Five Past Midnight in Bhopal (17 page)

For the twenty-six-year-old mechanical engineer Arvind Shrivastava, who was part of the first team recruited by Muñoz, “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 entitled
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 participants 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 space 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 attitude 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 goddess of chemistry intervened to put us all, Indians and Americans alike, on the
same wavelength.”

M
y 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 entitled 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 embarrassment 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 municipal 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 massaged 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 longshoremen; 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 masseurs,
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 cocktail 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 Ambassador, which she drove herself, were hung with curtains to hide her passengers
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 sex-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.