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The curse of the black cat by Radhika Ramaseshan


For us, it was Eveready. During my growing-up years in Bhopal, where my father was posted, the Union Carbide factory was not too far from our place off the railway colony. It was not an object of interest or curiosity because it looked just like the humungous power station opposite our house.

Nobody could figure out why it was called Eveready although the plant was set up to make pesticides and shared nothing with the battery manufacturer except for a common parent in Union Carbide. Perhaps the Eveready logo of a black cat leaping through the loop in the figure “9” had caught someone’s fancy.

One remembered the slums that had proliferated around the factory to serve the homes in the residential areas. Carbide went in for skilled workers; it had no use for the unskilled hands from these clusters.

A disaster in the making? Perish the thought. At least not in under-industrialised Bhopal. Bombay and Calcutta seemed designed for such catastrophes, not a somnolent town in central India that was known outside largely because of the Pataudis and its two lakes.

So when the headlines in early December, 1984, declared a death toll of a few hundreds because of a leak from Carbide, one was shaken. I was asked by Vinod Mehta, then editor of the weekly Sunday Observer, to take the first flight out of Bombay to Bhopal and stay put until further orders.

Twenty-six years later, it’s impossible and pointless to chronicle the experiences of those 15 days to the last authentic detail. But quite a few snapshots are so firmly etched in the subconscious that there are moments when I wonder how I managed to gather news and beat the deadlines. The hangover of guilt for being too much of a journo and not enough of a human being manifested itself for years in sleepless nights and occasional bouts of anti-Carbide activism.

People died like flies. I visited the house of our old maid, a Goan named Nellie, to learn that two of her six children had perished on the night of December 2 within minutes and her daughter had aborted a six-month foetus.

A family friend who lived in the posh Idgah hills recounted that a similar fate had struck his pregnant daughter-in-law. The tragedy, in that sense, was a leveller: a strong wind that blew on the night ensured the toxins would permeate almost all of the city.

Which is why the families of bureaucrats — who otherwise uphold class distinctions as an article of faith — stepped out of their bungalows to set up shelter homes for the thousands who had left the worst-affected slums, not knowing what fate had befallen their loved ones.

In one such camp, I met a boy who had lost his power of speech and memory: he was being called by various names. The teachers wondered what could trigger his recall. He didn’t seem in a state of shock, he smiled occasionally and sometimes grimaced. Somebody suggested he should be given a pencil and paper so something could be coaxed out of him in writing.

It was a near miracle. He wrote his name (I can’t remember what it was) and Kencha Chola in Urdu. That was where his home was. For a while, I followed his story. Until then, his family had been untraceable.

There was Tota Singh Chauhan, then a youthful 20-something, more of a political radical than a Carbide factory hand. Tota gave me a blow-by-blow account of what happened that night and emphasised he knew it was coming because the parent US company had offloaded a “flawed” plant design on Bhopal. Some of his revelations were corroborated by state government officials. Tota, older and sadder, was flogging the same facts on TV last night.

Then there was Arjun Singh, the chief minister of the day who fielded every withering question from the media with a straight face. There were the lawyers from the US who descended in droves on the slums and carried on a dialogue of the deaf with the victims.

One had the creeping feeling that Carbide would get away. The state’s top bureaucrats, who took journalists on a conducted tour of the plant, reinforced the theory that it was an “accident that just happened”. Unfortunate, but freakish.

I thought of the black cat’s imprint on the Eveready ad and concluded that Carbide had nine lives.