Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [58]
After intoning mantras into a microphone, a pandit with a shaven head placed the sacred objects on a thali, a ritual silver plate. First the purifying fire—burning oil in a clay dish—then rose petals, a few small balls of sweet pastry, a handful of rice and finally the sindoor, a little pile of scarlet powder. Ringing his small bell vigorously, the pandit blessed the collection of tools laid out by the workers. A solitary voice then rang out, promptly followed by a hundred others. “Vishvakarma kijai! Long live Vishvakarma!” That was the signal. The ceremony was over and the festivities could commence. The management of the factory had arranged for a banquet of meat curry and vegetables, lassi and puri, little cakes of fried wheat puffed up into balloons, to be prepared in a nearby kitchen. Beer and palm wine flowed like water. The alarm system’s loudspeakers poured out a stentorian flood of popular tunes and firecrackers went off on all sides. Employers and employees gave themselves up to celebration.
Like most of those in charge of the beautiful plant, Warren and Betty Woomer were not aware that the occupants of the neighboring bustees were gathered with similar fervor around the god of tools. There was, after all, an extraordinary concentration of workers in those areas, too. The workshops belonging to the shoemaker Iqbal, the sari embroiderer Ahmed Bassi and the bicycle repairman Salar, were just three small links in a whole chain of workplaces in which devotees of Vishvakarma labored in order to survive. In Jai Prakash and Chola, children supported their families by cutting up sheets of brass to make tools, or dipping fountain pen caps in chrome baths that gave off noxious fumes. Elsewhere, youngsters slowly poisoned themselves making matches and firecrackers, handling phosphorous, zinc oxide and asbestos powder. In poorly ventilated workshops that smelled of burning oil and overheated metal, emaciated men laminated, soldered and fitted pieces of iron-work together. A few paces away from the spacious house belonging to the Sikh moneylender Pulpul Singh, a dozen men sitting cross-legged made bidis. Nearly all of them suffered from tuberculosis and thus lacked the strength to pedal a rickshaw or pull a tilagari, a hand cart. Provided they did not stop for a single minute, they could roll up to thirteen hundred cigarettes a day. Every evening a tharagar would come from the town to collect what they had produced. For one thousand bidis, they received twelve rupees, the price of two kilos of rice.
How surprised Chairman Anderson and his works manager Warren Woomer would have been if ever they had chanced upon those places where so many men and children spent their lives making springs, truck parts, axles for weaving looms, bolts, gas tanks and even turbine gears to the tenth of a micron; men and children, who with a surprising degree of dexterity, inventiveness and resourcefulness, could produce, copy, repair or renovate any part or machine. Here the smallest scrap of metal, the lowliest bit of debris was reused, transformed, adapted. Here nothing was ever thrown away. Everything was always re-born, as if by some miracle.
In anticipation of the festival, labor had stopped in the workshops on the previous day, and everyone had scrambled to clean, repaint and adorn the rooms with garlands of foliage and flowers. The workers of Orya, Chola and Jai Prakash also made the god of tools proud.
In the space of one night, hellholes had been transformed into places of worship strewn with flowers and adorned with sumptuously decorated temporary altars. The traditional chromo of the four-armed god perched on his elephant was everywhere. Yesterday’s slaves had changed into gleaming shirts and brand new lunghis; their wives had got out their festival saris, preserved in the family coffers from the greed of the cockroaches. The children were equally resplendent. The entire local population squeezed in behind a brass and drum band whose flourishes resounded through the alleyways. The godfather