Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [46]
The two men were well aware that the boiling point of methyl isocyanate is 39° C. They also knew that the result could be catastrophic.
Qureshi put his head out of the window. A blast of burning air hit him in the face. “I bet it’s at least forty degrees, possibly even forty-five.”
Pareek grimaced and signaled to the driver of the front truck to stop. The two men at once rushed over to cover the drums with heavy isothermic tarpaulins. Then they took the extinguishers out of their holders. In case of danger a jet of carbonic foam could lower the temperature of a drum by a few degrees.
“But we didn’t harbor too many illusions,” the engineer later admitted.
For thirty-eight hours, the two intrepid Carbide employees acted as sheepdogs, with their Ambassador car sometimes in front of, and sometimes following, the two trucks. They had been given explicit instructions: their convoy was to stop before entering any inhabited area to allow time to fetch a police escort. “You could read the extreme curiosity on the local people’s faces at the sight of these two trucks surrounded by police officers,” Pareek would recall. “‘What can they possibly be transporting under their tarpaulins to justify that sort of protection?’ people must have been wondering.”
That first high-risk convoy was to be followed by dozens of others. Over the next six years, hundreds of thousands of gallons of the deadly liquid were to traverse the villages and countryside of Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. The day came in May 1980 when, to the delight of all the staff, especially those who had to supervise the trips, the chemical reactors of Bhopal’s brand new plant produced their first gallons of methyl isocyanate. They were dispatched into three huge tanks, which would soon store enough MIC to poison half the city.
The city that had withstood invasions, sieges and the bloodiest of political plots, was in the throes of succumbing to the charms of a foreign chemical giant. Eduardo Muñoz could rejoice; Carbide was going to achieve by peaceful means what no one else had managed in three centuries: the conquering of Bhopal. To the crescents on its mosques, the linga of its Hindu temples and the crosses on its Christian churches, the capital of Madhya Pradesh now added a profane emblem that was to forever alter its destiny: the blue-and-white logo of a pesticide plant.
“That prestigious symbol would contribute to the advent of a privileged class of workers,” Kamal Pareek would explain. “Whether you were employed at the very top of the hierarchy or as the humblest of operators, to work for Carbide was to belong to a caste apart. We were known as the ‘sahibs.’ ”
At Carbide, an engineer earned twice as much as a top official in the Indian administration. This meant he could enjoy a house, a car, several servants and travel in first-class, air-conditioned trains. What counted most, however, was the prestige of belonging to a universally recognized multinational. Social status plays as crucial a role in India as anywhere else. “When people read on my business card: ‘Kamal Pareek—Union Carbide India Limited,’ all doors were opened,” the engineer recalled.
Everyone dreamed of having a family member or an acquaintance employed by the company. Those who had that good fortune were quick to sing its praises.
“Unlike Indian companies, Carbide did not dictate what you should do with your salary,” a Carbide manager explained. “It was American liberty overlaying an Indian environment.”
For V.N. Singh, the son of an illiterate peasant from Uttar Pradesh, the envelope stamped with the blue-and-white logo that the postman delivered to him one morning “was like a message from the god Krishna falling from the sky.” The letter inside informed the young mathematics graduate that Carbide was offering him a position as an operator trainee in its phosgene unit. The boy scrambled across the fields as fast as his legs would carry him to take the news to his father. When they heard the news, his neighbors came running. Soon the entire village had formed a circle around