By Nayana Natarajan (2014)
Today
The silhouette of the ice capped mountain stared back into his window glass, on a January night. Outside, he sat on the wicker chair smoking away his last Cuban cigar from the silver box that his then friend Eduardo had gifted him some years ago when he worked for Twinkle Oil, Gas & Energy Company in the United Kingdom. He gazed at the front door of his home in Kullu Manali and walked towards it to softly push the door.
**************
Previously
Upala Reva, a mechanical engineer from Mandya district did his Masters in Marine Engineering at Brown University. He became the Operations Head at one of the world’s leading Energy companies. His stint at Twinkle lasted for ten years before his world shook right under his Crocodile skin loafers.
As a youngster Upala grew up on the rich paddy fields owned jointly by his grandfather and an agriculturist father who worked for a leading global agro-based company as a trader. As a teenager Upala borrowed his father’s Yezdi motorcycle and ran through the acres of fields that his family owned. On one such day the Yezdi broke down and he was stranded in the thick of nowhere, under a light drizzle. He was dead sure that the fuel tank was full because his father always made sure he didn’t end up in parts of their farm where no one could find his son. However when he bent down to check the fuel pipe, the iridescence of leaked petrol was on the flat stone slab under the motorcycle. The chatoyance of Upala’s light brown eyes gleamed at the colors that spread on the wet slab. Upala did not like the look of the leak but the magical stain stirred him. He started to look around and found a red piece of cloth tied around a nearby tree. Walking over to the tree he slowly entangled the tight knot of the semi-dry cloth. He held it in his hand and ripped it into two ribbons and tied one of them securely around the leak. He had no way to know what was left in the fuel tank and if he would be able to make it home. No one passed by the way for nearly an hour and a half. Upala just sat down on the ground. After a few minutes Upala breathed again when he saw help coming his way in the form of their farmhand on a bicycle. Worried that the young master had been gone an hour longer than his usual rides, the farmhand had come looking for Upala. What was left of this little incident was that young Upala was humbled by his unsophisticated knowledge of fixing a mere motorcycle but what really left a mark in his mind was the gradual spread of gleaming hues that he could no longer identify as petrol.
In May 1980, R.G. Public School posted the results of their Grade 10 students on the brick walls,in the standard format of print, in light purple colour. Parents and students scrambled to check their numbers and marks nearly causing a stampede at the gates. The Revas however, received a note from the school Principal congratulating the family, and Upala for scoring 90% marks and topping the school in Mathematics and Science. The family beamed with pride feeling secure of his future. In May 1982, Sharada Pre-University College celebrated the success of their star student by advertising his brilliant score and Number 1 rank in the State’s popular Newspaper.
Upala went on to study his Bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering at IIT, Chennai and completed his MS (Marine Science) at the prestigious Brown University of Rhode Island, USA in 1989.About to continue his education in the USA and enroll for his Doctorate, Upala received a message from his father. A colleague had received the phone call at the University when Upala was busy meeting with his guide - a stalwart in his field who had agreed to take in Upala as his student under a great amount of persuasion. The colleague, unable to deliver the note to Upala directly, had carefully instructed the Office Assistant to be considerate in handing over the note. Reading the lines, Upala’s eyes were filled with tears. A spark from a farm hand’s beedi had burnt down their haystacks, spread across 2 acres of barn yards and burnt down the entire family before dawn. Upala’s grandparents, mother and his baby brother were nestled in the home, built in wood, before fire caught the inside rooms that were adjacent to the burning haystacks. His father was in a different city on a business trip.
Flying back to Bangalore, the nearest international airport to Mandya, Upala was in a distant land, his world collapsing under heartbreak and him seeking answers to his passionate love, the science of fuels. He felt hurt at the irony of the vent. Here he was knocking the greatest academic doors to find solutions to the ever rising global problems of conserving fuel and there his house was burned down by the common most fuels known to man – wood and dried grass.
His father freed the baggage from his hands, looked him in the eye and dropped his head on his son’s chest sobbing. Upala’s eyes were dry but his throat was swelling as he looked at the help who had arrived with his father. It was the same farmhand who had rescued Upala from the leaking petrol pipe incident. Looking away to avoid meeting his eyes filled with kindness and empathy, Upala picked up his knap sack from the floor. With his arms around his father’s shoulder, Junior Reva Sir walked to the Mahindra Jeep, climbing into the rear seat and helping his father as the driver started the vehicle. The farmhand looked straight and slid into the seat beside the driver understanding Upala’s unexpressed sorrow and the obvious pain of both his masters.
In the events that followed, Upala stayed on in Mandya for 6 months with his father who was now retired from his job as a trader but continued to take care of their ancestral farm of 1200 acres. During these 6 months Upala collected himself and started to read the books he carried from the USA. He ventured to look for potential opportunities in his area to develop alternate solutions to fuel resources. He decided to move towards a different landscape that perhaps provided his desired outcome and also made him stay close to his father and the land his forefathers tilled.
****
Salcette is the home to the beautiful Sunset beach in Goa. A bearded young man in blue jeans and bare chest lay down on the sand and watched the sun go down. Serious and sharp on the outside his soul had started healing and he felt calm. Having already quit his smoking habit that he had picked during his Masters, his fingers itched to hold a nearby stick and pretend to smoke. Inwardly smiling at this strange impulse his eyes wandered to the length of the sand.
The completely deserted and almost dark landscape made Upala rise from the beach and brush away the sand on his back. He put his shirt on and started to walk the long distance to the nearest bus station.
A fellow IITian, Rodrigues (known to his friends as Rod), had started a new business unit in his father’s Oil and Energy Company in Goa and had made inroads to micro-algal biofuel technology. When Upala went to Rod looking for contacts in his field to find a job, Rod asked if he was interested to join his Biofuel division as a Research Lead. Upala jumped at the
opportunity to be a maverick entrepreneurial employee of D-Lite Oil and Energy Company for a monthly salary of Rs. 4,000. In the following days, Upala and Rod put their bright heads together and started exploring the Western coast of India. Every weekend they would swim or snorkel in the ocean together discovering different species of planktons, algae and fishes that could possibly solve the world’s fuel problems. In the meanwhile, Senior Reva had found a simple solution to his loneliness, his marriage to a friend’s widow residing in Ramnagar. Her name was Rohini.
As the days passed, Rod and Upala filed for a patent on a biodiesel product developed in the lab at D-Lite. This breakthrough technology would solve 3% of the global fuel needs on initial commercialization and could solve upto 10% of the needs as biotechnology would advance enough to grow the marine microbes in vitro, on an industrial scale. The energy industry was anxious to find some concrete solutions to their mounting demand for alternative fuels. Trade journals across the world carried news of this new product by D-Lite that could take the industry by storm.
It was in Goa that Upala shifted gears from a small private company to a leading multinational company. In 1997 Twinkle acquired D-Lite where Upala was leading a world-class project of generating energy from biological sources.
A South American businessman named Eduardo had started a private company focused on Oil, Gas & Energy in the Gulf. The company had grown very large in 15 years of its inception and the Head Office was registered at Wales, United Kingdom. The 5 year old daughter of the businessman was the apple of his eye and her nick name became the one that the world recognized as one of the most powerful lobbyists in the Oil, Gas & Energy sector. The Company was re-named Twinkle as it went public on the day she celebrated her first birthday. Eduardo’s business soared higher as it went public. The man who sincerely tried for his company to be a household name was also one of the firsts to read the news tidbit about the biodiesel product from a country unknown to him except for the name of a love monument called Taj Mahal.
Eduardo took flight to Mumbai on a Saturday afternoon and met some powerful business people in the city to start up new initiatives in the country and without a moment to spare he hired a taxi to Goa and sat in the back seat of a red Mercedes Benz with his Secretary.
Rod’s Portugal background may have come in handy in breaking the ice with Eduardo who was born in Havana, Cuba but lived in Brazil for 10 years during his growing years before moving to Ecuador, Qatar and UK. Eduardo was fluent in Spanish, Portugal, Quechua, Arabic, English and French. However, it was not the language connection that brightened Eduardo. It was the sombre black eyes of the handsome bearded man in Blue jeans and a checkered shirt wearing a lab coat that caught his attention. Upala’s greasy hands half stretched for a handshake and an apologetic smile broke through his face suggesting he needed a hand-wash. Eduardo grabbed the hand and sniffed the grease, displaying clear pleasure in seeing a man work on his “gold mine”.
The acquisition of D-Lite caused only a mild stir in the industry. The use of biodiesels and other fuels of such kind were not causing traders to sit up in their chairs. Not yet. However, the world was watching a new phenomenon from a country surrounded by the Indian Ocean where marine life was limited but promised fuel supplements or alternatives from those very few water-lives. Upala now headed the Eurasian R&D Team of Twinkle from Singapore and in turn was exposed to the deadly watchdogs of the global oil cartel. Rod and his father were however happy to stay rooted to their hometown and start a new venture with the newly gained capital of $35 million.
The dramatic rise in domestic crude oil consumption coupled with the meagre oil production put tremendous amount of stress on foreign exchange reserves alongside rising instability because of its cascading effect on the economy. The South Asian countries nervously watched and grumbled at their helplessness at the practices of the OPEC cartel in fixing very high crude oil prices. The ongoing challenges of exploration and the tremendous amount of CAPEX required to keep digging oil wells deep into the sea along with the serious environmental hazards made India in particular relook at its consumption, demand and imports of oil. Hence scientists came under pressure to vigorously develop newer plant based fuels to depend less on the global supply of oil. The Jatropha plant based biodiesel was clearly the most viable solution as corn and palm based fuels resulted in increased food prices due to displacement of food crops in agricultural lands. This snowball effect gave sleepless nights to the likes of Eduardo and his chieftain Upala whose core business was to deliver on newer inventions of biofuels to the world markets. Over time, the brilliant mind of Upala suffered a blow when he was requested to move out of R&D and into Global Operations at Wales, UK. He was replaced by a 28 year old valedictorian of Cranfield University, UK named Ben-Zion Levys.
In another world, due to the insistence of his closest blood relative, Upala’s father had given in to the rising demand for celluloitic fuels and planted Sugarcane stems all over his agricultural land. The crop fetched him very good return on investment for the first two years. He thanked his son silently for providing him a small fortune that he could keep in spite of all the unpredictability associated with cultivating agriculture land. The rising demand for ethanol in Brazil and US increased the fortunes of farmers surrounding the soils of the Revas. Meanwhile Upala’s company produced ethanol from the raw material sourced through its traders sitting in Belgaum with the crop from Mandya having a higher demand in the market compared to those sourced from other Indian states.
On July 13, 2007 it was a Friday afternoon in Qatar where Twinkle owned a Liquefied Natural Gas plant nearer to the Safaniya Oil Field. Most of the foreign nationals were busy working on the production line. Somewhere in Brazil there was an Ethanol producing unit, also owned by Twinkle. It was the largest production unit for ethanol on the world map. On the same day,both these units went into flames shaking the world energy market in its cylinders. While both countries suspected an accident in their backyards, Eduardo knew in no uncertain terms that his company was a victim of Energy terrorism and they were sending them a clear message.
The new R&D Head of Twinkle, Ben-Zion was hours away from filing a patent for his path breaking technology of generating fuel from soil microbes that were ubiquitous in nature. It would, by far, be the cheapest fuel that can be produced sustainably for centuries withoutpolluting the environment and cause no ill effects to living beings of the planet. Eduardo and Upala had gone through a tedious process of making sure that all the claims they would make are authentic and accurate. The company was holding its breath with this earth shattering invention burning in their hands. Somehow information had leaked.
****
The investigations were on, full scale. Insurance companies in both countries sent their experts to crack the source of the blasts at the two plants. At the Qatar plant all 45 of its foreign national employees had died whereas the Brazil plant had 13 deaths and 234 injuries. The entire staff at Brazil had evacuated the building for a bi-weekly fire drill from the Employee Health & Safety team. Most of the casualties were truck drivers who were pulling out their delivery vehicles and ended up as charred bodies in the last minute at the gates. No one was sure if it was arson or a leaky pipe that created this tragedy. The PR spokesperson at Twinkle had to lay low for a few days till they sorted out internally their response to media. Eduardo was zapped and moved around his office like a zombie. He knew his responsibility was to address the utter shock and morale of his existing employees. As for Upala Reva, he sat on the floor of his shower room under a sharp drizzle of cold water prickling the skin on his back.
In the aftermath of events, Eduardo announced to his shareholders and media that the two blasts were independent of each other and it was a freaky coincidence that were timed so closely. A new employee had intended to surprise a co-worker on a Birthday and brought a cake with a single candle into the Ethanol plant at Brazil near one of the grain elevators where different raw materials were stored. The co-worker frowning on this violation of safety protocol tried to put out the candle and instead, toppled the candle accidentally onto the dusty ground that caught fire with no haste. The mock fire drill alarm was running in high pitch causing more confusion and everyone trying to run to the exit. The two employees were immediately engulfed by the fire while most of the employees had gotten out. The remaining 11 employees seated in their trucks were already on the move and their reaction time was just not good enough. As for Qatar, static electricity had triggered the fire from one corner of the plant and the fire had quickly swallowed the entire plant. Upala, the Head of Operations of Twinkle Oil, Gas & Energy Company was let go as the next 12 months resulted in right sizing the company to recover costs from the damages at hand. Ben-Zion Levys left Twinkle of his own accord to join a small biotechnology company in Dyfed, UK.
****
As the wind blew, the ashes on the Reva farm, resulting from burning the dry leaves before harvesting the next crop of sugarcane, rose above the soil. Upala’s father sighed as he stood in the middle of his large farm missing his only surviving son.
The silhouette of the ice capped mountain stared back into his window glass, on a January night. Outside, he sat on the wicker chair smoking away his last Cuban cigar from the silver box that his then friend Eduardo had gifted him some years ago when he worked for Twinkle Oil, Gas & Energy Company in the United Kingdom. He gazed at the front door of his home in Kullu Manali and walked towards it to softly push the door.
**************
Previously
Upala Reva, a mechanical engineer from Mandya district did his Masters in Marine Engineering at Brown University. He became the Operations Head at one of the world’s leading Energy companies. His stint at Twinkle lasted for ten years before his world shook right under his Crocodile skin loafers.
As a youngster Upala grew up on the rich paddy fields owned jointly by his grandfather and an agriculturist father who worked for a leading global agro-based company as a trader. As a teenager Upala borrowed his father’s Yezdi motorcycle and ran through the acres of fields that his family owned. On one such day the Yezdi broke down and he was stranded in the thick of nowhere, under a light drizzle. He was dead sure that the fuel tank was full because his father always made sure he didn’t end up in parts of their farm where no one could find his son. However when he bent down to check the fuel pipe, the iridescence of leaked petrol was on the flat stone slab under the motorcycle. The chatoyance of Upala’s light brown eyes gleamed at the colors that spread on the wet slab. Upala did not like the look of the leak but the magical stain stirred him. He started to look around and found a red piece of cloth tied around a nearby tree. Walking over to the tree he slowly entangled the tight knot of the semi-dry cloth. He held it in his hand and ripped it into two ribbons and tied one of them securely around the leak. He had no way to know what was left in the fuel tank and if he would be able to make it home. No one passed by the way for nearly an hour and a half. Upala just sat down on the ground. After a few minutes Upala breathed again when he saw help coming his way in the form of their farmhand on a bicycle. Worried that the young master had been gone an hour longer than his usual rides, the farmhand had come looking for Upala. What was left of this little incident was that young Upala was humbled by his unsophisticated knowledge of fixing a mere motorcycle but what really left a mark in his mind was the gradual spread of gleaming hues that he could no longer identify as petrol.
In May 1980, R.G. Public School posted the results of their Grade 10 students on the brick walls,in the standard format of print, in light purple colour. Parents and students scrambled to check their numbers and marks nearly causing a stampede at the gates. The Revas however, received a note from the school Principal congratulating the family, and Upala for scoring 90% marks and topping the school in Mathematics and Science. The family beamed with pride feeling secure of his future. In May 1982, Sharada Pre-University College celebrated the success of their star student by advertising his brilliant score and Number 1 rank in the State’s popular Newspaper.
Upala went on to study his Bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering at IIT, Chennai and completed his MS (Marine Science) at the prestigious Brown University of Rhode Island, USA in 1989.About to continue his education in the USA and enroll for his Doctorate, Upala received a message from his father. A colleague had received the phone call at the University when Upala was busy meeting with his guide - a stalwart in his field who had agreed to take in Upala as his student under a great amount of persuasion. The colleague, unable to deliver the note to Upala directly, had carefully instructed the Office Assistant to be considerate in handing over the note. Reading the lines, Upala’s eyes were filled with tears. A spark from a farm hand’s beedi had burnt down their haystacks, spread across 2 acres of barn yards and burnt down the entire family before dawn. Upala’s grandparents, mother and his baby brother were nestled in the home, built in wood, before fire caught the inside rooms that were adjacent to the burning haystacks. His father was in a different city on a business trip.
Flying back to Bangalore, the nearest international airport to Mandya, Upala was in a distant land, his world collapsing under heartbreak and him seeking answers to his passionate love, the science of fuels. He felt hurt at the irony of the vent. Here he was knocking the greatest academic doors to find solutions to the ever rising global problems of conserving fuel and there his house was burned down by the common most fuels known to man – wood and dried grass.
His father freed the baggage from his hands, looked him in the eye and dropped his head on his son’s chest sobbing. Upala’s eyes were dry but his throat was swelling as he looked at the help who had arrived with his father. It was the same farmhand who had rescued Upala from the leaking petrol pipe incident. Looking away to avoid meeting his eyes filled with kindness and empathy, Upala picked up his knap sack from the floor. With his arms around his father’s shoulder, Junior Reva Sir walked to the Mahindra Jeep, climbing into the rear seat and helping his father as the driver started the vehicle. The farmhand looked straight and slid into the seat beside the driver understanding Upala’s unexpressed sorrow and the obvious pain of both his masters.
In the events that followed, Upala stayed on in Mandya for 6 months with his father who was now retired from his job as a trader but continued to take care of their ancestral farm of 1200 acres. During these 6 months Upala collected himself and started to read the books he carried from the USA. He ventured to look for potential opportunities in his area to develop alternate solutions to fuel resources. He decided to move towards a different landscape that perhaps provided his desired outcome and also made him stay close to his father and the land his forefathers tilled.
****
Salcette is the home to the beautiful Sunset beach in Goa. A bearded young man in blue jeans and bare chest lay down on the sand and watched the sun go down. Serious and sharp on the outside his soul had started healing and he felt calm. Having already quit his smoking habit that he had picked during his Masters, his fingers itched to hold a nearby stick and pretend to smoke. Inwardly smiling at this strange impulse his eyes wandered to the length of the sand.
The completely deserted and almost dark landscape made Upala rise from the beach and brush away the sand on his back. He put his shirt on and started to walk the long distance to the nearest bus station.
A fellow IITian, Rodrigues (known to his friends as Rod), had started a new business unit in his father’s Oil and Energy Company in Goa and had made inroads to micro-algal biofuel technology. When Upala went to Rod looking for contacts in his field to find a job, Rod asked if he was interested to join his Biofuel division as a Research Lead. Upala jumped at the
opportunity to be a maverick entrepreneurial employee of D-Lite Oil and Energy Company for a monthly salary of Rs. 4,000. In the following days, Upala and Rod put their bright heads together and started exploring the Western coast of India. Every weekend they would swim or snorkel in the ocean together discovering different species of planktons, algae and fishes that could possibly solve the world’s fuel problems. In the meanwhile, Senior Reva had found a simple solution to his loneliness, his marriage to a friend’s widow residing in Ramnagar. Her name was Rohini.
As the days passed, Rod and Upala filed for a patent on a biodiesel product developed in the lab at D-Lite. This breakthrough technology would solve 3% of the global fuel needs on initial commercialization and could solve upto 10% of the needs as biotechnology would advance enough to grow the marine microbes in vitro, on an industrial scale. The energy industry was anxious to find some concrete solutions to their mounting demand for alternative fuels. Trade journals across the world carried news of this new product by D-Lite that could take the industry by storm.
It was in Goa that Upala shifted gears from a small private company to a leading multinational company. In 1997 Twinkle acquired D-Lite where Upala was leading a world-class project of generating energy from biological sources.
A South American businessman named Eduardo had started a private company focused on Oil, Gas & Energy in the Gulf. The company had grown very large in 15 years of its inception and the Head Office was registered at Wales, United Kingdom. The 5 year old daughter of the businessman was the apple of his eye and her nick name became the one that the world recognized as one of the most powerful lobbyists in the Oil, Gas & Energy sector. The Company was re-named Twinkle as it went public on the day she celebrated her first birthday. Eduardo’s business soared higher as it went public. The man who sincerely tried for his company to be a household name was also one of the firsts to read the news tidbit about the biodiesel product from a country unknown to him except for the name of a love monument called Taj Mahal.
Eduardo took flight to Mumbai on a Saturday afternoon and met some powerful business people in the city to start up new initiatives in the country and without a moment to spare he hired a taxi to Goa and sat in the back seat of a red Mercedes Benz with his Secretary.
Rod’s Portugal background may have come in handy in breaking the ice with Eduardo who was born in Havana, Cuba but lived in Brazil for 10 years during his growing years before moving to Ecuador, Qatar and UK. Eduardo was fluent in Spanish, Portugal, Quechua, Arabic, English and French. However, it was not the language connection that brightened Eduardo. It was the sombre black eyes of the handsome bearded man in Blue jeans and a checkered shirt wearing a lab coat that caught his attention. Upala’s greasy hands half stretched for a handshake and an apologetic smile broke through his face suggesting he needed a hand-wash. Eduardo grabbed the hand and sniffed the grease, displaying clear pleasure in seeing a man work on his “gold mine”.
The acquisition of D-Lite caused only a mild stir in the industry. The use of biodiesels and other fuels of such kind were not causing traders to sit up in their chairs. Not yet. However, the world was watching a new phenomenon from a country surrounded by the Indian Ocean where marine life was limited but promised fuel supplements or alternatives from those very few water-lives. Upala now headed the Eurasian R&D Team of Twinkle from Singapore and in turn was exposed to the deadly watchdogs of the global oil cartel. Rod and his father were however happy to stay rooted to their hometown and start a new venture with the newly gained capital of $35 million.
The dramatic rise in domestic crude oil consumption coupled with the meagre oil production put tremendous amount of stress on foreign exchange reserves alongside rising instability because of its cascading effect on the economy. The South Asian countries nervously watched and grumbled at their helplessness at the practices of the OPEC cartel in fixing very high crude oil prices. The ongoing challenges of exploration and the tremendous amount of CAPEX required to keep digging oil wells deep into the sea along with the serious environmental hazards made India in particular relook at its consumption, demand and imports of oil. Hence scientists came under pressure to vigorously develop newer plant based fuels to depend less on the global supply of oil. The Jatropha plant based biodiesel was clearly the most viable solution as corn and palm based fuels resulted in increased food prices due to displacement of food crops in agricultural lands. This snowball effect gave sleepless nights to the likes of Eduardo and his chieftain Upala whose core business was to deliver on newer inventions of biofuels to the world markets. Over time, the brilliant mind of Upala suffered a blow when he was requested to move out of R&D and into Global Operations at Wales, UK. He was replaced by a 28 year old valedictorian of Cranfield University, UK named Ben-Zion Levys.
In another world, due to the insistence of his closest blood relative, Upala’s father had given in to the rising demand for celluloitic fuels and planted Sugarcane stems all over his agricultural land. The crop fetched him very good return on investment for the first two years. He thanked his son silently for providing him a small fortune that he could keep in spite of all the unpredictability associated with cultivating agriculture land. The rising demand for ethanol in Brazil and US increased the fortunes of farmers surrounding the soils of the Revas. Meanwhile Upala’s company produced ethanol from the raw material sourced through its traders sitting in Belgaum with the crop from Mandya having a higher demand in the market compared to those sourced from other Indian states.
On July 13, 2007 it was a Friday afternoon in Qatar where Twinkle owned a Liquefied Natural Gas plant nearer to the Safaniya Oil Field. Most of the foreign nationals were busy working on the production line. Somewhere in Brazil there was an Ethanol producing unit, also owned by Twinkle. It was the largest production unit for ethanol on the world map. On the same day,both these units went into flames shaking the world energy market in its cylinders. While both countries suspected an accident in their backyards, Eduardo knew in no uncertain terms that his company was a victim of Energy terrorism and they were sending them a clear message.
The new R&D Head of Twinkle, Ben-Zion was hours away from filing a patent for his path breaking technology of generating fuel from soil microbes that were ubiquitous in nature. It would, by far, be the cheapest fuel that can be produced sustainably for centuries withoutpolluting the environment and cause no ill effects to living beings of the planet. Eduardo and Upala had gone through a tedious process of making sure that all the claims they would make are authentic and accurate. The company was holding its breath with this earth shattering invention burning in their hands. Somehow information had leaked.
****
The investigations were on, full scale. Insurance companies in both countries sent their experts to crack the source of the blasts at the two plants. At the Qatar plant all 45 of its foreign national employees had died whereas the Brazil plant had 13 deaths and 234 injuries. The entire staff at Brazil had evacuated the building for a bi-weekly fire drill from the Employee Health & Safety team. Most of the casualties were truck drivers who were pulling out their delivery vehicles and ended up as charred bodies in the last minute at the gates. No one was sure if it was arson or a leaky pipe that created this tragedy. The PR spokesperson at Twinkle had to lay low for a few days till they sorted out internally their response to media. Eduardo was zapped and moved around his office like a zombie. He knew his responsibility was to address the utter shock and morale of his existing employees. As for Upala Reva, he sat on the floor of his shower room under a sharp drizzle of cold water prickling the skin on his back.
In the aftermath of events, Eduardo announced to his shareholders and media that the two blasts were independent of each other and it was a freaky coincidence that were timed so closely. A new employee had intended to surprise a co-worker on a Birthday and brought a cake with a single candle into the Ethanol plant at Brazil near one of the grain elevators where different raw materials were stored. The co-worker frowning on this violation of safety protocol tried to put out the candle and instead, toppled the candle accidentally onto the dusty ground that caught fire with no haste. The mock fire drill alarm was running in high pitch causing more confusion and everyone trying to run to the exit. The two employees were immediately engulfed by the fire while most of the employees had gotten out. The remaining 11 employees seated in their trucks were already on the move and their reaction time was just not good enough. As for Qatar, static electricity had triggered the fire from one corner of the plant and the fire had quickly swallowed the entire plant. Upala, the Head of Operations of Twinkle Oil, Gas & Energy Company was let go as the next 12 months resulted in right sizing the company to recover costs from the damages at hand. Ben-Zion Levys left Twinkle of his own accord to join a small biotechnology company in Dyfed, UK.
****
As the wind blew, the ashes on the Reva farm, resulting from burning the dry leaves before harvesting the next crop of sugarcane, rose above the soil. Upala’s father sighed as he stood in the middle of his large farm missing his only surviving son.
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