Five Past Midnight in Bhopal Read online

  For six weeks, along with most of the other villagers, Sheela, her children and their grandparents, would set off each morning at dawn for the forest of Kantaroli. There, the people would invade the undergrowth like a swarm of insects. With all the precision of robots, they would detach a leaf, place it in a canvas haversack and repeat the same process over and over again. Every hour, the pickers would stop to make up bunches of fifty leaves. If they hurried, they could generally manage to produce eighty bunches a day. Each bunch was worth thirty paisa, not quite two U.S. cents, or the price of two eggplants.

  During the first days, when the picking went on at the edge of the forest, young Padmini would often manage to make as many as a hundred bunches. Her brothers Ashu and Gopal were not quite as dexterous at pinching off the leaves. But between the six of them, the children, their mother and their grandparents, they brought back nearly a hundred rupees each evening, a small fortune for a family used to surviving for a whole month on far less.

  One day, word went around Mudilapa and the surrounding villages that a cigarette and match factory had recently been set up in the area, and that children were being taken on as labor. Of the hundred billion matches produced annually in India, many were still made by hand, and mostly by children, whose little fingers could manage the delicate work. This was true also for rolling bidis.

  The opening of this factory created quite a stir among the inhabitants of Mudilapa. There were no lengths to which people would not go to seduce the tharagar whose job it was to recruit the workforce. Mothers rushed to the mohajan, the village usurer, and pawned their last remaining jewels. Some sold their only goat. And yet the jobs they sought for their children were harsh in the extreme.

  “My truck will come by at four every morning,” the tharagar announced to the parents of the children he had chosen. “Anyone who is not outside waiting for it had better look out.”

  “And when will our children be back?” Padmini’s father gave voice to all the other parents’ concern.

  “Not before nightfall,” the tharagar responded curtly.

  Sheela saw an expression of fear pass over Padmini’s face. She sought at once to reassure her.

  “Padmini, think what happened to your friend Banita.”

  Sheela was referring to the neighbors’ little girl whose parents had just sold her to a blind man so they could feed their other children. There was nothing particularly unusual about the arrangement. Sometimes in the mistaken belief that their children were going to be employed as servants or in workshops, parents entrusted their daughters to pimps.

  It was still pitch dark when the truck horn sounded the next morning. Padmini, Ashu and Gopal were already waiting outside, huddled together against the cold. Their mother had risen even earlier to prepare a meal for them: a handful of rice seasoned with a little dhal, * two chapatis† each and a chili pepper to share, all wrapped in a banana leaf.

  The truck stopped outside a long, open, tiled shed, with a baked earth wall at the back and pillars to support the roof at the front. It was not yet daybreak and kerosene lamps scarcely lit the vast building. The foreman was a thin, overbearing, bully of a man, wearing a collarless shirt and a white loincloth.

  “In the darkness, his eyes seemed to blaze like the embers in our chula, ‡ ” Padmini would recount.

  “All of you sit down along the wall,” he ordered.

  Then he counted the children and split them into two groups, one for cigarettes, the other for matches. Padmini was separated from her brothers and sent to join the bidi group.

  “Get to work!” the man in the white loincloth commanded, clapping his hands.

  His assistants then brought trays laden with leaves like those Padmini had picked in the forest. The oldest assistant squatted down in front of the children to show them how to roll each leaf into a little funnel, fill it with a pinch of shredded to bacco, and bind it with a red thread. Padmini had no difficulty imitating him. In no time at all she had made up a packet of bidis. “The only thing I didn’t like about it was the pungent smell of the leaves,” she would confide. “To get through the pile of leaves in front of us, we found it best to concentrate on the money we’d be taking home.”

  Other workmen deposited piles of tiny sticks in front of the children assigned to making matches.

  “Place them one by one in the slots of this metal support,” the foreman explained. “Once it’s full, turn it round and dip the ends of the sticks in this tank.”

  The receptacle contained molten sulfur. As soon as the tips had been dipped and lifted out again, the sulfur solidified instantly.

  Padmini’s younger brother surveyed the steaming liquid with apprehension.

  “We’ll burn our fingers!” he said anxiously, and loudly enough for the foreman to hear.

  “You little idiot!” the man retorted. “I told you, you only immerse the end of the wooden sticks, not the whole thing. Have you never seen a match?”

  Gopal shook his head. But his fear of being burned was nothing compared with the real risk of being poisoned by the toxic fumes coming off the tank. It was not long before some of the children began to feel their lungs and eyes burning. Many of them passed out. The foreman and his assistants slapped their faces and doused them with buckets of water to revive them. Those who fainted again were mercilessly expelled from the factory.

  “Shortly after our arrival, a second shed was built to house a work unit to make firecrackers,” Padmini would recount. “My brother Ashu was assigned to it with about twenty other boys. After that I only saw him once a day, when I took him his share of the food our mother had prepared for us. The foreman would ring a bell to announce the meal break. Woe betide any of us who were not back in our places by the second bell. The boss would beat us with the stick he carried to frighten us and make us work faster and faster. Apart from that short break, we worked without interruption from the time we arrived until nightfall, when the truck would take us home again. My brothers and I were so tired we would throw ourselves onto the charpoy* without anything to eat and fall asleep straightaway.”

  A few weeks after the opening of the firecracker unit, tragedy struck. Suddenly Padmini saw a huge flame blazing in the shed where her brother Ashu was working. An explosion ripped away the roof and wall. Boys emerged, screaming, from the cloud of smoke. They were covered in blood. Their skin was hanging off them in shreds. The foreman and his assistants were trying to put out the fire with buckets of water. Padmini rushed frantically in the direction of the blaze, shouting her brother’s name. She was running about in all directions when she stumbled. As she fell, she saw a body on the ground. It was her brother. His arms had been blown off in the blast. “His eyes were open as if he were looking at me, but he wasn’t moving,” she would say. “Ashu was dead. Around him lay other little injured bodies. I picked myself up and went and took my other brother’s hand. He had taken refuge in a corner of the match shed. I sat down beside him, held him tightly in my arms, and together we wept in silence.”

  One month after this accident, a uniformed official from the Orissa Department of Animal Husbandry appeared in Mudilapa. Driving a jeep equipped with a revolving light and a siren, he was the first government representative ever to visit the village. Using a loudspeaker, he summoned the villagers, who assembled around his jeep.

  “I have come to bring you great news,” he declared, caressing the bullhorn with fingers covered in rings. “In accordance with her policy of helping our country’s most underprivileged peasants, Indira Gandhi, our prime minister, has decided to give you a present.” Bemused, the man marked the astonishment clearly visible on the faces of those present. Waving a hand at random in the direction of one of them, he inquired, “You, do you have any idea what our mother might want to give you?”

  Ratna Nadar, Padmini’s father, hesitated. “Perhaps she wants to give us a well,” he ventured.

  Already, the man in uniform had turned to someone else. “And you?”

  “She’s going
to make us a proper road.”

  “And you?”

  “She wants to provide us with electricity.”

  “And you? …”

  In less than a minute, the government envoy was in a position to assess the state of poverty and neglect in the village. But he was not concerned with any of these pressing needs. Heightening the suspense with a protracted silence, at last he continued: “My friends, I’ve come to inform you that our beloved Indira has decided to give every family in Mudilapa a cow.”

  “A cow?” repeated several stupefied voices.

  “What are we going to feed it on?” someone asked anxiously.

  “Don’t you worry about that,” the visitor went on. “Indira Gandhi has thought of everything. Every family is to receive a plot of land on which you’ll grow the fodder you need for your animal. And the government will pay you for your labors.”

  It was too good to be true.

  “The gods have visited our village,” marveled Padmini’s mother. She was always ready to thank heaven for the slightest blessing. “We must offer a puja* at once.”

  The government envoy continued his speech. He spoke with all the grandiloquence of a politician coming to dispense gifts before an election.

  “Don’t go, my friends, I haven’t finished! I have an even more important piece of news for you. The government has made arrangements for each one of your cows to give you a calf from semen taken from specially selected bulls imported from Great Britain. Their sperm will be brought to you from Bombay and Poona by government vets who will themselves carry out the insemination. This program should produce a new breed in your region, capable of yielding eight times more milk than local cattle. But take note that to achieve this result, you will have to undertake never to mate your cow with a local bull.”

  The bewilderment on the faces of the onlookers had been replaced by joy.

  “Never before have we had a visit from a benefactor like you,” declared Ratna Nadar, sure that he was relaying the gratitude of them all.

  The day the herd arrived, the women dug out their wedding saris and festival veils from the family coffers as if it were the Diwali or Dassahra † celebrations. All night long they danced and sang around the animals, who joined in with a concert of mooing.

  The Nadars named their cow after Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth to whom the Adivasis were as fervently devoted as Hindus.

  Just as the government envoy had announced, a few weeks later, vets arrived in Mudilapa. They came bearing fat syringes to inseminate the cows with British sperm. Ten moons later, in the yard outside every hut in the village, a calf made its entry into the world. But the villagers’ joy lasted only one night. Not one of the young calves managed to get to its feet and suckle from its mother. Sheela tried in vain to induce the starving newborn to drink a little milk out of a coconut shell. One after another, all the calves died. It was a disaster.

  “I’m going to take Lakshmi to a local bull,” Ratna Nadar told his family one morning. “It’s because their fathers aren’t from around here that our calves died,” he said.

  His neighbors decided to do the same but the attempt proved fruitless. The government agents had taken their own precautions. To prevent the peasants from having their cows inseminated by a local bull, they had had them all castrated.

  The inhabitants of Mudilapa took heart once more when they saw the young shoots they had sown for their cows on the half-acre allotted to them by the government sprouting from the ground. At least they would be able to feed their cattle. Every morning Ratna Nadar took his family to the field to watch over the welfare of the future harvest. One day, they noticed that the grass had changed color. It had turned gray. It couldn’t be for want of water; the soil was still damp from the last rains. On careful examination of the stems, Ratna, and every other farmer in the village, discovered that they were infested with black aphids that were devouring the stalks’ outer layers and sucking up the sap. Calamity had struck Mudilapa. Was Jagannath angry? The Nadars and their neighbors went to ask the village priest to offer a puja to the great god in order that their fields might be restored to health. Without fodder, their cows would die. The old man with his shaven head traced a circle around a few shoots and began to dance, chanting the ritual prayers. Then he sprinkled them with ghee, clarified butter, and set fire to them one by one.

  But Jagannath refused to hear. Consumed by aphids, the Nadars’ fodder died in a matter of days. It was September and they would not be able to sow again until the following spring. Soon their cow was reduced to skin and bone. The region’s cattle merchants got wind of the catastrophe. Like vultures they descended on Mudilapa, buying the animals dirt cheap while they were still alive. The Nadars had to resign themselves to letting Lakshmi go for fifty rupees, a little over a dollar.

  The sale enabled them to hold out for a few more weeks. When the elderly Shunda, the grandmother who kept the family savings wrapped up in a handkerchief, had got out her last few coins, Ratna gathered his family around him.

  “I’m going to the moneylender,” he declared. “I shall give him our field as security for his lending us something to live on until next seed-time. This time we’ll sow corn and lentils. And we’ll find a way of preventing those cursed little creatures from devouring our harvest.”

  “Ratna, father of my children,” Sheela interrupted timidly, “I’ve hidden it from you until now so as not to worry you, but you must know that we no longer have a field. One day when you were away, working in the palm grove, the government people came and took back all the plots of land they found with no crops on them. I tried to tell them that insects had eaten what we had planted, but they would not listen. The man in charge shouted ‘You’re useless!’ and tore up the papers they gave us when they brought us the cows.”

  The family fell silent, the despair palpable. Then a child’s voice rang out in the overheated hut.

  “I’ll go back to rolling bidis,” declared Padmini.

  Her courageous offer would not be accepted. A few days later, an unknown tharagar turned up in Mudilapa. He had been sent by the Madhya Pradesh Railroad to recruit a workforce to double the railway lines into the station in Bhopal, the state capital.

  “You could earn as much as thirty rupees a day,” he told Ratna Nadar, carefully examining the date-palm climber’s muscles with a professional eye.

  “What about my family?” asked Nadar.

  The tharagar shrugged his shoulders.

  “Take them with you! There’s plenty of room in Bhopal!” He counted the number of people in the hut. “There you go. Six train tickets for Bhopal,” he said, taking six small squares of pink paper out of his lunghi, a long cotton loincloth knotted at the waist. “It’s a two- to three-day journey. And on top of that, here’s a fifty-rupee advance on your first wages.”

  The tharagar was not being generous; the Adivasis were known to be as undemanding as they were exploitable.

  The deal was done in five minutes. The Nadar family’s exodus posed hardly any problems. Apart from a few tools, linens and household utensils and Mangal, the irrepressible parrot with his red and yellow plumage, they had no possessions. The next monsoon storms would demolish the hut, unless some passing family happened to take possession of it in the meantime.

  One morning, just as Surya, the sun god, was casting his first pink rays over the horizon, the Nadars set off, with Ratna and his father, Prodip, leading the way. They all carried bundles on their heads. The small caravan, to which other Mudilapa families had attached themselves, left a cloud of dust behind it. Young Gopal, the parrot cage in hand, pranced for joy at the prospect of adventure. Padmini, however, could not hold back tears. Before the road veered away to the north she looked back over her shoulder for one last time and bade farewell to the hut that had been her childhood home.

  2

  The Planetary Holocaust Wrought by Armies of Ravaging Insects

  The misfortune of the peasants from Mudilapa was just one tiny episode in a tragedy
affecting the entire planet. The black aphids that had driven the Nadars from their land were among eight hundred and fifty thousand varieties of insects—which, since the dawn of humanity, have been stripping us of our food supply. Many of their names give scant indication of the nature and magnitude of the disasters they cause. How, after all, would anyone ever suspect the oriental fruit moths, red-banded leaf rollers, rosy apple aphids, striped stem-borers or indeed white-backed plant-hoppers, of such capacity for destruction? With their flamboyant carapaces and their elaborate and varied weapons, these parasites are among the most fabulous creatures in the bestiary of God’s imagination. The dazzling iridescence of some fruit-eating moths is reminiscent of glittering, bejeweled apparel and quite unlike the hairy coat of the repulsive caterpillars that destroy cotton fields. Every species has its own method of surviving, to the detriment of its prey. There are insects that suck, like Mudilapa’s Indian aphids. Then there are pulp-eaters, plant-eaters and wood-eaters. Some grind up their prey with their mandibles, some suck it dry with a long proboscis, others lick it before sucking it up through a sheath encircling their tongue and yet others stab it with a “dagger,” then pump out the sap. Some nibble at leaves, gnawing them into crenallated shapes or puncturing them with little holes. Others invade the leaf canals and spread themselves through the veins. Dense foliage suddenly finds itself riddled with whitish spots that harbor armadas of assailants the size of pinheads. All at once, healthy, vigorous plants find themselves covered with brownish powdery pustules, which cause them to wither and die.