Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [3]
Above all, however, the experience pointed me in the direction of one of the most enthralling subjects of my career as a journalist and writer: Why and how could such a monumental accident take place? Who were the people who initiated it, those involved in it, the victims of it, and finally who benefited from it?
I asked the Spanish writer Javier Moro, author of The Mountains of the Buddha, a moving book on the tragedy of Tibet, to join me in Bhopal. Our research went on for three years. This book is the fruit of it.
Dominique Lapierre
Concern for man himself and his safety
must always form the chief interest of all
technical endeavors.
Never forget this in the midst of your
diagrams and equations.
Albert Einstein
The City of Bhopal
Part One
A NEW STAR IN THE INDIAN SKY
1
Firecrackers That Kill, Cows That Die, Insects That Murder
Mudilapa. One of India’s fifteen hundred thousand villages and probably one of the poorest in a country the size of a continent. Situated at the foot of the remote hill region of the state of Orissa, it comprised some sixty families belonging to the Adivasi community, descendants of the aboriginal tribes that had populated India over three thousand years ago before the Aryans from the north drove them back into the less fertile mountainous areas.
Although officially “protected” by the authorities, the Adivasis remained largely beyond the reach of the development programs that were trying to improve the plight of the Indian peasants. Deprived of land, the inhabitants of the region had to hire out their hands to make a living for their families. Cutting sugar cane, going down into the bauxite mines, breaking rocks along the roads—no task was too menial for those disenfranchised by the world’s largest democracy.
“Goodbye wife, goodbye children, goodbye Father, Mother, parrot. May the god watch over you while I’m away!”
At the beginning of every summer, when the village lay cloaked in a leaden and blazing heat, a lean, dark-skinned, muscular little man would bid farewell to his family before setting off with his bundle on his head. Thirty-two-year-old Ratna Nadar was embarking on a strenuous journey: three days of walking to a palm grove on the shores of the Bay of Bengal. Because of the strength in his arms and legs he had been taken on by a tharagar, an agent who traveled about recruiting laborers. Work in palm groves required an unusual degree of agility and athletic strength. Men had to climb, bare-handed and without a safety harness, to the top of date palms as tall as five-story houses in order to collect the milk secreted from the heart of the tree. These acrobatic ascents earned Ratna Nadar and his companions the nickname “monkey-men.” Every evening the manager of the enterprise would come and take their precious harvest and transport it to a confectioner in Bhubaneswar, the capital city of Orissa.
Ratna Nadar had never actually tasted this delicious nectar. But the four hundred rupees he earned from a season spent risking life and limb enabled him to feed the seven members of his family for several weeks. As soon as his wife Sheela had wind of his return, she would light an incense stick before the image of Jagannath, which decorated one corner of the hut, and thus gave thanks to the Lord of the Universe, a manifestation of the Hindu god Vishnu adopted by these Adivasis. Sheela was a frail but spirited woman with a ready smile. The braid down her back, her almond-shaped eyes and rosy cheeks made her look like a Chinese doll. There was nothing very surprising about that; her ancestors belonged to an aboriginal tribe, originally from Assam, in the far north of the country.
The Nadars had three children. The eldest, eight-year-old Padmini, was a delicate little girl with long dark hair tied in two braids. She had inherited Sheela’s beautiful, slanting eyes and her father’s determined