Part 3 (2/2)

”By the way, Mr. Dindayal, where is this town of yours, Bhopal?”

The Indian smiled and pointed proudly to his chest. ”In the very heart of India, dear Mr. Muoz.”

The heart of India! The expression excited the handsome Argentinian. Taking the Indian with him as navigator, he set off at once in his gray Mark VII Jaguar for the heart of the country. To him it was like arriving ”in a large village.” The industrial zone designated by the government lay just over a mile from the city center, and a little more than half a mile from the train station. In the past, it had been the site of the royal stables for the rulers of Bhopal. The troops of the sultana infantry had used it as a parade ground. The dark color of the soil accounted for the name of the place: Kali Grounds, ”kali” meaning ”black.” But the term may also have derived from the color of the blood with which the earth was saturated. For it was here that, before thousands of spectators, the kingdom's executioners used to lop off the heads of those whom the Islamic sharia* had condemned to death.

The Argentinian was not likely to be put off by such morbid a.s.sociations; two days' exploring had convinced him. This town of Bhopal held all the winning cards: a central location, an excellent road and railway system, and abundant electricity and water supplies. As for the Kali Grounds, in his eyes they held yet another trump: the string of huts and hovels extending along their boundaries promised to provide a plentiful workforce.

12.

A Promised Land on the Ruins of a Legendary Kingdom The large village the Carbide envoy thought he had seen from inside his Jaguar was in fact one of India's most beautiful and vibrant cities. But then Eduardo Muoz had not had time to discover any of Bhopal's treasures. Since 1722, when an Afghan general fell in love with the site and founded the capital of his realm there, Bhopal had been adorned with so many magnificent palaces, sublime mosques and splendid gardens that it was justifiably known as ”the Baghdad of India.” Above all, it was for its rich Muslim culture and tradition of tolerance that the town held a distinguished place in India's history. The riches of Bhopal had been forged first by a Frenchman, and then by four progressive female rulers-despite the burkahs that concealed them from the eyes of men. The commander-in-chief of the nawab's armies, and subsequently the country's regent, Balthazar I de Bourbon, and after him, the begums Sikander, Shah Jahan, Sultan Jahan and Kudsia had turned their realm and its capital into a model much admired in imperial Britain as well as by other African and Asian colonial countries. Not only had the four begums used their own funds to finance the advent of the railway line, they had opened up roads and markets, built cotton mills, distributed vast areas of land to their landless subjects, set up a postal system unequalled in Asia and introduced running water to the capital. In an effort to educate their people, they had introduced free primary instruction for everyone and promoted female emanc.i.p.ation by increasing the number of girls' schools.

The magnificence of the kingdom and its prestigious capital expressed itself in many different ways. A great lover of literature and herself the author of several philosophical treatises, Begum Shah Jahan attracted distinguished scholars and learned men from countries as far afield as Afghanistan and Persia to her court. The city had supplanted Hyderabad and Lah.o.r.e as a beacon of renascent Islamic culture that is so rich in Urdu literature, as well as painting and music. Of all the expressions of this heritage, it was to poetry that the begum contributed most. Reviving the tradition of the mushaira, evenings of poetry recitals when the people could meet the greatest poets, she threw open the reception rooms of her palace to all and arranged for monumental performances on the household cavalry's Lal Parade Ground. There, sixty to eighty thousand poetry lovers, three-quarters of the town's population, used to come and sit on the ground right through the night to hear poets sing of suffering, joy and the eternal aspirations of the soul. ”Weep not, my beloved,” implored one of the Bhopalis' favorite refrains. ”Even if for now your life is but dust and lamentation, it already proclaims the magic of what lies ahead.”

The next to last of these enlightened women rulers, Begum Sultan Jahan, had even created an inst.i.tution-revolutionary for the time-called the Bhopal Ladies Club. There, women were free to discuss their conditions and their future. The same begum had also given her female subjects the opportunity to go shopping with their faces uncovered by building the Paris Bazaar, a huge shopping center reserved exclusively for women. There they could walk about with their faces uncovered because all the shopkeepers were women. Simply dressed and without bodyguards, the begum herself liked to visit this emporium which was well stocked with items imported from London and Paris.

The British were unsparing in their respect for this remarkable lady. King George V invited her to his coronation and, in 1922, the prince of Wales paid a visit for the inauguration of the Government Council for the Kingdom of Bhopal, a democratic inst.i.tution quite unique in the princely India of that time. His visit was also intended to thank the begum for having emptied both her private purse and the state coffers to support the British war effort. After all, she had sent her eldest son to represent Bhopal and fight alongside the Allied soldiers in the trenches of the first world war.

Before she pa.s.sed away, Begum Kudsia, last of the sovereign ladies of Bhopal, nevertheless expressed her regret that her subjects seemed more interested in poetry than industrial projects or affairs of state. Despite the efforts of the economic development agency she had created with the support of the British, in the period between the world wars, very few firms came to Bhopal. Two textile mills, two sugar refineries, a cardboard and a match factory-the sum total was a modest one. Nor did the ascendance of a male sovereign to the throne do anything to rectify matters. The nawab Hamidullah Khan was a charming, cultivated prince but far more interested in decorating his palaces or breeding his horses than in constructing blast furnaces or textile factories. While Mahatma Gandhi was going on a hunger strike to force the British out of the country, he was having a luxury bathroom installed on the roof of one of his hunting station wagons.

On August 15, 1947, the subcontinent's independence cast the maharajahs and nawabs of the Indian kingdoms into the oubliette of history. The upset was a stroke of good fortune for Bhopal, which found itself promoted to the capital of the vast province of Madhya Pradesh that encompa.s.sed all the country's central territories. Its selection spurred the city into an era of feverish development. It had been chosen for the same three reasons Carbide would select it, twenty years later, as the site of its pesticide plant. Buildings had to be constructed to house the new province's ministries and administrative bodies, whole neighborhoods had to be built in which to lodge the thousands of officials and their families. A university, several technical colleges, a hospital with two thousand beds, a medical school, shops, clubs, theaters, cinemas, restaurants had to be erected. In the s.p.a.ce of five years the population increased from 85,000 to nearly 400,000.

This rise had brought with it an influx of small and large firms from all over India. And now, as the chrome muzzle of a gray Jaguar had just intimated, America was about to step in where only yesterday the last nawab and his guests had still been hunting tigers and elephants. So that, for the occupants of Orya Bustee, as for the hundreds of other immigrants who stepped off the trains each day looking for work, Bhopal at the end of the 1960s, was the promised land.

13.

A Continent of Three Hundred Million Peasants and Six Hundred Languages The City of the Begums greeted the government of Madhya Pradesh's decision as a gift from the G.o.ds. By a.s.signing a five-acre plot of land on the Kali Grounds to the entrepreneur Santosh Dindayal, along with permission to build a factory to formulate pesticides, the government was offering the city all the opportunities that went with an industrial venture. Eduardo Muoz was quick to pa.s.s on the glad tidings to his New York management before hurrying to the bar in Calcutta's luxurious Hotel Grand to celebrate with his wife Rita and his colleagues. He then set about looking for a team to build the factory. By a stroke of incredible luck, he chanced upon the perfect trio: first Maluf Habibie, a frail Iranian chemical engineer with metal rimmed spectacles, a specialist in formulation techniques for chemical products; then Ranjit Dutta, an engineer built like a football halfback, who had previously worked with Sh.e.l.l in Texas; and finally, the only Bhopali, Arvind Shrivastava who had only just completed his degree in mechanical engineering. The three men set camp in the back room of the Bhopal gas station that belonged to Muoz's Indian a.s.sociate. In two weeks they laid down the sketches for a plant, although ”plant” was a very grandiose name for a workshop to house the crushers, blenders and other equipment necessary for the commercial preparation of the imported concentrate of Sevin.

Like all important events in India, the groundbreaking was marked with a ceremony. A pandit* girdled with the triple thread of a brahmin came and chanted mantras over the hole dug out of the black earth. A coconut was brought, which Arvind Shrivastava decapitated with a billhook. The pandit poured the milk slowly onto the ground. Then the young engineer cut the flesh into small pieces, which he offered to the priest and the onlookers. The brahmin raised his hand and the workmen came forward and emptied their wheelbarrow full of concrete into the cavity. The G.o.ds had given their blessing. The venture could commence.

With no complicated pipework, no glistening tanks, no burning flares, no metal chimneys, the building that rose from the Kali Grounds bore no resemblance to the American monsters in the Kanawha Valley. In fact with its triple roof and line of small windows it looked more like a paG.o.da. Inside was a vast hangar with a range of conical silos mounted on grinding machines. This plant was to provide the Sevin concentrate imported from America with a granular carrier agent adapted to the various methods of diffusion. The Sevin to be sprayed from the air over the huge plantations in the Punjab had to be formulated more finely than the packaged Sevin that was to be spread by hand by the small farmers of Madhya Pradesh or Bengal. Whether granular or fine as dust, the Bhopal Sevin promised to be a unique insecticide, less for its intrinsic qualities than for the carrier agent Muoz's engineers had found for it.

To mystical India the Narmada River is the daughter of the sun. One has simply to behold it to achieve perfect purification. One single night of fasting on its banks guarantees prosperity for hundreds of generations, and drowning in it wrests one from the cycle of reincarnations. By a fortuitous stroke of geography this sacred river flowed just twenty-five miles from Bhopal. According to the Vedas, its banks were covered with a sand as magical as the waters they confined. Mixed with the pesticide from America, sand from the Narmada would avenge the Nadar family and all the other peasants ruined by voracious insects. India was going to escape the ancestral curse of its famines.

”It was the best Christmas present I'd ever received,” the turbaned Sardar Singh, who had bought the 1,200 tons of American Sevin from Muoz, would confide. The end of that year, 1968, saw the first delivery of Bhopal-produced insecticide arrive in his ministry's warehouses: 131 tons to be sprayed over the cotton and cereal plantations of the Punjab. Once the requirements of his beloved Punjab had been satisfied, however, Sardar Singh was likely to find himself with about 800 tons of pesticide left on his hands. How could he ensure that other peasants in his country benefited from this providential surplus? He turned to Eduardo Muoz for help.

”Your company sells more than five hundred million batteries a year in this d.a.m.n country,” he told him. ”Its agents range from the farthest reaches of the Himalayas to the backwaters of Kerala. Only an organization like yours can help me distribute my Sevin.”

The Argentinian raised his arms. ”My dear Mr. Singh, a bag of insecticide is not as easy to sell as a pair of batteries for a flashlight,” he pointed out.

The Indian adopted a coaxing tone. ”My dear Mr. Muoz, what you personally have achieved in Mexico and Argentina, you will manage to achieve here too. I have every faith in you. Let's say no more about it; your smile tells me you will help me.”

The challenge was a colossal one. From behind the wheel of his Jaguar, Muoz had gauged the enormity and complexity of India. The country bore no resemblance to Mexico or even Argentina, both of which he had ended up knowing like the back of his hand. India was a continent whose three hundred million peasants spoke five or six hundred different languages and dialects. Half of them were illiterate and thus unable to read the label on a sack of fertilizer or a bag of insecticide. Yet they were dealing with chemical products that were potentially fatal. Muoz had been horrified by the number of accidents the newspapers reported in rural areas: lung damage, burns to the skin, poisoning. The victims were almost always poor agricultural laborers whose employers had not seen fit to provide them with protective clothing or masks. To improve the efficacy of their manure, many peasants mixed different products together-almost always with their bare hands. Some even tasted the combination to make sure it had been mixed properly. In the poorest villages where whole families lived in one room, the bag of insecticide frequently sat in one corner, insidiously poisoning them with toxic emissions. Women drew water, did the milking or cooked food with containers that had once held DDT. The result was an alarming increase in certain disorders. A journey through the Tamil Nadu region horrified the Union Carbide representative. In some areas known for their intensive use of phytosanitary products, the instances of lung, stomach, skin and brain cancer defied counting. In the Lucknow region, half the laborers who handled pesticides were found to be suffering from serious psychological disorders as well as problems with their memory and eyesight. Worst of all, these sacrifices were pointless. Poorly informed peasants thought they could increase a product's effectiveness by doubling or tripling the manufacturer's recommended dosage. Their lack of understanding led many of them to ruin, sometimes even suicide. Newspaper headlines reported that the most popular method these desperate people used to kill themselves was swallowing a good dose of pesticide.

Despite his worries about the potential for misuse of insecticides, Eduardo Muoz responded to his Indian partner's appeal for help. He dispatched the sales teams for the batteries with the blue-and-white logo to dispose of the surplus Sevin. Soon nearly every single grocery, hardware shop, and traveling salesman would be selling the American insecticide. This apparently generous gesture was not entirely devoid of self-interest. The Argentinian was counting on it to provide him with an accurate a.s.sessment of the Indian market's capacity to absorb pesticides. The information would be crucial when the time came to determine the size and production volume of the Indian plant that Union Carbide had promised to build.

”Work with farmers, our partners in the field.” A tidal wave of notices bearing this slogan soon broke over the Bengali and Bihari countryside. They showed a Sikh in a red turban placing a protective hand on the shoulder of a poor old farmer with a face furrowed with wrinkles. In his other hand, the knight in s.h.i.+ning armor was brandis.h.i.+ng a box of Sevin the size of a package of supermarket crackers. He was using it to point at an ear of corn. The copy read ”My name is Kuldip Chahal. I am an area pesticide technologist. My role is to teach you how to make five rupees out of every rupee you spend on Sevin.”

Eduardo Muoz was all the more convinced: to convert the Indian peasants to Sevin, he would need legions of Kuldip Chahals.

14.

Some Very Peculiar Pimps The sudden appearance of concrete mixers, cranes and scaffolding over the bleak horizon of the Kali Grounds caused a stir in the bustees. The blue-and-white logo flying in the vicinity of the mud huts was an even more magical emblem than the trident of the G.o.d Vishnu, creator of all things. To Eduardo Muoz, that flag const.i.tuted a considerable victory. He had managed to persuade the New Delhi authorities that Union Carbide should no longer have to rely on an Indian intermediary to formulate its Sevin concentrate. It would be able to operate openly, under its own name. In New Delhi, as elsewhere in the world, international big business invariably found its own ways and means.

As soon as the construction site opened, several tharagars laid siege to Belram Mukkadam's teahouse. Carbide needed a workforce. Candidates came running and soon the drink stall became a veritable job recruitment center. Among the tharagars, Ratna Nadar recognized the man who had recruited him in Mudilapa to double the railway tracks. Ratna would have liked to have given him a piece of his mind, let him know just how bitter and angry he was, shout out that the poor were sick of having others grow fat from the sweat of their labor. But this was not the moment. He might have the undreamed of opportunity to work for the American multinational.

”I pay twenty rupees a day,” the tharagar announced, exhaling the smoke from his bidi. ”And I supply a helmet and cover-all, and one piece of soap a week, too.”

It was a small fortune for men used to feeding their families on less than four rupees a day. In grat.i.tude, they bowed to wipe the dust from their benefactor's sandals. Among them was the former leper, Ganga Ram. This would be the first job he had managed to land since leaving the wing for contagious diseases at Hamidia Hospital.

The next day at six o'clock, led by Mukkadam, all the candidates presented themselves at the gateway to the building site. The tharagar was there to check each worker's employment doc.u.ment. When it came to Ganga Ram's turn, he shook his head.

”Sorry, friend, but Carbide doesn't take lepers,” he declared, pointing to the two stumps of finger that were awkwardly gripping the sheet of paper.

Ganga Ram foraged in the waist of his lunghi for the certificate to show that he was cured. ”Look, look, it says there, I'm cured!” he implored, thrusting the paper under the tharagar's nose.

The latter was inflexible. For Ganga Ram the opportunity to don one of Carbide's coveralls would have to remain a dream.

That evening, those who had been fortunate enough to receive the blue linen uniform took it home with them. On the way, they presented it to the G.o.d Jagannath whose image presided over a small niche at the corner of the alleyway. Sheela, Padmini's mother, laid her husband's clothing at the deity's feet, placing a chapati and some marigold petals sprinkled with sugar water beside it.

A few days later, Belram Mukkadam's chief informant brought a piece of news that restored the hopes of Ganga Ram and all the others who had not been hired.

”This building site is just the thin end of the wedge,” announced Rahul, the legless cripple. ”Soon, sahibs will be arriving from America to build other factories and they're going to pay wages higher than even Ganesh * could imagine.”

Rahul was one of the most popular characters in Orya Bustee. He traveled at ground level on a wheeled plank, which he propelled with all the dexterity of a Formula 1 driver. With his fingers covered in rings, his long, dark hair carefully caught up in a bun, his gla.s.s bead necklaces and his s.h.i.+rts with gaudy, geometric patterns, Rahul introduced a note of cheeky elegance to the place. He was always abreast of any news, the slightest whisper of gossip. He was the Kali Grounds' newspaper, radio and magazine. His attractive looks, his smile and his generous disposition had earned him the nickname ”Kali Parade Ka Swarga dut”-”the Angel of Kali Parade.”

That morning he was the bearer of another piece of news that was to appall all those gathered at the teahouse.

”Padmini, Ratna and Sheela Nadar's daughter, has disappeared,” he announced. ”She hasn't been home for four days. She wasn't there this morning to help Sister Felicity with her clinic. Dilip, Dalima's son says he and his friends lost her in the station at Benares.”

This piece of information sent everyone rus.h.i.+ng to the Nadars' hut. In the bustee, everyone shared their neighbor's misfortune.

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