How would you feel if you were told that the water you’ve
been drinking every day for several decades contains toxic waste from a nearby
factory? And how would you feel when you’re told that this was known by the
companies in question but nobody bothered? And then, how would you feel if a
child in your family is born with brain cancer because his mother drank the
water while she was pregnant? This, in short, is the outline of the skeleton
that tumbles out of the closet in New Jersey’s small town of Toms River.
A Pulitzer Prize-winner is a book that needs no other
recommendation. But even so, a book like Toms
River is a treasured possession nonpareil. On the face of it, it’s the
story of one town’s battle for answers—answers to why the dreaded tentacles of
cancer were enveloping its children at a starkly alarming rate; a battle
against toxic dumpers and apathetic state agencies. But this isn’t the story of
one town. It’s the story of the world we are living in, it’s a story that is
much more chilling than any supernatural horror tale or gory serial-killer
saga, because it’s the kind of slow, invisible horror that could attack anyone
anywhere.
This is amazingly in-depth investigative journalism by Dan
Fagin, which traces almost the entire evolution of cancer research and the
case-study of clusters to correlate the causes, along with the sixty year saga
of polluting of a town’s river, soil, air and groundwater by callous industrial
behemoths —Ciba Geigy and Union Carbide— who refused to comply with state
regulations or build waste-treatment plants because those things would incur
huge costs and eat into their profits. That the cost of these profits would be
borne by children getting blood, brain and spinal cancers was a point that
didn’t seem to matter.
Among the industrial ‘villains’ that feature, Union Carbide
is a name that Indians can never forget – for the Bhopal Gas Tragedy. The book
highlights the very tragic reality that under cover of providing ‘mass
employment’ and ‘economic growth’, industrial giants are allowed to get
away—literally—with murder.
Fagin hits you in the gut with the tons upon tons of stomach-churning
details, but never a dull page would you find. Every line is worth poring over,
because Fagin’s astonishing writing prowess alternates so superbly between the
emotional, the medical and the criminal. Every chapter is replete with facts
and research yet has the quality of a fast-flowing page turner.
But sadly, unlike a regular thriller, there is no
retribution at the end. The families battle it out, waiting for scientists to
establish that the companies’ pollution did indeed lead to their children’s
suffering. But statistical tools and scientific research prove inadequate and
whatever little progress is made is outshouted by lobbying and business clout.
There were, of course, victories: like the clean-up
operation which treated ‘343,000 cubic yards of soil’—“enough to cover twenty
seven football fields with six feet of tainted dirt”, the charging of Ciba at
various counts and the “the largest legal settlement in the annals of toxic
dumping.” Yet, the feeling at the end is that of rage and helplessness.
You read the book with eyes popping out and mouth contorted,
wondering how much of this could be happening in the place you call your own.
Particularly when time and again, the book says that dye-making
operations—complete with killer gases and carcinogenic wastes—have moved to
Asia on account of cheaper labour. It ends, in fact, with exactly the same
happening in South China. You and I have reason to shudder, especially when the
blackened Toms River reminds you of the scarred Yamuna frothing sickly at the
mouth…
This is a book that simply must be read, if only to shake us
out of our ‘growth-induced’ stupor.
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