Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [52]
“This water is contaminated!” she announced.
All the other women present confirmed her verdict. Looking up at the steel structures that loomed on the horizon, Padmini’s mother shouted, “Come on everyone! Come and see! Carbide has poisoned our water!”
A few hours later, Rahul and several of the neighborhood’s young men burst into the teahouse.
“Belram, come quickly!” cried the cripple. “Your cow Parvati and all the other cows are dead. The crows and vultures that ate them are dead, too.”
Mukkadam set off at a run for the place the boys had indicated. The animals lay stretched out beside a pool fed by a rubber pipe that issued from the factory. “It’s water from Carbide that’s killed them,” he said angrily. “The same water that has poisoned our well. Let’s all go to Carbide, quickly!”
A cortege of three or four hundred people promptly set off on a march to the factory. The old man Omar Pasha and his sons, the former leper Ganga Ram, the shoemaker Iqbal, his friend Bassi the tailor and the bicycle repairman Salar marched at the head. Even the dairyman Bablubhai and the sorcerer Nilamber went. “Pay us compensation for the cows! Stop poisoning our well!” they yelled in chorus. In the second row came six men, bent beneath the weight of the charpoy they were carrying on their shoulders. On this string bed they had placed the body of the American multinational’s first victim. The painted horns, visible between the folds of the shroud, revealed that it was a cow. “Today it’s our cows. Tomorrow it will be us!” shouted the angriest members of the cortege. Hope of employment and the prestige of the uniform with the Carbide logo continued to feature in people’s dreams, but these deaths shattered any illusion they had of living in neighborly harmony.
The plant management appointed one of the engineers to settle the matter as quickly as possible. The American stood in front of the demonstrators.
“Friends, set your minds at rest!” he shouted into the megaphone. “Union Carbide will compensate you generously for your loss. If the owners of the cows that have died will just put up their hands!” The engineer was astonished to see a forest of hands spring up. He took a bundle of bills out of his pocket. “Union Carbide is offering five thousand rupees for the loss of each animal,” he announced. “That’s more than ten times the price of each of your cattle. Here are twenty-five thousand rupees. Share them between you!”
He held out the wad of bills to Mukkadam.
“And the water in our well?” insisted Ganga Ram.
“Don’t worry. We’ll have it analyzed and take whatever steps are necessary.”
The results of the tests were so horrific that the factory management never released them. In addition, soil samples taken from outside the periphery of the Sevin formulation unit revealed high levels of mercury, chromium, copper, nickel and lead. Chloroform, carbon tetrachloride and benzene were detected in the water from the wells to the south and southeast of the factory. The experts’ report was explicit: this was a case of potentially deadly contamination. Yet, for all the promises of Carbide’s representative, nothing was done to stop the pollution.
The envelope bore the stamp of the Indian Revenue Service. It contained the government’s official tribute to the man who, for nine years, had been fighting to give Indian agriculture the means to defend itself against the microscopic hordes that ravaged its crops. Eduardo Muñoz started when he read the letter inside the envelope. Becoming a tax payer in the Indian republic was not exactly one of his greatest aspirations, especially when, as the fiscal services informed him, he owed almost a 100 percent tax on his salary. He decided to pack his bags.
“Leaving India after all those thrilling years was heartbreaking,” Muñoz would recount. “But I left feeling confident. The Indian government had confirmed that Carbide was authorized to make all the ingredients for the production of Sevin on the Bhopal site. The document was numbered ‘C/11/409/75.’ After a long and difficult struggle, my beautiful