Rehman Khan was a twenty-nine-year-old Muslim who seldom parted from his embroidered skullcap, even when wearing his safety helmet. Originally from Bombay, he had moved to Bhopal to get married. His wife worked as a seamstress in the workshop that made Carbide’s coveralls. It was thanks to her that, after a brief training period, he had joined the MIC production unit as an operator. He had been working there for four months and earned a monthly salary of 1,400 rupees, a comfortable amount, given his lack of experience and qualifications. Like most of the 120 workers also on the site that evening, he had practically nothing to do. The factory’s production of MIC had been stopped. Khan was part of the second shift, and was on duty until twenty-three hundred hours. A passionate lover of poetry, as soon as his shift was over he intended to go to Spices Square for the grand mushaira being held in honor of the festival of Ishtema. To kill time that dreary winter’s evening, he had been playing cards with some of his comrades in the canteen when an urgent telephone call summoned him to the duty supervisor, Gauri Shankar, a tall bald Bengali who seemed extremely irritated.
“That lazy maintenance team hasn’t even managed to flush out the pipes!” he grumbled.
Shankar was referring to the pipework that carried the liquid MIC produced by the plant’s reactors to the tanks. Highly corrosive in nature, methyl isocyanate attacks pipes, leaving scoria deposits on their lining. High pressure jets of water had constantly to be sent into the piping to get rid of these impurities, not just because they would eventually block the flow, but above all because they could get into the storage tanks and contaminate the MIC.
Shankar brandished the logbook for the MIC production unit. “Here are the instructions left by A.V. Venugopal,” he explained. “The production supervisor wants us to flush the pipes.”
Khan knitted his thick eyebrows. “Is it absolutely necessary to do it this evening? The plant’s stopped. I would have thought it could wait till tomorrow. Don’t you think?”
Shankar shrugged his shoulders. He had no idea. In truth neither he nor Venugopal the supervisor were knowledgeable about the factory’s very complex maintenance procedures. They had both only just arrived there, one from Calcutta, the other from Madras. They knew virtually nothing about MIC or phosgene apart from their very distinctive smells. Like the former superdirector Chakravarty, the only industry they were familiar with was the one that produced Carbide’s fortune in India: batteries.
In his note, the supervisor had given succinct instructions as to how the requisite washing operation should be carried out. He stipulated that it should begin with the cleaning of the four filters and the circuit valves. He went on to supply a list of stopcocks to be turned off to prevent the rinse water from entering the tanks containing the MIC. But he had forgotten to recommend one crucial precaution: the placing of solid metal discs at each end of the pipes connected to the tanks. Two segments of the pipework had only to be disconnected and the discs slid into the housings provided for the purpose, then the whole thing bolted up again. The process required a little less than an hour. Only the presence of these “slipbinds” as the engineers called them, could guarantee that the tanks were hermetically sealed. The valves and stopcocks under attack from corrosion could not, alone, ensure their insulation.
Rehman Khan set to work by closing the main stopcock. It was a complicated process because the stopcock was located three yards off the ground, at the center of a tangle of pipes that were difficult to get to. Bracing himself against two girders, he put all his weight on the handle that closed the stopcock, yet he still could not be sure that he had managed to seal it completely, so rusted and corroded were the metal parts. After that, he climbed back down to turn off the other stopcock and start flushing. He had only then to connect a hosepipe to one of the draincocks on the pipework and turn on the tap. For a few seconds he listened to the water rushing vigorously into the pipes and noted the time in the logbook: it was eight-thirty.
The young operator quickly realized that something unusual was going on: the injected water was not, as it should have been, coming out of the four draincocks provided for the purpose. Khan tapped them lightly with a hammer and discovered that the filters in two of them were blocked with metal debris. He immediately cut off the water supply and alerted his supervisor by telephone. The latter did not arrive for quite a while, and when he did, his lack of experience meant he was not much help.
He simply instructed Khan to clean the filters on the evacuation draincocks well, and turn the water back on. “With the pressure of the flow, they’ll let the water out eventually.”
The young Muslim agreed, with some reservations. “But if the water doesn’t come out through the draincocks, it’ll go somewhere else,” he suggested.
The supervisor failed to grasp the vital implications of this remark. “We’ll just have to see!” he replied, clearly irritated that he had been disturbed for something so trivial.
As soon as his superior had gone, Khan began cleaning the filters, then turned the wash tap back on. Shankar was right: the water flowed out normally through the first two draincocks and, after a moment, through the third one, too. But the fourth seemed to be permanently blocked. Khan was not unduly worried. As his boss had said, the system would eventually clear itself. He went on flushing the pipes, using all the pressure in his hose. Several hundred gallons poured into the pipes. Two hours later, at ten-thirty, half an hour before the changeover of shifts, he knocked on the door to his superior’s cabin.
“What shall I do?” he asked. “Shall I keep the water running, or should I turn it off?”
Shankar looked doubtful. He rubbed his chin.
“Keep it running,” he said eventually. “The insides of those bloody pipes are supposed to be completely spotless. The night shift will turn the tap off.”
At these words, Rehman Khan penciled in a brief report of the operation in progress in the logbook.
“Good night, sir. See you tomorrow!” he then said. He was in a hurry to shower and dress for the evening’s big event, the mushaira in Spices Square.
It was now eleven o’clock at night. Spices Square was humming with poetry lovers impatient to hear their favorite poets. On the other side of the city, the reception rooms and lawns of the Arera Club were teeming with guests, as were the sumptuously decorated tents set up for the marriages in the affluent neighborhoods of New Bhopal and Shamla Hills. On the Kali Grounds, strings of bulbs lit up Dilip and Padmini’s wedding celebrations. The whole of Bhopal had given itself up to rejoicing on that night blessed by the stars. It was in the Railway Colony beneath a shower of fireworks, that the festivities were most splendid. The one thousand guests at the wedding of Rinu Diwedi, younger daughter of the chief controller of the Bhopal railway to the son of a Vidisha merchant, watched with wonder the ritual procession of the Barat. Perched on a white mare covered with a velvet cloth embroidered with gold, wearing a span-gled turban on his head, young Rajiv caracoled toward his fiancée who was waiting for him under Parvez’s most beautiful shamiana. Before he straddled his mount, his father had marked his forehead with the red and black spots that would banish the evil eye forever and guarantee Rajiv a propitious future. He had also been given a coconut with red stripes scratched onto it, a traditional token of good luck. In front of the white mare walked a woman taking tiny steps: his mother. She was dressed in the double silk and gold sari she kept for special occasions. Fervently she strewed the ground with handfuls of salt, to eliminate all of life’s pitfalls from her son’s path.
37
“What if the Stars Were to Go on Strike?”
Twenty-three hundred hours—11 P.M. It was time for a change of watch on the bridge of the vessel Rehman Khan and his comrades from the previous shift had just left. The man who took over command of the control room was a Bengali Hindu named Suman Dey. Twenty-six years old, with a degree in science from the University of California, he was both competent and respected. The seventy-five dials lit up in front of him made up the factor
y’s control panel. Every needle, every luminous indicator supplied information, showed the state of activity in each section, signaled an eventual anomaly. Temperatures, pressures, levels, outputs—in his capacity as officer of the watch, Suman Dey was kept constantly apprised of the condition of the plant. At least that was the theory, because, for some time now, some of the apparatus had been breaking down. Dey was therefore obliged to go and get his information on site. He was not always able to. For the past several days, because of a fault in the transmission circuit, there had been no temperature reading coming through from tank 610. To calm his own frustration, he meditated on the words of a large notice hanging on the wall above the dials: “SAFETY IS EVERYBODY’S BUSINESS.” There was nothing definite, however, to make the young Bengali believe that the safety of the factory was not assured.
Certainly, the faces of the six night-shift operators betrayed no sign of disquiet. They settled in for the night around the brazier in the small room adjoining the control room used as the site canteen because those in it could be mobilized immediately in case of alert. The men on duty that night were a perfect reflection of India’s enormous diversity. Next to the Muslim supervisor Shekil Qureshi, the man who had escorted the MIC trucks, sat the Sikh V.N. Singh whose parents had been so thrilled to see him join Carbide. Next to him was a tall, twenty-nine-year-old Hindu with a melancholy face. Mohan Lal Varma was in the midst of a dispute with the management who, for six months, had been refusing to give him his classification and salary as a sixth-grade operator. There was also a Jain, originally from Bombay and as thin as a wire, a son of a railway employee from Jabalpur and a former trader from Bihar.
Apart from Qureshi, Singh and Varma, who were to continue the cleaning operation that the previous shift had started, the men had nothing specific to do that night because their production units had been stopped. They chatted about the plant’s gloomy future, smoked bidis, chewed betel and drank tea.
“Apparently the Sevin sales aren’t going too well anymore,” said the Jain from Bombay.
“They’re going so badly that they’ve decided to dismantle the factory and send it in bits to some other country,” added the merchant from Bihar who had become a specialist in alpha naphthol.
“Which country?” the Jain asked anxiously.
“Venezuela!” replied the Muslim from Jabalpur.
“Not Venezuela!” corrected Qureshi who had sources in the management offices. “Brazil.”
“Meanwhile, we’re the ones Carbide drops in the shit,” Varma said angrily. His struggles with his superiors had made him aggressive.
Qureshi tried to allay his colleagues’ fears. They all liked this tall, slightly clumsy fellow, who was always ready to share his inexhaustible repertoire of ghazals. Listening to him sing his poems, the nights did not seem quite so long. They had been pleasantly surprised to find him there that evening, because the roster had not shown him on duty until the next day. At the last minute, however, he had agreed to stand in for a colleague who had been invited to one of the weddings—a very noble gesture on his part on a night when there was a mushaira.
While still carrying on with the discussion, Qureshi cast an eye over the logbook, brought up to date by the previous shift. On the page for tank 610, for the pressure reading for twenty hundred hours, he read, “2 psig.” He gave a smile of satisfaction. Two pounds per square inch of pressure! That meant that all was well inside the tank. The Muslim’s expression darkened, however, when he realized that this information was three hours old. Three hours!
“Before half the technicians were laid off, we used to take pressure and temperature readings every two hours. Now it’s every …”
“Eight hours,” specified Suman Dey who had just emerged from the control room.
An atmosphere of extreme depression prevailed for some time over the metal structures of the factory. Ever since the departure of the men who had given it its soul—Woomer, Dutta, Pareek, Ballal—morale had plummeted, discipline had lapsed and, worst of all, the safety culture had gone out the window. It was rare now for those handling toxic substances to wear their helmets, goggles, masks, boots and gloves. It was even rarer for anyone to go spontaneously in the middle of the night to check the welding on the pipework. Eventually, and insidiously, the most dangerous of ideas had crept in, namely that nothing serious could happen in a factory when all the installations were turned off. As a result, plant workers preferred card games in the site canteen to tours of inspection around the dormant volcano.
“Hey guys! Can you smell it? Hey, can you smell it?” Mohan Lal Varma had sprung to his feet. He sniffed noisily. “Have a sniff, go on! I swear there’s MIC in the air!”
This sudden excitement on the part of the quiet young Hindu provoked much amusement all around.
“Sort out your snoot! Idiot!” cried the Jain from Bombay. “There can’t be any smell of MIC in a factory that’s stopped!”
“It’s not MIC you can smell, it’s Flytox!” interrupted the factory worker from Bihar. “They sprayed a whole canister of it about before we got here!”
“That’s why we haven’t been eaten up by mosquitoes yet!” confirmed the Muslim from Jabalpur.
Everyone in Bhopal agreed: Flytox was a godsend. It was, after all, the miracle insecticide that provided protection against the City of the Begums’ worst scourge: its mosquitoes.
Amid all the hullabaloo of the festivities taking place on the other side of the Kali Grounds, no one noticed a frail young girl dressed in a simple blouse and blue cotton skirt. She threaded her way through the guests preparing to dine on the sisal mats. She approached several of the guests, apparently looking for someone.
“Do you know where Sister Felicity is?” she asked, clearly agitated.
Dalima, who had overheard the question, joined the stranger and scrutinized the faces by the light of the strings of bulbs. The banquet had begun. The men were on one side, the women on the other. Only the bride was missing from the feast. She had momentarily withdrawn to a neighbor’s hut to open her wedding presents. Eventually, Dalima spotted the missionary sitting among a group of women. The young messenger rushed over to her.
“Anita, what are you doing here?” the nun asked, surprised. “Sister, you must come at once! There’s been an accident at home.”
The Scotswoman led Anita to an autorickshaw parked outside the teahouse.
“What is it?” she asked, concerned.
“The little one you have in your room …”
“Nadia?”
“Yes. She had a terrible fit. She started smashing everything up. She yelled far more loudly than last night, louder than any of the nights before the monsoon. She yelled like a madwoman. She called for you. Three of us tried to calm her down, restrain her, but …”
“But?”
“She got away from us. She threw herself out of the window.”
“Oh my God!” The nun felt her heart pound. For a few seconds she remained silent, then slowly crossing herself, she said softly, “Lord Jesus, receive your innocent child into your Paradise.”
“She’s not dead, sister!” Anita said quickly. “An ambulance has taken her to Hamidia Hospital.”
Fifteen minutes later, Anita and Sister Felicity ran through the emergency entrance to the building where the air was thick with the smell of disinfectant and ether. The floor was spotted with red stains left where people chewing betel had spat. The wards were almost empty. Sunday was not a day for too many accidents. Under the inscription DOCTORS ON DUTY, two doctors were settling down for a quiet night in their small office. Tall and lanky, with his black shock of hair carefully combed, the thirty-five-year-old Hindu Deepak Gandhe, and his young Muslim colleague Mohammed Sheikh had been students together at the Gandhi Medical College, the enormous building on the other side of the road. Since then they had been inseparable. One was a general practitioner; the other a surgeon. That was the usual combination for a tour of duty. The arrival of Sister Felicity and the young Indian girl
caught them right in the middle of a game of dominoes. They stood up.
“Doctors, we’ve come about Nadia,” said Sister Felicity.
Dr. Sheikh’s face froze. He played nervously with his mustache. The two women prepared themselves for the worst. Dr. Gandhe, however, gave the faintest of smiles.
“Little Nadia has undergone an operation,” he said softly. “For the moment she has survived her injuries. We hope to be able to save her. She’s in intensive care.”
The Scotswoman’s eyes filled with tears. “May I see her?”
“Yes, Sister, you can even spend the night with her. You’ll have the whole ward to yourself. There’s no one else in intensive care this evening.”
While Sister Felicity and young Anita began a prayer and vigil night beside little Nadia’s injured body, the thousand guests at the wedding in the Railway Colony tucked into petits fours, kebabs, prawns, diced chicken in ginger and pieces of cheese wrapped in spinach delivered by an army of turbaned servants. Despite the fact that his cardiologist had forbidden him alcohol because of his coronary problems, Harish Dhurve, the stationmaster, tested his luck with the glasses of “English liquor,” the imported British whisky being served. Suddenly he found himself nose to nose with his doctor.
“Indulge me, doctor, this evening is exceptional, a night blessed by the stars!” he apologized.
Five Past Midnight in Bhopal Page 23