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| Do you feel the quality of life has improved in independent India? |
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| Bhopal revisited: Animal`s Story | | | SPEAKING VOLUMES | | | Nilanjana S Roy / New Delhi August 14, 2007 | | | |
| I
used to be human once. So I’m told. I don’t remember it myself, but
people who knew me when I was small say I walked on two feet just like
a human being...” Opening lines of Animal’s People by Indra Sinha
| | | | Most Indians will
remember December 3, 1984; those who were in Bhopal on that day will
never be able to forget it. In the early hours of December 3, a holding
tank at a Union Carbide pesticide plant overheated, releasing 40 tonnes
of methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas; the death toll from what is considered
one of the worst industrial disasters ever was somewhere between 15,000
and 22,000. | | | | Bhopal was
extensively reported on and written about, but unlike other disasters,
it seemed to daunt writers. Partition literature has grown over the
years, and become more complex in the telling. The assassination of
Indira Gandhi, earlier in 1984, finds its way — usually clumsily — into
a score of contemporary Indian novels. This generation of young
writers, from Sujit Saraf (The Peacock Throne) and Raj Kamal Jha
(Fireproof) to Altaf Tyrewala (No God in Sight), are beginning to find
ways to tell the darker stories that emerge in the wake of contemporary
riots and disasters. The Kargil war found its best chroniclers not in
the ranks of fiction writers, but among journalists whose memoirs of
that brief conflict remain invaluable. | | | | The accident at
the plant that made Bhopal, like Chernobyl, into something approaching
a verb, a city’s name converted into shorthand for an almost Biblical
tragedy, deterred most fiction writers. The redoubtable Dominique
Lapierre was one of the few to boldly go where wiser souls had not gone
before. About 18 years after the gas tragedy, Lapierre co-wrote It Was
Five Minutes Past Midnight along with Javier Moro. This fast-paced
novel blended some solid investigative journalism into the history of
the Union Carbide plant with the mawkish, fairy-tale-to-noir horrorshow
story of Padmini, a young slum dweller whose marriage takes place on
the night of the disaster. Lapierre, whose generosity as an author is
only surpassed by his instinctive talent for finding the right cliché
for the right occasion, donated his royalties from the book to Bhopal
victims.
| | | | In 2002, Amulya
Malladi came out with A Breath of Fresh Air, a delicate, meandering but
eminently readable novel that looked at the gas tragedy from the
perspective of Anjali, a young woman who can never forgive her
ex-husband for his role in the damage she suffers on December 3.
Malladi’s book captured the nuances of relationships very well, and
grapples with some of the complexities and challenges of the cost of
being a survivor. But while it was a competent and moving novel, it
lacked force, and suffered from some of the defects of a debut novel.
| | |
| “Sunil, for much of your short life, you believed
people were coming to murder you,” Indra Sinha
wrote in 2006, in a tribute to a friend of his, a
fellow activist who worked on behalf of the Bhopal
victims. Sunil was 13 at the time of the Bhopal gas
tragedy. Separated from his parents, he lost consciousness
and was tossed onto a pile of corpses to be taken
to hospital. He survived that; he managed to find
his younger siblings; he found work; he became an
activist for Bhopal; and slowly, little by little,
he lost his sanity. In 2006, Sunil Kumar put on a
T-shirt that said, “No More Bhopals”,
and hanged himself from the ceiling fan. |
| | | I have never met
Indra Sinha, but from his previous books, I know him as a man of
magnificent obsessions. His non-fiction work, The Cybergypsies,
chronicled cyberculture in an age when that word had not yet been
invented. His first novel, The Death of Mr Love, was an entertaining if
uneven fictionalisation of the Nanavati murder, one of Bombay’s
best-beloved scandals. It was clear from both books that Sinha had the
ability to immerse himself in the world that he was writing about,
whether virtual, historical or real. | | | | But his
involvement with Bhopal is much more than an obsession: finding justice
and practical help for those who survived the tragedy is a commitment
that Sinha has made for several years, as a journalist, as an activist,
and now as a writer. His novel, Animal’s People, is about a boy called
Jaanvar, crippled by a disaster that’s hit the fictional city of
Khaufpur. It’s on the Booker longlist, but that isn’t why you should
read it. Despite the occasional clunkiness of the language and a
tendency to be over-lyrical, Sinha’s writing is powerful and Jaanvar’s
story is deeply moving. This may the closest to the non-stereotypical
Bhopal novel that we’re going to get for a while. nilanjanasroy@gmail.com (Disclaimer: The author is chief editor, EastWest and Westland Books. The opinions expressed here are personal) | | | | | |
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| Updated:15-08-07 00:51 hrs IST |
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