Five Past Midnight in Bhopal Read online

  The crime committed by the infamous aphids in the Mudilapa fields would not go unpunished. All over the world armies of scientists and researchers were working relentlessly to destroy the miniature monsters. One of the chief temples dedicated to the crusade against the insects was an agronomical research center in Yonkers, a residential suburb of New York City on the banks of the Hudson River. It was called the Boyce Thompson Institute.

  The man who founded this institute was a billionaire with a messianic desire to commit his wealth to some great humanitarian cause. William Boyce Thompson (1869–1930) had amassed a huge fortune from copper mining in the mountains of Montana. In October 1917 the American Red Cross had made him a colonel and placed him in charge of an aid mission to Russia, then in the throes of the Bolshevik revolution. The generous industrialist had swapped his bow tie and top hat for a military uniform, and added a million dollars of his own money to the funds produced by the American government for the victims of the Russian famine. He came back from his journey convinced that world peace depended on the equitable distribution of food, a conviction that was reinforced by his ardent faith in science and which led to the formulation of a spectacular philanthropic project. Because population growth was going to increase the need for food, it was vitally urgent to understand “why and how plants grow, why they flourish or decline, how their diseases can be stemmed, how their development can be stimulated by better control of the elements that enable them to live.” The study of plants, so the generous patron claimed, could make a decisive contribution to humanity’s well-being.

  Out of this conviction was born, in 1924, the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research, an ultramodern agronomical research center, built on several acres of land less than an hour from downtown New York City. Endowed by its founder with $10 million—a considerable sum at the time—the institute incorporated chemistry and biology laboratories, experimental greenhouses and insect vivaria.

  It was on the front line of the battle against plant-eating species that the Boyce Thompson Institute researchers achieved their first significant victories: they eradicated the beetles killing Californian pines by inventing a subtle, sweet-smelling substance that lured the destructive little creatures into fatal traps.

  At the beginning of the 1950s the Aphis fabae wrought havoc on the farmlands of the United States, Mexico, Central and South America. Found also in Malaysia, Japan and southern Europe, the Aphis fabae attacked potatoes, cereals, beetroot and fruit trees, as well as vegetables, animal fodder and garden plants. This tiny predator has a beak equipped with two very fine piercing stylets with which it sucks the sap from plants. As the Indian farmer Ratna Nadar would so painfully discover, plants abruptly deprived of their vital substance wither and perish in days. Before going in for the kill, this aphid, scarcely bigger than a pinhead, injects its victim with toxic saliva, causing hideous deformation of the stalks and leaves. To finish off the job, it exudes from its rectum honeydew to attract ants. These ants deposit a sootlike residue on the leaves, which stifles any growth.

  This was not the only nightmare parasite to afflict American and Asian farmers at that time. The red vine spider, a species of armyworm and the striped stem-borer joined forces with other destructive insect species to deprive humanity of a large part of its agricultural resources. Only the chemical industry could come up with a means of eradicating such a scourge. Conscious of all that was at stake, a number of companies went into action. One of them was American. Its name was Union Carbide.

  Born at the beginning of the century of a marriage of four companies that produced batteries and arc lamps for acetylene street lights and headlights for the first cars, Carbide—as it was affectionately known by its staff—owed its first glorious hour to World War I. It was helium from its stills that enabled tethered balloons to rise into the skies above France and spot German artillery fire; it was iron- and zirconium-based armor-plating of its invention that thwarted the Kaiser’s shells on the first Allied tanks; it was Carbide’s active carbon granules in gas masks that protected the lungs of thousands of infantrymen in the trenches of the Somme and Champagne. Twenty-five years later, another world war was to enlist Carbide’s services for America. Out of its collaboration with the scientists of the Manhattan Project, the first atomic bomb was born.

  In less than a generation the absorption of dozens of other businesses propelled the company to the forefront of America’s multinationals. By the second half of the century it was among the mightiest of U.S. companies, with 130 subsidiaries in some 40 countries, approximately 500 production sites and 120,000 employees. In 1976 it was to announce a revenue of $615 billion. The products that emerged from its laboratories, factories, pits and mines were innumerable. Carbide was the great provider of industrial gases such as nitrogen, oxygen, carbon, methane, ethylene and propane used in the petrochemical industry, as well as chemical substances like the ammonia and urea used in the manufacture of fertilizers, among other things. It also produced sophisticated metallurgical items based on alloys of cobalt, chrome and tungsten that were used in high-tensile equipment such as airplane turbines. Finally, it made a whole range of plastic goods for general use. Eight out of ten American housewives did their shopping with plastic bags stamped with the blue-and-white logo of Union Carbide. The logo also appeared on millions of plastic bottles, food packaging, photographic film and many other everyday items. The intercontinental telephone conversations of half the planet’s inhabitants were conducted via underwater cables protected with sheathing made by Carbide. The antifreeze for one in every two cars, 60 percent of batteries, 60 percent of silicone implants used in cosmetic surgery, the rubber for one in every five tires, most aerosol fly and mosquito sprays, and even synthetic diamonds issued from the factories of a giant whose shares were among the safest investments on Wall Street.

  From its imposing fifty-two-story aluminum and glass skyscraper at 270 Park Avenue in the heart of Manhattan, Carbide determined the habits and dictated the choices of millions of men, women and children across the five continents. No other industrial company enjoyed the same degree of respectability. After all, didn’t people say that what was good for Carbide was good for America—and therefore the world?

  The production of pesticides was in line with its past and its experience. The objective—to rid humanity of the insects that were stealing its food—could only enhance its international prestige.

  5

  Three Zealots on the Banks of the Hudson

  They looked more like Davis Cup players than laboratory researchers. Thirty-four-year-old Harry Haynes and thirty-six-year-old Herbert Moorefield, both vigorous and fit-looking men, belonged to a profession that was relatively new. They were doctors of entomology. In July 1954, Union Carbide’s management had rented an entire wing of the Boyce Thompson Institute in Yonkers for these two eminent experts. It had further strengthened the team by adding to it one of the most brilliant staff members of its South Charleston, West Virginia, research center, thirty-eight-year-old chemist Joseph Lambrech. To these three exceptionally gifted people the company entrusted a mission of the utmost importance: Devise a product capable of exterminating a wide range of parasites while adhering to prevailing standards for the protection and safety of humans and the environment. That summer, on the top floor of the multinational’s New York office, no one was in any doubt: the company that managed to reconcile these two objectives would walk away with the world pesticide market. Lambrech gave the object of his labors a code name: Experimental Insecticide Seven Seven. For convenience’s sake it would soon become “Sevin.”

  Going through all his predecessors’ studies with a fine-tooth comb, the chemist combined new molecules, hoping to find one that would kill aphids, red spiders and armyworms without leaving too many toxic residues in the vegetation and environment. For months on end, his entomologist colleagues tested his combinations on leaves, stems and ears of corn infested with all kinds of insects. In its hundreds of cages and containers, the Boyce
Thompson Institute harbored an unimaginably rich zoo of the infinitely small. It also had acres of glass houses in which all the climates of the planet could be recreated around a limitless variety of plants. In large glass cases the different molecules could be tested with sprays of varying doses, directed from every possible angle at samples of every variety of crop. The entomologists Haynes and Moorefield would then deposit colonies of insects raised in their laboratories on the treated surfaces. Hour by hour they would observe their subjects’ agony. They collected the corpses on glass slides, examined them under the microscope, and subjected the plants and soil to detailed analysis to find any traces of chemical pollution. Their observations would enable their chemist colleague to hone the production of an insecticide ever nearer to what was required.

  After three years of intense effort the team came up with a combination of a methyl derivative of carbamic acid and alpha naphthol, in the form of whitish crystals soluble in water. Those three years had been taken up with hundreds of experiments, not just on all known species of insects, but also on thousands of rats, rabbits, pigeons, fish, bees and even shrimps and lobsters. Finally, one evening in July 1957, the three zealots in Yonkers, together with their wives, were able to crack open a bottle of champagne. Although the god DDT had had to be cast down, agriculture would not remain defenseless. Sevin, born on the banks of the Hudson, would soon put a weapon in the hands of all the farmers of the world.

  Carbide was quick to flood America with brochures proclaiming the birth of its miracle product. There was no end to the praises sung to it. To underline its “low toxicity to humans,” photographs depicted Herbert Moorefield, one of the inventors of Sevin, in the process of tasting a few granules with all the glee of a child licking his chocolate-coated lips. According to the publicity, Sevin protected an infinite range of crops: cotton, wheat, lemons, bananas, pineapples, olives, cocoa, coffee, sunflowers, sorghum, sugar cane and rice. You could spread it on maize, alfalfa, beans, peanuts and soybeans right up until harvest time, with no danger of any toxic residues. It worked just as well on adult insects as it did on eggs and larvae. It was so effective that it even poisoned parasites that had developed resistances to other insecticides. Its potency was not limited to agricultural crops. A few ounces of Sevin spread around the outside of a home, or sprayed on the walls, frame or roof, exterminated mosquitoes, cockroaches and other bugs harmful to family life. Better still, Sevin controlled the number of fleas, lice and ticks on dogs, cats and farmyard animals, without putting their lives at risk. In short, Sevin was precisely the lucrative panacea that Carbide’s new agricultural products division had been waiting for.

  No one was more convinced of this fact than a twenty-nine-year-old Argentinian agronomical engineer. Handsome and charming, Eduardo Muñoz came from a well-to-do Buenos Aires family. He had chosen to pursue agronomy as an act of defiance after he failed the entrance examination for the diplomatic service. He had married an attractive American girl who worked at the United States embassy, and so found among his wedding presents the perfect incentive to set off for new pastures, the celebrated green card. Out of the fifty offers he received when he sent off his curriculum vitae, he chose the first. It came from Union Carbide. A year’s training on the various company sites and a monthly salary of $485 had turned the handsome Argentinian into a proper “Carbider.” The invention of Sevin was to provide him with the opportunity to exercise his extraordinary talents as a salesman. In Mexico, Columbia, Peru, Argentina, Chile, Brazil … soon there was hardly a single farmer who was not aware of the merits of the American pesticide. Agricultural fairs, harvest competitions, farmers’ meetings—Muñoz was everywhere with his banners glorifying Sevin, his on-site demonstrations, his handouts and his sponsored lotteries. It was almost inevitable that Central and South America would one day become too restrictive for the indefatigable traveling salesman. He would have to find other places in which to satisfy his passion for selling.

  6

  The Daily Heroism of the People of the Bustees

  Here, brother, it is cheaper to sweat a fellow to death than hire a buffalo,” remarked Belram Mukkadam to Padmini’s father who had just come back from a day’s work on the railway line.

  The sturdy date-palm climber from Orissa was reeling with exhaustion. All day long he had carted sleepers and heavy steel tracks from one place to another. The coolies the railway management had recruited were all immigrants like him, forced into exile by the poverty of the countryside.

  From the outset, this slave labor had been terrible. Ratna Nadar grew weaker by the day, stricken with nausea, cramps, bouts of sweating and dizziness. His muscles wasted visibly. Soon he had difficulty standing. He suffered from hallucinations and nightmares. He was the victim of what specialists call “convict syndrome.” The small quantity of rice, lentils and occasional fish that he bought before leaving for work in the morning was for him. It is a tradition among India’s poor that the family food be kept for the rice-earner. Even so, the frequent lack of cooking fuel prevented him from eating it. Several weeks passed before Ratna felt his strength returning. Only then could the whole family eat.

  For Padmini and her brother Gopal, the brutal immersion in the overpopulated world of city workers was just as painful. Every day they saw sights that shocked the sensibilities of children raised in the countryside.

  “Gopal, look!” cried Padmini one morning, pointing to a gang of youngsters scaling the back of a stationary train.

  “They’re out to pinch bits of coal,” Gopal explained calmly.

  “They’re thieves!” Padmini was indignant, furious that her brother did not share her outrage. Her eyes filled with tears.

  “Dry your eyes, little one!” a grown-up voice commanded. “You too will pick up coal to make ladhus.* If you don’t, your mother won’t be able to cook anything for you to eat.”

  The man who had just spoken had no fingers left on his right hand. Padmini and her parents would come to know and respect this prominent figure in Orya Bustee. At thirty-eight, Ganga Ram was a survivor of leprosy, a disease that still afflicts five million Indians today. Thrown out on the streets by the owner of the garage in Bombay where he used to wash cars, Ram had ended up in the communal ward of Hamidia Hospital in Bhopal. He had been treated and cured, and had a certificate given to him by a doctor to prove it. Uncertain where to go and what to do, for seven years he had remained in the wing for contagious diseases, performing small services for the nurses and patients. He had applied dressings, changed the incontinent, administered enemas and even given injections. One day, he was called upon to transport an attractive woman of about thirty with luminous green eyes. A truck had broken both her legs. Her name was Dalima, and it was love at first sight. During her stay in the communal ward, Dalima had adopted a ten-year-old orphan who had been found half dead on a sidewalk. He had been taken to the hospital in a police van. His name was Dilip. Lively and alert, this skinny urchin with short-cropped hair was the darling of the occupants of the communal ward. A few weeks later, the former leper, Dalima and young Dilip left the hospital to settle in Orya Bustee. There, with the tip of his walking stick, Belram Mukkadam had assigned them a place on which to build a hut. Some of the neighbors provided bamboo canes, planks and a piece of canvas; others brought cooking utensils, a charpoy and a little linen. “All we had by way of luggage were Dalima’s crutches,” Ganga Ram recalled.

  For months they survived on Dilip’s resourcefulness alone. He was the one who inveigled the neighborhood children into pinching bits of coal fallen from the locomotives. One morning, he persuaded Padmini to go with him.

  “You have to hurry up, little sister. The railway police are on the lookout.”

  “Are they nasty?” The little girl was worried.

  “Nasty!” The boy burst out laughing. “If they catch you, be prepared to give them a fat baksheesh.* Otherwise they’ll take you away in a van and there …” Dilip made a gesture that the little peasant girl did not understand.
r />   When they got back from their expedition, the slum midwife, the elderly Prema Bai, who lived in the hut opposite the Nadars, gave her young neighbor a little straw and some nanny-goat droppings.

  “Crumble the coal with the straw and the droppings and knead the whole lot together for a good while,” she instructed. “Then make little balls out of it and put them to dry.”

  An hour later Padmini took the fruits of her harvest triumphantly to her mother.

  “Here you are, Mother: ladhus. Now you’ll be able to cook Father’s food.”

  For peasants used to the sovereign silence of the countryside, the din of the trains passing in front of their huts was a painful trial. Their lives revolved around the rhythm of the incessant coming and going of dozens of trains. “I got to know their timetable, to know whether they were on time or late,” Padmini recalled. “Some of them, like the Mangala Express, made our huts shake as they roared past in the middle of the night. That was the worst one. The Shatabdi Express to Delhi went by in the early afternoon and the Jammu Mail just before sunset. The drivers must have had fun, terrifying us with the roar of their whistles.”

  There were some advantages to being so close to the railway tracks. When a red light brought a train to a halt outside the huts, the engineers would throw a few coins for the children to run and buy them some pan, a betel leaf filled with spices that is chewed. There was always some small change left over.

  “Watch where you put your feet when you’re walking between the rails,” Dilip advised Padmini. “That’s where people go to take a crap.”

  Fortunately, the tracks were also strewn with a multitude of small treasures that people on the trains had thrown away. There were bottles, old tubes of toothpaste, dead batteries, empty tins, plastic soles, shreds of clothing and tags to be picked up. Dilip used to negotiate a price for them with a ragpicker who came around every week. The daily takings could be as much as three or four rupees, about ten cents. Dilip and Gopal, Padmini’s brother, would cut out the picture of the Taj Mahal from Magnet cigarette packs and make playing cards, which they sold on the station platforms. “I shall never forget the Orya Bustee trains,” Padmini would say. “They brought a little excitement and joy into our difficult life.”