An un-missable, unforgettable journey

BRIDGET HANNA

WRITING IN 777, THE NEWSLETTER OF THE BHOPAL MEDICAL APPEAL

Indra Sinha's delirious new novel, Animal's People, takes place in Khaufpur, a city decimated by the gasses of a foreign company, twenty years ago. "Most people round here don't know their age," says Animal "I do, because I was born a few days before that night, which no one in Khaufpur wants to remember, but nobody can forget."

In this lively and fascinating book, Animal, a gas orphan crippled by illness after he and his family were poisoned by the Kampani, narrates his own remarkable life and the story of a community irrevocably altered by chemicals, into a tape recorder left behind by a foreign journalist. His tale is a raucous, biting, hilarious mix of languages, obscenities and real revelations delivered at a cheerful pace. Animal's world is tough, unforgiving, and unforgettable, and his perspective is nothing if not different. Bent in half by an infection at a young age, Animal walks on all fours and grapples, as he cranes his neck upward to participate, with the large and small questions of humanity, cruelty, love and adolescence.

Journalists, activists, governmentwallli doctors, small time con artists, and regular people who have lost their voice or their their livelihood, come alive in Animal's tale. In a complex and flawed world, marred by poison and poverty, animal tries to understand his own humanity. Animal's name in Hindi is Jaanvar, which means "one who lives." What does it mean to be alive, intelligent, aroused and deeply curious, despite having no family, money, or manifest hope?

What the relationship is between Sinha's Khaufpur and Bhopal, India, marred by a similar disaster in a similar location at a similar time, is not clear. Probably, Bhopal is at most an inspiration, but clearly a deeply textured one. But Sinha helps us to know Khaufpur, its troubles, textures and triumphs, more intimately and more humanely than we could ever hope to know those in Bhopal. Through Sinha's fiction, then, we may yet get a glimpse into the difficult but always dynamic lives of those who do live in Bhopal. Regardless, his tale is an un-missable and unforgettable journey.