Dominique LaPierre: Five past midnight in Bhopal

By MARGIE THOMSON Herald books editor

The night of December 2, 1984, was one of the most festive nights of the Bhopal calendar. It was Ishtema (a great prayer gathering), a massive tribute to the Goddess of Poetry was taking place in a city square, and astrologers had named it a most auspicious night for weddings. All over Bhopal, throughout all the social castes and religions, joyous wedding groups were gathered.

Young Padmini and Dilip, rag-pickers and train scavengers from the slum area known as Orya Bustee, were among the happy couples celebrating against the backdrop of one of the city's major employers, the Union Carbide pesticide factory. The steel towers of the plant, deemed by its owners to be "as inoffensive as chocolate cake", were silhouetted just a couple of hundred of metres away from the 3m-square sheds in which the pair and their families lived.

As Padmini took the small wedding stage to dance in homage to the god Jagannath, the happy crowd fell silent as Union Carbide's siren began to howl. It stopped, but a minute later the terror began.

The community's bull and five cows, bought with the compensation money from an earlier accident at the factory, burst upon the gathering, vomiting yellow froth, their pupils swollen up like balloons and great burning tears pouring from their eyes. Before the horrified onlookers, they sank to the ground and died.

In a matter of seconds the smell of boiled cabbage, freshly cut grass and ammonia - the unforgettable stink created by the deathly cocktail of gases, including lethal methyl isocyanate - escaping in a heavy cloud from the factory, covered the densely populated slum area known as the Kali Grounds, where some of Bhopal's poorest people lived.

Their fate could be read at a glance: the windsock that Union Carbide flew above the factory was full and gently pulling in their direction.

What happened that night was one of the worst industrial disasters the world has seen. But it has been largely forgotten, except by the victims. While between 16,000 and 30,000 people were killed immediately, around 500,000 more were injured - and 150,000 remain chronically affected by the tragedy, which still kills 10 to 15 patients a month.

French writer Dominique LaPierre tells the story in his trademark style that's a blend of novelistic and journalistic techniques. He brings his many characters to life as people - rather than the statistics they are to the world - giving colour and texture to their communities and saluting the joy they find even amid devastating and relentless hardship.

This book has already sold hundreds of thousands of copies in Europe and won a major French prize, La Prix des Maisons de la Presse.

LaPierre alternates between the stories of Bhopal's people (especially focusing on the families of Padmina and Dilip in the Orya Bustee slum but also including other sections of the social landscape) and the story of Union Carbide and the pesticide industry.

He shows us the terrible effect of insects on the crops grown by India's peasants, and the need they have for some kind of pest control - it was just such an agricultural disaster that drove Padmina's family off their land and into Bhopal in the first place.

By the 1960s, scientists were turning to the chemical industry for a solution to this worldwide problem, and we trace Union Carbide's growing involvement in pesticide development and manufacture until, in 1980, it opened its "beautiful factory" in Bhopal.

A feeling of impending doom, of course, hangs over the book, and as LaPierre drops pebble after pebble into the pond - an act of carelessness here, a budget-cutting erosion of safety procedures there - a horrible feeling of inevitability starts to grow.

The book abounds in heroes: the whistle-blowing journalist "who had the gift of prediction but not of persuasion"; the pot-bellied restaurateur who, the morning after the disaster, gleefully took on the challenge of feeding 50,000 people. But there are not actually that many out-and-out villains.

It is the old story about the banality of evil. Carelessness, greed, tunnel vision, wilful ignorance, wilful deafness, cost-cutting - these are the things that killed Bhopal's people.

The company has claimed the disaster was the result of sabotage, but LaPierre shows this was unlikely, and that safety standards had fallen by the wayside in the period leading up the leak. Also, following the gas leak, the company did not do all it could to help. It never released the composition of the gases, making medical treatment ineffectual; it eschewed the victims' claims for compensation; and in the end, on condition that legal action would not be pursued, paid the Indian Government US$470 million ($991 million), little of which ever found its way to the right places.

Union Carbide no longer legally exists; it was bought largely by Dow Chemicals, which of course denies any culpability for what happened in Bhopal. However, LaPierre has said that, since the book has been published, Dow has "indicated it's prepared to collaborate in helping the victims of the tragedy".

It is now 18 years since the gas cloud rolled over Bhopal.

LaPierre's extraordinary career is a model of what can be done with the written word. He goes looking for stories and finds them in life itself, and tells them with so much colour and pizzazz that he arouses the interest of people who might otherwise turn away from such desperate need.

A large part of his success, though, is that when he looks at life, even among the poorest sections of humanity, he never sees only hardship; he sees also the strength of these people, their humanity, the joy they take from life.

His books sell in the millions. City of Joy, for instance, about the very poor of Calcutta, has sold seven million copies around the world and has been made into a film starring Patrick Swayze. LaPierre pours his royalties into many projects including, in India, care for children suffering from leprosy, clinics for tuberculosis, and gynaecological clinics for the victims of Bhopal.

With young Spanish writer Javier Moro, LaPierre spent three years researching what happened on that December night in 1984 and describes it as "one of the most enthralling subjects of my career: why and how could [this] monumental accident take place? Who were the people who initiated it, those involved in it, the victims of it, and finally who benefited from it?"

Five Past Midnight in Bhopal is also to be made into a film - directed bizarrely, worryingly by Oliver Stone - with Penelope Cruz as Padmini. Jeremy Irons has expressed an interest, too. It's a short step indeed from human horror to box-office entertainment.

LaPierre's book is as busy as an Indian city itself. At times we might feel that it, too, is overcrowded, and we might grimace at the non sequiturs, the occasional over-blown passages. But it is full of the pulse and drama of life and is a valuable reminder that most of the human story takes place well away from newspaper headlines.

Simon and Schuster

$37.95