Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [18]
One of these joys came from an unexpected source. Every morning, Padmini’s mother and her neighbors would take up their positions along the railway line to wait for the arrival of the Punjab Express. On their heads they carried buckets, bowls and basins. As soon as the train stopped, they would rush to the engine.
“May the great god bless you!” they would call out in a chorus to the engineer. “Will you turn on your tap for us?”
If he was kindly disposed, the driver would undo the valve on his boiler and fill their containers with a few gallons of a commodity to which few of Bhopal’s poor had access: hot water.
7
An American Valley That Ruled the World
Dilip had an eye for these things. He saw at once that the hut built by Ratna Nadar and his family would never survive the onslaughts of the monsoon.
“You should double the roof supports,” he advised Padmini.
The little girl gave a gesture of helplessness.
“We haven’t even the money to buy incense sticks for the god,” she sighed. “It’s three days since Grandpa and Grandma have eaten. They refuse to sacrifice the parrot.”
Dilip took a five-rupee note out of his shorts.
“There,” he said, “that’s an advance on our next treasure hunt along the railway track. Your father will be able to buy two bamboo poles.”
That same year, on the other side of the world, in a lush valley in West Virginia, a team of Union Carbide engineers and workmen were putting in the girders for a new factory destined to be the multinational’s flagship. The Kanawha Valley had long served as a fief of the company with the blue-and-white logo. Curiously enough, it owed its nickname of “Magic Valley” to the most ordinary of resources: its salt beds. With reserves of almost a billion tons, the area had attracted people and animals since prehistoric times. Salt had made wild animals carve pathways through the forest to the saline pools along the river. It had sent Indians along the same routes in pursuit of game, then provided them with the brine in which to preserve their kill. In the seventeenth century, it had drawn a few intrepid explorers to an otherwise inhospitable region, for white gold was not the magic valley’s only trump. The ancient forests that covered it had provided the material necessary to build houses, as well as boats and barges in which to transport the salt, carts, bridges and mill wheels. An entire lumber industry had grown up along the Kanawha. Connecting directly with the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, the river gave the valley’s merchandise and travelers access to the center and the south of the country.
At the beginning of the first world war, the valley was also found to contain prodigious energy resources. The discovery of oil, coal and natural gas had precipitated the Kanawha into the world of the chemical industry. The 1920s had seen the region’s woodlands replaced by forests of metal chimneys, towers, flares, reservoirs, platforms, and pipe and tube work. These new factories belonged to giants like Du Pont de Nemours, Monsanto and Union Carbide. It was there, on its Institute site, and in its research center a few miles away from the peaceful little town of South Charleston, that Carbide’s chemical engineers had come up with the innumerable innovative products that were to transform the lives of millions. Turning chemistry into the Mr. Fix-it of everyday life, they had helped to revolutionize products as varied as fertilizers, medicines, textiles,