Listen, I Will Tell You What Terror Is: Indra Sinha

To me terror is waking in darkness to the sound of screams. My eyes and mouth are on fire. There’s a white cloud in the room. The children are coughing. Voices are yelling ‘Run! Run!’ Not knowing what’s happened, I yell to my wife to grab the kids and get out. Someone shouts, ‘The Union Carbide factory has exploded!’ In the alley outside, the street lamp is burning brown, so thick are the clouds of gas. People are rushing past. They jostle and clash like water rushing in a river. Some are in underclothes, others are naked. Those who fall don’t get up. The gas is blinding. It’s agony. In the crush our children’s hands are torn from ours. They are gone. We scream their names.

All around us people are dying. Some have piss and shit running down their legs. Some are choking. People are washing their eyes in filthy drains to ease the pain. This woman lost her unborn baby. As she ran her womb opened and the foetus fell out, right there in the street. What name should I give to the things I have seen?

Next morning I’m searching the heaps of dead for my family. Black, withered leaves are falling from the trees. I meet a man burying his baby. He looks at me and says ‘Good morning.’ We both start crying.

As days pass, we who survived are hit by pain, fever, giddy fits, nausea, breathlessness, damaged eyes, aching limbs. We don’t know if we’ll live or die and the hospital doctors don’t know because the company which killed our children won’t give information about the gas. They say it’s a ‘trade secret’.

People are full of fear. We’re breathless, sick, not able to work. Everyone asks, how will we survive? I used to carry sacks on my back, now I can barely carry myself. Then I think, so what if I starve? I have no family to feed. When the gas came everything fell, and everything fell through our fingers. Before the gas, I was poor. Afterwards, I was a beggar.

Months go by. You want to know what terror is? It’s women too scared to give birth, coming to the hospital with urine samples, begging to be tested. It’s ‘Carbide babies’, born dead with tiny heads, flesh like bluish jelly, eyes that stare like boiled eggs.

A dozen years pass. People don’t get better. Union Carbide still won’t give the information. We are sick, we don’t know what’s in store. 8,000 died in the first days, but the dying has never stopped. Some wish they were dead. Many girls who were babies, or born around the night of gas, don’t get their menses. Others bleed once in three months, or three times a month. The poor kids suffer in silence because such things aren’t talked about. If they can’t have children, who’ll marry them?

More time passes and now there’s a new terror. People who weren’t in Bhopal on that night are getting ill with the same symptoms as gas victims. They too have the cough and chest pains, skin rashes, blisters and sores that won’t heal. They’re dizzy and breathless. Why? We learn that there are poisons in our drinking wells. They come from the same place the gas did: Union Carbide’s factory. Those people left chemicals lying in heaps in the open air. The rains washed them into the soil and into our wells. No wonder the water tastes bad. It burns. The water-poisons will collect in our bodies like the gas-poisons have. They can cause cancers and deformed babies. They’re in our blood. They’re in our breast milk. Doctors have found them. The women weep because they know they’ve been suckling their babies with poison. Union Carbide knew for ten years about the soil and water in the factory being poisoned. Knowing the danger it kept quiet. It kept quiet even though we were the same people whose families it had killed, whose health it had ruined. It still refuses to clean its factory.

I have told you what terror is. Now you tell me who are the terrorists.