Part 3 (1/2)

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

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

Mukkadam bowed almost to the ground.

”Bless you, sister! The G.o.d has sent you. There's so much suffering to be relieved here.”

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

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

Mukkadam led the nun through the labyrinth of alleyways.

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

”I'm used to it,” his visitor rea.s.sured him, greeting those who gathered along her way with a cheerful namaste.*

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

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

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

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

”Me, me, didi!”

Felicity turned to see a little girl with slanting eyes.

”What's your name?”

”Padmini.”

”All right, Padmini, I'll take you on trial as my a.s.sistant in our small clinic.”

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

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

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

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

”Take him and ma.s.sage him gently,” she told her. ”That's all we can do.”

Padmini sat down on a jute sack in the alleyway and placed the child in her lap. She poured a little mustard oil on her hands and began to ma.s.sage the small body. Her hands came and went along its upper torso and limbs. Like a succession of waves, they started on the baby's sides, worked across his chest and up to the opposite shoulder. Stomach, legs, heels, the soles of his feet, his hands, his head, the nape of his neck, his face, the wings of his nose, his back and his b.u.t.tocks were successively stroked and vitalized, as if nourished by Padmini's supple, dancing fingers. The child suddenly began to gurgle for sheer bliss. ”I was dazzled by so much skill, beauty and intelligence,” Felicity would later say. ”In the depths of that slum I had just discovered an unsuspected power of love and hope. The people of Orya Bustee deserved the mercy of G.o.d.”

11.

”A Hand for the Future”

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

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

In April of 1962, the American management of Carbide revealed the nature and scope of its new projects in a full-page advertis.e.m.e.nt in National Geographic magazine. Ent.i.tled ”Science Helps to Build a New India,” the ill.u.s.tration was meant to be allegorical. It depicted a dark-skinned, emaciated peasant working obviously infertile soil with the aid of a primitive plow drawn by two lean oxen. Two women in saris with a pitcher of water and a basket on their heads, surveyed the scene. In the background appeared the waters of a mighty river, the Ganges. Just beyond the sacred river, glittering with a thousand fires in the sunlight, arose the gilded structures of a gigantic chemical complex with its towers, chimneys, pipework and tanks. Above it, in the upper half of the picture, a light-skinned hand emerged from the orange sky. Between thumb and index finger it was holding a test tube full of a red liquid, which it was pouring over the peasant and his plow. Carbide had no doubt drawn its inspiration from the scene on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in which Michelangelo portrays the hand of G.o.d touching Adam's to give him life. Under the heading, ”A Hand for the Future,” the company delivered its message in the s.p.a.ce of a single paragraph: Cattle working in the fields ... the eternal River Ganges ... elephants caparisoned with jewels ... Today these symbols of ancient India coexist with a new vision, that of modern industry. India has built factories to strengthen its economy and provide its four hundred and fifty million people with the promise of a bright future. But India needs the technological knowledge of the Western world. That is why Union Carbide, working with Indian engineers and technicians, has made its scientific resources available to help construct a large plant to produce chemical products and plastic goods near Bombay. All over the free world, Union Carbide has undertaken to build plants to manufacture chemical products, plastic goods, gases and alloys. Union Carbide's collaborators are proud to be able to share their knowledge and skills with the citizens of this great country.

This piece of purple prose concluded with an exhortation: ”Write to us for a brochure ent.i.tled 'The Exciting World of Union Carbide.' In it you'll find out how our resources in the different domains of carbon, chemical products, gases, metals, plastic goods and energy continue daily to work new wonders in your life.”

”New wonders in your life.” This eloquent promise was soon to find a spectacular opportunity for fulfillment. It was at a time when India was trying desperately to banish the ancestral specter of famine. After the severe food shortages at the beginning of the 1960s, the situation was at last improving. The source of this miracle was an apparently una.s.suming batch of Mexican grain. Christened Sonora 63 by its creator, the American agronomist and future n.o.bel peace prize winner, Norman Borlang, the grain produced a new variety of high-yielding corn. With heavy ears that were not susceptible to wind, light variation or torrential monsoon rains, and short stems that were less greedy, this fast growing seed made it possible to have several harvests a year on the same plot of land. It brought about a great change, the famous Green Revolution.

This innovation suffered serious constraints, however. In order for the high-yielding seeds to produce the multiple harvests expected of them, they needed lots of water and fertilizer. In five years, between 1966 and 1971, the Green Revolution multiplied India's consumption of fertilizer by three. And that was not all. The very narrow genetic base of high-yield varieties and the monoculture a.s.sociated with them made the new crop ten times more vulnerable to disease and insects. Rice became the favorite target for at least a hundred different species of predatory insects. Most devastating were the small flies known as green leafhoppers. The stylets with which they sucked the sap from young shoots could destroy several acres of rice fields in a few days. In the Punjab and other states, the invasion of a form of striped aphid decimated the cotton plantations. Against this scourge, India had found itself virtually defenseless. In its desire to promote the country's industrialization, the government had encouraged the local production of pesticides. Faced with the enormity of demand, however, locally manufactured products had shown themselves to be cruelly inadequate. What was more, a fair number contained either DDT or HCH (hexachlorocyclohexane), substances considered so dangerous to flora, fauna and humans that a number of countries had banned their use.

Finding themselves unable to provide their peasants with a ma.s.sive supply of effective pesticides, in 1966 Indian leaders decided to turn to foreign manufacturers. Several companies, among them Carbide, were already established in the country. The New York multinational was interested enough to dispatch one of its best scouts from its sales team to New Delhi. It chose the young Argentinian agronomical engineer, Eduardo Muoz. After all, hadn't this engaging sales representative managed to convert the whole of South America to the benefits of Sevin? Muoz promptly proved himself up to the task by inaugurating his mission with a masterstroke.

The legendary emperor Asoka who had spread the Buddha's message of nonviolence throughout India would have been amazed. On a winter evening in 1966, the hotel in New Delhi that bore his name welcomed the princ.i.p.al executives of Carbide's Indian subsidiary company along with a hundred of the highest officials from the Ministry of Agriculture and the Planning Commission. These dignitaries had gathered to celebrate the quasi-historic agreement signed that afternoon at the Ministry of Agriculture in front of a pack of journalists and photographers. The contract would arm Indian peasants against aphids and other insects destroying their crops. To this end, it provided for the immediate importation of 1,200 tons of American Sevin. In return, Carbide undertook to build a factory to make this same pesticide in India within five years. Eduardo Muoz had negotiated this agreement with a high-ranking official named Sardar Singh, who indicated he was impatient to see the first deliveries arrive. He was, as his turban and bearded cheeks indicated, a Sikh, originally from the Punjab. The peasants of his community had been the first victims of the marauding insects.

As chance would have it, the Carbide envoy was able to satisfy the hopes of his Indian partner sooner than antic.i.p.ated. Discovering that a cargo of 1,200 tons of Sevin destined for farmers in the locust-infested Nile Valley, was held up in the port of Alexandria by overzealous customs officers, the Carbide envoy managed to have the s.h.i.+p diverted to Bombay. Two weeks later, the precious Sevin was received there like a gift from heaven.

The euphoria subsided somewhat when it was discovered that the Sevin from the Egyptian s.h.i.+p was actually a concentrate that could not be used until it had undergone appropriate preparation. In their own jargon, specialists called this process ”formulation.” It consisted of mixing the concentrate with sand or gypsum powder. Like the sugar added to the active substance in a medicine to facilitate its consumption, the sand acts as a carrier for Sevin making it possible to either spread or spray the insecticide as needed. There was no shortage of small industrial units in India that could carry out this transformation process. But Muoz had a better idea. Carbide itself would make its Sevin usable, by building its own formulation factory. No matter that the Industrial Development and Regulation Act reserved the construction of this kind of plant for very small firms and only those of Indian nationality, he knew he could comply tacitly with the law by finding someone to act as a front man.

Like anywhere else in the world, there is no shortage in India of intermediaries, agents, compradores prepared to act as go-betweens for any kind of business. One morning in June 1967, a jolly little man turned up in Eduardo Muoz's office.

”My name is Santosh Dindayal,” he announced, ”and I am a devotee of the cult of Krishna.” Taken aback by this mode of introduction, the Argentinian offered his visitor a cigar. ”I own numerous businesses,” the Indian went on. ”I have a forestry development company, a scooter concession, a cinema, a gas station. I've heard about your plan to build a pesticide factory.” At this point in his account, the man a.s.sumed a slightly mysterious air. ”Well, you see, it so happens that I have entrees all over Bhopal.”

”Bhopal?” repeated Muoz, to whom the place meant nothing.

”Yes. It's the capital of the state of Madhya Pradesh,” the Indian continued. ”The state government is eager to develop its industry. It could well be useful for your project.”

Drawing vigorously on his cigar, the little man explained that the people running Madhya Pradesh had set aside an area for industrial development on vacant land north of the capital.

”What I'm proposing is that I apply in my name for a license to construct a plant that can transform the Sevin your friends have imported into a product that can be used on crops. The cost of such an undertaking shouldn't be more than fifty thousand dollars. We can sign a partners.h.i.+p contract together. You do the work on the factory and then you can give me a proportion of the proceeds.”

The Argentinian was so pleased he nearly swallowed his cigar. The proposal was an excellent first step in the larger industrial venture he was counting on launching. It would provide an immediate opportunity to make Indian farmers appreciate the benefits of Sevin, and give the engineers in their research departments in South Charleston time to come up with the large pesticide plant that the Indian government seemed to want to see built on its land. Suddenly, however, a question sprang to mind.