Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [43]
One day, however, Carbide did pay a visit to the terra incognita that bordered on the Kali Grounds. “People thought the end of the world had come,” Padmini’s father would recall. The occupants of the bustees heard a plane roar overhead. The aircraft made several circles, skimming so low that the people below thought it would decapitate the Chola mosque’s small minaret. Then, in a flash, it disappeared into the setting sun. This unusual apparition provided food for furious discussion at the teahouse. The legless cripple Rahul, who always liked to appear well informed, claimed that it was “a Pakistani plane come to pay homage to the fine factory that the Muslim workmen were building in their town of Bhopal.”
The plane that appeared over the Kali Grounds was indeed the bearer of an homage, but not the one Rahul had imagined. The twin-engine jet plane Gulf Stream II that put down on January 19, 1976, at Bhopal’s airport, bore the gilded wings and company crest of UCC. Inside, it carried Union Carbide’s chief executive officer, a tall strapping fellow of fifty with white hair and a youthful air. A graduate of Harvard Business School and a former Navy reserve officer, Bill Sneath had climbed every rung of the multinational before becoming its chief in 1971. He was accompanied by his wife, an elegant young woman in a Chanel suit, and an entourage of corporate officials. They had all come from New York to inaugurate the first phytosanitary research and development center built by Carbide in the third world.
The architecture of this ultramodern edifice, with its facades dripping with glass, was inspired by the American research center in Tarrytown. Built on the site of the palace that Eduardo Muñoz helped Union Carbide buy from the last nawab family, it very nearly never came into being. While digging the foundations, the masons had uncovered the skeleton of a bird and several human skulls. Word had then gone around that they belonged to three workmen who had mysteriously disappeared during the construction of the palace in 1906. In response to this appalling omen the masons abandoned the site. To entice them back, Eduardo Muñoz had had to resort to strong measures. He had tripled their salaries and arranged for a puja to lift the evil spell. When Bill Sneath arrived, the center already comprised several laboratories, in which some thirty researchers were working, and greenhouses, in which many varieties of local plants were being grown.
The central government minister of science and technology, the highest authorities of the state of Madhya Pradesh and the city of Bhopal, and all the local dignitaries from the chief administrator to the most senior police officer gathered round the Sneaths, the Muñozes and the board of directors of Carbide’s Indian subsidiary for the grandiose ceremony that sealed the marriage between the New York multinational and the City of the Begums. Before his speech, one of the sari-clad hostesses had anointed Bill Sneath with the tilak of welcome, a dot of red powder on the forehead that symbolizes the third eye that can see beyond material reality. The eyes of Carbide’s CEO surveyed with pride the vast concrete and glass block of the magnificent research center. A few moments earlier they had discovered the construction site, where towers, chimneys, tanks and scaffolding were beginning to emerge from the Kali Grounds. Wearing helmets bearing their names, Bill Sneath and his wife had toured the different units, pursued by photographers. In his hand, Sneath triumphantly brandished a package of Sevin formulated on site.
What the American CEO would not see that winter was the jumble of huts, sheds and hovels that fringed the parade ground and grew like the swelling of a malignant cancer.