Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [26]
One day a woman deposited an extremely emaciated baby on the table. Sister Felicity entrusted the tiny shriveled body to Padmini.
“Take him and massage him gently,” she told her. “That’s all we can do.”
Padmini sat down on a jute sack in the alleyway and placed the child in her lap. She poured a little mustard oil on her hands and began to massage the small body. Her hands came and went along its upper torso and limbs. Like a succession of waves, they started on the baby’s sides, worked across his chest and up to the opposite shoulder. Stomach, legs, heels, the soles of his feet, his hands, his head, the nape of his neck, his face, the wings of his nose, his back and his buttocks were successively stroked and vitalized, as if nourished by Padmini’s supple, dancing fingers. The child suddenly began to gurgle for sheer bliss. “I was dazzled by so much skill, beauty and intelligence,” Felicity would later say. “In the depths of that slum I had just discovered an unsuspected power of love and hope. The people of Orya Bustee deserved the mercy of God.”
11
“A Hand for the Future”
Out of the thirty-eight countries on the planet where Union Carbide had hoisted its blue-and-white flag, no other had established such long-standing and warm links with the company as India. Perhaps this was due to the fact that for nearly a century the multinational had been providing a commodity as precious as air or water. For hundreds of millions of Indians who had no electricity, Carbide’s lamps brought light to the most remote villages. Thanks to the half a billion batteries made in its factories each year, the whole of India knew and blessed the American company’s name.
The rich profits from this monopoly and Carbide’s conviction that the country would one day become one of the world’s great markets, had induced the company to regroup all kinds of production under the aegis of an Indian subsidiary known as Union Carbide India Limited. So it was that the flag of this subsidiary fluttered over fourteen factories. In India, Carbide manufactured chemical products, plastic goods, photographic plates, film, industrial electrodes, polyester resin, laminated glass and machine tools. The company also had its own fleet of seven trawlers on the Bengal coast, specializing in deep-water shrimping. With an annual revenue of $170 million in 1984, Union Carbide India Limited was a successful example of the corporation’s globalization policy. Of course, Union Carbide retained ownership of 51 percent of the shares in its Indian subsidiary, the intention being that the parent company would control all production and any new projects on Indian soil.
In April of 1962, the American management of Carbide revealed the nature and scope of its new projects in a full-page advertisement in National Geographic magazine. Entitled “Science Helps to Build a New India,” the illustration was meant to be allegorical. It depicted a dark-skinned, emaciated peasant working obviously infertile soil with the aid of a primitive plow drawn by two lean oxen. Two women in saris with a pitcher of water and a basket on their heads, surveyed the scene. In the background appeared the waters of a mighty river, the Ganges. Just beyond the sacred river, glittering with a thousand fires in the sunlight, arose the gilded structures of a gigantic chemical complex with its towers, chimneys, pipework and tanks. Above it, in the upper half of the picture, a light-skinned hand emerged from the orange sky. Between thumb and index finger it was holding a test tube full of a red liquid, which it was pouring over the peasant and his plow. Carbide had no doubt drawn its inspiration from the scene on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in which Michelangelo portrays the hand of God touching Adam’s to give him life. Under the heading, “A Hand for the Future,” the company delivered its message in the space of a single paragraph:
Cattle working in the fields … the eternal River Ganges … elephants caparisoned with jewels … Today these symbols of ancient India coexist with a new