Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [31]
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A Continent of Three Hundred Million Peasants and Six Hundred Languages
The City of the Begums greeted the government of Madhya Pradesh’s decision as a gift from the gods. By assigning a five-acre plot of land on the Kali Grounds to the entrepreneur Santosh Dindayal, along with permission to build a factory to formulate pesticides, the government was offering the city all the opportunities that went with an industrial venture. Eduardo Muñoz was quick to pass on the glad tidings to his New York management before hurrying to the bar in Calcutta’s luxurious Hotel Grand to celebrate with his wife Rita and his colleagues. He then set about looking for a team to build the factory. By a stroke of incredible luck, he chanced upon the perfect trio: first Maluf Habibie, a frail Iranian chemical engineer with metal rimmed spectacles, a specialist in formulation techniques for chemical products; then Ranjit Dutta, an engineer built like a football halfback, who had previously worked with Shell in Texas; and finally, the only Bhopali, Arvind Shrivastava who had only just completed his degree in mechanical engineering. The three men set camp in the back room of the Bhopal gas station that belonged to Muñoz’s Indian associate. In two weeks they laid down the sketches for a plant, although “plant” was a very grandiose name for a workshop to house the crushers, blenders and other equipment necessary for the commercial preparation of the imported concentrate of Sevin.
Like all important events in India, the groundbreaking was marked with a ceremony. A pandit* girdled with the triple thread of a brahmin came and chanted mantras over the hole dug out of the black earth. A coconut was brought, which Arvind Shrivastava decapitated with a billhook. The pandit poured the milk slowly onto the ground. Then the young engineer cut the flesh into small pieces, which he offered to the priest and the onlookers. The brahmin raised his hand and the workmen came forward and emptied their wheelbarrow full of concrete into the cavity. The gods had given their blessing. The venture could commence.
With no complicated pipework, no glistening tanks, no burning flares, no metal chimneys, the building that rose from the Kali Grounds bore no resemblance to the American monsters in the Kanawha Valley. In fact with its triple roof and line of small windows it looked more like a pagoda. Inside was a vast hangar with a range of conical silos mounted on grinding machines. This plant was to provide the Sevin concentrate imported from America with a granular carrier agent adapted to the various methods of diffusion. The Sevin to be sprayed from the air over the huge plantations in the Punjab had to be formulated more finely than the packaged Sevin that was to be spread by hand by the small farmers of Madhya Pradesh or Bengal. Whether granular or fine as dust, the Bhopal Sevin promised to be a unique insecticide, less for its intrinsic qualities than for the carrier agent Muñoz’s engineers had found for it.
To mystical India the Narmada River is the daughter of the sun. One has simply to behold it to achieve perfect purification. One single night of fasting on its banks guarantees prosperity for hundreds of generations, and drowning in it wrests one from the cycle of reincarnations. By a fortuitous stroke of geography this sacred river flowed just twenty-five miles from Bhopal. According to the Vedas, its banks were covered with a sand as magical as the waters they confined. Mixed with the pesticide from America, sand from the Narmada would avenge the Nadar family and all the other peasants ruined by voracious insects. India was going to escape the ancestral curse of its famines.
“It was the best Christmas present I’d ever received,” the turbaned Sardar Singh, who had bought the 1,200 tons of American