Five Past Midnight in Bhopal (9 page)

It was on the smell, or rather the lack thereof, that the initial results of these unprecedented efforts were judged. A properly
sealed chemical plant does not give off any smell. Such was not the case with the factories polluting the Kanawha Valley with
emissions that none of its two hundred and fifty thousand residents could escape. “The smells ended up permeating the trees,
flowers, the river water and even the air we breathed,” complained Pamela Nixon, a thirty-eight-year-old laboratory assistant
at the Saint Francis Hospital in South Charleston. Along with several hundred other black families, she lived in the Perkins
Avenue area, close by the tanks and chimneys of the Institute works. A few days before the launch of the new factory, Pamela
and her neighbors found a leaflet in their mailboxes sent by Union Carbide’s local management. Entitled
Plan for the General Evacuation of Institute
, this document listed the procedures to be observed in case of an incident. The first instruction was to stay put. “Switch
your radio to WCAW station, 689 meters medium wave, or your television to channel 8 on station WCHS,” the document instructed.
“This is the kind of announcement that you are likely to hear:
At ten o’clock this morning, the West Virginia state police reported an industrial accident involving dangerous chemical substances.
The accident occurred at 09.50 hours at the Institute site of the Union Carbide Company. All persons living in the vicinity
are invited to remain in their homes, close their doors and windows, turn off all fans and air-conditioning systems, and keep
a listening watch for further instructions. The next communication will be broadcast in five minutes.
” Pamela Nixon taped the sheet of paper to a corner of her fridge door.

Two weeks later, when the new plant had begun production, the young woman suddenly noticed a strange smell coming in through
her kitchen window. It was being carried on the breeze blowing, as usual, from the direction of the industrial structures
located upwind of her home. It was neither the smell of fish nor the odor of rotten eggs that she had grown accustomed to.
This new smell went to show that even if the plant she could see from her house was a model of advanced technology, it was
not, in fact, totally sealed. However it triggered a childhood memory. Like her mother’s cooking every Sunday after church,
the methyl isocyanate produced by Union Carbide smelled like boiled cabbage.
^*

T
he figure who entered the Orya Bustee one morning took Belram Mukkadam by surprise. He had never before seen a European venture
into the neighborhood. Tall, dressed in a black, ankle-length robe, with a metal cross strung across her chest, her gray hair
boyishly cropped and thick round glasses taking up much of her thin face, she sported a luminous smile. Mukkadam welcomed
her with his customary friendliness.

“What a pleasant surprise! Welcome, sister. What wind of good fortune brings you here?” he asked.

The visitor saluted him the Indian way. “I’ve heard your neighborhood needs someone to provide medical care for the sick,
the children and the elderly. Well, here I am. I’ve come to offer you my humble services.”

Mukkadam bowed almost to the ground.

“Bless you, sister! The god has sent you. There’s so much suffering to be relieved here.”

Forty-nine-year-old Sister Felicity McIntyre was Scottish. Born into a diplomatic family that had spent long periods in France,
at eighteen she had entered a missionary order. Sent first to Senegal, then to Ceylon and finally to India, she had spent
the last fourteen years in Bhopal where she ran a center for abandoned children. Most of them were suffering from serious
mental handicaps. The center had been established in a modern building in the south of the city. It bore the beautiful name
of
“Ashanitekan”
—House of Hope. Above the entrance the nun had nailed a plate with the inscription: “When God closes one door, he opens another.”
Children with Down’s syndrome, autism, tuberculosis of the bone, polio; blind, deaf and mute children—all lived together in
a single large room with pale green walls decorated with pictures of Mahatma Gandhi and Jesus Christ.

There, several young girls trained by Sister Felicity busied themselves with the children, helping them move, walk or play.
Parallel bars, rubber balls, swivel boards and small pedal-cars took the place of physiotherapy equipment. Here life was stronger
than any misfortune. Many of the patients needed special care. They had to be dressed, fed, taken to the toilet, washed. Above
all, their intelligence had to be awakened, a task that demanded endless patience and love. Sister Felicity shared her bedroom
with a mentally retarded twelve-year-old. Suffering from spina bifida, a paralysis of the spinal column, Nadia was as dependent
as a baby. But her smile proclaimed her will to live and her gratitude. Although she refuted the idea, Sister Felicity was
to Bhopal what Mother Teresa was to Calcutta.

Mukkadam led the nun through the labyrinth of alleyways.

“This is a really wretched place,” he apologized.

“I’m used to it,” his visitor reassured him, greeting those who gathered along her way with a cheerful
namaste.
^*

She went into several huts and examined some of the children. Rickets, alopecia, intestinal infections … Orya Bustee had the
full collection of diseases found in poverty-stricken neighborhoods. The nun was on familiar ground, and no stranger to the
slums. She was always willing to enter people’s homes, or sit down with them, regardless of their caste or creed. She had
learned to receive the confidences of the dying, to watch over the dead, to pray with their families, wash corpses and accompany
the deceased on their last journey to the cemetery or the funeral pyre. Above all, with the assistance of her large, black,
simulated-leather bag full of medicines and small surgical instruments, she had treated people, comforted and cured them.

“I’ll come every Monday morning,” she announced in Hindi. “I’ll need some families to take turns at letting me use their huts.”

The suggestion gave rise to an immediate commotion. All the mothers were prepared to offer the white
didi
, or “big sister,” the use of their lodgings so that she could care for the occupants of the bustee.

“And then I’ll need a volunteer to help me,” she added, casting a discerning eye around the faces crowded about her.

“Me, me, didi!”

Felicity turned to see a little girl with slanting eyes.

“What’s your name?”

“Padmini.”

“All right, Padmini, I’ll take you on trial as my assistant in our small clinic.”

On the following Monday an expectant line had formed in the alleyway in front of Padmini’s hut, well before Sister Felicity
arrived. Padmini had tried to sort out the most serious cases in order to take them first. More often than not, these were
rickety babies with swollen stomachs whom their mothers held out to the nun with a look of entreaty.

“In all my years of working in Africa, Ceylon and India, I had never seen such cases of deficiency diseases. The fontanels
had not even closed up in many of the children. The bone of their skulls had become deformed for lack of calcium and their
dolichocephalic features made them look a bit like Egyptian mummies,” Sister Felicity recounted.

Tuberculosis might be the number one killer in Orya Bustee and its neighboring slums, but typhoid, tetanus, malaria, polio,
gastrointestinal infections and skin diseases caused damage that was often irreversible. Confronted with all these poor people
looking to her for miracles, the nun felt all the strength go out of her. Sensing her fatigue, Padmini gently mopped the large
beads of sweat coursing down her forehead, threatening to impede her vision. Rising above the nauseating smells and horrific
sights, the young Indian girl supported her big sister with her unfailing smile. The little girl’s expression, it too born
of suffering and poverty, revived the nun’s courage whenever it faltered.

One day a woman deposited an extremely emaciated baby on the table. Sister Felicity entrusted the tiny shriveled body to Padmini.

“Take him and massage him gently,” she told her. “That’s all we can do.”

Padmini sat down on a jute sack in the alleyway and placed the child in her lap. She poured a little mustard oil on her hands
and began to massage the small body. Her hands came and went along its upper torso and limbs. Like a succession of waves,
they started on the baby’s sides, worked across his chest and up to the opposite shoulder. Stomach, legs, heels, the soles
of his feet, his hands, his head, the nape of his neck, his face, the wings of his nose, his back and his buttocks were successively
stroked and vitalized, as if nourished by Padmini’s supple, dancing fingers. The child suddenly began to gurgle for sheer
bliss. “I was dazzled by so much skill, beauty and intelligence,” Felicity would later say. “In the depths of that slum I
had just discovered an unsuspected power of love and hope. The people of Orya Bustee deserved the mercy of God.”

O
ut of the thirty-eight countries on the planet where Union Carbide had hoisted its blue-and-white flag, no other had established
such long-standing and warm links with the company as India. Perhaps this was due to the fact that for nearly a century the
multinational had been providing a commodity as precious as air or water. For hundreds of millions of Indians who had no electricity,
Carbide’s lamps brought light to the most remote villages. Thanks to the half a billion batteries made in its factories each
year, the whole of India knew and blessed the American company’s name.

The rich profits from this monopoly and Carbide’s conviction that the country would one day become one of the world’s great
markets, had induced the company to regroup all kinds of production under the aegis of an Indian subsidiary known as Union
Carbide India Limited. So it was that the flag of this subsidiary fluttered over fourteen factories. In India, Carbide manufactured
chemical products, plastic goods, photographic plates, film, industrial electrodes, polyester resin, laminated glass and machine
tools. The company also had its own fleet of seven trawlers on the Bengal coast, specializing in deep-water shrimping. With
an annual revenue of $170 million in 1984, Union Carbide India Limited was a successful example of the corporation’s globalization
policy. Of course, Union Carbide retained ownership of 51 percent of the shares in its Indian subsidiary, the intention being
that the parent company would control all production and any new projects on Indian soil.