FOREWORD

First of all, if you have bought a copy of this book, let me say a very big thank you. While this is a story mainly set in Birmingham, it has also been written, unapologetically, with the aim of raising money for the Bhopal Medical Appeal. So, in buying it, you have already helped to make a difference to someone.

It has been written out of love and anger. The anger will be self-explanatory. The love is something I feel for two places. One is the city of Birmingham, our old industrial heartland, which I have been writing about for many years and where people, in the not-so-distant past, were no strangers to industrial accidents. The other is Bhopal, a city also located at the heart of its mother country, India. Bhopal was one of the princely cities; it is sited on two lakes and it is old, beautiful and fascinating.

In Britain, most people who remember Bhopal at all think of it as a place in which a catastrophe happened a long time ago. In December 1984, its name became associated with what is still considered the world’s worst industrial accident. The poison gas leak over the northern area of Bhopal tends to be remembered as an event involving thousands of deaths, horrific physical suffering and shameful corporate callousness.

However, the contamination of Bhopal by the American-owned Union Carbide pesticide plant did not begin with, nor was it confined to, the events of December 1984. Less well known than the gas leak, but still wreaking terrible effects in this part of the city, is the ongoing poisoning of its water through chemical contamination from the plant, which has never been cleared.

There are of course still many survivors of the gas leak, living with pain, disability and a bitter sense of injustice. An estimated 150,000 still require health care as a result of ‘that night’. Their agony went untreated, or was inadequately treated, for many years. It was to help alleviate this suffering that a charity, the Bhopal Medical Appeal, was set up in 1994. Now, however, the toxic legacy of Bhopal continues into the second and third generation. Children of gas- and water-affected parents are being born with extreme deformities, suffering a variety of agonizing, debilitating conditions.

Nor, of course, is Bhopal the world’s only toxic hot spot. There is an urgent and ongoing question of how we enforce the idea that ‘the polluter pays’.

There is more information and more stories at the end of this book and on my website at www.anniemurray.co.uk, especially about some of the women and children of Bhopal.

However, this is, in the end, a story and I hope you will enjoy it. I have written it as a gift for Bhopal – and for you.

With warm wishes,

Annie