Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [146]
And what of the beautiful plant? One day in January 1985, shortly after Operation Faith, a tharagar turned up outside the teahouse in Orya Bustee.
“I’m looking for hands to dismantle the rails from the railway line leading to the factory,” he said.
The stretch of track linking the factory to the main railway line had never been used. It was a testimony to the megalomania of the South Charleston engineers who had arranged for the purchase of both a locomotive and freight cars to transport the enormous quantities of Sevin the factory was supposed to produce. Timidly, Ganga Ram, who had lost most of the customers of his painting business in the catastrophe, put up his hand.
“I’m looking for work,” he said, convinced that the tharagar would reject him when he saw his mutilated fingers.
But that day Carbide was taking on any available hands. The former leprosy sufferer would at last be able to have his revenge by helping to dismantle the monster that had once refused him employment.
For one year, Jagannathan Mukund headed the team assigned to closing down the factory, a Herculean task that involved cleaning every piece of equipment, every pipe, every drum and tank, first with water and then with a chemical decontaminant. These cleaned and scrubbed parts of the factory were sold off to small local entrepreneurs. In 1986, when the job was done, the last workmen wearing the once prestigious coverall with the blue-and-white logo left the site forever.
Today, the abandoned factory looks like the vestige of some lost civilization. Its metal structures rust in the open air. In the rough grass lie pieces of the sarcophagi that protected the tanks. On the control room walls, the seventy dials rest in eternal peace, including the pressure gauge for tank 610, with its needle stuck on the extreme left of the instrument, lasting testament to the fury of the MIC. The notices with the inscription “SAFETY FIRST” add a touch of irony to a scene of industrial devastation.
What was to be done with this mute but powerful witness? In 1997, India’s minister for culture suggested turning the whole of the Kali Grounds site into an amusement park. But the indignant outcry the proposal provoked caused the authorities to withdraw it. The accursed factory must remain there always, as a place of remembrance.
Fortunately, a privileged few managed to escape the misfortune that befell most of the tragedy’s victims. Orya Bustee’s bride and groom were among them. Miraculously resurrected after her rescue from the funeral pyre, Padmini was able to rejoin her loved ones after a long and painful recovery in Hamidia Hospital. She returned to Orya Bustee and set up home with her husband Dilip in her parents’ hut. Very soon, however, the nightmare of that tragic night began to haunt her to the point where she could no longer bear the place in which she had spent her adolescence. The mere sight of the metal structures mocking her from a few hundred yards away very nearly drove her insane. That was when an opportunity presented itself in the form of a plot of land for sale, about forty miles from Bhopal, near the banks of the Narmada River. The idea of returning along the trail that had once brought her family from Orissa to Bhopal filled the young Adivasi with enthusiasm. She persuaded her husband that they could make their home in the country, have a small farm and live on what they produced. Her mother