prepared for the solemn day in which she would be the center of attention. From her early childhood in
Mudilapa and subsequently in Bhopal, she had learned everything that a good wife and mother of a family should know. As for her parents, they knew that they would be judged on the manner in which their daughter conducted herself in her husband’s home. Unlike girls who were of strict Hindu observance, her conduct would not be assessed exclusively on submission to her husband. Among those Adivasis whose society is matriarchal, women enjoy prerogatives otherwise reserved for men. One of them is that of finding a husband for their daughters. They are, however, spared the main task associated with this responsibility—that of gathering together an acceptable dowry—because it is the fiancé who brings his betrothed a dowry.

  The daughter of an unskilled worker, even one employed by Union Carbide, was not the most glittering catch. Finding a husband would therefore take some time. But, as tradition required, that morning Padmini exchanged her child’s skirt and blouse for her first sari. There was no celebration at the Nadars’. Her mother simply wrapped the panties that had absorbed the first blood in a sheet of newspaper. “When we celebrate your marriage, we will go and take these to the Narmada,” she told her daughter. “We’ll offer them to the sacred river in order that it may bless you and bring you fertility.”

  It is a well-known fact that love is blind. Especially when the object of one’s passion is an industrial monster like a chemical plant. Warren Woomer had always refused to accept that the fate of Carbide’s factory in Bhopal should be determined by profitability alone. No capitalist enterprise, however, could go on absorbing the loss of millions of dollars. The projections drawn up seven years earlier, predicting annual profits of seven to eight million dollars, were no longer remotely feasible. Could Woomer’s replacement reverse the situation? The son of a former governor of the Reserve Bank of India, whose signature still appeared on two rupee notes, Jagannathan Mukund had many feathers in his cap, but he was not a magician. As an undergraduate at Cambridge, he had been a brilliant chemistry student. He went on to complete his doctorate at MIT in Boston and was promptly snapped up by Carbide. He then spent two years in Texas, two more running the Indian petrochemical plant on the island of Trombay, and finally three years at Institute in West Virginia, mastering the complicated techniques involved in the production of MIC. Mukund was married to the daughter of the deputy secretary of the United Nations, herself a distinguished economist and university professor. He was the father of a little girl who was born with a heart deformity whom American surgeons had saved by an operation that, at the time, they alone could perform. In theory, such an experienced leader was another gift from Carbide to its jewel in Bhopal. But it was in theory only, for the directors of Union Carbide India Limited, made the new works manager subject to a general manager to whom they gave the mission of reducing the factory’s losses, by whatever means necessary.

  Cultured, refined and always supremely elegant in tailored suits from London, this “superdirector,” an aristocratic Bengali by the name of D.N. Chakravarty, was fifty-two years old. A great lover of poetry, high living, Scotch whisky and pretty women, he was certainly a distinguished chemist, but utterly unsuited to work in a plant that produced dangerous chemical substances. His entire career had been spent at the head of an industry where a broken conveyer belt was the worst of all possible disasters. The battery division he had run from his office in Calcutta had in fact been a sinecure, reaping colossal profits without any risk whatsoever. The appointment of this intractable administrator would prove to be a fatal mistake.

  29

  “My Beautiful Plant Was Losing Its Soul”

  The young engineer who had risked his life escorting the first barrels of MIC from Bombay to Bhopal could not believe it. “When we were asked to show the new superdirector around the factory, it felt like taking a tourist round Disneyland,” Kamal Pareek would recall.

  Chakravarty knew nothing at all about how a plant of that kind worked. He did not know what most of the components were for. He got their names wrong: what he was calling a mixer was in fact a blender. In English the two words may mean essentially the same thing, but in Bhopal’s technical jargon, they referred to distinct parts. “We realized at once that this savior they’d sprung on us was not party to the mystique of the chemical industry,” Pareek would remember. “The only thing he was interested in was figures and accounts.”

  This might still have turned out for the good, if only the new superdirector had been prepared to admit that a plant like that could not be run like a battery factory; if he could have graciously acknowledged that, in a company of that kind, decisions must come from all levels, each one affecting as it did the lives of thousands of people; if he had understood that seemingly favorable conditions could suddenly swing the other way, that the levels in the tanks were constantly rising and falling, that the combustion of the reactors varied by the moment; in short, that it was impossible to run that sort of plant simply by sending out memos from his directorial armchair. “When you’re in charge of a pesticide plant,” Pareek explained, “you have occasionally to come out of your office, put on overalls and join the workers on site, breathing in the smell of grass and boiled cabbage.”

  Carbide’s great achievement had been that of integrating a vast spectrum of different cultures and guaranteeing the humblest of its workers the right to speak. Unfortunately, neither Jagannathan Mukund, though steeped in considerable American experience, nor his superior from Calcutta, seemed inclined to engage in a dialogue. Their understanding of human relations appeared to be based upon a concept of caste, not in the religious sense, but in a hierarchical sense. The introduction of such rifts was, little by little, to corrupt, divide and demotivate.

  “Once drastic cuts became the sole policy objective, and one man’s say-so was the only authority, we knew the plant was inevitably going to hell,” Kamal Pareek would confirm.

  Once again it was Rahul who bore the news. In a matter of minutes it was all around the bustees.

  “Carbide has just laid off three hundred coolies. And apparently that’s only the beginning.”

  “Haven’t the unions done anything about it?” Ganga Ram asked sharply.

  “They weren’t given any choice,” explained Rahul.

  “Does that mean they’re going to shut down all the installations?” worried Sheela Nadar, afraid that her husband might be among the men laid off.

  “Not necessarily,” Rahul tried to be reassuring. “But it does seem the sale of plant medicines isn’t going all that well anymore.”

  “It’s not surprising,” observed Belram Mukkadam, “the rains didn’t come this year and people are leaving the countryside.”

  Sunil, the eldest son of the Kumar family whose rice fields had been obliterated by the drought, spoke up. “Plant medicines are great when things are going well,” he declared. “But when there’s no water left to give the rice a drink, they’re useless.”

  Sunil was right. The gathering around Rahul had increased in size. The news he had brought provoked widespread consternation. After living so long in the shadow of the factory, after burning so many incense sticks to get jobs there, after being woken with a start by the howl of its sirens, after so many years of living together on this patch of land, how could they really believe that this temple of industry was crumbling?

  “This year the rains are going to be very heavy,” said the sorcerer Nilamber, whose predictions were always optimistic. “Then Carbide will take back those it kicked out today.”

  Sheela Nadar gave the little man with the goatee a grateful smile. Everyone noticed that her daughter Padmini was wearing a cotton sari instead of her children’s clothes.

  “The trainees from the plant have stopped coming to the House of Hope,” Padmini added. The House of Hope was the training center Carbide had set up in part of the building occupied by Sister Felicity’s handicapped children. “The classrooms have been closed for several days. I don’t think anyone’s coming back—they’ve taken away all their equipment.”

  Discouraged, the gr
oup fell silent, each one contemplating the mighty structure looming on the horizon.

  “I tell you they’ve only sacked our men so they can put even more money in their pocket,” decreed Prema Bai who had come from helping a new citizen of Orya Bustee into the world. “Don’t you worry: Carbide will always be there.”

  The whole city adopted her opinion. Neither the death of one of its workers, nor the ensuing union unrest, nor the apocalyptic predictions of Rajkumar Keswani had been able to tarnish the factory’s prestige in the Bhopalis’ eyes. The star that Eduardo Muñoz and a group of impassioned engineers had constructed, was as much a part of the city as its mosques, palaces and gardens. It was the crowning glory of an industrial culture that was completely new to India. The residents of Bhopal might not know what exactly the chimneys, tanks and pipework were for, but they were enthusiastic participants in all the sporting and cultural activities the plant could organize. There were some indications, however, at the beginning of 1983, that the honeymoon was drawing to a close. Under pressure from Carbide’s top management, Chakravarty and Mukund devoted their energies to making further cuts. “In India, like anywhere else in the world, the only way to reduce expenditure is to reduce running costs,” Kamal Pareek was to say. “In Bhopal, wages constituted the primary expense.” After the three hundred coolies were dismissed, many skilled workers and technicians were laid off. In the methyl isocyanate production unit alone the manpower in each shift was cut by half. In the vitally important control room, only one man was left to oversee some seventy dials, counters and gauges, which relayed, among other things, the temperature and pressure of the three tanks of MIC. Maintenance crews underwent the same cuts. The plant went from a total of nearly a thousand employees to six hundred and forty-two. What was more, a hundred and fifty workers were yanked from their regular workstations to make up a pool of manpower that could be moved here and there as the need arose. The result was a drop in the standard of work as many specialists found themselves assigned to tasks for which they had not been trained. The replacement of retiring skilled personnel with unskilled workers made further savings possible at the risk of having key positions filled by inexperienced people. The latter often spoke only Hindi, while the instruction manuals were written in English.