From India, from Ward’s friends in India, comes this brief statement of admiration for an American citizen who created a niche for himself in the hearts of hundreds of people outside the United States.

Most friends and acquaintances remember Ward for his persistent, staunch, unrelenting lobbying for the cause of the victims of the Bhopal gas disaster associated with Union Carbide, an American multinational. Ward’s intensive and continuous support expressed itself in a number of significant books about the disaster and several media articles stretching almost 25 years. He got T.R. Chauhan, a UC operative at the time of the disaster, to write the definitive account of what happened within the plant on the night of the disaster. These were the public face of Ward’s association with the Bhopal gas victims. What is not so well known is that he invariably travelled to the city of Bhopal whenever he visited India and lived and worked with the activists there without ceremony. He was also personally known to several of the victims who knew him as their man in the US.

We had the good fortune to know Ward and Cynthia much earlier, since the mid-seventies. For most of those years, Ward was a regular visitor. He sometimes stayed long months and simply became part of the family. He visited with us practically every year in the eighties and nineties.

Ward was easily voted “most favourite guest,” because he had this uncanny ability to slip into the ways of our household. He never wanted anything special done for him, whether it was food or schedules or even company. Whenever we were free we would talk, otherwise he always had his work to do and we had ours. We would sometimes ask – when he stayed on long visits – whether the food was too spicy or would he like some thing else prepared and his reply was always the same: everything is just fine. He didn’t just say it, he meant it, for he ate with gusto and polished up his plate just like all of us did. 

Ward with Claude and Norma in Goa, India, around 1982

We were astonished at his carpentry skills. We used to reserve all our little carpentry jobs for him when we knew he was coming around because he always insisted on doing hands-on work along with his intellectual stuff. He repaired shelves and wooden stands for us, doors that would not close properly, window panes and bolts that needed fixing, drawers that jammed and umpteen such small and big tasks. Nothing fazed him really. He would handover a small list of requirements for fixing the job and once they were procured he would go about the work on his own, making improvements along the way. 

We remember way back in the eighties, when we lived on a farm, he dug up an entire patch for planting onion bulbs and sowed them in too, sweating away as he worked in the early morning sun. Another time he helped to cut up a pig and joined us in making Goan sausages, spiced with red hot chili and vinegar. What a guy! We have a picture of him with us from that time which has survived all these years.

Ward would always wake up early in the morning, long before we did, make himself a glass of warm water and begin reading the huge volume of papers and books that he always lugged around with him in those unmistakeable, worn out briefcases. We can still picture him walking up and down our living room, dictating into a recorder, eyes half shut, completely absorbed in his work. (The dictation would be sent to his faithful Indian steno, Kamal Raina, in Delhi whom he kept employed for several years.) In the evenings, work for the day completed, he would take what he considered to be a well-deserved glass of feni (a heady local Goan liquor) and sit out in the balcony, our two dogs sprawled beside him, and he was ready to chat with whichever of us or the boys were free. When our children were very small, Ward would happily hold on to any of the babies, if we asked. Nothing was ever too difficult or too low-brow for him to handle. 

His last visit to us was when he was already post-75. This time he was accompanied by Carolyn Oppenheimer. We still remember him taking Carolyn for a hop when we visited a local flea market and he found some lively music being played there!

So let us not grieve about him for too long. Let us decide instead to celebrate the life of this extraordinary individual. He made a deliberate choice to stay out of the rat race, work with the victims of industrial disasters, resist unjust wars, and just about make a nuisance of himself with the powers-that-be. Norma and I would therefore like to express today the simple pleasure of having known him over the past three decades and being grateful for that as well.

Claude and Norma Alvares