Animal’s People
(Greenpeace/Raghu Rai, from Outlook)
They buried babies, gently brushing the dust away from the tiny faces.
They covered their own burning eyes with cloth bandages.
They carried the bodies of their loved ones for burial.
They pasted identification labels onto the foreheads of little children.
They made three-tiered graves because there was no other way to find enough space for all the bodies.
They borrowed money for medical treatment.
They aborted their pregnancies.
They coughed. And coughed.
Here is Raghu Rai’s photo essay on Bhopal. The young man in the last photograph, Sunil Kumar, was 13 years old on that horrific night in December 1984 when the gas leaked across the town. Abandoned for dead, he managed to survive. His parents and three of his siblings had died. But Sunil managed to locate his two surviving siblings - a baby brother and a nine-year old sister - and, working as a labourer, he brought them up.
(Sunil, photographed by Raghu Rai - Source)
One day in July last year, over two decades after that night, Sunil put on a t-shirt that said NO MORE BHOPALS. And then he killed himself.
Here is Indra Sinha’s tribute to this “mad Bhopali child”.
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“I understand because these are my people.” - Animal, the narrator in Indra Sinha’s new novel.
