Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [2]
We want to thank also our friends who made our travels and stays in India so productive and pleasant: M.M. Sanjay Basu and all the staff at Far Horizon, Ranvir Bhandari, Audrey Daver, Bharat Dhruv, Madan Kak and the whole staff of TCI, Sanjiv Malhotra, Sunil Mukherjee, Gilbert Soulaine and Gilles Renard.
We address our special gratitude to those who help us so generously in our humanitarian work: their excellencies the ambassadors Bernard de Montferrand and Kanwal Sibal, Mary Allizon, Rina and Takis Anoussis, David Backler and the Foundation Marcelle and Jean Coutu, Otto Barghezi, Jamshed Bhabha, Drs. Françoise Baylet-Vincent, Angela Bertoli, Henri-Jean Philippe and their benevolent friends of the organizations Gynécologie sans Frontières and Pathologie, Cytologie et Développement, Lon and Dick Behr, Nicolas Borsinger and the Foundation ProVictimis, Pierre Ceyrac, Kathryn and John Coo, Gaston Dayanand, Peter and Richard Dreyfus, Behram and Mani Dumasia, Catherine and David Graham, Priti Jain, Mohammed Kamruddin and the whole team of UBA, Adi and Jeroo Katgara, Ashwini and Renu Kumar, François Laborde and the whole team of HSP, Ila Lumba, Michèle Migone and all the Friends of Italy, Christina Mondadori and the Foundation Benedetta d’Intino, Aman Nath, Aloka Pal, Sabitri Pal, Shirin Paul, Mohammed Abdul Wohab and the whole staff of SHIS, Gaston Roberge, June and Paul Shorr, James Stevens and the whole team of Udayan, Sukhesi Didi and the whole staff of Belari, Ratan Tata, chairman of the Tata Group, Suzanne and Alexander Van Meerwijk, Francis Wacziarg, Harriet and Larry Weiss and all those who prefer to remain anonymous.
We could not have written this book without the enthusiastic faith of our publishers. Our warm thanks to Leonello Brandolini, Nicole Lattès and Antoine Caro in Paris; Carlos Reves and Berta Noy in Barcelona; Shekhar and Poonam Malhotra in Delhi; Helen Gummer and Katharine Young in London; Gianni Ferrari, Massimo Turchetta and Joy Terekiev in Milan; Larry Kirshbaum and Jessica Papin in New York; and finally to our friend and translator Kathryn Spink, herself the author of remarkable works on Mother Teresa, Brother Roger of Taizé, Little Sister Magdeleine of Jesus and Jean Vanier.
Letter to the Reader
One day I met a tall Indian in his forties, with a red bandanna around his head and hair knotted in a braid at the back of his neck. The brightness of his smile and the warmth of his expression made me realize immediately that this was a man with compassion for the poor. Having heard that my second City of Joy dispensary boat had just been launched in the Ganges Delta to bring medical aid to the inhabitants of the fifty-four islands, he wanted to ask for my help.
Right after he got the news of a deadly chemical accident in the city of Bhopal, Satinath Sarangi, “Sathyu” as he is called, rushed to the rescue of the survivors of the worst industrial disaster in history. On the night of the second of December 1984, a massive leak of toxic gases killed between sixteen and thirty thousand people and injured around five hundred thousand others. Sathyu decided to dedicate his whole life to the victims. Since 1995, he has been running a nongovernmental, nonpolitical and nonreligious organization, which tirelessly cares for the poorest and most neglected men, women and children affected by the gas.
Sathyu wanted to ask me to finance the creation and equipment of a gynecological clinic to treat underprivileged women who, sixteen years after the tragedy, were still suffering from its dreadful effects.
I had a vague recollection of the tragedy but, in all my fifty years of roving about India, I had never visited the magnificent capital of Madhya Pradesh.
I went to Bhopal. What I found there gave me what was probably one of the strongest shocks of my life. With the help of my book royalties and the generosity of readers of The City of Joy, Beyond Love and A Thousand Suns, we were