Five Past Midnight in Bhopal Read online

  Copyright © 2002 by Pressinter S.A. and Sesamat Worldwide Rights S.A.

  All rights reserved.

  WARNER BOOKS

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

  First eBook Edition: April 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-446-56124-2

  Contents

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgments

  Letter to the Reader

  Map of the city of Bhopal

  Part One: A NEW STAR IN THE INDIAN SKY

  1 Firecrackers That Kill, Cows That Die, Insects That Murder

  2 The Planetary Holocaust Wrought by Armies of Ravaging Insects

  3 A Neighborhood Called Orya Bustee

  4 A Visionary Billionaire to the Rescue of Humanity’s Food

  5 Three Zealots on the Banks of the Hudson

  6 The Daily Heroism of the People of the Bustees

  7 An American Valley That Ruled the World

  8 A Little Mouse under the Seats of Bhopal’s Trains

  9 A Poison That Smelled Like Boiled Cabbage

  10 They Deserved the Mercy of God

  11 “A Hand for the Future”

  12 A Promised Land on the Ruins of a Legendary Kingdom

  13 A Continent of Three Hundred Million Peasants and Six Hundred Languages

  14 Some Very Peculiar Pimps

  15 A Plant as “Inoffensive as a Chocolate Factory”

  16 A New Star in the Indian Sky

  17 “They’ll Never Dare Send in Their Bulldozers”

  18 Wages of Fear on the Roads of Maharashtra

  19 The Lazy Poets’ Circle

  20 “Carbide Has Poisoned Our Water!”

  21 The First Deadly Drops from the “Beautiful Plant”

  22 Three Tanks Dressed up for a Carnival

  23 “Half a Million Hours of Work and Not a Day Lost”

  24 Everlasting Roots in the Black Earth of the Kali Grounds

  Part Two A NIGHT BLESSED BY THE STARS

  25 A Gas That Makes You Laugh Before It Kills You

  26 “You Will Be Reduced to Dust”

  27 Ali Baba’s Treasure for the Heroes of the Kali Grounds

  28 The Sudden Arrival of a Cost-Cutting Gentleman

  29 “My Beautiful Plant Was Losing Its Soul”

  30 The Fiancés of the Orya Bustee

  31 The End of a Young Indian’s Dream

  32 The Vengeance of the People of the Kali Grounds

  33 Festivities That Set Hearts Ablaze

  34 A Sunday Unlike Any Other

  35 A Night Blessed by the Stars

  Part Three THREE SARCOPHAGI UNDER THE MOON

  36 Three Sarcophagi under the Moon

  37 “What if the Stars Were to Go on Strike?”

  38 Geysers of Death

  39 Lungs Bursting in the Heart of the Night

  40 “Something Beyond All Comprehension”

  41 “All Hell Has Broken Loose Here!”

  42 A Half-Naked Holy Man in the Heart of a Deadly Cloud

  43 The Dancing Girl Was Not Dead

  44 “Death to the Killer Anderson!”

  45 “Carbide Has Made Us the Center of the World”

  Epilogue

  What Became of Them

  “All That Is Not Given Is Lost”

  Other books by

  Dominique Lapierre and Javier Moro

  Dominique Lapierre

  A Thousand Suns

  Beyond Love

  The City of Joy

  Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins

  The Fifth Horseman

  Freedom at Midnight

  O Jerusalem

  … Or I’ll Dress You in Mourning

  Is Paris Burning?

  Javier Moro

  The Mountains of the Buddha

  The Jaipur Foot

  Los Senderos de la Libertad

  To the heroes of the Orya Bustee,

  of Chola and of Jai Prakash Nagar.

  Acknowledgments

  First and foremost we would like to express our immense gratitude to our wives, Dominique and Sita, who shared every moment of our long and difficult research and who were our irreplaceable helpers in the preparation of this work.

  Heartfelt appreciation to Colette Modiano, Paul and Manuela Andreota, Pascaline Bressan, Michel Gourtay, Mari Carmen Doñate, Eugenio Suarez and Antonio Ubach, who spent long hours correcting our manuscript and gave us their encouragement.

  A very special thank you to Antoine Caro for his exceptional assistance with the preparation of this book, as well as to Pierre Amado for his valuable advice on India.

  This book is the fruit of patient research both in the United States and in India. In the United States we would like particularly to thank engineer Warren Woomer and his wife Betty who made us welcome in their charming house in South Charleston, enabling us to reconstruct the happy years when Warren was in charge of the Bhopal factory. Similarly we would like to thank engineer Eduardo Muñoz for our innumerable meetings in San Francisco and at his villa in Sausalito, in the course of which we were able to reconstruct, almost day by day, the adventure of establishing a high-tech pesticide plant in the heartland of India, and Muñoz’s fight to limit its size and the dangers involved.

  Again in the United States, we would like to thank Halcott P. Foss and engineers Jean-Luc Lemaire and William K. Frampton, for having opened wide the doors to the Institute 2 factory, the Bhopal plant’s elder sister, where Sevin is still produced from deadly methyl isocyanate. Additional thanks go to Jean-Luc Lemaire and to René Crochard for the illuminating explanations that facilitated the writing of the technical parts of our book. We include in this American tribute Ward Morehouse and David Dembo who, from their small East River office in New York, conduct an unrelenting struggle to make the truth about the Bhopal disaster known and who generously gave us access to their precious archives. And we would like to express our gratitude to Kathy Kramer for having placed at our disposal documentation concerning the Boyce Thompson Institute in Yonkers where the Sevin, which was to wipe out insects ravaging the harvests of peasants throughout the world, was invented.

  Among all the Indian engineers who took part in the adventure of Bhopal’s “beautiful plant,” our gratitude is due primarily to Kamal Pareek for the entire days we spent together, reconstructing in every little detail the extraordinary hope that the Bhopal factory had brought with it, the subsequent slow agony and the eventual catastrophe. Grateful thanks also go to engineers Umesh Nanda and John Luke Couvaras who patiently shared their memories and entrusted numerous unpublished documents to us. We would similarly like to express out gratitude to Jagannathan Mukund who was the factory’s last managing director and who allowed us to bombard him with questions for three days on his Conoor property in the mountains of the Nilgiris in southern India.

  Naturally a very large part of our research was conducted in Bhopal itself, where the assistance of Satinath Sarangi and his team of record keepers from the Sambhavna Trust was indispensable to us, as were the generous help and hospitality of Farah Khan and her mother Niloufar Khan, Begum Rachid, Bano and Yadar Raachid Uzzafar Khan, Sonia and Nader Raachid Uzzafar Khan, as well as Mr. and Mrs. Balthazar de Bourbon, Enamia, Kamlesh Jamaini, the chronicler Nasser Kamal, Manish Mishra and Dr. Zahir ul-Islam who helped us uncover the secrets of the culture and legendary past of their beautiful city.

  We wish to thank also his excellency Mr. Digvijay Singh, the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, for his warm reception, and all those who so generously helped us in the various aspects of our research. By alphabetical order: M.M. Shyam Babu, K.D. B
allal in Bangalore, Dr. Bambhal, Sudeep Banerjee, Sajda Bano, Ahmed Bassi, Dr. Bhandari, Praful Bidwai, N.M. Buch, Father Dennis Carneiro, Amar Chand, Dr. Heeresh Chandra, T.R. Chouhan, S.P. Chowdhary, Mr. Chughtai, Deena Dayalan and the staff of The Other Media, Mr. Diwedi, Dr. Banu Dubey, R.K. Dutta, Dr. Deepak Gandhe, Brigadier Garg, Subashe Godane, V.P. Gokhale from Eveready, Ahsan Hussain, Santosh Katiyar, Rehman Khan, Colonel Gurcharan Singh Khanuja, Rajkumar Keswani, Dr. Loya, Dr. N.P. Mishra, Dr. Nagu, Shekil Qureshi, Ganga and Dalima Ram, Dr. Rajanarayan, Salar, Dr. Sarkar, Dr. Satpathy, Arvind Shrivastava, V.N. Singh, Commissioner Ranjit Singh, S.K. Trehan, Dr. Trivedi, Dr. Varadajan, Mohan Lal Varma, Rev. Timothy Wankhede.

  Union Carbide’s management in India and the United States failed to respond to our requests for interviews and information.

  By contrast, we are grateful to the Rhône-Poulenc division of Aventis, which took over the proprietorship of the Institute 2 factory in the United States, and to its director for agro-international public relations, Georges Santini, for having generously received us both in Institute 2 and at the research department in Lyon. We include in our appreciation Christine Giulani, in charge of public relations for Dow Agro Sciences, for the warm welcome provided at the Letcombe Regis laboratories in Great Britain.

  We want to thank also our friends who made our travels and stays in India so productive and pleasant: M.M. Sanjay Basu and all the staff at Far Horizon, Ranvir Bhandari, Audrey Daver, Bharat Dhruv, Madan Kak and the whole staff of TCI, Sanjiv Malhotra, Sunil Mukherjee, Gilbert Soulaine and Gilles Renard.

  We address our special gratitude to those who help us so generously in our humanitarian work: their excellencies the ambassadors Bernard de Montferrand and Kanwal Sibal, Mary Allizon, Rina and Takis Anoussis, David Backler and the Foundation Marcelle and Jean Coutu, Otto Barghezi, Jamshed Bhabha, Drs. Françoise Baylet-Vincent, Angela Bertoli, Henri-Jean Philippe and their benevolent friends of the organizations Gynécologie sans Frontières and Pathologie, Cytologie et Développement, Lon and Dick Behr, Nicolas Borsinger and the Foundation ProVictimis, Pierre Ceyrac, Kathryn and John Coo, Gaston Dayanand, Peter and Richard Dreyfus, Behram and Mani Dumasia, Catherine and David Graham, Priti Jain, Mohammed Kamruddin and the whole team of UBA, Adi and Jeroo Katgara, Ashwini and Renu Kumar, François Laborde and the whole team of HSP, Ila Lumba, Michèle Migone and all the Friends of Italy, Christina Mondadori and the Foundation Benedetta d’Intino, Aman Nath, Aloka Pal, Sabitri Pal, Shirin Paul, Mohammed Abdul Wohab and the whole staff of SHIS, Gaston Roberge, June and Paul Shorr, James Stevens and the whole team of Udayan, Sukhesi Didi and the whole staff of Belari, Ratan Tata, chairman of the Tata Group, Suzanne and Alexander Van Meerwijk, Francis Wacziarg, Harriet and Larry Weiss and all those who prefer to remain anonymous.

  We could not have written this book without the enthusiastic faith of our publishers. Our warm thanks to Leonello Brandolini, Nicole Lattès and Antoine Caro in Paris; Carlos Reves and Berta Noy in Barcelona; Shekhar and Poonam Malhotra in Delhi; Helen Gummer and Katharine Young in London; Gianni Ferrari, Massimo Turchetta and Joy Terekiev in Milan; Larry Kirshbaum and Jessica Papin in New York; and finally to our friend and translator Kathryn Spink, herself the author of remarkable works on Mother Teresa, Brother Roger of Taizé, Little Sister Magdeleine of Jesus and Jean Vanier.

  Letter to the Reader

  One day I met a tall Indian in his forties, with a red bandanna around his head and hair knotted in a braid at the back of his neck. The brightness of his smile and the warmth of his expression made me realize immediately that this was a man with compassion for the poor. Having heard that my second City of Joy dispensary boat had just been launched in the Ganges Delta to bring medical aid to the inhabitants of the fifty-four islands, he wanted to ask for my help.

  Right after he got the news of a deadly chemical accident in the city of Bhopal, Satinath Sarangi, “Sathyu” as he is called, rushed to the rescue of the survivors of the worst industrial disaster in history. On the night of the second of December 1984, a massive leak of toxic gases killed between sixteen and thirty thousand people and injured around five hundred thousand others. Sathyu decided to dedicate his whole life to the victims. Since 1995, he has been running a nongovernmental, nonpolitical and nonreligious organization, which tirelessly cares for the poorest and most neglected men, women and children affected by the gas.

  Sathyu wanted to ask me to finance the creation and equipment of a gynecological clinic to treat underprivileged women who, sixteen years after the tragedy, were still suffering from its dreadful effects.

  I had a vague recollection of the tragedy but, in all my fifty years of roving about India, I had never visited the magnificent capital of Madhya Pradesh.

  I went to Bhopal. What I found there gave me what was probably one of the strongest shocks of my life. With the help of my book royalties and the generosity of readers of The City of Joy, Beyond Love and A Thousand Suns, we were able to open the gynecological clinic. Today it takes in, treats and cures hundreds of women whom the town’s hospitals had abandoned to their fate.

  Above all, however, the experience pointed me in the direction of one of the most enthralling subjects of my career as a journalist and writer: Why and how could such a monumental accident take place? Who were the people who initiated it, those involved in it, the victims of it, and finally who benefited from it?

  I asked the Spanish writer Javier Moro, author of The Mountains of the Buddha, a moving book on the tragedy of Tibet, to join me in Bhopal. Our research went on for three years. This book is the fruit of it.

  Dominique Lapierre

  Concern for man himself and his safety

  must always form the chief interest of all

  technical endeavors.

  Never forget this in the midst of your

  diagrams and equations.

  Albert Einstein

  The City of Bhopal

  Part One

  A NEW STAR IN THE INDIAN SKY

  1

  Firecrackers That Kill, Cows That Die, Insects That Murder

  Mudilapa. One of India’s fifteen hundred thousand villages and probably one of the poorest in a country the size of a continent. Situated at the foot of the remote hill region of the state of Orissa, it comprised some sixty families belonging to the Adivasi community, descendants of the aboriginal tribes that had populated India over three thousand years ago before the Aryans from the north drove them back into the less fertile mountainous areas.

  Although officially “protected” by the authorities, the Adivasis remained largely beyond the reach of the development programs that were trying to improve the plight of the Indian peasants. Deprived of land, the inhabitants of the region had to hire out their hands to make a living for their families. Cutting sugar cane, going down into the bauxite mines, breaking rocks along the roads—no task was too menial for those disenfranchised by the world’s largest democracy.

  “Goodbye wife, goodbye children, goodbye Father, Mother, parrot. May the god watch over you while I’m away!”

  At the beginning of every summer, when the village lay cloaked in a leaden and blazing heat, a lean, dark-skinned, muscular little man would bid farewell to his family before setting off with his bundle on his head. Thirty-two-year-old Ratna Nadar was embarking on a strenuous journey: three days of walking to a palm grove on the shores of the Bay of Bengal. Because of the strength in his arms and legs he had been taken on by a tharagar, an agent who traveled about recruiting laborers. Work in palm groves required an unusual degree of agility and athletic strength. Men had to climb, bare-handed and without a safety harness, to the top of date palms as tall as five-story houses in order to collect the milk secreted from the heart of the tree. These acrobatic ascents earned Ratna Nadar and his companions the nickname “monkey-men.” Every evening the manager of the enterprise would come and take their precious harvest and transport it to a confectioner in Bhubaneswar, the capital city of Orissa.

  Ratna Nadar had never actually ta
sted this delicious nectar. But the four hundred rupees he earned from a season spent risking life and limb enabled him to feed the seven members of his family for several weeks. As soon as his wife Sheela had wind of his return, she would light an incense stick before the image of Jagannath, which decorated one corner of the hut, and thus gave thanks to the Lord of the Universe, a manifestation of the Hindu god Vishnu adopted by these Adivasis. Sheela was a frail but spirited woman with a ready smile. The braid down her back, her almond-shaped eyes and rosy cheeks made her look like a Chinese doll. There was nothing very surprising about that; her ancestors belonged to an aboriginal tribe, originally from Assam, in the far north of the country.

  The Nadars had three children. The eldest, eight-year-old Padmini, was a delicate little girl with long dark hair tied in two braids. She had inherited Sheela’s beautiful, slanting eyes and her father’s determined profile. The small gold ring, which she wore, as tradition dictated, through the ala of her nose, enhanced the brightness of her face. Getting up at dawn and going to bed late, Padmini assisted her mother with all the household chores. She had helped to raise her two brothers, seven-year-old Ashu and six-year-old Gopal, two tousle-haired little rascals more inclined toward chasing lizards than fetching water from the village water hole. Ratna’s parents also shared the Nadars’ home: his father Prodip, whose gaunt face was traversed by a thin, gray mustache, and his mother Shunda, already wrinkled and bent.

  Like tens of millions of other Indian children, Padmini and her brothers had never been anywhere near a school blackboard. The only lessons they had learned taught them how to survive in the harsh world into which the gods had ordained they should be born. And, like all the other occupants of Mudilapa, Ratna Nadar and his family were always on the lookout for any opportunity to earn the odd rupee. Each year, at the beginning of the dry season, one such opportunity arose: the time came to pick the various leaves used to make bidis, the slender Indian cigarettes with the tapered tips.