Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [0]
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WARNER BOOKS
Hachette Book Group
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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