Five Past Midnight in Bhopal (11 page)

T
he large village the Carbide envoy thought he had seen from inside his Jaguar was in fact one of India’s most beautiful and
vibrant cities. But then Eduardo Muñoz had not had time to discover any of Bhopal’s treasures. Since 1722, when an Afghan
general fell in love with the site and founded the capital of his realm there, Bhopal had been adorned with so many magnificent
palaces, sublime mosques and splendid gardens that it was justifiably known as “the Baghdad of India.” Above all, it was for
its rich Muslim culture and tradition of tolerance that the town held a distinguished place in India’s history. The riches
of Bhopal had been forged first by a Frenchman, and then by four progressive female rulers—despite the burkahs that concealed
them from the eyes of men. The commander-in-chief of the nawab’s armies, and subsequently the country’s regent, Balthazar
I de Bourbon, and after him, the begums Sikander, Shah Jahan, Sultan Jahan and Kudsia had turned their realm and its capital
into a model much admired in imperial Britain as well as by other African and Asian colonial countries. Not only had the four
begums used their own funds to finance the advent of the railway line, they had opened up roads and markets, built cotton
mills, distributed vast areas of land to their landless subjects, set up a postal system unequalled in Asia and introduced
running water to the capital. In an effort to educate their people, they had introduced free primary instruction for everyone
and promoted female emancipation by increasing the number of girls’ schools.

The magnificence of the kingdom and its prestigious capital expressed itself in many different ways. A great lover of literature
and herself the author of several philosophical treatises, Begum Shah Jahan attracted distinguished scholars and learned men
from countries as far afield as Afghanistan and Persia to her court. The city had supplanted Hyderabad and Lahore as a beacon
of renascent Islamic culture that is so rich in Urdu literature, as well as painting and music. Of all the expressions of
this heritage, it was to poetry that the begum contributed most. Reviving the tradition of the
mushaira
, evenings of poetry recitals when the people could meet the greatest poets, she threw open the reception rooms of her palace
to all and arranged for monumental performances on the household cavalry’s Lal Parade Ground. There, sixty to eighty thousand
poetry lovers, three-quarters of the town’s population, used to come and sit on the ground right through the night to hear
poets sing of suffering, joy and the eternal aspirations of the soul.
“Weep not, my beloved,”
implored one of the Bhopalis’ favorite refrains.
“Even if for now your life is but dust and lamentation, it already proclaims the magic of what lies ahead.”

The next to last of these enlightened women rulers, Begum Sultan Jahan, had even created an institution—revolutionary for
the time—called the Bhopal Ladies Club. There, women were free to discuss their conditions and their future. The same begum
had also given her female subjects the opportunity to go shopping with their faces uncovered by building the Paris Bazaar,
a huge shopping center reserved exclusively for women. There they could walk about with their faces uncovered because all
the shopkeepers were women. Simply dressed and without bodyguards, the begum herself liked to visit this emporium which was
well stocked with items imported from London and Paris.

The British were unsparing in their respect for this remarkable lady. King George V invited her to his coronation and, in
1922, the prince of Wales paid a visit for the inauguration of the Government Council for the Kingdom of Bhopal, a democratic
institution quite unique in the princely India of that time. His visit was also intended to thank the begum for having emptied
both her private purse and the state coffers to support the British war effort. After all, she had sent her eldest son to
represent Bhopal and fight alongside the Allied soldiers in the trenches of the first world war.

Before she passed away, Begum Kudsia, last of the sovereign ladies of Bhopal, nevertheless expressed her regret that her subjects
seemed more interested in poetry than industrial projects or affairs of state. Despite the efforts of the economic development
agency she had created with the support of the British, in the period between the world wars, very few firms came to Bhopal.
Two textile mills, two sugar refineries, a cardboard and a match factory—the sum total was a modest one. Nor did the ascendance
of a male sovereign to the throne do anything to rectify matters. The nawab Hamidullah Khan was a charming, cultivated prince
but far more interested in decorating his palaces or breeding his horses than in constructing blast furnaces or textile factories.
While Mahatma Gandhi was going on a hunger strike to force the British out of the country, he was having a luxury bathroom
installed on the roof of one of his hunting station wagons.

On August 15, 1947, the subcontinent’s independence cast the maharajahs and nawabs of the Indian kingdoms into the oubliette
of history. The upset was a stroke of good fortune for Bhopal, which found itself promoted to the capital of the vast province
of Madhya Pradesh that encompassed all the country’s central territories. Its selection spurred the city into an era of feverish
development. It had been chosen for the same three reasons Carbide would select it, twenty years later, as the site of its
pesticide plant. Buildings had to be constructed to house the new province’s ministries and administrative bodies, whole neighborhoods
had to be built in which to lodge the thousands of officials and their families. A university, several technical colleges,
a hospital with two thousand beds, a medical school, shops, clubs, theaters, cinemas, restaurants had to be erected. In the
space of five years the population increased from 85,000 to nearly 400,000.

This rise had brought with it an influx of small and large firms from all over India. And now, as the chrome muzzle of a gray
Jaguar had just intimated, America was about to step in where only yesterday the last nawab and his guests had still been
hunting tigers and elephants. So that, for the occupants of Orya Bustee, as for the hundreds of other immigrants who stepped
off the trains each day looking for work, Bhopal at the end of the 1960s, was the promised land.

T
he City of the Begums greeted the government of Madhya Pradesh’s decision as a gift from the gods. By assigning a five-acre
plot of land on the Kali Grounds to the entrepreneur Santosh Dindayal, along with permission to build a factory to formulate
pesticides, the government was offering the city all the opportunities that went with an industrial venture. Eduardo Muñoz
was quick to pass on the glad tidings to his New York management before hurrying to the bar in Calcutta’s luxurious Hotel
Grand to celebrate with his wife Rita and his colleagues. He then set about looking for a team to build the factory. By a
stroke of incredible luck, he chanced upon the perfect trio: first Maluf Habibie, a frail Iranian chemical engineer with metal
rimmed spectacles, a specialist in formulation techniques for chemical products; then Ranjit Dutta, an engineer built like
a football halfback, who had previously worked with Shell in Texas; and finally, the only Bhopali, Arvind Shrivastava who
had only just completed his degree in mechanical engineering. The three men set camp in the back room of the Bhopal gas station
that belonged to Muñoz’s Indian associate. In two weeks they laid down the sketches for a plant, although “plant” was a very
grandiose name for a workshop to house the crushers, blenders and other equipment necessary for the commercial preparation
of the imported concentrate of Sevin.

Like all important events in India, the groundbreaking was marked with a ceremony. A
pandit
^*
girdled with the triple thread of a brahmin came and chanted mantras over the hole dug out of the black earth. A coconut
was brought, which Arvind Shrivastava decapitated with a billhook. The pandit poured the milk slowly onto the ground. Then
the young engineer cut the flesh into small pieces, which he offered to the priest and the onlookers. The brahmin raised his
hand and the workmen came forward and emptied their wheelbarrow full of concrete into the cavity. The gods had given their
blessing. The venture could commence.

With no complicated pipework, no glistening tanks, no burning flares, no metal chimneys, the building that rose from the Kali
Grounds bore no resemblance to the American monsters in the Kanawha Valley. In fact with its triple roof and line of small
windows it looked more like a pagoda. Inside was a vast hangar with a range of conical silos mounted on grinding machines.
This plant was to provide the Sevin concentrate imported from America with a granular carrier agent adapted to the various
methods of diffusion. The Sevin to be sprayed from the air over the huge plantations in the Punjab had to be formulated more
finely than the packaged Sevin that was to be spread by hand by the small farmers of Madhya Pradesh or Bengal. Whether granular
or fine as dust, the Bhopal Sevin promised to be a unique insecticide, less for its intrinsic qualities than for the carrier
agent Muñoz’s engineers had found for it.

To mystical India the Narmada River is the daughter of the sun. One has simply to behold it to achieve perfect purification.
One single night of fasting on its banks guarantees prosperity for hundreds of generations, and drowning in it wrests one
from the cycle of reincarnations. By a fortuitous stroke of geography this sacred river flowed just twenty-five miles from
Bhopal. According to the Vedas, its banks were covered with a sand as magical as the waters they confined. Mixed with the
pesticide from America, sand from the Narmada would avenge the Nadar family and all the other peasants ruined by voracious
insects. India was going to escape the ancestral curse of its famines.

“It was the best Christmas present I’d ever received,” the turbaned Sardar Singh, who had bought the 1,200 tons of American
Sevin from Muñoz, would confide. The end of that year, 1968, saw the first delivery of Bhopal-produced insecticide arrive
in his ministry’s warehouses: 131 tons to be sprayed over the cotton and cereal plantations of the Punjab. Once the requirements
of his beloved Punjab had been satisfied, however, Sardar Singh was likely to find himself with about 800 tons of pesticide
left on his hands. How could he ensure that other peasants in his country benefited from this providential surplus? He turned
to Eduardo Muñoz for help.

“Your company sells more than five hundred million batteries a year in this damn country,” he told him. “Its agents range
from the farthest reaches of the Himalayas to the backwaters of Kerala. Only an organization like yours can help me distribute
my Sevin.”

The Argentinian raised his arms. “My dear Mr. Singh, a bag of insecticide is not as easy to sell as a pair of batteries for
a flashlight,” he pointed out.

The Indian adopted a coaxing tone. “My dear Mr. Muñoz, what you personally have achieved in Mexico and Argentina, you will
manage to achieve here too. I have every faith in you. Let’s say no more about it; your smile tells me you will help me.”

The challenge was a colossal one. From behind the wheel of his Jaguar, Muñoz had gauged the enormity and complexity of India.
The country bore no resemblance to Mexico or even Argentina, both of which he had ended up knowing like the back of his hand.
India was a continent whose three hundred million peasants spoke five or six hundred different languages and dialects. Half
of them were illiterate and thus unable to read the label on a sack of fertilizer or a bag of insecticide. Yet they were dealing
with chemical products that were potentially fatal. Muñoz had been horrified by the number of accidents the newspapers reported
in rural areas: lung damage, burns to the skin, poisoning. The victims were almost always poor agricultural laborers whose
employers had not seen fit to provide them with protective clothing or masks. To improve the efficacy of their manure, many
peasants mixed different products together—almost always with their bare hands. Some even tasted the combination to make sure
it had been mixed properly. In the poorest villages where whole families lived in one room, the bag of insecticide frequently
sat in one corner, insidiously poisoning them with toxic emissions. Women drew water, did the milking or cooked food with
containers that had once held DDT. The result was an alarming increase in certain disorders. A journey through the Tamil Nadu
region horrified the Union Carbide representative. In some areas known for their intensive use of phytosanitary products,
the instances of lung, stomach, skin and brain cancer defied counting. In the Lucknow region, half the laborers who handled
pesticides were found to be suffering from serious psychological disorders as well as problems with their memory and eyesight.
Worst of all, these sacrifices were pointless. Poorly informed peasants thought they could increase a product’s effectiveness
by doubling or tripling the manufacturer’s recommended dosage. Their lack of understanding led many of them to ruin, sometimes
even suicide. Newspaper headlines reported that the most popular method these desperate people used to kill themselves was
swallowing a good dose of pesticide.