by Annie Murray
Aasif gives a complicated nod. ‘There are many difficulties. Later we are going to some of the living quarters here – if you visit almost any house close to the factory there is a problem. People still sick from the gas, children with deformities, many cancers. And other physical sickness, breathing problems, mental-health problems also and mental retardation.’
We stand silent, listening.
‘You see, water has been badly contaminated – and it is spreading further each year.’ He is insistent that we take this in. It’s not just about one night, one gas leak – it’s about thirty years of poisoning, generation after generation.
He stops in the garden, close to a section of tall, sword-like leaves. Turmeric – very medicinal, he tells us.
‘The organization Greenpeace have given us the title “Toxic Hotspot”. They did testing on the water, some years back. Many chemicals, and many, many times more than safe levels. For example, dichlorobenzene – this causes anaemia and leukaemia, damage to liver and kidneys, skin problems, vomiting, even damaging chromosomes of the body. That is just one chemical in the water. There is very much carbon tetrachloride, causing dizziness, vomiting, sickness – even coma. And others . . . chloroform, tetrachloroethane . . .’
He seems to have the report off by heart. All we can do is listen, appalled, to the cocktail of toxic horror visited upon these neighbourhoods.
‘No one is wanting to take responsibility – the chemical companies, Indian government and state government. Chemical plant is still there. No one is now prepared to say they own the site, which is still putting chemicals in the water, even a very rich country like the USA – they wash their hands of it. They handed the site to our state government as a gift.’
‘A gift?’ Pat says. She is silent with astonishment for a moment, then she asks, ‘Why do people stay here? Why don’t they just leave?’
Aasif looks at her almost pityingly. ‘Where should they go? A few have left, but for many people they have nothing and nowhere to go. This is their home. They have family members who are sick. At least there is some treatment here.’ With sudden change of tack, he says, ‘You will take tea?’
‘Oh, no, it’s OK, thanks,’ we chorus.
‘OK then. We will go to meet Nalika. Now is your turn to ride a motorcycle.’ His solemn face breaks into a grin again. Pat and I look at each other.
Nalika is a quiet, serious young woman in a tidy orange saree and grey cardigan, who pats the back of her motorbike. I scramble on obediently behind her. Pat, making a comical Well, here goes face at me, hops on behind Aasif and off we go. After a few minutes, we are beaming at each other. No helmets, mad – though not very fast-moving traffic. A risky, heady freedom, the sun shining, wind through our hair. I wonder what Fred would say if he could see us, I think, almost giggling.
But I feel quite safe with Nalika, who steers her little cycle expertly through the traffic, until we can see the looming old factory again and turn into a narrow street lined with tiny, brick dwellings piled one above another, some of them painted in bright colours, some with satellite dishes all pointing in the same direction.
People, stalls, cows and dogs all compete for space and we wind our way through to the point where the roughly paved street gives way to a muddy track lined with still more houses. Most are brick but there are some shacks made of old pallets and bits of plastic. They would all have been more like that once – in 1984. Back in those days, many people had just arrived in Bhopal from elsewhere and had found a few square feet to set up home. These places almost back on to the wall of the chemical factory.
‘We will meet two families who are happy to greet you,’ Aasif says, once we have come to a halt and scrambled off the bikes again.
Nalika stops at a door and calls out. A tall man in white invites us graciously inside and leads us to what must be the room for visitors – bare except for brightly coloured walls, yellow and green; a shelf with some artificial flowers. We meet his wife, his son. All of them smile and shake our hands. And then his daughter. Immediately we can see there are problems. She is twenty years old, we are told. She is tiny, looks perhaps fourteen, and her face is not regular; boss-eyed and vacant-looking. She has a sweetness about her and smiles at us.
‘She knows nothing of what is going on,’ Aasif says. ‘She cannot speak – she has no education.’
‘Selfie,’ the boy says. He looks about sixteen. ‘Photo?’
So we do family shots and shake hands and thank them and are on our way again.
‘Are people not sick of strangers turning up, taking pictures?’ I ask Aasif. I feel we are invading people’s privacy.
He looks at me. ‘They know they have to keep telling their story. They already feel forgotten – that nothing is being done. Tell everyone you can. That is one thing we can do.’
In a second home we meet a young woman who greets us from a squatting position. It only takes seconds to realize how unnatural the posture is. Her legs are splayed impossibly far apart so that each one is at right angles to her body. She cannot stand or walk but is condemned to shuffling about on her haunches. She is eighteen years old and Aasif tells us she was born like this. But, she tells us, smiling happily as he translates, she is married and expecting a child. She very much hopes the baby will be born normal. Her proud mother stands nearby, nodding and smiling.
I think of what Aasif said: in every house you find a problem.
And soon we are on the bikes again, turning to stop on a patch of rough ground under a flyover.
‘Actually,’ Aasif says, having almost to shout again, ‘the flyover is new – it cuts through the middle of where the evaporation ponds were.’
Just nearby, in an open expanse of ground where grey cows graze and kids play games of cricket, is a wide, sunken area. The evaporation ponds. The idea of dumping toxic waste and letting the sun evaporate the liquid did not work too well in a country where the monsoon can flood any body of water over its edges on a regular basis. And as for the lining . . .
‘Here.’ Aasif calls us over to a lip at the edge of what was an original pond and squats down. ‘See?’ Along the edge we see the frayed, remaining edge of some black plastic. The lining which was put in to protect the local people from toxic waste. For one of many times that day, we find ourselves staring in appalled disbelief.
‘God,’ Pat says. ‘That’s like the lining Fred put in our pond.’ She looks at Aasif. ‘Is that even legal?’
He laughs up at her. ‘Legal. Ha ha.’ Standing, he says, ‘Soon after the Union Carbide company came here in the early eighties, the locals started noticing their cows were dying. People were getting sick – water tasting very bad. This was before the gas leakage. Many years ago now.’ He pulls his shoulders back. ‘For these people living here, the disaster never ends. Poison gas, drinking poisonous water – this goes on and on, into next generation and the next. We do not know how it can be finished.’
We all stand in the warm sun, Aasif and Nalika, Pat and I, looking across the open space dotted with pools of water and, at its far edge, the jumbled, crowded neighbourhood beyond. The traffic roars on the flyover behind us. I find myself wondering what exactly is in the soil under our feet, in this place where people have been apparently far more disposable than the toxic material itself. About the mental state of the people running those corporations. Perhaps greed should be defined as a mental illness: the crazed, loveless desire to protect shareholder profit and absolutely nothing else?
‘So,’ Aasif says as we go back to the bikes, ‘I have the pass now, for tomorrow. We can go to visit the abandoned site.’
‘Jo? Hi!’
It’s so good to hear Ian’s voice. I’m sitting down in the foyer of the hotel, leaving Pat in peace upstairs. There are not many people about, but I lean forward, hugging one arm around myself, trying to hold on to our privacy.
‘You sound cheerful,’ I say. He does sound really pleased to hear me.
‘Yeah,’ he says, considering this. ‘Not bad.’
‘This is the day you see the counsellor, right?’
‘Yep. Yeah. It’s . . . good. I think it’s helping.’
‘That’s great,’ I say. ‘I’m really glad.’ I don’t want to ask him questions now – I’m just happy to hear him sounding OK.
‘So – how’s it going?’
‘It’s amazing.’ I tell him about the city, all the mechanics and workshops, about the lake and the auto rickshaw rides.
‘Pat gets so excited, she’s practically jumping up and down in the seat!’
I tell him a bit about the clinics and the plant. ‘But there’s too much to explain. I wish you were here as well – there are so many things I’d like to show you.’
‘Yeah.’ He hesitates. ‘I kind of wish I was too.’
‘Do you?’ This is unexpected. Ian has never been one for going anywhere much.
‘Well, yeah – sounds good. Important.’
He seems different somehow. More open to things. He tells me he has been to visit Paul and Dorrie, just once, and that generally everything’s fine.
There’s a pause, and then he says, ‘I love you, Jo. And I’m sorry.’
‘I’m sorry too.’
I think we both know what we mean.
I lie in bed afterwards feeling warm and loved and hopeful.
Forty
The road we walk on into the factory site has dry, scrubby vegetation on each side. The two government officials lead us along it, at first seeming bored and indifferent. After all, these remains have been here so many years now, festering away. But as we move on and they see our interest, they become more animated and start pointing things out to us.
There are low office buildings mouldering away among the trees and scrub. And then we see the main plant, once a slick new edifice of shiny pipework, of tubes and valves and tanks roofed over but open at the sides. Now the corrugated-iron roof and everything else are brown with rust, some tanks so corroded that their bases have dropped off, spilling heaven knows what into the ground.
It’s a haunting place, the structure wound round with creepers and leaves, small trees forcing their branches between what was once the bodywork of one of India’s finest industrial hopes: a giant pesticide factory. Pesticides to keep crops alive, to increase yield and wealth. The creators assured everyone it would be ‘inoffensive as a chocolate factory’.
But this place was no Cadbury’s.
Three giant storage tanks, long and rounded with thick spouts at one end and looking like large abandoned railway locomotives, lie in the shrubbery. The tanks once contained one of the most dangerously toxic and reactive chemicals in the industry, methyl isocyanate. One of its components is phosgene – used in the trenches in the First World War. And one of the factors which keeps it safe – not reacting, in other words – is that it needs to be cool, kept below a temperature of no higher than zero degrees Celsius. In Bhopal, even in winter the temperature never drops below fifteen degrees. And in summer . . .
By 1984, the plant was no longer operating. The Americans had realized it was not as profitable as they had hoped and wrote it off. The skilled engineers who had taken pride in it left one by one. Costs were cut at every turn – with no thought of the ultimate cost to the people living round the plant. Disregarding the huge quantity of lethal chemical still sitting in those tanks – something that would not be allowed in Western countries – in October, the refrigeration was turned off, thereby saving a few dollars a day.
We walk in silence, looking, imagining. I try to visualize it in its heyday, a modern vision of progress, pride and hope (and, of course, profit). Then began the downward slide, the cost-cutting, the fact that the safety systems were not maintained in working order. Eventually, on 2 December 1984, came the events of ‘that night’.
Afterwards, Union Carbide put forward theories blaming Sikh terrorists for what happened. Following that, they attempted to blame the actions of a ‘disgruntled employee’. Neither of these theories have ever been supported by evidence. The version of events from the technicians present on the site at the time was that they began a routine cleaning operation in the neglected plant with its clogged pipes. This resulted in water backing up into the tank of methyl isocyanate. Its reaction with the water resulted in a massive build-up of heat and pressure. Gas came hissing out of the pressure relief valve to form a deathly, heavy cloud which soon seeped its way into the houses nearby. One of the gases it broke down to under heat was hydrogen cyanide.
The area of the site is not all that big – maybe a kilometre square. Along the back wall, only metres from the plant, are still the slum dwellings. Close. So close.
As we go out, a different way from where we came in, Aasif shows us a figure standing at what was once the main entrance to the factory.
‘This was built in 1986, by a Dutch lady,’ he says. ‘Her mother and father died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.’ A stone figure on a plinth, of an anguished woman with a baby in her arms, another child at her skirts, running from the gas. It is called Mother and Child.
It’s a long time before either of us feels like saying anything.
As we go back to find Aasif’s bike, he says, ‘Is there anywhere else you would like to go?’
‘Yes,’ I say. We have agreed on this before. ‘Just once more, we would like to go to Chingari.’
This afternoon there is a different set of children at Chingari. A group of deaf boys has come for treatment and they greet each other with great enthusiasm, laughing and jostling. A few parents are with children in the little sandy playground and Pat and I go to see them, playing with some of the kids again.
Twins of about six appear – two boys. They both hurry over to the little iron seats of the roundabout and jump on. They seem almost manically active and there is something about their faces. Some of the children are obviously profoundly handicapped. With others, you can’t quite put your finger on it but you can see that something is not well with them.
‘No speaking.’ Their mother, a lively-looking woman of about thirty, dressed from head to foot in black, points to one. ‘This one –’ she indicates the other – ‘go to school, but lot of problem.’
They are full of beans, somehow a little too much so, and keen to have attention. Their mother gives way to us as we play with them – takes a rest and goes to talk to another of the women.
And then I see a familiar face appear. The mother of the profoundly autistic boy, Sanjay. What is especially sad is that he does not seem able even to play. Once again, she leads him to the wall and they sit together, watching the other, more active children. Or at least, she is watching. It is hard to know what goes on in Sanjay’s mind. Pat stays, turning the roundabout for the twins, but I go over to see Sanjay and his mother.
She smiles gently, recognizing me as I join her on the wall. We both sit with our bare feet in the sand of the playground. She has bright red leggings on today, a dark green shalwar dress and black cardigan.
‘Hello, Sanjay,’ I say to him. He eyes me, but there is no real reaction.
‘No speech,’ she tells me again, patiently. ‘Autistic boy.’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Very difficult.’
She gives a tilt of her head as if to say, You don’t know the half of it. Which of course I don’t.
‘What is your name?’ I ask her.
She touches her chest. ‘Priyanka. You?’
‘Jo.’
‘Jo. OK.’ She digests this as she pulls her cardigan closer round her. I’m comfortably warm in a T-shirt, but so far as everyone here seems to be concerned it’s now winter and cold.
‘You speak good English,’ I say.
Again an incline of the head. ‘I learn in school. I was going to the university, to be pharmacist. Then I got married. But now –’ she nods at her son – ‘he is my life. That is all.’
There is a quiet, long-accustomed anguish about her. Our eyes meet. There is nothing really to be done.
‘D’you mind telling me what happened?
’ I ask. ‘That night? I mean, maybe you don’t want to talk about it . . .’
‘It’s OK.’ She clasps her hands neatly in her lap. When she talks it is as if she is repeating a story she has told numerous times before. ‘My husband’s father was an engineer here in Bhopal.’
‘At the Union Carbide plant?’ I ask, startled.
‘No. He was civil engineer,’ she explains, talking with her hands as much as her voice. ‘He was out of the city for a few days. That night he was coming back – by train. So his wife went to greet him at the railway station over here in Bhopal. She take with her their little ten-years-old son – my husband – and her two other children, boy, girl. When train came in, very late, already the gas was there. They tried to stop the train coming into the city but message did not get through. My husband’s father died on the railway platform, from the gas. Many people there, many crowds, so many people dying of the gas. His wife try to save her children. They run away. Balram, my husband, he say his mother took her woolly –’ she fingers the edge of her cardigan to demonstrate – ‘she take it off, tell him, “Cover your face.” His brother died, and his mother, a few days later. Baby sister is living. The two children were left alone.’
I watch as she speaks, looking ahead of her. Her voice is flat.
‘Where did they go?’ It’s so unbearable I can hardly take it in.
‘Father’s brother and wife took them.’
‘And your husband – how is his health?’
‘He has some lung problem – and his seeing. Sometimes very bad. I do not know if he will live long.’
She turns to me, rolls her eyes. She is friendly, tired, resigned. Then she looks at Sanjay and her face clouds.
‘We are here now to help him – but one day we will both die. Then what?’
I can’t answer this. There is no answer. We sit in silence for a moment.
‘You – children?’ she asks.
That question – one I would dread from anyone else, feels different coming from her.
That night, I think to myself. That night, something terrible must have happened inside the body of your husband, resulting in this wooden boy sitting beside you. And my ‘That night’ . . .
