| BOOKS: INREVIEW
Poison in the Night
By
Shailaja Neelakantan/NEW DELHI
Issue cover-dated November 29, 2001
It was Five Minutes Past
Midnight in Bhopal, By Dominique LaPierre and Javier
Moro. Full Circle, 250 rupees ($5.20)
AT FIVE PAST MIDNIGHT in Bhopal, India, on
December 2, 1984, a Union Carbide plant leaked a noxious chemical
into the winter air. The wind, blowing from the north, swept
deadly methyl isocyanate across the slums of the city, killing
between 20,000 and 30,000 people and poisoning as many as 500,000.
It was the world's worst industrial disaster, and in much of
the world it has already been forgotten.
Carbide said it was sabotage. But it was obvious that poor
safety conditions and dangerous cost-cutting measures led to
the tragedy at the plant the company had deemed "as inoffensive
as a chocolate factory." Carbide never apologized.
The U.S. has yet to extradite to India Carbide's then chairman
Warren Anderson. Meanwhile, the company paid a measly $470 million
in compensation, on the condition the Indian government press
no further legal charges, and very little of that money reached
the victims. Seventeen years later, women still give birth to
diseased and deformed babies and 160,000 people are still awaiting
treatment.
It was Five Minutes Past Midnight in Bhopal, written by Frenchman
Dominique LaPierre and Spaniard Javier Moro, uses novelistic
and journalistic techniques to tell the story of the tragedy
through the experiences of a young girl, Padmini and her family,
who lived in Bhopal at the time.
The book opens in the eastern state of Orissa where black aphid
insects have devastated the crop on a small piece of land owned
by Padmini's family. This misfortune, the authors say, was just
one tiny episode in a tragedy affecting the entire world. The
black aphids were among 850,000 varieties of insects that had
been devastating crops for centuries.
For decades, companies and laboratories around the world had
been looking for the perfect pesticide that would exterminate
these insects. The authors say that scientists realized in the
mid-1960s that only the chemical industry could come up with
an effective pesticide, and this is where Union Carbide makes
its entrance in the book. Carbide played a major role in the
two world wars, was a huge global presence and with 14 factories
in India was a well-known name to millions of Indians as well.
LaPierre and Moro alternate between accounts of Carbide's growing
involvement in the pesticide industry and the progression of
Padmini's life. Her family, not knowing what lies ahead, moves
to Bhopal after the crops are destroyed. They become part of
the itinerant labour force that is building a railway line there,
and live in Bhopal for many years. It is on the night of Padmini's
wedding that the deadly gas leak occurs. She's half blinded
and falls unconscious in a stampede and is mistaken for dead.
As she's about to be cremated a volunteer notices Padmini's
hand moving and she is saved. But her father perishes.
The authors have talked to a variety of people, including a
local journalist, Rajkumar Keswani, whose painstaking and prescient
reports of security breaches in the Carbide plant went largely
ignored. Keswani managed to obtain a copy of a 1982 report on
the Bhopal plant that itemized roughly a hundred breaches of
operational and safety regulations
LaPierre and Moro have tracked down interesting sources, but
unfortunately, the novelistic turns the book takes are not that
successful. "Novelizing" the tragedy could have exposed
its human dimensions powerfully, but here melodrama and orientalism
glamorize the victims.
The incongruous cover art -- a photo of a beaming, bejewelled
girl -- betrays the authors' eye for the exotic. The book is
packed with orientalist descriptions, purple prose and unfortunate
metaphors. The authors never fail to refer to their characters
as Hindu, Muslim, Sikh or Christian. There are long non sequiturs
about beggars, pimps and lepers. And completely egregious details
of decadent soirees held by Bhopal's former royalty.
It is hardly surprising then that the book has become a runaway
bestseller in Europe. Oliver Stone is planning to film the novel,
with Penelope Cruz -- of all people -- playing Padmini. This
is all familiar terrain for LaPierre, whose City of Joy, also
set in India in Calcutta, was made into a maudlin film starring
Patrick Swayze.
Meanwhile, no court of law ever passed judgment on Union Carbide.
The book quotes a Carbide defence lawyer who argued that an
American court was not competent to assess the value of a human
life in the Third World: "How can one determine the damage
inflicted on people who live in shacks?"
If nothing else, at least It was Five Past Midnight in Bhopal
brings the tragedy to centre stage again. Bhopal should not
be forgotten.
Shailaja Neelakantan is a writer based in Hong Kong
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