The Night The Air Held Us By Our Throats

It was a still winter night. The stealth in the air was a sinister warning of the massacre that residents of Bhopal would wake up to, the lucky ones, that is. Like the rest of the city, unaware of the impending doom, accompanied by my parents, we returned home around 11 pm after attending a wedding. The Indian winter wedding season was in full swing. Doors and windows well shut, we went to bed, oblivious of the havoc that was unfolding in the other part of the capital.

Yes, it was Bhopal, on the night of December 2, 1984, a night that has left an indelible mark in the lives and minds of everyone who was in the city on that fatal night. Very early, the following morning, I was suddenly woken by my mother’s voice saying something about a gas leak. No one knew where the leak was from or what it was; neighbours gathered; some said it was some gas cylinder that had burst. Stories passed from person to person and panic gripped the city.

Where was the government, the state machinery? It was later learnt that most ministers, including then Madhya Pradesh chief minister Arjun Singh, and senior officials had fled the city. The people of Bhopal were floundering in the dark, trying to understand what was actually happening. Suddenly, about 9:30 am on December 3, a widow in our neighbourhood  was at our door, banging the door and crying uncontrollably. Her school-going son had gone to a friend’s house a few blocks away, she said, and there had been a scare about a second leak, maybe from the Union Carbide plant.

As I ran to get her son back, the road was flooded with cars, scooters, people running helter-skelter, screaming, “Woh aa raha hai! Cylinder phat gaya hai.” No one would stop to tell anyone who asked what the panic and bustle was all about. Suddenly, a car stopped beside me and a head popped out to tell me, “Beta, run, there has been a second leak.” I braved the way ahead to reach the widow’s son and get him to his mother, but nervousness and fear was rapidly setting in. After returning home with the young boy and handing him over to his mother, I was ordered to get into the house, and the windows and doors were locked, while my parents figured out what needed to be done next. By then, the enormousness of the disaster slowly started dawning on all of us. The news of the second leak was covered by some newspapers, but no one ever got to know whether it really happened or not.

By noon, my sister and brother-in-law, who also lived in Bhopal, came home and we decided to sit tight at home. My niece, then a toddler, was our main concern; to protect her from any effect was the family’s priority. Bhopal by then had become a ghost town. Those still alive huddled together in their homes.

The days that followed can only be described as a dance of death. With trepidation, yet anxious to help, accompanied by my sister, who was a banker, and her colleagues, we went to the areas around the Union Carbide plant, which was surroun­ded by slums, to provide any help we could, as by then it was clear there was a shortage of doctors and medical assistance. The horror that stared at us when we entered the slums is unforgettable. The old, the young, toddlers—everyone was coughing, eyes bulging out of the sockets, some kind of white liquid streaming down their cheeks. People were vomiting, screaming, crying helplessly. They had not had any medical attention even two days after the fateful night. We went to the city’s hospitals, to see if we could get medicines to the people. The hospital grounds had turned into impromptu morgues. Most people there were dead, some barely breathing. A doctor who had been working round the clock told us the only way to help those affected by methyl isocyanate (MIC) was to do nothing. No one knew what to do, there was no literature from Union Carbide.

Reportedly, we later learnt, that apart from MIC, the gas cloud may have contained phosgene, hydrogen cyanide, carbon monoxide, hydrogen chloride, oxides of nitrogen, monomethyl amine (MMA) and carbon dioxide. But that was a knowledge that came much later. During the emergency, doctors, medical college freshers from other cities who were called in to Bhopal, engineering students—they were all working in hospitals along with doctors, with very little real information available. Clearly, because of lack of any information, the right drugs were not being administered. Schools and colleges were converted into temporary hospitals. The putrid smell of death was engulfing the city. Animals and cattle lay dead everywhere; there were carcasses floating in the lake. Vegetables, fruits, water—all contaminated. Foodgrain stocks were soon running out in people’s homes. All we ate for the next two months was rice and lentils or rajma. My father and brother-in-law took turns to drive to Hoshangabad to buy water and milk.

Most of us trying to help the affected were falling ill. After visiting the sufferers, my sister suddenly began coughing and vomiting. In the aftermath, doctors were encouraging pregnant women to abort. My sister’s colleague, who was five months pregnant, and thereby could not abort, later gave birth to a disabled child despite a perfectly healthy pregnancy until the gas leak. She lives in Bhopal with her son to tell the story of what happened to the people of the city. There are many in Bhopal who developed breathing problems and still live with it.

The official figure was about 3,000 dead, but it could not have been less than 25,000. Entire families had been wiped out and mass cremations took place in urgency because of the stench. The plant had several slums around it and most of those people remain unaccounted for. Recently, I spoke to an elderly tailor who had lived through the nightmare. He described how a family member woke him up in the night and told him to run. People ran in all directions that night, some into the area where the gas cloud had settled.

There were stampedes here and there as people ran or fled in cars loaded beyond capacity. Even on the outskirts of the city one could see bodies strewn about. There were some blocks of flats near the plant in which not a single person survived that night. I remember that a wedding was taking place at Professors Colony, not far from the plant, and the bride and groom had completed two pheras when the news spread and they all fled the city. The rest of the pheras were conducted in Itarsi.

There was also the brave station master who did not let one of the major late-night express trains stop at Bhopal by giving a green signal and saved the lives of the passengers. Not much after he flagged the train away to safety, he died in his office. The next day the Bhopal railway station lay abandoned. Not a coolie or a beggar in sight.

On January 30, 1985, almost two months after the trag­edy, I was travelling to Delhi and coincidentally met a team of doctors in the train who were coming from the south to attend a medical conference on the effects of the Union Carbide tragedy. They were keen to gather details of my experience of that dreadful night. And in exchange, they shared their non-veg food with me. For me, that was bliss, having lived on lentils and rice for two months.

Time heals, and life continues. But life has never been the same for those who lived through that night. The state had let Bhopal down that night. Health issues continue to dog generations. Memories of that grotesque night stalk memories. Thirty years on, justice has still not been done.

(Nabanita Sircar is Outlook’s London correspondent.)