Five Past Midnight In Bhopal Part 4

That winter Dilip, Padmini and the gang of young ragpickers that worked the trains had been extending their expeditions farther and farther afield. They ventured beyond Nagpur, even as far as Gwalior, which prolonged their absence by two or three days. Hopping from train to train, they roved the dense railway network of northern India with increasing audacity. One of the most lucrative destinations was the holy city of Benares, situated some 375 miles away, to which trainloads of Hindus of all castes went on pilgrimage. They could make it there and back in four days, which meant that if Padmini set out on a Monday, she would return in time for Sister Felicity's clinic, something she would not miss for the world. These long journeys were fraught with danger. One evening when she parted from her friends to run and buy some fritters, the train left without her. It was the last one that night. Alone in Benares's vast station overrun with travelers, vendors and beggars, Padmini panicked. She burst into tears. A man wearing a white cap approached and pressed a crumpled ten-rupee note into the palm of her hands.

"Don't thank me, little one.

I'm the one who needs you." He invited the little girl to sit down beside him and told her that his wife had just been called away to Calcutta to look after her dying father.

"She won't be back for a few days and I'm looking for someone to take care of my three small children while she's away," he explained. "I live close by. I'll give you fifty rupees a week."

Without giving her time to answer, the man scooped Padmini up by the armpits and carried her to a car parked in front of the station. Like all great pilgrimage centers, Benares played host to a fair number of dubious activities. The prost.i.tution of little girls did a particularly brisk trade. According to popular belief, de-flowering a virgin restored a man's virility and protected him against venereal disease. The city's numerous pleasure houses relied on professional procurers to supply them with virgins. These procurers often bought girls from very poor families, notably in Nepal, or arranged fict.i.tious marriages with pretend husbands. In other instances, they simply abducted their victims.

Two other white-capped men were waiting in the car for an adolescent girl to be delivered to them. The vehicle took off at top speed and drove for a long time before it stopped outside the gate of a temple. Twenty girls crouched inside the courtyard, guarded by more men in white caps. Padmini tried to escape from her captors but she was forced through the gate.

In this city where every activity had sacred a.s.sociations, some pimps tried to trick their young victims into believing that they would be partic.i.p.ating in a religious rite. Padmini was captured during the festival of Makara Sankrauti, celebrated on the winter solstice. Makara is the G.o.ddess of carnal love, pleasure and fertility.

The young captives were driven inside the temple where two pandits with shaven heads and chests encircled with the brahmin's triple cord were waiting for them. "That was the beginning of a nightmare that went on for two days and two nights," Padmini recounted. Cajoling one minute, threatening the next, banging their gongs to punctuate their speech, performing all kinds of rituals at the feet of the numerous deities in the sanctuary, the men sought to break down the girls' resistance and prepare them for the work that awaited them. Fortunately Padmini did not understand the language they spoke.

Once their very peculiar training was over, the captives were taken under escort to Muns.h.i.+gang, Benares's brothel quarter, to be divided up between the various houses that had bought them. Padmini and two other little victims were pushed into one of the houses and taken to the first floor where a woman in her fifties was waiting for them.

"I'm your new mother," the madam declared with a cajoling smile, "and here are some presents that will turn you into proper princesses."

She unfolded three different colored skirts with matching blouses and showed them several boxes containing bracelets, necklaces and cosmetics. The gifts were part of what the pimps referred to as "the breaking of the girls."

"And now, I'll go and get you your meal," the madam announced.

Padmini watched as she left the room, locking the door behind her. It was now or never. Barely two yards separated the three little girls from the window of the room in which they were confined. Padmini made a sign to her companions, rushed to the window, unbolted it, then jumped into the void. Her fall was miraculously broken by a fruit vendor's stall. She picked herself up, and seconds later, was lost in the crowd. Her getaway had been so swift that no one had time to react. Following her instincts, the little girl ran straight ahead as fast as her legs would carry her. Soon she reached the banks of the Ganges and turned left along the ghats, the stairs beside the river. In her flight she had lost her two companions but she was sure that they too had been able to escape. The great G.o.d Jagannath had protected her. All she had to do now was find the station and climb aboard the first train for Bhopal. *

Two days later, as Dilip and his friends prepared to slip aboard the Bombay Express, they suddenly caught sight of their little sister getting out of a train car. They let out such shrieks of joy that the pa.s.sengers flew to the windows in curiosity.

"There you are," said Padmini, pulling a package from her bag. "I've brought you some fritters."

The boys bore her aloft in triumph, then took her home. News of her return, already broadcast by the legless cripple Rahul, brought hundreds of local residents rus.h.i.+ng to her hut.

15.

A Plant as "Inoffensive as a Chocolate Factory"

An official letter from the Indian Ministry of Agriculture informed Eduardo Muoz that the New Delhi government was granting Union Carbide a license to manufacture five thousand tons of pesticide a year. This time it was not just a matter of adding sand to several hundred tons of concentrate imported from America, but permission to actually produce Sevin, as well as its chemical ingredients, in India itself.

As usual, the Argentinian, along with his wife Rita and his colleagues, celebrated this latest success in the bar of the Hotel Grand in Calcutta. But as he raised his champagne gla.s.s to the success of the future Indian factory, he felt a nagging doubt. "Five thousand tons, five thousand tons!" he repeated, shaking his head. "I'm afraid our Indian friends may have been thinking a bit too big! A factory with the capacity for two thousand tons would be quite large enough for us to supply the whole of India with Sevin."

The first sales figures for the Sevin formulated in the small unit on the Kali Grounds were not very encouraging. This was the reason for Eduardo Muoz's reluctance. Despite an extensive information and advertising campaign, the Indian farmers were not readily giving up familiar products like HCH and DDT. The climatic variations of so immense a country with its late or inadequate monsoons and its frequent droughts that could suddenly reduce demand, meant that regular sales of the product could not be guaranteed. A salesman above all else, Muoz had run his numbers over and over again. His most optimistic predictions did not exceed annual sales of two thousand tons. Wisdom ordained that Carbide should limit its ambitions. Certain that he would be able to convince his superiors, he flew to New York. In his briefcase, meticulously sorted by province, groups of villages and sometimes even by individual village, were the results of his first sales effort. He hoped they would be enough to persuade his employers that they should modify their investment in India, even if it meant leaving room for eventual compet.i.tors. He was wrong. That journey to New York was to set the seal on the first act in a catastrophe.

The Argentinian could never have imagined that his greatest adversary would be a man who had been dead for twenty-one years. The whole of American industry continued to revere as a prophet the man who, shortly after the second world war, had revolutionized relations between management and work-force. As an obscure employee in a Philadelphia bank, Edward N. Hay, who sported a short Charlie Chaplinstyle mustache and oversleeves to protect his starched s.h.i.+rts, had seemed unlikely to leave behind much of a legacy. The obsessive ideas of this nondescript clerk, however, would make him as famous a figure in the industrial world as Frederick Taylor, the man who developed the theory of scientific management of factory work. Edward N. Hay was convinced that the members of the industrial workforce did not receive the attention they warranted. Starting from this premise, he had devised a point system to evaluate every job done in a company. The idea was immediately adopted by a number of branches of American industry. By the end of the 1960s Union Carbide was one of the most enthusiastic users of his methods. All of its industrial projects were automatically a.s.signed a point value, according to a system that determined the importance, size and sophistication of any installations to be constructed. The more numerous and complex the project, the higher the number of points. Because each point corresponded to a salary advantage, it was in the interests of the engineers a.s.signed to planning and implementing any industrial project to see that, right from the outset, it was given the maximum number of points possible.

"I realized at once, I didn't stand a chance," Eduardo Muoz would recount. "Even before they heard what I had to say, the management committee, made up of all the division heads and key members of the board of directors, had rallied enthusiastically in support of the Indian proposal."

"India has a market of three hundred million peasants," immediately declared one of Carbide's executives.

"Five hundred million soon," added one of his colleagues.

"Don't you worry, Eduardo, we'll sell our five thousand tons, and more!" was the message unanimously delivered. "Moreover," announced Carbide's CEO, "to show you just how much faith we have in this project, we're allocating it a budget of twenty million dollars."

"An extravagant sum that Mr. Hay's point system was going to spread in a manner advantageous to everyone," Muoz would reckon after meeting the South Charleston engineers in charge of laying the plans for the factory. These men were high-level chemists and mechanics, respected leaders in the field of manufacturing processes, in charge of reputable projects; in short they were the elite of the workforce at Union Carbide's technical research center in South Charleston. "But they were all little dictators," Muoz would say. "They were obsessed with just one idea, that of using their twenty-million-dollar bounty to create the most beautiful pesticide plant India would ever know."

Showing them his doc.u.ments, the Argentinian tried desperately to explain to his partners the distinctive characteristics of the Indian market. His line of reasoning left them cold.

"The Indian government's license is for an annual production of five thousand tons of pesticide. So we have a duty to build a plant to produce five thousand tons," Muoz recalled the project's chief engineer interjecting in a cutting voice.

"Clearly my commercial arguments were of no concern to those young dogs," Muoz would remember. "They weren't bound by any obligation to make a profit. They were simply itching to plant their flares, reactors and miles of piping in the Indian countryside."

In the face of such obstinacy, the Argentinian sought a compromise.

"Wouldn't it be possible to proceed in stages?" he suggested. "That is to say, to start by building a two thousand ton unit, which could then be enlarged if the market proved favorable?"

"My question brought sarcasm from the audience," recalled Muoz.

"My dear Eduardo," the project chief went on, "you must appreciate that engineering work for this type of factory requires that we establish the size of production envisaged from the outset. The reactors, tanks and controlling mechanisms of a plant that manufactures two thousand tons of Sevin are not of the same caliber as those of a factory two and a half times larger. Once a production target has been set, it can't be changed."

"I take your point," Muoz conceded, trying to be tactful. "Especially as I imagine it's possible to slow down production in a factory that is larger than necessary to adapt production to demand?"

"That's exactly right," the project chief agreed, pleased to see the discussion ending with consensus.

Alas, this consensus was only an illusion.

The Argentinian still had plenty of issues to take up with the men from South Charleston. The most important one had to do with the actual conception of the Indian factory. The Inst.i.tute factory near South Charleston, which had been designed to produce thirty thousand tons of Sevin a year and which was to serve more or less as a model, functioned around the clock. In order to maintain this continuity, considerable quant.i.ties of MIC, methyl isocyanate, had to be manufactured and stored. At the South Charleston plant, three tanks made out of high resistance steel and fitted with a complex refrigeration system stored up to a hundred and twenty tons of MIC.

To Muoz's way of thinking, stocking such a quant.i.ty of this highly dangerous product might be justifiable for a factory like the one at the Inst.i.tute, which ran twenty-four hours a day, but not in a much more modest plant where production was carried out as the need arose. For his own peace of mind the Argentinian went to Bayer in Germany and to the French Littorale factory near Beziers. Both companies handled MIC.

"All the experts I met went through the roof when I told them our engineers intended to store twenty-two to twenty-six thousand gallons of MIC in the tanks at the prospective Bhopal plant," Muoz would recount. "One German told me, 'We only produce our methyl icocyanate as needed. We'd never risk keeping a single liter for more than ten minutes.' Another added, 'Your engineers are out of their minds. They're putting an atomic bomb in the middle of your factory that could explode at any time.' As for the Beziers engineers, the French government had quite simply forbidden them to stock MIC in anything but the small number of twenty-gallon drums that they imported directly from the United States as required."

Shaken by the unanimity of opinion, the Argentinian returned to South Charleston to try and convince Carbide that it should modify its plans for the future Bhopal plant. Rather than store tens of thousands of gallons of potentially fatal materials, Muoz suggested producing MIC in batches, on an as-needed basis, a system similar to the one used at Beziers. This system eliminated the need to keep large quant.i.ties of dangerous substances on site.

"I quickly realized that my proposal ran counter to American industrial culture," Muoz would recall. "In the United States, they love to produce around the clock, in large quant.i.ties. They're besotted with enormous pipes running into giant tanks. That's how the whole of the oil industry and many others work."

Nevertheless, the South Charleston team wanted to allay the visitor's fears.

"The numerous safety systems with which this type of plant is equipped enable us to control any of the MIC's potentially dangerous reactions," the project leader a.s.sured him. "You have absolutely no need to worry. Your Bhopal plant will be as inoffensive as a chocolate factory."

Other problems awaited the Argentinian on his return to India. His next priority was to find a site for the prospective factory. His superiors in New York and South Charleston had agreed upon the choice of Bhopal, which was already home to the Sevin formulation unit. But the new site would have to be completely different in size. The plant would be a hydra-headed monster. There would be the unit producing alpha naphthol, one for carbon oxide, one for phosgene and one for methyl isocyanate. Alongside these installations with their control rooms, works and hangars, the plant would also have a collection of administrative buildings, a canteen, an infirmary, a decontamination center and a fire station, as well as a whole string of surveillance posts. All together it would need at least one hundred and twenty acres and an infrastructure capable of supplying the enormous quant.i.ties of water and electricity that would be necessary.

The Kali Grounds met all these conditions. But the Argentinian was against the site. "I'd lost the battle over the size of the factory," he would say. "But at least I could try and stop it being built too close to areas where people were living." The officials of the Madhya Pradesh government rolled out the red carpet. The arrival of a multinational as prestigious as Union Carbide was an extraordinary G.o.dsend for the town and the region. It meant millions of dollars for the local economy and thousands of jobs. Ratna Nadar, along with all the other residents of the bustees, would be kept in work for years.

Together with Muoz, the Carbide team who had come from New York examined several sites suggested by the authorities. None of them was really satisfactory. In one place the water supply was inadequate; in another the electricity was wanting; elsewhere the ground was not firm enough to bear the weight of construction. That was when the residents of Orya and its neighboring bustees witnessed cars mysteriously coming and going from the Kali Grounds. The vehicles frequently paused to let their occupants out. This activity went on for several days, then stopped. The envoys from New York had finally overcome Muoz's reservations. Of course the Kali Grounds, next to the formulation works, was the right place to build the plant. As for any risk to those living nearby if an accident were to occur, the New York envoys rea.s.sured Muoz that his fears were totally unfounded.

"Eduardo, if this plant is built as it should be, there will be no danger," declared the man in charge.

"Take New York, for example," his a.s.sistant interjected. "Three airports surrounded by skysc.r.a.pers: La Guardia, JFK and Newark. Planes take off every minute and logically they should crash into the buildings whenever it's the least bit foggy, or collide with one another."

"And yet," his boss went on, "New York's airports are the safest in the world. It will be the same in Bhopal."

Despite his doubts, Muoz had little choice but to agree. He and his colleagues presented themselves at the Madhya Pradesh government offices to submit their request for a one hundred and twenty acre plot of land on the Kali Grounds. The piece of land in question had to adjoin the five acres of the formulation works. According to munic.i.p.al planning regulations, no industry likely to give off toxic emissions could be set up on a site where the prevailing wind might carry effluents into densely populated areas. Such was the case with the Kali Grounds where the wind usually blew from north to south, in other words, into the bustees, the railway station and the over-populated parts of the old town. The application should have been turned down. But the Union Carbide envoys had taken care not to mention in their application that the pesticide they planned to produce would be made with one of the most lethal gases of the chemical industry.

Clearly, Indira Gandhi had no great affection for her country's maharajahs and nawabs. When the British left, her father Jawaharlal Nehru and the leaders of the Indian independence movement had taken power away from them. She had then proceeded to confiscate their last remaining privileges and possessions. Eduardo Muoz saw their persecution as a providential gift. The imaginative Argentinian dreamed of building in Bhopal, in tandem with the pesticide plant, a research center along the lines of the American Boyce Thompson Inst.i.tute. After all, the Indian climate and the diseases and insects that damaged its crops were all factors a.s.sociated with its particular environment. An Indian research center might come up with a new generation of pesticides better suited to the country. It would be an opportunity for the future plant to diversify its production and, who knows, perhaps one day hit the jackpot with new molecules that could be exported all over Asia. Indian researchers and technicians would work for salaries ten or twelve times less than those of their American colleagues. All that was missing was a location. When Muoz discovered that the brother of the last nawab, threatened with government expropriation, was seeking to sell his Jehan Numa palace, he leaped at the chance. Rising magnificently from Shamla Hill, one of the seven hills surrounding the city, the edifice dominated the town. Its park, made up of ten acres of tropical vegetation, rare trees, shrubs and exotic blooms, formed a sumptuous oasis of coolness, color and scent. The building would probably have to be demolished, but the estate was vast enough to accommodate research laboratories, planetaria, greenhouses and even a luxurious guest house for pa.s.sing visitors. Convinced that an Indian would handle the purchase more adeptly than he, Muoz placed his a.s.sistant, Ranjit Dutta, in charge of negotiations. They were hustled through. Three days later, this jewel of Bhopal's ancestral patrimony fell into the clutches of the American multinational for the rock-bottom price of one million one hundred thousand rupees, approximately $65,000. *

16.

A New Star in the Indian Sky The India of the naked sadhus, * of sacred elephants caparisoned in gold; the India of devotees of a million G.o.ds praying in the waters of the Ganges; the India of sari-draped women planting rice in the south or picking leaves in the tea plantations of the Himalayas; the immemorial India of the wors.h.i.+ppers of s.h.i.+va, Muhammad and Buddha; the India that had given the world prophets and saints such as Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Ramakrishna, Sri Aurobindo and Mother Teresa. The India of our fantasies, myths and dreams, had yet another face: the country was, by the 1960s, a developing industrial and technological power.

Few people found this more surprising than the small group of American engineers sent to Bombay by Union Carbide in 1960 to build a petrochemical complex. The venture united two vastly different cultures, with the magic of chemistry as their only common denominator. This encounter proved so productive that Carbide took on a whole team of young Indian engineers to inject new blood into the veins of the mighty American company. All those young men thought, worked and dreamed in English. They came from great schools like the Victoria Jubilee Technical Inst.i.tute of Bombay founded by the British, or those created by the young Indian republic like the Madras Technical College, the Indian Inst.i.tute of Science in Bangalore and the prestigious Rajputi College in Pilani. Some were graduates of eminent Western universities like Cambridge, Columbia or Boston's Ma.s.sachusetts Inst.i.tute of Technology (MIT). Hindu, Muslim, Sikh or Christian, whatever their religion, they shared the same faith in science. The mantras they chanted were the formulae for chemical processes and reactions. Living in an economy that modeled itself on protectionism and socialism, they were only too delighted to have pried open the door of a Western company where they could show off their talents, know-how, imagination and creativity. It was Carbide's genius to play this Indian card and involve the cream of local talent in its designs for industrial globalization.

"One good thing about this recognition was that it dispelled the archaic image many Westerners had of our country," the engineer Kamal Pareek would say. Son of an Uttar Pradesh lawyer, a graduate of the celebrated Pilani college, tennis champion and American film buff, at twenty-three, this baby-faced young man was the embodiment of the youthful Indian energy Carbide was keen to harness. "We Indians have always been particularly sensitive to the potential of the transformation of matter," he confided. "Our most ancient Sanskrit texts show that this sensitivity is part of our culture. We have a long-standing tradition of producing the most elaborate perfumes. Since the dawn of time our Ayurvedic medicine has used chemical formulae borrowed from our plants and minerals. The mastery of chemical elements is part of our heritage." Pareek loved to furnish examples. "In Rajasthan there is a tribe of very backward people called the Bagrus," he recounted. "They make dyes for fabrics out of indigo powder, which they mix with crushed horn from horses' hoofs. To that they add pieces of bark from an ashoka tree and the residues of ant-infested corn. These people who have had no education, who are completely ignorant of the chemical phenomena operating at the heart of their concoctions, are on a par with the foremost chemists. Their dyes are the best in the world."

The first chemical plant Carbide built in India was inaugurated on December 14, 1966. The blue-and-white flag hoisted into the sky over the island of Trombay, near Bombay, was symbolic. A few miles from the spot where, four and a half centuries earlier, the galleon Hector had unloaded the first British colonizers, it embodied the desire of a new set of adventurers to make India a platform for its industrial worldwide expansion. After the island of Trombay, it was Bhopal's Kali Grounds that were to see the same flag fly over a highly sophisticated plant. The potentially deadly toxicity of its intended products had, however, sown doubt in the minds of a few members of the New York management team. Was it wise to hand over technology as complex and dangerous as that a.s.sociated with methyl isocyanate to a third world country? In the end the excellent qualifications of the Indian engineers recruited for the Trombay factory allayed their fears. The Indians were invited to South Charleston to have some input into the plans for the Bhopal plant, an experience that the young technician, Umesh Nanda, son of a small industrialist in the Punjab, would never forget.

"Encountering the Inst.i.tute Sevin plant was like being suddenly projected into the next millennium," he recalled. "The technical center designing the project was a hive inhabited by an army of experts. There were specialists in heat exchangers, centrifugal pumps, safety valves, control instruments and all the other vital parts. You had only to supply them with the particulars of such-and-such an operation to receive in return descriptions of, and detailed plans for, all the apparatus and equipment necessary. To mitigate the dangerous nature of the substances we were going to be using in Bhopal, bulky safety reports told us about all the safety devices installed at the Inst.i.tute. For weeks on end, we made a concerted effort with our American colleagues to imagine every possible incident and its consequences: a burst pipe, a pump breaking down, an anomaly in the running of a reactor or a distillation column."

"It was a real pleasure working with those American engineers," confirmed Kamal Pareek. "They were so professional, so attentive to details, whereas we Indians often have a tendency to overlook them. If they weren't satisfied, they wouldn't let us move on to the next stage."

The pursuit of perfection was Carbide's hallmark. The company even brought over a team of Indian welders in order to familiarize them with the special acid and temperature-resistant alloys with which they would be working. "Going to America to learn how to make up alloys as temperamental as Inconel, Monel or Hastelloy, was as epic a journey as flying off in Arjuna's chariot to create the stars in the sky," marveled Kamal Pareek.

The stars! Eduardo Muoz, the magician behind the whole venture, could give thanks to the G.o.ds. The pesticide plant he was going to build on the Kali Grounds might not be exactly the one he had dreamed of, but it did promise to be a new star in the Indian sky.

At the beginning of the summer of 1972, Carbide dispatched all the plans for the factory's construction and development to India. Unfortunately, this mountain of paperwork was not exactly the finest gift American technology could send to the developing world. The design of Bhopal's "beautiful plant" would not include all the safety equipment and security systems equipping Carbide's Inst.i.tute plant in the U.S. Later, the precise reasons for these money-saving measures would remain obscure. It seems that the sales of the Sevin formulated in Bhopal had not reached the hoped-for level. Disastrous climatic conditions and the appearance on the market of a competing and less costly pesticide may have accounted for this reduction in sales. Because Indian law severely restricted the involvement of foreign companies in their local subsidiaries, Union Carbide India Limited suddenly found itself forced to reduce the factory's construction budget. American and Indian experts a.s.sured, however, that none of the cutbacks were to diminish the overall safety of the plant.

Four years later, the giant puzzle designed in South Charleston and created piece by piece in Bombay, was finally transported to Bhopal for a.s.sembly.

John Luke Couvaras, a young American engineer, described taking part in the project as "embarking on a crusade. You had to put yourself into it, body and soul. You lived with it every minute of the day and night, even when you were a long way from the works. If, for example, you were installing a distillation tower you'd fussed over lovingly, you were as proud of it as Michelangelo might have been of the ceiling in the Sistine chapel. You kept an eye on it to make sure it went like clockwork. That kind of venture forced you to be vigilant at all times. It exhausted you, emptied you. At the same time you felt happy, triumphant."

17.

"They'll Never Dare Send in Their Bulldozers"

American or Indian, none of the engineers and technicians working on the Kali Grounds could ever have imagined the suffering, trickery, swindling, love, faith and hope that was life for the ma.s.s of humanity who occupied the hundreds of shacks around the factory. As in any impoverished area, the worst existed alongside the best, but the presence of figures like Belram Mukkadam managed to transform these patches of h.e.l.l into models for humankind. He was a devout Hindu, but when he made his unforgettable stands, he was joined by Muslims, Sikhs, animists, and perhaps most remarkably, an Irani. The Iranis with their light skin and delicate features formed a small community of some five hundred people in Bhopal. Their forefathers had come to Bhopal in the 1920s, after an earthquake destroyed their villages in Baluchistan, on the borders of Iran. Now, their leader was an august old man with honey colored eyes, by the name of Omar Pasha, invariably dressed in a kurta, a long tunic, and cotton trousers. He lived with his sons, his two wives and his henchmen in a modern three-story building on the edge of Orya Bustee. Three times a week, he would tear himself away from his comfortable life to take the sick from the three bustees to Hamidia Hospital. Driving those poor wretches through traffic that terrified them, then steering them along hospital corridors into packed waiting rooms was no small feat. But without an escort the poor had little chance of being examined by a doctor. And even if they were lucky enough to see a physician, they would not have been able to explain what was wrong with them or understand the recommended treatment. The majority of the inhabitants of the bustees spoke neither Hindi nor Urdu but one of the innumerable regional dialects or languages. Omar Pasha demanded that the slum dwellers be treated like human beings and made certain they actually received the medicines they were prescribed. Yet this saint was one of Bhopal's most notorious G.o.dfathers. It was he who controlled the traffic in opium and ganja, the local has.h.i.+sh, as well as the brothels in the Lakshmi Talkies district; he ran the gambling, especially satha, which consisted of betting on the daily share-price of cotton, gold and silver.

He was also head of a real estate racket that made him one of the richest property owners in the town. To a.s.sure himself of the political support necessary to maintain his business interests he gave generously to the Congress party (the political party in power at that time), where he served as one of the district's most active electoral agents. The ballots of Orya, Chola and Jai Prakash Bustees were in his hands. Good old Omar Pasha! His enormous fingers and powerful biceps testified to the fact that he had been a boxer and wrestler in his youth. With advancing age he had turned to another sport: c.o.c.kfighting. He bought his champions in Madras and fed them himself, on a mixture of egg yolk, clarified b.u.t.ter, and crushed pistachio and cashew nuts. Before every fight he would rub each one down "like a boxer before a match," he would say with a hint of nostalgia. His ten c.o.c.ks roamed freely about the floors of his house, watched over by bodyguards, for each one was worth between twenty and thirty thousand rupees, almost a thousand dollars-a sum Padmini's father could not hope to earn in ten years of hard labor.

The area was home to a host of other colorful people. The dairyman Karim Bablubhai distributed a portion of the milk from his seventeen buffalo cows to children with rickets. He dreamed of Boda, the young orphan girl from Bihar whom he had just married, giving him an heir. The yellow-robed sorcerer Nilamber, who exorcized evil spirits by sprinkling those possessed with country liquor, had promised him that this dream would come true provided Boda performed a puja at the sacred tulsi every day. There was also the Muslim shoemaker Mohammed Iqbal, whose hut on alleyway No. 2 smelled unbearably of glue, and his a.s.sociate Ahmed Ba.s.si, a young tailor of twenty, who was famous for embroidering the marriage saris for the rich brides of Bhopal. The Carbide engineers might have been surprised to discover that in the sheds made out of planks, sheet metal and bamboo, which they could see from the platforms of their giant factory, men in rags were producing masterpieces. The shoemaker and the tailor, like their friend Salar the bicycle repairman in alley No. 4, were always ready to respond to Belram Mukkadam's call. In the bustee no one ever declined to give him a helping hand.

Certainly this was true of Hussein, the worthy mullah with the small gray goatee who taught local children suras from the Koran on the porch of his small, mud-walled mosque in Chola. And the old midwife Prema Bai who, crippled by childhood polio, dragged herself from hut to hut in her white widow's clothing, leaning heavily on a stick. Yet, her luminous smile out-shone her suffering. In one corner of her hut, under the little altar where an oil lamp burned day and night before a statuette of Ganesh, the old woman carefully laid out the instruments that made her an angel of the bustee: a few shreds of sari, a bowl, two buckets of water and the Arabian knife she used to cut the babies' umbilical cords.

Who would have believed it? America and all her advanced technology was moving into the middle of a ring of hovels, and she knew nothing about those who washed up against the walls of her installation like the waves of an ocean. Neither an expatriate from South Charleston nor an Indian engineer molded by Carbide's values knew anything about the universe inhabited by those thousands of men, women and children who lived but a stone's throw away from the three methyl isocyanate tanks they were in the process of a.s.sembling.

One day, however, Carbide did pay a visit to the terra incognita that bordered on the Kali Grounds. "People thought the end of the world had come," Padmini's father would recall. The occupants of the bustees heard a plane roar overhead. The aircraft made several circles, skimming so low that the people below thought it would decapitate the Chola mosque's small minaret. Then, in a flash, it disappeared into the setting sun. This unusual apparition provided food for furious discussion at the teahouse. The legless cripple Rahul, who always liked to appear well informed, claimed that it was "a Pakistani plane come to pay homage to the fine factory that the Muslim workmen were building in their town of Bhopal."

The plane that appeared over the Kali Grounds was indeed the bearer of an homage, but not the one Rahul had imagined. The twin-engine jet plane Gulf Stream II that put down on January 19, 1976, at Bhopal's airport, bore the gilded wings and company crest of UCC. Inside, it carried Union Carbide's chief executive officer, a tall strapping fellow of fifty with white hair and a youthful air. A graduate of Harvard Business School and a former Navy reserve officer, Bill Sneath had climbed every rung of the multinational before becoming its chief in 1971. He was accompanied by his wife, an elegant young woman in a Chanel suit, and an entourage of corporate officials. They had all come from New York to inaugurate the first phytosanitary research and development center built by Carbide in the third world.

The architecture of this ultramodern edifice, with its facades dripping with gla.s.s, was inspired by the American research center in Tarrytown. Built on the site of the palace that Eduardo Muoz helped Union Carbide buy from the last nawab family, it very nearly never came into being. While digging the foundations, the masons had uncovered the skeleton of a bird and several human skulls. Word had then gone around that they belonged to three workmen who had mysteriously disappeared during the construction of the palace in 1906. In response to this appalling omen the masons abandoned the site. To entice them back, Eduardo Muoz had had to resort to strong measures. He had tripled their salaries and arranged for a puja to lift the evil spell. When Bill Sneath arrived, the center already comprised several laboratories, in which some thirty researchers were working, and greenhouses, in which many varieties of local plants were being grown.

The central government minister of science and technology, the highest authorities of the state of Madhya Pradesh and the city of Bhopal, and all the local dignitaries from the chief administrator to the most senior police officer gathered round the Sneaths, the Muozes and the board of directors of Carbide's Indian subsidiary for the grandiose ceremony that sealed the marriage between the New York multinational and the City of the Begums. Before his speech, one of the sari-clad hostesses had anointed Bill Sneath with the tilak of welcome, a dot of red powder on the forehead that symbolizes the third eye that can see beyond material reality. The eyes of Carbide's CEO surveyed with pride the vast concrete and gla.s.s block of the magnificent research center. A few moments earlier they had discovered the construction site, where towers, chimneys, tanks and scaffolding were beginning to emerge from the Kali Grounds. Wearing helmets bearing their names, Bill Sneath and his wife had toured the different units, pursued by photographers. In his hand, Sneath triumphantly brandished a package of Sevin formulated on site.

What the American CEO would not see that winter was the jumble of huts, sheds and hovels that fringed the parade ground and grew like the swelling of a malignant cancer. Most of the men who lived there with their families made up the workforce for Carbide's various building sites. They had almost all been invited to the inauguration of the research center. The present each had been handed by Carbide's CEO was not, perhaps, very valuable, but for Padmini's father and all those living in homes with no electricity, a flashlight and three batteries stamped with the blue-and-white Carbide logo was indeed a royal gift.

The gift that Sanjay Gandhi, the younger son of India's prime minister, had in store for several million of his country's poor that same winter was of a very different nature. Taking advantage of the state of emergency his mother had imposed to establish her power and muzzle the opposition, the impetuous young man had taken it into his head to clean up India's princ.i.p.al cities by ridding their pavements and suburbs of "encroachments," in other words "squatters." It was alleged that one-tenth of vacant land was, in certain towns, taken up by people with no t.i.tle deeds. This was the case with the bustees on the Kali Grounds. The sanitary conditions there were so abominable and the risk of epidemic so flagrant that the munic.i.p.al authorities had often considered destroying the neighborhoods. But the local politicians, more concerned about keeping votes in the next election than getting rid of islands of poverty, had always opposed such radical action. Strengthened by the support of the beloved son of the all-powerful Indira, however, Bhopal's munic.i.p.al leaders had decided this time to take action.

One fine morning, two bulldozers and several truckloads of policemen burst onto the esplanade in front of the teahouse. The officer in charge of the operation clambered onto the leading truck, which was equipped with a loudspeaker.

"People of Orya Bustee, Jai Prakash and Chola! By order of Sanjay Gandhi, central government and the city authorities, I am charged to warn you that you must leave the sites you are occupying illegally," he declared. "You have one hour in which to vacate the place. After that deadline, your huts will be destroyed and all people remaining will be apprehended and taken by force to a detention camp."

"Oddly enough, the appeal didn't provoke any reaction at first," Ganga Ram, the former leper, recalled. People formed a silent mob in the alleyways, stunned. Then suddenly, one woman let out a howl. With that all the other women began to shriek as if their entrails were being torn out. The sound was terrifying. Children came running from all sides like crazed sparrows. The men had rushed to the teahouse. Rolling along on his wheeled plank, Rahul, the legless cripple, rounded everyone up. Old women went to take offerings and incense sticks to the statues of the G.o.ds in the district's various shrines. In the distance, the inhabitants of the bustee could hear the bulldozers roaring like wild elephants eager to charge. That was when Belram Mukkadam appeared. When he began to speak outside the teahouse, he seemed very sure of himself.

"This time the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds have come with bulldozers," he thundered. "Even if we lie down in front of their caterpillars, they won't stop at crus.h.i.+ng us to pulp." He paused after these words, as if thinking. He fiddled with his mustache.

"You could see things were churning away in his head," Ganga Ram would say.

"We do have one way of blocking those sc.u.m," Mukkadam continued, swiping at the air several times with his cane. He seemed to be savoring what he was about to say. "My friends, we're going to change the names of our three bustees. We're going to call them after the much-loved son of our high priestess, Indira. We're going to call them the 'Sanjay Gandhi Bustees.' They'll never dare, yes, I can a.s.sure you, that they'll never dare send in their bulldozers against a neighborhood named after Sanjay!"

The manager of the teahouse then pointed his stick at a rickshaw waiting outside the entrance to the Carbide worksite.

"Ganga!" he directed the former leper. "Jump in that rattle-trap and hurry to Spices Square! Get them to paint a big banner marked WELCOME TO THE SANJAY BUSTEES. If you get back in time, we're saved!"

Just as the apostle of the Kali Grounds had so magnificently predicted, the banner strung between two bamboo poles at the mouth of the road leading to Orya Bustee caused the tide of policemen and the bulldozers to stop dead in their tracks. The piece of material that bore the first name of Indira Gandhi's son in imposing red letters was more powerful than any threat. The residents could go back to their huts without fear. Destiny would crush them in a different way.