Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [75]
The failure of the publicity campaign Muñoz had launched compounded these unfavorable conditions. In vain, Carbide flooded the countryside with posters depicting a Sikh holding a packet of Sevin and explaining to a peasant, “My role is to teach you how to make five rupees out of every rupee you spend on Sevin.” Farmers devoted most of their resources to buying seed and fertilizer. It had proven more difficult than anticipated to induce peasants to change their traditional practices and adopt farming methods involving the intensive use of pesticides. Many farmers had come to realize that it was impossible to fight the onslaught of predatory insects in isolation. The insects migrated from treated areas to untreated fields then returned to where they started as soon as the pesticide that had driven them away had lost its efficacy. These frustrating comings and goings had contributed strongly to the decline in pesticide sales. In 1982, Carbide’s salesmen had only been able to sell 2,308 tons of their white powder. That was less than half the production capacity of the industrial gem designed by the ambitious young men of South Charleston. The forecasts for 1983 were even more pessimistic.
While storm clouds gathered over the future of the proud plant, a small trivial event took place one day in a hut in Orya Bustee that was to change Padmini’s life completely. One morning, when she awoke on the charpoy she shared with her parents and brother, she found a bloodstain in her underwear. She had started her first period. For a young girl in India this intimate progression is a momentous occasion. It means that she is ready for the one great event in her life: marriage. Custom may have it that a girl is married while she is still a child, but that is only a formality; the real union takes place after puberty. Like all the other little girls of her age, even those from the humblest Adivasi families, Padmini had been prepared for the solemn day in which she would be the center of attention. From her early childhood in Mudilapa and subsequently in Bhopal, she had learned everything that a good wife and mother of a family should know. As for her parents, they knew that they would be judged on the manner in which their daughter conducted herself in her husband’s home. Unlike girls who were of strict Hindu observance, her conduct would not be assessed exclusively on submission to her husband. Among those Adivasis whose society is matriarchal, women enjoy prerogatives otherwise reserved for men. One of them is that of finding a husband for their daughters. They are, however, spared the main task associated with this responsibility—that of gathering together an acceptable dowry—because it is the fiancé who brings his betrothed a dowry.
The daughter of an unskilled worker, even one employed by Union Carbide, was not the most glittering catch. Finding a husband would therefore take some time. But, as tradition required, that morning Padmini exchanged her child’s skirt and blouse for her first sari. There was no celebration at the Nadars’. Her mother simply wrapped the panties that had absorbed the first blood in a sheet of newspaper. “When we celebrate your marriage, we will go and take these to the Narmada,” she told her daughter. “We’ll offer them to the sacred river in order that it may bless you and bring you fertility.”
It is a well-known fact that love is blind. Especially when the object of one’s passion is an industrial monster like a chemical plant. Warren Woomer had always refused to accept that the fate of Carbide’s factory in Bhopal should be determined by profitability alone. No capitalist enterprise, however, could go on absorbing the loss of millions of dollars. The projections drawn up seven years earlier, predicting annual profits of seven to eight million dollars, were no longer remotely feasible. Could Woomer’s replacement reverse the situation? The son of a former governor of the Reserve Bank of India,