It was early morning of a cold 3rd of December, roughly about 20 years now, that we heard the news, that some kind of an industrial accident had taken place in Bhopal, my home town in India. Bhopal, right about in the centre of the country, was then a small provincial town, the administrative capital for the Madhya Pradesh state. Other than being a state capital, the city could boast of few other things of importance. Bhopal was named after Raja Bhoj, an 11th century ruler, whose claim to fame relates to a quote "Kahan Raja Bhoj, kahan Gangu Teli" alluding to the vast difference and gap between rulers and ordinary peasants. It is surrounded by a very interesting set of fascinating places, with amazingly realistic cave paintings dating back to about 5000 BC; a Hindu Shiv temple which possesses the tallest stone Shiv lingam and has a huge religious gathering there every year on the occasion of Shivratri; a huge Buddhist Stupa with intricate stone carvings at Sanchi, which is supposed to be the repository of the Buddha's finger.
Bhopal was one of the old princely kingdoms of pre Independence India which have been ruled by a series of women rulers and there is a reasonably famous book called as “Begums of Bhopal” by Shahrayar M. Khan. Bhopal is also famous for having the ex ruler as Nawab of Pataudi (he was an ex-Indian cricket captain, married to a very famous Indian actress). It’s a city of two halves, the old Bhopal, with very narrow streets jammed with taxi's, bicycles, cars, scooters, pushcarts, donkeys, cows and children; very crowded with tiny shops selling everything from refrigerators to beaded velvet purses; garages, houses all almost piled one on top of another, the call to prayers from the innumerable mosques resounding from the walls, the food streets with delectable treats such as biryani, kebabs and curries; the feeling of teeming humanity was in those streets. Then there was the new Bhopal, a planned city, no industry to speak off and most of the people being bureaucrats with their families; living in large government supplied accommodation with big gardens, very wide roads, very green, full of lakes and one of the good towns in the cacophony that is India.
It is a very nice place to grow up. There are lots of trees to climb, pools and rivulets to catch fish in, and small steep sided hills to climb and trek in, something which a growing boy will love. One felt connected with the city, a bunch of very good and extremely smart/intelligent friends to hang out with (no girls I am afraid, lets not push the story out too much). It was a sleepy little town which suddenly woke up to being the sad and unfortunate city, where thousands died after an industrial accident released a poisonous gas at the Union Carbide plant (now owned by Dow) in the heart of the city.
It being a cold December night, the heavier than air poison methyl isocyanate gas which leaked, no wind, very crowded narrow streets, all combined into a disastrous situation and turned Bhopal into a gas chamber. Small crowded houses mean that most people sleep on the floor, the cold weather meant that they were sleeping tightly wrapped up in blankets with doors and windows tightly closed. The heavier than air gas meant that it crept along the ground and entered through every crack and slot in doors and windows. The lack of wind and narrow streets meant that the poison gas wasn’t able to be dispersed. Plus the industrial plant (which made pesticides) was slam bang in the middle of the old city, surrounded with slums and the aforementioned teeming humanity. Hundreds died in their sleep, thousands more found their lungs rotting away, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see because of the streaming eyes. It was a scene from hell, but something which we didn’t know when we set out to college at 7AM.
There were very few students around and our Professor of Chemistry, Dr. Maini, took the opportunity to talk to us about the use of carbon to absorb poisons. Be that as it may, by 8AM in the morning, it was clear that there will be no classes and I made a beeline to the canteen to quaff the usual cuppa chai. My friend Rajan was also there and we were discussing the little that we knew about the accident. We were young lions then and we decided to go over to the scene of the accident and see if we could possibly help out in any way. So we hopped on Rajan's bike and off we went to the far side of the train station and looked around for, well, something to do or somewhere we could help. We spotted a small team of doctors from the local main general public hospital and asked them, can we help? Well, I think we were more a hindrance than a help but be that as it may, we opened doors, offered water, gave directions, etc.
I do not know about Rajan's memories, but I can only remember few snippets, a small desolate monkey chained to a tree in one of the very narrow lanes between mud houses. It survived because it was higher up in the tree so the heavy methyl isocyanate gas didn’t affect it that much, but still it yowled with streaming eyes. It was a startling sight, seeing a small monkey crying. Piles of dead buffaloes, extremely dusty air, a sense of eerie desolation in some of the lanes where everybody was dead. The lawns in front of the Gandhi Medical College were covered with shrouded bodies. One very poignant scene I will never forget, a child was sitting next to a shroud, pulling on the arm and softly crying out, "Mother, why aren’t you waking up?"
The second day, the army stepped in with their heavy equipment and we could see transporters and mobile cranes breaking houses to get to the piles of dead cattle to dispose of the carcasses, to avoid more of a catastrophe. Quite a lot of the houses had their own buffalos and cows in their courtyards and they had died there. Obviously, the big army transporters and mobile cranes couldn’t really enter into the narrow streets, so they called out the tanks to break in. The heat of the afternoon was bloating the carcasses and we heard stories of how people had died when they were caught in the vicinity of some of the carcasses exploding. The bulldozers on the outskirts of the city were digging huge massive trenches lined with limestone to bury the cadavers.
The cattle were lucky, they had these machines lift their carcasses up and bury them quickly. The humans were singularly unfortunate. With the Muslim injunction to bury the dead on the same day, bodies went unburied for a long time because entire families were wiped out. Grave diggers are amongst the poorest of the poor and there were not that many of them in the first place. Shallow graves were dug and people buried willy nilly. One of the most poignant photographs that I remember is of a little baby being buried in a very shallow grave, its eyes open and a hand trying to cover its body with a thin layer of soil and stones. Look at the hyperlink given below and then see if it doesn’t rip your heart apart with sadness.
and I went back the second day and again tried to help out, giving medical attention (which consisted of giving digestive tablets and asking people to wash their eyes out with water). Nobody had a clue about the accident. The junior doctors were bewildered by the symptoms. So there was actually no real cure to the problem and the doctors were trying to do something, anything at all, to try to help the poor sufferers who had started coming up in droves for help. Let us also not forget that Bhopal is a small town, with very little medical infrastructure (a point to which I will return in my next column) so combined with ignorance about the poison gas, it was really very little anybody could do, but to helplessly watch them die or suffer.
Well, prescribing digestive tablets and asking people to wash their eyes out with water we could do, and that's what we did. I do not remember much from this day, except for one incident when this poor fellow came up to me and thinking I was a doctor handed over this little bundle of rags to me and said, "Doctor Sahib, my daughter is not well, can you please take a look at her?". Rajan was with the other team and I have to admit that I was absolutely panic stricken. I looked around for help and my eyes fell on the hopeful but defeated rheumy eyes of the father. I don’t remember whether the mother was there, but I don’t think she was. Well, never say die and I tried to help by blowing air into her mouth, rubbing her little hands, but within minutes even my untrained eyes could see that she had gone. I have to confess that I took the coward's way out and told the father to take her to the hospital. We went back home by the afternoon and I was hors de combat by the evening, I had been exposed to the poison gas.
Lord only knows where I caught it from, either from one of the cattle, or from giving mouth to mouth to the baby or from somewhere else. Mind you, the gas was still present for 7 days and nights. So anybody who was there would be exposed to it. This is an indication of the sheer ignorance everybody had. If this had happened elsewhere, the city would have been quarantined and/or evacuated! Anyway, it was touch and go, my parents tried all the medical techniques starting from Allopathy to Homeopathy. In fact, Ma made a trip to a grave/shrine of a great Sufi Saint at Fatehpur Sikri to beg for my life. Anyway, whether it was the quacks or the medicines or the prayers or a combination of all of them, it worked and I am here to bore you all with this.
This was much more than what happened to the poor benighted gas sufferers. Much has been written about the inquiry on the accident, the medical details, the legal situation and the law suits, the compensation paid and all that. Thousands of these men, women and children have and are going to keep on suffering because of this accident. Their lungs have rotted out. They cannot walk 10 steps without gasping for breath. The women who were widowed were absolutely wretched because their man had died and left them with no economic hope. The state government, so significantly stretched for resources, had to try to help the survivors. Small industrial units, such as sewing workshops and light manufacturing, were set up. Local medical centres were built, research centres established to research these conditions, industrial engineers understood and have spread the word on safety and storage of these dangerous gases, town planners have learnt about the dangers of having chemical plants inside the town levels. The recent EU chemical safety directive has got some connections to this disaster. The world learnt much from this disaster, the survivors got something out of it and the general public has now forgotten all about it. Life goes on. Robert Frost said : “In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life - it goes on.”
I revisited this incident 20 years later this year and was extremely impressed and amazed by one of the most remarkable things which came out of this tragedy, namely the Bhopal Memorial Hospital and Research Centre (BMHRC). But more about this next week.
All this to be taken with a grain of salt!
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