Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [41]
The pursuit of perfection was Carbide’s hallmark. The company even brought over a team of Indian welders in order to familiarize them with the special acid and temperature-resistant alloys with which they would be working. “Going to America to learn how to make up alloys as temperamental as Inconel, Monel or Hastelloy, was as epic a journey as flying off in Arjuna’s chariot to create the stars in the sky,” marveled Kamal Pareek.
The stars! Eduardo Muñoz, the magician behind the whole venture, could give thanks to the gods. The pesticide plant he was going to build on the Kali Grounds might not be exactly the one he had dreamed of, but it did promise to be a new star in the Indian sky.
At the beginning of the summer of 1972, Carbide dispatched all the plans for the factory’s construction and development to India. Unfortunately, this mountain of paperwork was not exactly the finest gift American technology could send to the developing world. The design of Bhopal’s “beautiful plant” would not include all the safety equipment and security systems equipping Carbide’s Institute plant in the U.S. Later, the precise reasons for these money-saving measures would remain obscure. It seems that the sales of the Sevin formulated in Bhopal had not reached the hoped-for level. Disastrous climatic conditions and the appearance on the market of a competing and less costly pesticide may have accounted for this reduction in sales. Because Indian law severely restricted the involvement of foreign companies in their local subsidiaries, Union Carbide India Limited suddenly found itself forced to reduce the factory’s construction budget. American and Indian experts assured, however, that none of the cutbacks were to diminish the overall safety of the plant.
Four years later, the giant puzzle designed in South Charleston and created piece by piece in Bombay, was finally transported to Bhopal for assembly.
John Luke Couvaras, a young American engineer, described taking part in the project as “embarking on a crusade. You had to put yourself into it, body and soul. You lived with it every minute of the day and night, even when you were a long way from the works. If, for example, you were installing a distillation tower you’d fussed over lovingly, you were as proud of it as Michelangelo might have been of the ceiling in the Sistine chapel. You kept an eye on it to make sure it went like clockwork. That kind of venture forced you to be vigilant at all times. It exhausted you, emptied you. At the same time you felt happy, triumphant.”
17
“They’ll Never Dare Send in Their Bulldozers”
American or Indian, none of the engineers and technicians working on the Kali Grounds could ever have imagined the suffering, trickery, swindling, love, faith and hope that was life for the mass of humanity who occupied the hundreds of shacks around the factory. As in any impoverished area, the worst existed alongside the best, but the presence of figures like Belram Mukkadam managed to transform these patches of hell into models for humankind. He was a devout Hindu, but when he made his unforgettable stands, he was joined by Muslims, Sikhs, animists, and perhaps most remarkably, an Irani. The Iranis with their light skin and delicate features formed a small community of some five hundred people in Bhopal. Their forefathers had come to Bhopal in the 1920s, after an earthquake destroyed their villages in Baluchistan, on the borders of Iran. Now, their leader was an august old man with honey colored eyes, by the name of Omar Pasha, invariably dressed in a kurta, a long tunic, and cotton trousers. He lived with his sons, his two wives and his henchmen in a modern three-story building on the edge of Orya Bustee. Three times a week, he would tear himself away from his comfortable life to take the sick from the three bustees to Hamidia Hospital. Driving those poor wretches through traffic that terrified them, then steering them along hospital corridors into packed waiting rooms