The failure of the publicity campaign Muoz 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 antic.i.p.ated 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 p.u.b.erty. 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 a.s.sessed 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 a.s.sociated with this responsibility-that of gathering together an acceptable dowry-because it is the fiance 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 pa.s.sion 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, whose signature still appeared on two rupee notes, Jagannathan Mukund had many feathers in his cap, but he was not a magician. As an undergraduate at Cambridge, he had been a brilliant chemistry student. He went on to complete his doctorate at MIT in Boston and was promptly snapped up by Carbide. He then spent two years in Texas, two more running the Indian petrochemical plant on the island of Trombay, and finally three years at Inst.i.tute in West Virginia, mastering the complicated techniques involved in the production of MIC. Mukund was married to the daughter of the deputy secretary of the United Nations, herself a distinguished economist and university professor. He was the father of a little girl who was born with a heart deformity whom American surgeons had saved by an operation that, at the time, they alone could perform. In theory, such an experienced leader was another gift from Carbide to its jewel in Bhopal. But it was in theory only, for the directors of Union Carbide India Limited, made the new works manager subject to a general manager to whom they gave the mission of reducing the factory's losses, by whatever means necessary.

Cultured, refined and always supremely elegant in tailored suits from London, this "superdirector," an aristocratic Bengali by the name of D.N. Chakravarty, was fifty-two years old. A great lover of poetry, high living, Scotch whisky and pretty women, he was certainly a distinguished chemist, but utterly unsuited to work in a plant that produced dangerous chemical substances. His entire career had been spent at the head of an industry where a broken conveyer belt was the worst of all possible disasters. The battery division he had run from his office in Calcutta had in fact been a sinecure, reaping colossal profits without any risk whatsoever. The appointment of this intractable administrator would prove to be a fatal mistake.

29.

"My Beautiful Plant Was Losing Its Soul"

The young engineer who had risked his life escorting the first barrels of MIC from Bombay to Bhopal could not believe it. "When we were asked to show the new superdirector around the factory, it felt like taking a tourist round Disneyland," Kamal Pareek would recall.

Chakravarty knew nothing at all about how a plant of that kind worked. He did not know what most of the components were for. He got their names wrong: what he was calling a mixer was in fact a blender. In English the two words may mean essentially the same thing, but in Bhopal's technical jargon, they referred to distinct parts. "We realized at once that this savior they'd sprung on us was not party to the mystique of the chemical industry," Pareek would remember. "The only thing he was interested in was figures and accounts."

This might still have turned out for the good, if only the new superdirector had been prepared to admit that a plant like that could not be run like a battery factory; if he could have graciously acknowledged that, in a company of that kind, decisions must come from all levels, each one affecting as it did the lives of thousands of people; if he had understood that seemingly favorable conditions could suddenly swing the other way, that the levels in the tanks were constantly rising and falling, that the combustion of the reactors varied by the moment; in short, that it was impossible to run that sort of plant simply by sending out memos from his directorial armchair. "When you're in charge of a pesticide plant," Pareek explained, "you have occasionally to come out of your office, put on overalls and join the workers on site, breathing in the smell of gra.s.s and boiled cabbage."

Carbide's great achievement had been that of integrating a vast spectrum of different cultures and guaranteeing the humblest of its workers the right to speak. Unfortunately, neither Jagannathan Mukund, though steeped in considerable American experience, nor his superior from Calcutta, seemed inclined to engage in a dialogue. Their understanding of human relations appeared to be based upon a concept of caste, not in the religious sense, but in a hierarchical sense. The introduction of such rifts was, little by little, to corrupt, divide and demotivate.

"Once drastic cuts became the sole policy objective, and one man's say-so was the only authority, we knew the plant was inevitably going to h.e.l.l," Kamal Pareek would confirm.

Once again it was Rahul who bore the news. In a matter of minutes it was all around the bustees.

"Carbide has just laid off three hundred coolies. And apparently that's only the beginning."

"Haven't the unions done anything about it?" Ganga Ram asked sharply.

"They weren't given any choice," explained Rahul.

"Does that mean they're going to shut down all the installations?" worried Sheela Nadar, afraid that her husband might be among the men laid off.

"Not necessarily," Rahul tried to be rea.s.suring. "But it does seem the sale of plant medicines isn't going all that well anymore."

"It's not surprising," observed Belram Mukkadam, "the rains didn't come this year and people are leaving the countryside."

Sunil, the eldest son of the k.u.mar family whose rice fields had been obliterated by the drought, spoke up. "Plant medicines are great when things are going well," he declared. "But when there's no water left to give the rice a drink, they're useless."

Sunil was right. The gathering around Rahul had increased in size. The news he had brought provoked widespread consternation. After living so long in the shadow of the factory, after burning so many incense sticks to get jobs there, after being woken with a start by the howl of its sirens, after so many years of living together on this patch of land, how could they really believe that this temple of industry was crumbling?

"This year the rains are going to be very heavy," said the sorcerer Nilamber, whose predictions were always optimistic. "Then Carbide will take back those it kicked out today."

Sheela Nadar gave the little man with the goatee a grateful smile. Everyone noticed that her daughter Padmini was wearing a cotton sari instead of her children's clothes.

"The trainees from the plant have stopped coming to the House of Hope," Padmini added. The House of Hope was the training center Carbide had set up in part of the building occupied by Sister Felicity's handicapped children. "The cla.s.srooms have been closed for several days. I don't think anyone's coming back-they've taken away all their equipment."

Discouraged, the group fell silent, each one contemplating the mighty structure looming on the horizon.

"I tell you they've only sacked our men so they can put even more money in their pocket," decreed Prema Bai who had come from helping a new citizen of Orya Bustee into the world. "Don't you worry: Carbide will always be there."

The whole city adopted her opinion. Neither the death of one of its workers, nor the ensuing union unrest, nor the apocalyptic predictions of Rajk.u.mar Keswani had been able to tarnish the factory's prestige in the Bhopalis' eyes. The star that Eduardo Muoz and a group of impa.s.sioned engineers had constructed, was as much a part of the city as its mosques, palaces and gardens. It was the crowning glory of an industrial culture that was completely new to India. The residents of Bhopal might not know what exactly the chimneys, tanks and pipework were for, but they were enthusiastic partic.i.p.ants in all the sporting and cultural activities the plant could organize. There were some indications, however, at the beginning of 1983, that the honeymoon was drawing to a close. Under pressure from Carbide's top management, Chakravarty and Mukund devoted their energies to making further cuts. "In India, like anywhere else in the world, the only way to reduce expenditure is to reduce running costs," Kamal Pareek was to say. "In Bhopal, wages const.i.tuted the primary expense." After the three hundred coolies were dismissed, many skilled workers and technicians were laid off. In the methyl isocyanate production unit alone the manpower in each shift was cut by half. In the vitally important control room, only one man was left to oversee some seventy dials, counters and gauges, which relayed, among other things, the temperature and pressure of the three tanks of MIC. Maintenance crews underwent the same cuts. The plant went from a total of nearly a thousand employees to six hundred and forty-two. What was more, a hundred and fifty workers were yanked from their regular workstations to make up a pool of manpower that could be moved here and there as the need arose. The result was a drop in the standard of work as many specialists found themselves a.s.signed to tasks for which they had not been trained. The replacement of retiring skilled personnel with unskilled workers made further savings possible at the risk of having key positions filled by inexperienced people. The latter often spoke only Hindi, while the instruction manuals were written in English.

Kamal Pareek would never forget "the painful meetings during which section heads were obliged to present their plans for cuts." The most senior engineers were reluctant to suggest solutions that would compromise the safety of their installations. But the pressures were too great, especially when they came from Carbide's Danbury headquarters. That was how the decision was reached not to change certain parts every six months but only once a year. And to replace any damaged stainless steel pipes with ordinary steel piping. Numerous cuts were made along those lines. Chakravarty, the man primarily responsible for this flurry of cutbacks, seemed to know only one metal, the tinplate used in batteries. He behaved as if he knew nothing about corrosion or the wear and tear on equipment subject to extreme temperatures.

"In a matter of weeks, I saw everything I'd learned on the banks of the Kanawha River go out the window," Pareek would say. "My beautiful plant was losing its soul."

Unfortunate Kamal Pareek! Like so many other young Indians whom science had wrested from the ancestral constraints of their country and projected into the twentieth century, he had put his faith in the new values preached by the prestigious American multinational. He was suddenly discovering that that magnificent edifice was founded on one religion alone: the religion of profit. The blue-and-white hexagon was not a symbol of progress; it was just a commercial logo.

No ceremony was held to mark the departure of D.N. Chakravarty in June 1983. He left Bhopal satisfied that he had been able, in part, to stem the factory's hemorrhaging finances.

Jagannathan Mukund was left in charge, but with a mission to continue the policy of cutbacks initiated by the envoy from Calcutta. He rarely left the air-conditioned ivory tower of his office. His June 1983 reply to the three inspectors from South Charleston claimed that many of the defects had been corrected, but critical items remained to be addressed. Some of the faulty valves in the phosgene and MIC units would not be able to be replaced for several more months. As for the automatic fire detection system in the carbon monoxide production unit, it could not be installed for a year at the earliest. These grave infractions of the sacrosanct safety principles would soon provoke another cry of alarm from the journalist Rajk.u.mar Keswani. The factory was continuing to go downhill. The maintenance men had no replacement valves, clamps, f.l.a.n.g.es, rivets, bolts or even nuts. They were reduced to replacing defective gauges with substandard instruments. Small leaks from the circuits were not stopped until they were really dangerous. Many of the maintenance procedures were gradually phased out. Quality control checks on the substances produced became less and less frequent, as did the checks on the most sensitive equipment.

Soon the factory only went into operation when the sales team needed supplies of Sevin. This was precisely the method that Eduardo Muoz had tried, ten years earlier, to convince the engineers in South Charleston to adopt, in order to avoid stocking enormous quant.i.ties of MIC. Now that the plant was operating at a reduced pace, Mukund stopped MIC production in order to gradually empty the tanks. Soon they held only about sixty tons. It was a trivial quant.i.ty by the Inst.i.tute's American standards but enough, if there were an accident, to fulfill Raj-k.u.mar Keswani's apocalyptic predictions.

In the autumn of 1983, Mukund made a decision that was to have far-reaching consequences. Ignoring his predecessor's warning, he shut down the princ.i.p.al safety systems. In his view, because the factory was no longer active, these systems were no longer needed. No accident could occur in an installation that was not operating. His reasoning failed to take into account the sixty tons of methyl isocyanate sitting in the tanks. Interrupting the refrigeration of these tanks might possibly save a few hundred rupees worth of electricity a day, and possibly the same amount in freon gas. But it violated a fundamental rule laid down by Carbide's chemists, which stipulated that methyl isocyanate must, in all circ.u.mstances, be kept at a temperature close to 0 C. In Bhopal, the temperature never drops below 15 or 20 C, even in winter. Furthermore, in order to save a few pounds of coal, the flame that burned day and night at the top of the flare was extinguished. In the event of an accident this flame would burn off any toxic gases that spilled into the atmosphere. Other pieces of essential equipment were subsequently deactivated, in particular the enormous scrubber cylinder, which was supposed to decontaminate any gas leaks in a bath of caustic soda.

There were many engineers who were unable to bear the degradation of the high-tech temple they had watched being built. By the end of 1983, half of them had left the factory. On December 13, it was time for the one who had been there the longest to go. For the man who had so often risked his life escorting trucks full of MIC from Bombay to Bhopal, the departure was both heartrending and liberating.

Before leaving his beautiful factory, Kamal Pareek wanted to show his comrades that in case of danger, the safety systems so imprudently shut down could be started up again. Like a sailor climbing to the top of his ship's main mast to light the signal lamp, he scaled the ladder to the immense flare and relit the flame. Then he headed for the three tanks containing the methyl isocyanate and unbolted the valves that supplied the freon to the coils that kept them refrigerated. He waited for the needle of the temperature gauge to drop back down to 0 C. Turning then to K.D. Ballal, the duty engineer for the unit that night, he gave a military salute and announced, "Temperature is at zero Celcius, sir! Goodbye and good luck! Now let me run to my farewell party!"

30.

The Fiances of the Orya Bustee Don't cry, my friend. I'll take you to the Bihari's place. He already has a herd of about a hundred. He might like to take on one more."

After Belram Mukkadam, Satish Lal, a thin, bent, good-natured little man with bulging muscles, was one of the bustee's longest-standing occupants. He lived in the hut opposite Padmini's family. He had left his village in Orissa to find work in the city in order to pay back the debts he had incurred for his father's cremation. A childhood friend, who had come back to the village for the festival of Durga, had enticed him to Bhopal where he was a porter at the main train station. "Come with me," he had said, "I'll get you a coolie badge and you'll buy yourself a uniform. You'll make fifteen to twenty rupees a day." So Satish Lal had worked at Bhopal station for thirty years. His seniority gave him a certain prestige in the porters' union, which was led by a man from the state of Bihar who was known simply as "the Bihari." Now Satish Lal hoped that his standing in the union would enable him to help his neighbor, Ratna Nadar, find work. Padmini's father, along with three hundred other unskilled workers, had been laid off by Carbide.

"You never actually see the Bihari," Satish Lal explained. "No one even knows where he crashes. He's a gang leader. He couldn't give a d.a.m.n whether it's you or Indira Gandhi carrying the luggage along the platforms, just so long as every evening you pay him his whack-in other words a share of your tips. One of his employees takes care of that. He's the only one who can get you the badge authorizing you to work as a coolie. But don't think he's any easier to approach than his boss. You have to be introduced to him by someone he trusts. Someone who'll tell him who you are, where you come from, what caste, what line of descendants, what clan you belong to. And it's in your interests to greet him with your sweetest namaste and throw in plenty of sadarjis, * as many as ever you like. And invoke upon his person the blessing of Jagannath and all the deities."

"Shouldn't I also give him something?" asked the former Carbide worker anxiously. He had always had to grease the tharagars' palms to get himself taken on.

"You're right, my friend! You'd better have fifty rupees ready, some pan and a good dozen packs of bidis. Once he's accepted you, the police will look into whether you've been in any trouble in the past. There again you'd better have some baksheesh on to hand." Ratna Nadar's eyes widened as the amount he would have to lay out grew. "And then there's the stationmaster's P.A. He pa.s.ses on the green light from the police to his boss, who is the guy who gives you your badge. Your badge is a talisman. When your bones ache too much for you to carry bags and suitcases, you can pa.s.s it on to your son. But be careful, if you refuse to take a minister's or some other big shot's baggage because they never tip, the stationmaster can take it away from you."

In the time he had been working at the station, Satish Lal had done it all. He even claimed to have carried on his head the enormous trunks of Hamdullah Khan, the last nawab. They were very heavy; the locks on them were solid silver.

With his lunghi bulging at the waist with rupees for the various intermediaries, Nadar set out for the station in the company of his neighbor. Before entering the small office next to the cloakroom occupied by the coolies' union, the two men stopped before an altar, which harbored, beside a tulsi, an orange statue of the G.o.d Ganesh. Ratna Nadar rang the small bell in front of the divinity to ask for his protection and placed a banana and a few jasmine petals in the offering bowl.

Ganesh fulfilled Padmini's father's wishes. A few days later, Satish burst into Ratna's hut.

"You did it, my friend!" he announced triumphantly. "You're Bhopal station's one hundredth and first coolie. Go quickly and buy yourself a red tunic and turban. And a supply of tidbits and sweets. The stationmaster's waiting to give you your badge."

It was a ritual. At each full moon, the elders of the Kali Grounds took their places on sisal mats laid end to end, men on one side, women on the other, to discuss the affairs of their community. The men would exchange pan and bidis, the women sweets. One of the purposes of these meetings was to review the young people of the neighborhood who had reached marriageable age. Their names were listed and a debate ensued at once. Soon certain boys' and certain girls' names would be linked together. Comment on the merits and disadvantages of these hypothetical marriages would redouble. So seriously did the inhabitants of the bustees take their family lineage that the process was sometimes carried over to the next meeting.

One day old Prema Bai spoke up. "We have to find a good husband for Padmini," she said emphatically.

"Prema Bai's right," said the lovely Dalima.

There followed some discussion. Several boys were mentioned, among them Dilip, Dalima's adopted son. For that reason Dalima followed the conversation with rapt attention. As usual, Belram Mukkadam tried to calm things down.

"There's no rush," he declared. "As I understand it, Padmini Nadar is still too young."

"You've been misinformed, brother," the girl's mother immediately replied, "she's reached marriageable age. And we want to find the best possible husband for her."

"You couldn't find a better husband for your daughter than my son Dilip," Dalima said proudly. "He's an exceptional boy and I want a wife for him who is no less so."

The real meaning of this statement was lost to no one. Its purpose was less to extol the boy's virtues than it was to make certain that Sheela's expectations regarding a dowry were realistic.

"My daughter is just as exceptional as your son," Sheela countered. "And if your son is such a treasure, you will of course have antic.i.p.ated giving him a generous dowry."

"I have antic.i.p.ated doing my duty," Dalima responded, anxious to avoid confrontation at this stage in negotiations.

The discussion continued within the framework of a very precise ritual, which neither of the two parties could breach. It would take two more a.s.semblies under the full moon and a lot of debate to reach agreement over the union of Dilip and Padmini. The transaction could then proceed to the manguni, the official request for the girl in marriage. Out of respect for tradition, the boy's parents invited several of the neighborhood's elders to represent them in this traditional formality. But, as always in India, no ceremony could take place without first consulting a jyotiji, an astrologer who was to examine the stars to see whether the proposed couple were compatible and determine the most propitious date for the manguni. In the neighboring Chola Bustee lived an old man with a white beard named Joga, who, for forty years, had been a fortune-teller on the streets of the old city of Bhopal. His was not always an easy task, especially when, as was the case with Dalima and the Nadars, the parents of the prospective marriage partners did not know the exact date on which their children had been born. Old Joga confined himself to suggesting that the marriage request should take place during a month under the benign influence of the planet Venus, and on a day of the week that was not Friday, Sat.u.r.day or Sunday, the three inauspicious days of the Indian lunar-solar calendar.

A procession as elaborate as that of the three magi kings came to a halt outside the Nadars' hut. In the recollection of Orya Bustee, there had never before been such a manguni. Ganga Ram had arranged for a young goat to be cooked, and the elders accompanying him arrived with their arms full of delicacies, sweets, bottles of beer and country liquor.

It was a real barakanna, a great banquet such as the occupants of the bustees had never previously known. Ganga Ram, who had conquered leprosy, put his crippled wife back on her feet and given the community a television set had also shown himself to be the most generous of stepfathers. On behalf of her daughter, Padmini's mother accepted the pindhuni, the silk outfit decorated with gold thread that he brought as an official and tangible expression of the promise of matrimony. The engaged couple did not take part in this ceremony. All the preparations for their marriage occurred without them. It was customary that they not meet until the wedding night, when, as a symbol of their marriage, Dilip would lift the veil from his fiancee's face to place red sindur powder on the parting of her hair. However, Dilip and Padmini had clearly known each other for a long time.

Once the banquet was over, it was time to move on to the most serious issue: the dowry. It was to old Prema Bai that Padmini's mother had entrusted the role of negotiating this important ritual payment. With the help of some of the other women, she had drawn up a list of the items Dilip's family would be expected to give his future wife. The list included two cotton saris, two blouses, a shawl and various household utensils. It also included jewels: some imitation, others real, in this instance two rings, a nose stud and a matthika, an ornament worn on the forehead. As for gifts for the bride's family, they were to include two dhotis for her father, two vests and two punjabis, the long tunic b.u.t.toned from the neck to the knees. Her mother was to receive two silk saris and a pair of sandals encrusted with small ornamental stones. They were poor people's requirements, certainly, but they were worth some three thousand rupees, a fabulous sum even for the proprietor of a small painting firm.

Belram Mukkadam, Iqbal and Rahul, who represented Dilip's family, had listened unflinchingly, as the croaky voice of the elderly midwife laid out her demands. As marriage negotiations were traditionally long-winded affairs, custom had it that the groom's clan consulted together before giving its consent. Dalima was so keen for her son to marry Padmini, however, that the three envoys wagged their heads at the same time, indicating that they accepted all the girl's family's conditions.

It was then that old Joga, the white-bearded astrologer who had silently witnessed all these exchanges, cut in. "Before you conclude your haggling, I would appreciate it if you would agree on the remuneration for my services," he declared vehemently.

"We thought of two dhotis for you and a sari for your wife," replied Mukkadam.

"Two dhotis and a sari!" exclaimed the jyotiji, beside himself. "You've got to be joking!"

From the recesses of their huts, the entire alleyway followed this unexpected turn of events with avid interest.

"If you're not satisfied, we'll find another jyotiji," Rahul threatened.

The astrologer burst out laughing. "I'm the one who drew up the horoscopes! No one else will agree to choose the marriage date instead of me!"

This reply was greeted with much chortling from the onlookers. Some of the women heckled him. "He's a real son of a b.i.t.c.h, that jyotiji!" sneered one of them. "More than that, he's devious," said another.

Suddenly, Dalima's voice erupted like thunder. Her beautiful green eyes were bloodshot. She was fuming. "You piece of s.h.i.t!" she shouted. "If you spoil my boy's marriage, I'll skin you alive!"

The astrologer made as if to get up and go. The shoemaker Iqbal held him by the arm. "Stay," he begged.

"Only if you pay me a hundred-rupee deposit immediately."

The partic.i.p.ants looked at each other helplessly. All of a sudden, however, there was the stocky figure of Ganga Ram. He was holding a bundle of notes between the stumps of his right hand.

"There you are," he said dryly, dropping the notes into the little man's lap. "Now tell us on what day we should celebrate our children's marriage."

The astrologer went through the motions of thinking. He had already done his calculations. He had eliminated all the days when the sun entered the ninth and twelfth signs of the zodiac, and chosen one when the sun was favorable for the groom while the planet Jupiter was most beneficent for the bride-tobe.

"December second, between ten o'clock and midnight, will be the most propitious time for your children's union," he announced.

31.

The End of a Young Indian's Dream The doc.u.ment was stamped "BUSINESS: CONFIDENTIAL" and dated September 11, 1984. Addressed to the person in charge of Union Carbide's engineering and safety department in South Charleston, it was signed J.M. Poulson, the engineer who, two years previously, had headed the safety audit of the Bhopal factory. This time Poulson and the five members of his team had just finished inspecting the storage conditions of several hundred tons of methyl isocyanate at Inst.i.tute 2, deep in the Kanawha Valley, home to more than two hundred and fifty thousand Americans.

The doc.u.ment revealed that the Inst.i.tute plant was suffering from a number of defects and malfunctions: vibrations likely to rupture sensitive piping; potentially dangerous leakage from various pumps and other apparatus; corrosion of electric cable sheathing; poor positioning of several automatic fire extinguishers in sectors of prime importance; faults in the filling systems to the MIC tanks, etc. In short, deficiencies that proved that safety at the flagship factory left a lot to be desired. The doc.u.ment also claimed that the actual health of personnel working in Inst.i.tute was at risk. Poulson and his team had in fact discovered that workers in the MIC unit were often subjected to chloroform vapors, especially during maintenance operations. There was no monitoring system to measure the duration of their exposure, despite the fact that chloroform was a highly carcinogenic substance. The report stipulated that an interval of fifteen minutes would const.i.tute dangerous overexposure. All the same, the investigators considered these risks relatively minor in comparison with the danger "of an uncontrollable exothermic reaction in one of the MIC tanks and of the response to this situation not being rapid or effective enough to prevent a catastrophe." The doc.u.ment gave a detailed list of the circ.u.mstances that could make such a tragedy possible. The fact that the tanks were used for prolonged storage was conducive to internal contamination, which was likely to pa.s.s unnoticed until precisely such a sudden and devastating chemical reaction occurred. The investigators had actually found that the tank's refrigeration system introduced minuscule impurities, which could become the catalysts for such a reaction. They had discovered that these impurities could also come from the flare meant to burn off the toxic gases at a height of 120 feet. In short, the most modern plant, one that Carbide had counted among the safest in the whole of the United States' chemical industry, appeared to be at the mercy of a few drops of water or metal filings. "The potential hazard leads the team to conclude that a real potential for a serious incident exists," declared the doc.u.ment. In his accompanying letter, Poulson gave the names of sixteen Carbide executives who should receive copies of his report. Strangely, this list made no mention of the man to whom it was a matter of primary concern. Jagannathan Mukund, managing director of the Bhopal plant, with three tanks permanently holding sixty tons of MIC, would remain ignorant of the concerns expressed by the American engineers and, in particular, of their recommendations to counteract a possible catastrophe.

The plant on the Kali Grounds was a little like his baby. It was he who had set down the plans for the first formulation unit. It was he who had bought the splendid palace from the nawab's brother to turn it into an agronomical research center. Together with Eduardo Muoz and several other fanatical pioneers, Ranjit Dutta had laid the foundations for the beautiful plant right in the heart of the City of the Begums. As far as this engineer with the physique of a football player was concerned, his time spent in Bhopal had been a magical period in a richly successful career. After leaving India in 1976 to work in Carbide's American agricultural products division, Dutta had repeatedly returned to the site of his first love. Every year he vacationed there with his family, boating on the waters of the Upper Lake, listening to poets during the mushairas in Spices Square, and dreaming beside the illuminated outline of the factory whose funnels he had designed. *

Now, at the age of fifty-four, he was vice-president in charge of the agricultural products division at the company's headquarters. And that summer of 1984, at the time when the team of investigators led by Poulson was compiling its report, the Indian engineer had just come back from a pilgrimage to Bhopal. This time, however, the man who loved the city so much returned sad and disappointed.

"I didn't like what I saw during that visit," he later recounted. "I saw the approaches to the factory overrun with rubbish and weeds. I saw unoccupied workers chatting for hours over cups of tea. I saw mountains of files strewn about the management's offices. I saw pieces of dismantled equipment lying about the place. I saw disorientated, unmotivated people. Even if the factory had temporarily stopped production, everyone should have been at their workstations getting on with maintenance work... . It's strange but I sensed an atmosphere of neglect."

As soon as he got back to Danbury, Dutta tried to relay this impression to his superiors but, oddly, it seemed none of them wanted to listen. "They probably thought I was harboring some sort of grievance against the local management," he would say, "or that I wanted to take over the running of the factory again. But I only wanted to warn them that strange things were going on in Bhopal, and that people there were not doing their jobs as they should."

It would not be long before Dutta had an explanation for this apparent indifference. If no one at the top of Union Carbide seemed interested in the neglect to which the factory had fallen prey, it was for a reason: in Danbury the Bhopal plant had already been written off. Dutta would have formal confirmation of the fact at the conference, which, every year, a.s.sembled the heads of the company's agricultural divisions in the Connecticut countryside. At this meeting, in August 1984, marketing strategies for products made by Carbide throughout the world-sales prices, methods of beating the compet.i.tion and acquiring new clients-were discussed and agreed upon. The topics included the Bhopal factory. As early as 1979, the economic viability of the plant had been subjected to extensive debate. One of the various options management considered was simply stopping its construction but because of the late stage in the building process, this idea had been abandoned. Five years later, the situation had further deteriorated. The plant was now losing millions of dollars. The sales prospects for Sevin in 1984 did not exceed a thousand tons, half the amount for the preceding year and only a fifth of the plant's total production capacity. It was a financial disaster. At the August 1984 meeting, therefore, approval was given for a liquidation program. In fact, the multinational was counting on getting rid of its costly Indian factory by moving its installations to other third world countries. Brazil, for example, could accommodate the phosgene, carbon-monoxide and methyl-isocyanate units. As for the Sevin formulation and packaging works, Indonesia seemed the ideal place for them to be relocated.

In the autumn of 1984, Carbide's vice president for Asia sent a top-secret message to Bhopal. He wanted to know the financial and practical feasibility of dismantling and moving the plant, "taking into account the moderate price of Indian labor."

The task of gathering the necessary information was entrusted to the Hindu engineer Umesh Nanda. Nine years earlier, a brief advertis.e.m.e.nt in the Times of India had enabled this son of a modest industrialist in the Punjab to fulfill the dream of all young Indian scientists of his generation: that of joining a renowned multinational. Now, he was charged with shattering his own dream. "Dismantling and shipping the Sevin production unit should not pose any problem," he responded in a telex to his superiors on November 10. "The same would not appear to be true of the MIC unit, however, because of extensive corrosion damage." Nanda warned that the unit could be rea.s.sembled only after repair work involving considerable expense was completed. The Indian's telex provided the answers to Carbide's queries. It also confirmed what had been Rajk.u.mar Keswani's worst fears. The beautiful plant had been abandoned.

After a two-year absence, Rajk.u.mar Keswani was back in Bhopal. He was not yet aware that Carbide had decided to write the factory off and was preparing to transfer parts of it to other third world countries. Ever more alarming information from his contacts inside the plant prompted him to sound a fourth alarm, ent.i.tled "BHOPAL ON THE BRINK OF DISASTER." This time he really believed that his article would rouse public opinion and convince the authorities. Jansatta, the regional daily that ran his piece, was not a local journal but one of India's biggest newspapers, and a part of the prestigious Indian Express group. Once again, however, Keswani was a voice crying alone in the wilderness. His latest apocalyptic predictions provoked not the slightest interest in the public, any more than they incited the munic.i.p.al authorities to take any safety measures. The journalist sought an explanation for this latest failure. "Wasn't I convincing enough?" he asked himself. "Do we live in a society where people mistrust those interested in the public good? Or do they just think I'm putting pressure on Carbide to fill my own pockets?"

The wheel of destiny was turning. In a few weeks' time, Keswani's round face would appear on all the world's television screens. He would become the youngest reporter ever to receive the Press Award of India, the highest possible distinction accorded to a journalist of the subcontinent.