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By Root 1099 0

—phosgene and monomethylamine—had themselves been obtained by combining other substances. As the temperature of the gases rose, the operators opened up the circuits one by one. The few privileged people present in the control room held their breath. The fateful moment was approaching. John Luke Couvaras checked the dials on the reactors’ temperature and pressure gauges. Then he cried, “Go!” Whereupon an operator activated a circuit that sent the phosgene and the monomethylamine into the same steel cylinder. The combination produced a gaseous reaction. This gas was at once cooled down again, purified and liquefied. Then came a burst of applause. Six years after setting off an atomic explosion, India had just produced its first drops of methyl isocyanate.

“We weren’t able to see the first trickle of MIC,” Pareek later recalled, “because it went straight into the holding chamber. But as soon as the chamber was full we put on our protective suits to take a sample of a few centiliters of the liquid. I carried the container with as much respect as if it had been a statue of Durga to the laboratory to have the contents analyzed. We were thrilled at the result. Our Indian MIC was as pure a vintage as Kanawha Valley’s!”

While Union Carbide’s tanks were filling up, a celebration of a very different kind was going on at the southern boundary of the Kali Grounds. Belram Mukkadam, Rahul, Ganga Ram, Ratna Nadar and many of the other residents of Orya Bustee gathered around the five horned beasts the cattle merchant had just delivered. With the compensation money paid out by Carbide, Mukkadam had decided to replace his cow Parvati with a bull. He called it Nandi, after the bull the god Shiva had taken as his mount because it kept all danger and evil at bay. That night, by the light of the full moon, he marked the animal’s forehead with the trident of the god. It was an emblem that augured well. Mukkadam was sure it would guarantee the fertility of the new herd and ensure divine protection on the Kali Grounds’ bustees.

22

Three Tanks Dressed up for a Carnival

By appointing one of its best men to the helm of the Indian pesticide plant, the American multinational was signaling the degree of control it expected to exercise over the Bhopal installation. Modest, almost timid-looking behind his thick glasses, Warren Woomer was one of Carbide’s most experienced and respected engineers. Moreover, he was familiar with India and Bhopal after having carried out two assignments there. He had helped get up the unit that produced alpha naphthol, a substance used in the composition of Sevin. And he also had been instrumental in the launching of the Sevin plant, checking to be certain that his Indian colleagues were correctly applying everything he had taught them at Institute.

Being an American in charge of a thousand Indians of different origins, castes, religions and languages was the toughest challenge of his career. Woomer began with a detailed inspection of the ship.

“I couldn’t find anything fundamental at fault,” he would recall. “Of course the control room would seem obsolete to us now, but at the time it was the best that India could produce. I noticed nothing really shocking about either the design or the functioning of the plant. In any case my bible was the MIC manual of use with its forty pages of instructions. Every one of them was to be treated as Gospel truth, especially the directive to keep the MIC in the storage tanks at a temperature close to zero degrees Celsius. On this point I had decided to be intractable. Yes, it was imperative that every single drop of MIC was kept at zero degrees. What’s more, my long honeymoon with some of the most dangerous chemical substances made me add one recommendation to the MIC manual of use. I considered it vitally important: only stock a minimum quantity of methyl isocyanate on site.”

Although he had encountered no problems at a technical level, Woomer still realized that many things could be improved, notably the way in which staff members performed their tasks.

“For example,