TAKE A WALK THROUGH the narrow alleyways off the main road and you immediately know that something’s wrong.
It’s as if the spectre of death is hovering there, ready to speed away those who eluded it one December night, twenty-five years ago. Everyone bears the scars of that horrifying encounter.
Halfway down the lane, Ambereen Khan sits on a battered old chair outside her concrete home. Squinting through goggle-like glasses, she strains to make out the approaching visitor. Her body is emaciated, rigid with arthritis, her legs swollen, and her breathing forced. Ambereen could easily pass for a woman in her sixties, but she’s just thirty-two.
If a cloud of poison gas swept silently across London or New York, killing thousands and crippling many more, we would expect drastic action and answers. The injured would be given relief, the bereaved would be compensated, the guilty parties prosecuted. And, once the dust had settled, Parliament would pass laws ensuring such a catastrophe never happened again.
But in Bhopal things are different.
To the outside world the city’s name is still synonymous with a multi-national’s incompetence. To the people who live there still, Bhopal stands for a far greater misfortune. In the back streets, a stone’s throw south of the Union Carbide factory, they say that the lucky ones perished that night back in 1984. Those who survived have been dealt decades of pain, and the worst affected have been Bhopal’s women.
On breathing the toxic gas, hundreds of them had spontaneous abortions. Many more pregnant women later had still-births, or babies which died after a few days of life. Yet thousands more were made sterile by the disaster. In Bhopal, congenital deformities are common to children born in the years since the toxic leak.
The day before the poison cloud destroyed her life, Ambereen Khan was preparing for her wedding to a man from a neighbouring town.
‘As soon as his family heard about the gas leak,’ she whispers softly, ‘they forbid him to marry me. You see, people don’t want to marry girls from Bhopal. They’re scared that we will give birth to children with two heads.’
Ambereen was eventually married to a local man who had himself become handicapped by the calamity. The possibility of deformed children was never an issue though, for the gas had made Ambereen infertile.
‘Now I am waiting to die,’ she says resolutely. ‘Look around… there’s no joy here, only misery and death.’
As Ambereen pauses to rub her swollen eyes, I scan the street. She’s right. There are no children playing in the long shadows of the afternoon, and none of the usual bustle of Indian back-street life. In the distance, a funeral procession carries a cheap coffin to a nearby Muslim burial ground. Walking solemnly behind, their eyes fixed at the ground, are the relatives of the tragedy’s latest victim.
The area where Ambereen lives is called Jai Prakash Nagar. A predominantly Muslim area, it is home to hundreds of low-income families, most of which used to be casual labourers. They relied on their physical health to work.
A staunchly pious community, some considered the catastrophe to be a scourge sent by God. Accordingly, thousands refused to seek compensation but instead blamed themselves. Those that did seek justice – Ambereen and her husband among them – faced a steep uphill task. Most could not understand the paperwork needed to make a claim. Those who did receive a little money found themselves relieved of it by unscrupulous agents of the underworld.
But, for Ambereen and the women like her, some assistance is at hand. Twice a week, Aziza drops by to have a chat and make sure she’s coping with the pain. Aziza, who’s a health visitor from the Sambhavna Clinic, has to deal daily with the victims’ anger and their sense of betrayal.
‘They can’t understand why their teeth are falling out,’ she explains, ‘why their eyes are bloodshot, why they’re struggling for a single breath, or why arthritis is crippling them well before old age.’
After spending a little time with Ambereen, Aziza heads back to the clinic. Thirty women there are waiting to be treated. Dr. Rachana Pandey, sees each of them in turn.
‘I had just graduated from medical school in 1984,’ she says, ‘and was at Bhopal’s Hamidya Hospital the night of the gas leak. Words can’t explain the scene. There were bodies everywhere. Every inch of space was covered with the dying and the dead.’
The doctor motions for the next patient to enter the surgery.
‘My medical career has been devoted to helping those who were exposed to the poison gas,’ she continues. ‘We never thought that the suffering and death would go on like this. Women are getting their menopause decades before their time, children are suffering from stunted growth, while scores of others are mentally handicapped.’
Dr. Pandey smiles at the young woman who has come to her for treatment, suffering from chronic depression.
‘Look at her,’ she says. ‘Her husband’s been beating her because she can’t conceive, telling her she’s worthless, that she’s a witch. No wonder she’s depressed.’
The Sambhavna Clinic treats only victims of the Union Carbide seepage. More than a hundred a day flock through its doors and make use of its already stretched resources. Patients (eighty per cent of whom are women) are charged a small one-time registration fee, after which all treatment is free. The Clinic is kept afloat by donations, and was set up in the ’nineties with help from the British-based charity Pesticides Trust. There’s an emphasis on Ayurvedic healing, on yoga, and on Western-style counselling – sharing experiences of that life-changing night.
The scale of the situation is enormous.
The hundred thousand female children who were exposed and survived are now at a child-bearing age.
‘An additional problem,’ explains Sarangi, ‘is that women in this community aren’t used to discussing such personal problems within their own families, let alone with others.’
While their bodies ache and burn with the effects of the gas, the victims’ minds are haunted by the memory. Pick anyone at random and they’ll recount their tale.
December 3rd, 1984 was a warm night. Most people had left their windows open. Shortly after one a.m., more than half a million people woke in terror, fighting for breath, their lungs. Their eyes streaming and, gasping, they leapt from their beds and ran into the streets.
‘The gas came in a great fog, which wafted silently into the houses,’ says one women. ‘Outside there was a stampede. All around us our friends and relatives were dropping to the ground,’ adds another.
At that moment no one could have known the awful truth: that a venting pipe at the Union Carbide pesticide plant had fractured, releasing a cocktail of eighteen toxic chemicals, including hydrogen cyanide and the deadly, unstable gas methyl isocyanate.
Unsure of what to do, thousands fled through the streets, charging directly into the path of the poison, over forty tonnes of which was being carried on the wind. Those who made it to hospital had little hope, as no one knew the cause of the disaster.
Morning brought a sobering scene of carnage. There were corpses everywhere. Families huddled together, mothers clutching their children, their eyes bulged, blood vomited down their chests. Hundreds of cows and dogs were dead, too, as were the birds, fallen from the trees.
The official human death toll that night was put at 5,325. But as bodies were scooped into massive pits so quickly, to prevent the spread of disease, no one’s quite sure how many died. The real figure is probably closer to ten thousand.
Zenath was only a child in 1984. Now an adult, she’s still deeply traumatized by the disaster.
‘Everyone remembers,’ she says gently. ‘How can we forget? It’s burned into our memories. We try not to speak of it, but it is always here inside us. My mother led my sisters and me to the mosque. We clambered over bodies to get inside, and we sheltered there, crouching down as low as we could. Around us people were praying, screaming, and they were dying. Everyone was blinded by the gas, everyone choking, desperately clinging onto life.’
Zenath would like to be married, but there’s no money for her dowry. And, in any case, no one wants to marry a sterile woman. Not even in Bhopal. Her father, a watch-repairer, blinks through extra-thick lenses. His eyesight is bad and getting worse. He’s forced to concentrate on mending wall-clocks now, and soon he’ll have to give that up, too.
Across town, at the Bhopal Eye Hospital, senior Surgeon Dr. Dubey is preparing to operate on his seventh patient of the morning. More than three hundred people flock daily to the hospital.
‘Most of those who come here suffer from nebular cornea opacity,’ he explains, ‘it’s like a cataract. Some were blinded totally, while others rubbed their eyes afterwards and went blind as a result.’
Dr. Dubey peers out of his first floor window. A line of patients snakes its way around the building. Most of them have their eyes bandaged. ‘Look at that,’ he says, ‘I treat them as fast as I can, but each day dozens more arrive.’
Miriam is at the end of the line. A mother of three, she’s blind in her right eye. And now her left eye is clouding over. She has constant headaches and can’t walk very far these days. In the stampede that December night she was separated from her husband. She presumes he perished and was buried in one of the mass graves. Each of their children has illnesses resulting from the gas. Despite applying for compensation, the authorities insisted that Miriam had come from a neighbouring city, and was merely pretending to be a victim.
Every Tuesday, Abdul Jabar, a legal advocate, gives free help to women who were affected by the gas attack, in a park in central Bhopal. The founder of the Bhopal Gas Victim’s Association, he sees that the ailing fill out the compensation forms properly.
‘Had this tragedy taken place in the West,’ he says, ‘the factory would have been levelled straight away, but here people are too accepting. It’s inevitable that there will be another “Bhopal”. Indian factories haven’t learnt from our example. It’s just a matter of time. It could happen tomorrow.’
Thousands of women need Abdul Jabar’s help. As they wait to see the man they regard as a saviour, they swap details of their illnesses. Those who come to Abdul Jabar’s sessions need all the help they can get. Compensation for the Bhopal victims has become embroiled in one of the worst bureaucratic jams in Indian history, a nation famous for drawn-out legal actions.
From the very start, the signs were bad.
Union Carbide dragged its heels for years before paying up. Finally, they made a one-time settlement of $470 million to the Indian government – that was back in 1989. But, as a stream of people in Bhopal are quick to point out, the government is in no hurry to hand out the cash. Progressing at a snail’s place, its system is still collecting millions of dollars in interest on money that hasn’t reached those who so desperately deserve it.
Once the money was safely locked in the State’s coffers, those making a claim were forced to queue up for days for a token which would permit them to get a claim form. Then began the convoluted process of claim courts and endless hearings. Victims need to attend as many as thirty hearings to have their claim considered. The only way to oil the wheels of justice is a seven hundred rupee bribe. But few people have that kind of cash.
The former Chairman of Union Carbide, Warren Anderson, is deeply unpopular in Bhopal as one might expect. His name forms part of a common slogan on walls around town – reading simply ‘Hang Anderson’.
As he lives in quiet retirement in Florida, Union Carbide itself is eager to distance itself from responsibility. The Bhopal plant was, they say, owned by a separate entity Union Carbide (India), even though the American parent company is said to have owned more than half its stock. They protest, too, that the damaged venting pipe was sabotaged by a disgruntled employee.
Back in Jai Prakash Nagar, Ambereen’s neighbour, Amina Beeh, pulls a scratched chest X-ray from a box and wipes it with her scarf. Like many of Bhopal’s women, she’s suffered for years from a catalogue of health problems, problems that are getting worse.
‘My lungs were burnt, as if acid was poured into them,’ Amina says. ‘And I need regular treatment for a severe gynaecological disorder.’
Staring out at the former Union Carbide factory, Amina dabs her eyes. It’s time for her medicine. Putting away her X-ray, she gulps down an assortment of pink and white pills. Then, she leans back into her chair, and sighs.
‘Every day at this time I do this,’ she says, ‘I close my eyes and remember how different it used to be. I think of the faces of my family and all my friends,’ she whispers, ‘and I pretend the gas never came. For a moment I breathe easy, and I forget.’