The Beautiful and the Damned Page 3

  What kind of man brings a stranger home when his wife has just given birth? In Jabbar’s house, I was introduced to his wife, a Kashmiri woman in her late twenties. She was dressed in a black hijab, her hair covered but her face unveiled, and she looked exhausted from her labour. I saw the baby and encountered a squadron of mosquitoes that made me thankful that the cradle had come with a net. Relatives and neighbours passed in and out so fluidly as to leave little distinction between outdoors and indoors, between sitting room and bedroom. I drank tea and talked to Jabbar’s neighbours. They were working-class people who were proud of him, of the fact that he had become a father, of the trees he had got for them to plant in the neighbourhood, which was poor without being squalid. Then it was time for Jabbar to head out again because he wanted me to meet people in the nearby slums.

  But the initial question remained in my mind, if inflected differently. What kind of man takes a Hindu stranger home even when the proprieties of a lower-middle-class Muslim background demand an observance of the purdah, and especially when his wife seems uncomfortable not following such convention? And if that seems needlessly traditional, what kind of man doesn’t see the necessity, accepted even among modern individuals, of separating the private and the public?

  One possible answer – and it was the answer Jabbar gave me when I asked him this – is that the idea of separation, between men and women, Hindus and Muslims, the private and the public, is an artificial one. ‘My mother never observed the purdah,’ he told me. But the disaster of 1984 had broken down other walls, Jabbar said. For some, it had been a temporary erasure of boundaries as they stopped to help the dying and the injured for a few weeks. For Jabbar, who had at the time been a small contractor drilling borewells, the change had been permanent, marking him out for a life as an activist rather than as a businessman.

  Another possible answer – and this was one Jabbar didn’t come up with – is that it is an obsessed person, one without a sense of proportion, who doesn’t observe the distinctions between private and public life, between the needs of activism and the demands of domesticity. It was an answer that had some interpretative power when it came to Jabbar’s life, because Yasmeena was his second wife. Jabbar had been married before to a woman called Rehana, a marriage significant enough a decade after its dissolution for Jabbar, his neighbours and his rival at the Bhopal Group for Information and Action to refer to it.

  Rehana had been an early member of Jabbar’s organization, a woman from a lower-middle-class Muslim background similar to Jabbar’s. She had been in her twenties, a divorced mother of two children, at the time she began working with Jabbar in the organization. A bad-tempered, arrogant woman was how Jabbar’s neighbours referred to Rehana, as did Usha and Jamila, two of the women in the organization who had known her. Jabbar spoke about Rehana less emphatically, with a touch of despair that was somewhat unusual for him. He had married her because he had been attracted to her ‘radical’ personality, he told me, using the English word to emphasize the quality that he had found appealing.

  ‘It wasn’t easy for me to convince my family to accept our marriage. Even though she was young and beautiful, you know the kind of stigma our community has against divorced women. And she had two children from her previous marriage, which prejudiced them against her even more. I was young, a man, and they thought I could do better.’

  But Rehana’s radical nature changed into simple querulousness with marriage. Jabbar said that it had made him so unhappy – her fights with neighbours, with small children – that he had wanted to kill himself. But what made him end the marriage was her newly discovered sense of status. She wanted him to rise socially and economically, to become important, to be more than an organizer.

  ‘I found out – and I found out after a long time, because my comrades kept the fact from me – that if anyone came to see me at home and she answered the door, she would turn them away. She would say, “Come back later, the boss is sleeping.” That was something I couldn’t accept.’

  It sounded annoying but not a serious flaw, I thought. Perhaps she had wanted to spend more time with him. But Jabbar wouldn’t accept this argument.

  ‘When she said, “The boss is asleep,” she was doing something horrible. The people who come to me for help, I am not their boss. When we organize the afflicted, we have to believe that they are our equals. Otherwise, we become like the politicians and civil servants who are supposedly there to serve us, who are elected by us, paid from our taxes, and yet treat us as their inferiors.

  ‘You will have noticed,’ Jabbar continued, ‘that when some of the older women speak to us after the rally and want our contact information, I rebuke my associates if they just rattle off the phone number and address. I ask them to write it on a slip of paper and give it to them, because otherwise we’re taking advantage of the fact that an elderly, illiterate woman won’t remember a phone number or address given out so quickly. She won’t know how to write it down and it will make her feel small, make her feel inadequate. But when you write it out and give it to her, you show her that you are not a politician, not an incredibly important person, not her boss. That’s what Rehana wouldn’t understand, that I didn’t choose to do this in order to become a boss, to be someone rich and powerful. The other thing she didn’t understand is that organizing doesn’t stop at five in the evening. The people who came to my house were often desperate, perhaps about to be evicted, perhaps with a child who had to be admitted to hospital.’

  Failed marriages are notoriously tricky narratives even when one of the protagonists isn’t an organizer. But when one person is obsessed with work that knows no limits, that involves interacting with suffering and poverty on an everyday basis and that does not lead to easily quantifiable rewards, the person can find his or her work destroying an otherwise resilient relationship. And Jabbar’s work, which I observed through long mornings and afternoons spent at his office, the flow of time punctuated by the cry of the muezzin from a nearby mosque, involved an unending set of challenges and rather small victories.

  The organization had filed a case in the Supreme Court asking the government to distribute the full amount of the compensation money it had taken from Union Carbide. Two decades after the event, the government had paid out no more than an interim amount of $80 for each person, and even that money had to be divided with corrupt lawyers and officials. People who came to Jabbar for help included those who weren’t members of his organization, such as a middle-aged man who showed up one afternoon and began to cry with rage and frustration as he told us his story.

  He was a waiter in a tea shop who had been affected by the gas, and the government had recently released his initial payment to the lawyer the waiter had needed to hire to make his compensation case. The lawyer invited the waiter into his chamber and asked him to take half the money and leave the rest as fees. When the waiter protested, saying that he had already paid the fees, the lawyer called in a few men, thrashed the waiter and threw him out. When the waiter tried to file a police report at the local station, the officer in charge laughed at him.

  Jabbar’s forehead grew furrowed as he heard this story. He asked for the name of the lawyer and called other lawyers to ask them what they thought of the man. When he had verified from a few different sources that the lawyer was known to be both corrupt and violent, he asked the waiter for the name of the police official who had refused to help him. Then he called a senior police officer and told him the story, including the fact that the area police station hadn’t done anything. He made an appointment for the waiter with the senior official, hung up, and asked someone to talk the waiter through the procedure he would have to follow when he met the senior police officer.

  The whole process took about an hour, in which time Jabbar earned the waiter’s gratitude, confirmed his reputation in the slums and tenements of Bhopal as an honest, pugnacious man and achieved nothing in terms of furthering his organization’s presence outside the city. It was very different from the wa
y the Bhopal Group for Information and Action was run by Satinath Sarangi, a man whose name came up often as a reference point in Western articles and reports.

  I had gone to visit Sathyu (as Sarangi is known) a few days earlier. Sathyu met me at the site where he was putting up a new building for Sambhavna. It would serve both as headquarters for his organization and as an Ayurvedic clinic for gas victims. The new clinic was set back from the crowded roads and settlements of the old city. The red-brick building, Sathyu said, was planned to be ecologically sustainable. It would be kept cool – temperatures in Bhopal reach 110 degrees in the summer – by a complicated system of airflow and by water circulating around the walls. The garden, where we sat and talked while the sun set over the Shyamla Hills in front of us, would be used to grow organic herbs. The patients, when the clinic was in operation, would receive Ayurvedic medicines and massages.

  It was as different from Jabbar’s chaotic operation as Sathyu was from Jabbar. Tall, bearded, and sporting a ponytail, Sathyu had the look of an ageing Indian rock singer. He wore a turban that was wrapped loosely around his head and a black shirt proclaiming ‘Toulouse 27/9/2001, 27/9/2002, 27/9/2003’, which he explained to me as commemorating a chemical plant explosion in 2001 in Toulouse, and where he had gone in 2003 to attend a conference.

  Sathyu was handsome and articulate, alert to the ways of the world. And while Jabbar didn’t like interacting with the West, Sathyu thrived on it, even if his West was the alternative, countercultural West of green, anti-globalization politics. I could see how much such interaction characterized Sathyu’s organization, from the Indian Americans and Bard College undergraduates who sat around his office to the design and principles of the new clinic. When Greenpeace came to Bhopal, as they had done in 2002 when they broke into the factory site, they had worked in partnership with Sathyu. Even the clinic, though Sathyu was initially reluctant to talk about financing, had been built with money donated by readers of the Guardian.

  So when Sathyu said that Jabbar was inefficient and outdated, it was hard to dismiss his charges. They had been colleagues once, in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. At that time, when Union Carbide had swiftly dissociated itself from the local factory (initially refusing to even reveal the composition of the gas because it was a proprietary formula) and senior Indian politicians and officials had fled the city, a large number of disparate personalities, left-leaning political parties and groups had come together under a loose coalition called ‘Morcha’ (Forum). But Morcha had splintered a few years after the event, when the pressure of the original disaster was no longer available to seal the fissures created by conflicting temperaments and varied ideologies. In that aftermath, when various members of Morcha went their separate ways, Jabbar had become corrupt, Sathyu said. He had amassed large amounts of money and started hobnobbing with the politicians. But what Sathyu said he found especially unforgivable was that Jabbar had treated his first wife, Rehana, very badly.

  Sathyu wouldn’t elaborate upon these charges, but when I asked him if he missed working with Jabbar, he paused to reflect. ‘Jabbar has charisma,’ he said. ‘I miss that very much. He has an ability to convince a crowd, work them into a frenzy, and he can interact with common people.’

  It seemed like a good assessment of Jabbar’s strengths. It was also a good assessment, indirectly, of the weakness of Sathyu’s organization. It was Sathyu’s organization I would turn to when I was far from Bhopal and needed a sense of what was happening around the compensation of victims or attempts by Indian industrialists to pressure the government into giving Dow Chemicals complete legal immunity before it began fully fledged operations in India. Sathyu had a terrific website where information and reports had been collated and organized neatly. What he didn’t have were the working-class women, slum-dwellers and toothless old men one encountered constantly in Jabbar’s office. At the premises of the Bhopal Group for Information and Action, the gas victims seemed to appear only on posters on the walls.

  In the slums of Bhopal too, in areas where the disaster has had the greatest fallout, I discovered an inverse relationship between international fame and local knowledge. No one in the slums knew Sathyu or his organization, but everyone knew Jabbar. You could have efficiency or popular support, international alliances or deep local roots, it seemed, but not both.

  I found this paradox fascinating, especially in the new India, a place supposed to have become exposed to the world – or, in other words, the West – through globalization. So I pushed Jabbar, saying that I could understand why he didn’t like Western corporations but I wanted to know what he had against Greenpeace and Western NGOs trying to help the people he cared about. Jabbar began to talk about the arrogance of showing up among impoverished people with laptops and digital cameras. ‘They fly in for a few days,’ he said, and I knew the verb ‘fly’ was as important here as the phrase ‘few days’. When Jabbar went to Delhi, he didn’t even buy a ticket for a reserved berth, let alone in an air-conditioned coach. He travelled in a ‘general’ compartment with no assigned seating and no limit to the number of people who could get on, a free-for-all realm where every inch of space is claimed by some part of a human body.

  ‘They stay in that fancy hotel, Lake View, where it’s five thousand rupees a night,’ Jabbar said.

  ‘It’s not,’ I told him. ‘It’s less than half that amount.’ But I was relieved I wasn’t staying there: I knew that Jabbar approved of the fact that I was staying at the more downmarket Indian Coffee House Hotel.

  Jabbar was undeterred by my correction of the room rates at Lake View. ‘It’s still half a month’s wages for people here. How will poor people even talk to someone living there, in what looks like luxury, let alone march with them?’ We were talking in Jabbar’s office and he led me up to a photograph that showed a young man with thick glasses and a slim, almost emaciated body. ‘That is the picture of someone who was a wonderful comrade.’

  The man was Shankar Guha Niyogi, an activist who had tried to organize mill workers in the neighbouring state of Chhattisgarh through the eighties and nineties. The workers had been mostly tribal people, living in tenements and kept in virtual bondage to mill owners and moneylenders.

  ‘When Niyogi came to Bhopal,’ Jabbar said, ‘he asked me to take him to a market to buy a frock for his daughter. He kept pushing away everything I showed him, saying that he wanted something cheaper. Eventually, I got so frustrated that I asked him what his problem was. We were in an ordinary bazaar, after all, and the frocks were fairly cheap. And what Niyogi told me was, “Jabbar, the people I organize wouldn’t be able to afford these for their daughters. If my daughter, who plays with their children, is seen wearing far better clothes, how will they take me seriously? How will they see me as one of them, and not on the side of the owners and the moneylenders?” ’

  Niyogi was killed in the early nineties by thugs hired by the mill owners, although his wife has stayed on and continues to organize the mill workers. In the late eighties, Jabbar himself had come close to being killed when buying vegetables in the market one day. He was shot in the stomach by a man working for a slum landlord angered by Jabbar’s advocacy on behalf of the tenants. The shooter was relatively inexperienced, so his aim faltered at the last minute even though he had got close to Jabbar.

  But apart from that single dramatic incident, Jabbar’s worries tended to be about prosaic things. He had a weak heart, and our conversations included breaks for the many pills he had to swallow. His organization operated on very little money – and although Sathyu had talked of Jabbar amassing money, I had seen no signs of such money on him, either at work or at home. The women in the organization made a little money from what Jabbar described as ‘job work’, which meant they made the stuffed toys that nobody bought, and stitched misshapen baseball caps and flags for political parties about to fight an election. Some money came from voluntary subscriptions from the members, and some from contributions made by well-wishers. The Honda scooter Jabbar ro
de had been bought with money given him by the writer Arundhati Roy. Hartosh, a friend of mine who had been a correspondent in Bhopal for four years, said that he had paid Jabbar’s telephone bills on a few occasions.

  Yet Jabbar disagreed with my view that he was ill-disposed towards people from the West or from cities like Delhi. ‘I don’t have anything against Greenpeace,’ he said. ‘But I want them to come down to my level when they are here. I don’t want them to be in a hurry when they get here. I want them to slow down, to spend time with us, to allow us to get to know each other. We are not against the world or disinterested in what’s happening elsewhere. Our Saturday rallies are the college we attend to find out more about other people. We have guest speakers who tell us about globalization, about the war in the Middle East, about religion and secularism.’ He was pleased about the fact that he had convinced many of the Muslim women in the organization to get rid of the veil, and that he had Hindus and Muslims working closely together in an India that had become increasingly sectarian. ‘It’s a slow process. It takes time,’ he said. ‘But time is our ally.’

  That seemed like a surprising comment to me. Time was the ally of the bureaucrat, the status quo-ist, I had always thought. Time, we are told, is our great enemy when we wish to effect social change, and it had certainly been the enemy of those people in Bhopal who had seen, over the years, the disaster fade in public memory and their own hopes diminish. Time had taken away the Bollywood good looks I had noticed in an old photograph of Jabbar’s and forced him to swallow all those pills. It had made him less efficient than the younger Sathyu and marked him in his inability to exploit the Internet and the new mobility of the world.