Five Past Midnight in Bhopal (26 page)

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.

T
he 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.