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 a.s.sistant, 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 Inst.i.tute 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 end 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. Cl.u.s.ters 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.
One hour later, the sixteen drums marked with the skull and crossbones sign were loaded aboard the two trucks. An agonizing journey was about to begin. Caught up in the chaos of tongas, * rickshaws, buffalo carts, sacred elephants, other animals of all kinds and overloaded trucks, the two big rigs and Pareek and Qureshi"s white Amba.s.sador car set out on the road to Bhopal. "Every rut, every time a horn sounded, every acrobatic overtaking of a vehicle, every railway crossing, made us jump," Shekil Qureshi remembered.
"Have you had any dealings with MIC before?" Pareek suddenly asked his companion who was fervently muttering prayers.
"Yes, once. A sparkling liquid in a bottle. It looked just like mineral water." At this idea the two men broke into a slightly strained laughter. "In any case," Qureshi went on, "it was so clear, so transparent, you"d never have thought you had only to inhale a few drops for it to kill you."
Pareek directed the driver to pa.s.s the two trucks and stop a little farther on. The sun was so hot that he was worried. "Our cans mustn"t start to boil."
The two men were well aware that the boiling point of methyl isocyanate is 39 C. They also knew that the result could be catastrophic.
Qureshi put his head out of the window. A blast of burning air hit him in the face. "I bet it"s at least forty degrees, possibly even forty-five."
Pareek grimaced and signaled to the driver of the front truck to stop. The two men at once rushed over to cover the drums with heavy isothermic tarpaulins. Then they took the extinguishers out of their holders. In case of danger a jet of carbonic foam could lower the temperature of a drum by a few degrees.
"But we didn"t harbor too many illusions," the engineer later admitted.
For thirty-eight hours, the two intrepid Carbide employees acted as sheepdogs, with their Amba.s.sador car sometimes in front of, and sometimes following, the two trucks. They had been given explicit instructions: their convoy was to stop before entering any inhabited area to allow time to fetch a police escort. "You could read the extreme curiosity on the local people"s faces at the sight of these two trucks surrounded by police officers," Pareek would recall. ""What can they possibly be transporting under their tarpaulins to justify that sort of protection?" people must have been wondering."
That first high-risk convoy was to be followed by dozens of others. Over the next six years, hundreds of thousands of gallons of the deadly liquid were to traverse the villages and countryside of Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. The day came in May 1980 when, to the delight of all the staff, especially those who had to supervise the trips, the chemical reactors of Bhopal"s brand new plant produced their first gallons of methyl isocyanate. They were dispatched into three huge tanks, which would soon store enough MIC to poison half the city.
The city that had withstood invasions, sieges and the bloodiest of political plots, was in the throes of succ.u.mbing to the charms of a foreign chemical giant. Eduardo Muoz could rejoice; Carbide was going to achieve by peaceful means what no one else had managed in three centuries: the conquering of Bhopal. To the crescents on its mosques, the linga of its Hindu temples and the crosses on its Christian churches, the capital of Madhya Pradesh now added a profane emblem that was to forever alter its destiny: the blue-and-white logo of a pesticide plant.
"That prestigious symbol would contribute to the advent of a privileged cla.s.s of workers," Kamal Pareek would explain. "Whether you were employed at the very top of the hierarchy or as the humblest of operators, to work for Carbide was to belong to a caste apart. We were known as the "sahibs." "
At Carbide, an engineer earned twice as much as a top official in the Indian administration. This meant he could enjoy a house, a car, several servants and travel in first-cla.s.s, air-conditioned trains. What counted most, however, was the prestige of belonging to a universally recognized multinational. Social status plays as crucial a role in India as anywhere else. "When people read on my business card: "Kamal Pareek-Union Carbide India Limited," all doors were opened," the engineer recalled.
Everyone dreamed of having a family member or an acquaintance employed by the company. Those who had that good fortune were quick to sing its praises.
"Unlike Indian companies, Carbide did not dictate what you should do with your salary," a Carbide manager explained. "It was American liberty overlaying an Indian environment."
For V.N. Singh, the son of an illiterate peasant from Uttar Pradesh, the envelope stamped with the blue-and-white logo that the postman delivered to him one morning "was like a message from the G.o.d Krishna falling from the sky." The letter inside informed the young mathematics graduate that Carbide was offering him a position as an operator trainee in its phosgene unit. The boy scrambled across the fields as fast as his legs would carry him to take the news to his father. When they heard the news, his neighbors came running. Soon the entire village had formed a circle around the fortunate chosen one and his father. Both were too moved to utter a sound. Then a voice shouted: "Union Carbide ki jai! Long live Union Carbide!" All the villagers joined in the invocation, as if the entry of one of their own into the service of the American company were a benediction for all the occupants of the village.
As for Shekil Qureshi, the Muslim who had taken part in the dangerous transportation of the drums from Bombay to Bhopal, joining Carbide as a supervisor trainee brought him a sumptuous marriage at the Taj ul-Masajid, the great mosque built by Begum Shah Jahan. Dressed in a glittering sherwani, a long tunic of gilded brocade, his feet shod in slippers encrusted with precious stones, his arm entwined with the traditional band inscribed with prayers soliciting the protection of Allah for him and his wife, a red silk Rajasthani turban on his head, the young chemistry graduate from Saifia College proudly advanced toward the mihrab* of the mosque, "dreaming of the linen coverall with the blue-and-white logo that was, as far as he was concerned, the finest possible attire."
Such was the prestige conferred by a job with Carbide that families from all over came to Bhopal to find husbands for their daughters. One morning, sensing his end was near, Yusuf Bano, a cloth merchant in Kanpur, put his eighteen-year-old daughter Sajda on the express train to Bhopal with the secret intention of having her meet the son of a distant cousin, who was working in the phosgene unit on the Kali Grounds. "My cousin, Mohammed Ashraf was a handsome boy with a thick black mustache and a laughing mouth," the woman later recalled. "I liked him at once. All his workmates and even the director of the factory came to our wedding. They gave us a very amusing present. My husband was moved to tears: two Union Carbide helmets with our first names interlaced in gilded lettering."
For the twenty-six-year-old mechanical engineer Arvind Shrivastava, who was part of the first team recruited by Muoz, "Carbide wasn"t just a place to work. It was a culture, too. The theatrical evenings, the entertainment, the games, the family picnics beside the waters of the Narmada, were as important to the life of the company as the production of carbon monoxide or phosgene."
The management constantly urged its workers to "break up the monotonous routine of factory life," by creating cultural interest and recreational clubs. In an India where the humblest sweeper is brought up on historical and mythological epics, the result exceeded all expectations. The play ent.i.tled Shikari ki bivi put on by the workers from the phosgene unit was a triumph. It exalted the courage of a hunter who sacrificed himself to kill a man-eating tiger. As for the first poetry festival organized by the Muslims working in the formulation unit, it attracted so many partic.i.p.ants that the performance had to be extended for three additional nights. Then came a magazine. In it, the operator of the carbon monoxide unit, who was also the editor-in-chief, called upon all employees to send him articles, news items and poems, in short any material that might "introduce ingenious ideas to contribute to everyone"s happiness."
These initiatives, which were typically American in inspiration, soon permeated the city itself. The inhabitants of Bhopal may not have understood the function of the chimneys, tanks and pipework they saw under construction, but they all came rushing to the cricket and volleyball matches the new factory sponsored. Carbide had even set up a highly successful hockey team. As a tribute to the particular family of pesticides to which Sevin belonged, it called its team "the Carbamates." Nor did Carbide forget the most poverty stricken. On the eve of the Diwali festival, young Padmini saw an official delegation of Carbiders handing out baskets full of sweets, bars of chocolate and cookies. While the children launched themselves at the sweets, other employees went around the huts, distributing what Carbide considered to be a most useful gift in overpopulated India: condoms.
As for the Americans, who suddenly found themselves parachuted into the heart of India, they often felt as if they had landed on another planet. In the s.p.a.ce of twenty-four hours, forty-four-year-old Warren Woomer and his wife Betty had traveled from their peaceful, germ-free West Virginia to the bewildering maelstrom of noises, smells and frenetic activity of the City of the Begums. For the man to whom the company would shortly entrust the command of the Bhopal factory, the adventure was "a real culture shock."
"I knew so little about India!" he candidly would admit. "I realized we"d have to adjust our thought processes and way of life to thousand-year-old traditions. How were we going to get our turbaned Sikh employees to wear a helmet while performing dangerous procedures when even the Indian army had given up with that obligation? Before I left South Charleston, I didn"t even know what a Sikh was!"
For his young compatriot, John Luke Couvaras, who, in his enthusiasm, had likened the Bhopal venture to "a crusade," "the experience was absolutely unique. I particularly remember the feeling of excitement," he said, "but India never failed to endear itself to us, sometimes quite comically."
In the beginning, employees regularly arrived late to their workstations.
"Sahib, the buffalo cows had escaped," one of Couvaras"s workers explained. "I had to run after them to milk them."
The American admonished the former peasant gently. "The running of our factory cannot depend on the whims of your cows," he stated clearly.
"But after six months, everything was working to order," admitted Couvaras.
There were plenty of other surprises in store for the young engineer, starting with the difference in att.i.tude between Hindu and Muslim engineers. "If there was a problem, a Muslim would give you the facts straight and then acknowledge his responsibility. Whereas a Hindu would remain vague and then incriminate fate. We had to adapt ourselves to these differences. Fortunately, after a certain level of education, the G.o.ddess of chemistry intervened to put us all, Indians and Americans alike, on the same wavelength."
19.
The Lazy Poets" Circle My very dear engineer Young, your presence does us infinite honor. Be so good as to remove your shoes and stretch out on these cushions. Our poetry recital is due to commence in a few moments. While you"re waiting, do quench your thirst with this coconut."
Thirty-one-year-old Hugo Young, a mechanical engineer originally from Denver, Colorado, could scarcely believe his eyes. He had suddenly found himself thousands of light-years away from his phosgene reactors, in the vast drawing room of one of Bhopal"s numerous patrician residences. About him, some twenty men of different ages were reclining on silk cushions embroidered with gold and silver, their heads resting on small brocade pillows. By buying these pillows they had acquired the right of entry into the most exclusive men"s club, the Lazy Poets" Circle. Bhopal might be launching itself into the industrial era, but as one expatriate of the Kanawha Valley testified, it was not going to give up any of its traditions. All the adepts of the Lazy Poets" Circle continued to observe the very particular laws and rites of their brotherhood. Those reclining were considered to be lazy poets of the first order; those seated were lazy poets of the second order; and those standing were voluntarily depriving themselves of the respect of their peers. This hierarchy of posture ent.i.tled the reclining to command the seated and the seated to command the standing. It was a subtle philosophy, which even found its expression in material things. For example, cups and bowls with thick rims were strictly prohibited so members of the Lazy Poets" Circle would not have to open their lips any wider than necessary when drinking.
All afternoon, poets, singers and musicians followed one another at the bedsides of the lazy, charming them with couplets and aubades. In the evening, after an army of turbaned servants had served them all kinds of samosas, the brotherhood took the young American to the parade ground in the old town where a poetry festival was being held. That evening, the mushaira had brought together several authors, professional and amateur, who were singing their works to a particularly enthusiastic audience.
"My friends made a point of translating the ghazals* for me," Young remembered. "They all evoked tragic destinies, which love saved in the end. As I listened to the voices with their harmonies rising ever higher until they sounded almost like cries for help, I thought with embarra.s.sment of the deadly phosgene I was making in my reactors only a few hundred yards from that prodigious happening."
In the course of the evening one of the members of the Lazy Poets" Circle placed a hand on the young American"s shoulder.
"Do you know, dear engineer Young, which is the most popular mushaira in Bhopal?" he asked.
The engineer pretended to think. Then with a mischievous wink, he replied, "The Lazy Poets", I imagine."
"You"re way off, my dear fellow. It"s the mushaira of the munic.i.p.al police. The chief of police told a journalist one day that it was "better to make people cry through the magic of poetry than with tear gas." "
Indolent, voluptuous, mischievous and always surprising- that was Bhopal. John Luke Couvaras would never forget the spectacle he came across one afternoon in the living room of his villa in Arera Colony. Stretched out on a sofa, his young Canadian wife was being ma.s.saged by two exotic creatures with kohlrimmed eyes and heavy black tresses that tumbled to their thighs. The grace of their movements, their delicacy and concentration extracted a string of compliments from the engineer, but the thanks he received in response could have come from the mouths of a pair of longsh.o.r.emen; the long henna-decorated hands kneading away at his wife"s flesh belonged to two hijras, or eunuchs.
Less than eight hundred yards from the futuristic complex rising from the Kali Grounds, in old houses washed out by the monsoon, lived a whole community of hijras, a very particular caste in Indian society. They had come to the City of the Begums from every region of India, for festivals and pilgrimages, and they stayed. Three or four hundred eunuchs were reckoned to inhabit Bhopal. They lived in small groups organized around a guru who acted as head of the family. Apart from being talented ma.s.seurs, they played an important role in local Hindu society. According to religious tradition, these beings, neither men nor women, had the power to expunge sins committed by newborn babies in their previous lives. Whenever there was a birth, the hijras came running, carrying tambourines coated in red powder for the ceremony of purification. They were always generously remunerated. No one in Bhopal would haggle over the services of the hijras, for fear of incurring their maledictions.
The expatriates from South Charleston experienced a culture shock that only India could induce. For the thirty-six-year-old bachelor Jack Briley, an alpha naphthol expert, the East and all its charms were embodied in a woman. She was one of the nawab"s nieces. He had met her at a c.o.c.ktail party in honor of the president of the World Bank. Refined, cultured and liberated-something that was rare in Muslim circles-and gifted with a lively sense of humor, twenty-eight-year-old Selma Jehan was, with her large kohl-rimmed eyes, "the perfect incarnation of a princess out of A Thousand and One Nights of the kind a young American from the banks of the Kanawha River might dream of." Jack Briley allowed himself to fall easily under her spell. As soon as he could escape from the plant, the young Muslim woman showed him the city of her ancestors. As the rules of purdah* ordained, the windows of the old family Amba.s.sador, which she drove herself, were hung with curtains to hide her pa.s.sengers from others" sight.
Selma brought her suitor first to the city palaces, where some members of her family were still living. Most of these once-grand buildings were in a sorry state, with cracked walls, ceilings occupied by bats and grimy furniture.
Some of these residences housed the survivors of another age. Begum Zia, Selma"s grandmother, lived among her bougainvilleas and her neem and tamarind trees in Shamla Hills. She never failed to show visitors the silver-framed portrait of the first gift she had received from her husband: a sixteen-year-old Abyssinian slave in Turkish trousers with a waistcoat embroidered with gold.
Briley had the good fortune to be a guest at several receptions held by his young friend"s unusual grandmother. There he met all the town"s uppercrust, people like Dr. Zahir ul-Islam who had just successfully performed Bhopal"s first s.e.x-change operation, or the little man they called "the Pasha," the town"s gossip. Wearing a wine-colored fez, and a suit of silver brocade, with his eyes made up with kohl, the Pasha spoke English with an Oxford accent. He had lived in England for twenty years but left because he said he felt too Indian there. He found living in India difficult, because he felt too English. Only in Bhopal did he feel at home.
Another regular at Begum Zia"s soirees was an eccentric old man dressed in rags, known as Enamia. Under his real name, Sahibzada Sikander Mohammed Khan Taj, this obscure, impecunious cousin of the begum had married a Spanish princess. He, too, had spent twenty years in London where he worked in a sausage factory before being dismissed for "unhygienic behavior." No one had ever tried to find out what lay behind the peculiar charge, but the begum and her friends doted upon old Enamia. A great connoisseur of the city, nothing gave him more pleasure than showing foreign visitors around it in his old Jeep with its defunct shock absorbers. He knew the history of every street, monument and house. Enamia was Bhopal"s memory.
The begum"s dinners also brought together pa.s.sing artists, politicians, writers and poets. Another regular was of course Eduardo Muoz, 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 pa.s.sionate 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 G.o.ddess 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 G.o.d 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 a.s.set. 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 b.u.t.ter 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 G.o.d, 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 puree made out of gifts from the precious animal-milk, b.u.t.ter, yogurt, dung and urine. The receptacle was pa.s.sed 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, c.o.c.kroaches 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 Ba.s.si 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 a.n.a.lyzed 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 Muoz 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," Muoz 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 doc.u.ment 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." "
Muoz"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 G.o.d 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 Muoz 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 munic.i.p.al 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 cla.s.s 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 Inst.i.tute"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 a.s.signed 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 Inst.i.tute 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 a.s.signed 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 a.s.set," affirmed the preamble to the doctrine"s manifesto, "and their health and safety are therefore our number one 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 a.s.suring 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 Inst.i.tute, 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 a.s.sistant 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.
"At Inst.i.tute," the Indian engineer would say, "the posters of which the management seemed most proud were not graphs tracking the rise of Sevin sales, but safety awards the company"s various factories throughout the world had won."