KOCHI: Two children, Amil and Chunni, oppressed by family and fate, encounter each other in Bhopal. Amil, a 10-year-old, is kidnapped by the Kumars to labour at their home to atone for the ‘dishonour’ his grandfather brought on the family when he survived the war and the sons (all recruited to fight World War I) of his benefactors, the Kumars, didn’t.
Chunni, of the Kumar family, manages the home, her father’s ego, her brother’s tyranny, and gets extra money in for the now hard-up family, by selling rags got from chopping workers’ overalls stolen from the nearby pesticide plant. Such is the setting of Tim Walker’s novel,
The Prisoner of Bhopal (Walker Books), that has just been released in India in the 40th anniversary year of the Bhopal gas tragedy, post-independence India’s worst industrial disaster so far. At least 3,787 died and the health of more than five lakh were affected due to the gas leak at the Union Carbide factory on the night of December 2, 1984.
In 1984, Walker, then a young graphic designer in London, was given an assignment to place a black-and-white photograph of an Indian farmer alongside some text for the back of a pesticide leaflet. The client was Union Carbide. The leaflet was for a pesticide similar to the one manufactured in the company’s plant in Bhopal, India. “Halfway through completing my layout task, the Bhopal disaster was announced on the radio and I was instructed to stop work,” he says. But he never got Bhopal out of his head.
In the novel, which way the wind blows and the ability to gauge it — an ability Amil shares with his Chachaji, a worker at the pesticide plant, and his grandfather — is what makes the difference between life and death. Amil’s exposure to gas during the Bhopal disaster, and his great-grandfather’s exposure to poison gas during World War I are two parallel grids on which Walker’s novel moves. “The idea for the story began by seeing a parallel – between devastation caused by a company, and devastation caused by a war,” says Walker to TMS.
Excerpts from a conversation:
Would you say that the experience of designing a Union Carbide pamphlet turned you into a writer?
What I felt most when writing the book was a sense of duty to my young readers – to tell a story that was engaging enough to deserve their attention. I also felt a duty to the victims of the disaster, to acknowledge their suffering. To depict such suffering in a children’s book was a challenge but a necessary one — many of the victims of the disaster are still alive, indeed the Sambhavna and Chingari health clinics in Bhopal continue to treat those affected.
I don’t think working on a pesticide leaflet at the time of the disaster turned me into a writer. But it jolted me into thinking about the world, and wanting to have a say in how it should be, which ultimately was via writing.
Why did the Bhopal gas tragedy have such an impact on you? What different aspects does your novel bring to light, given that the facts are well-known? Recently we have also had quite a riveting Netflix series, Railway Men, about the night and early morning of the leak and how it played out in the lives of some characters.
Until the disaster, I had not considered that large companies could put profits before the lives of their employees, so Union Carbide’s culpability in the disaster came as a shocking revelation. The disaster is much more known in India than in the UK. I’d like my book to bring it to the attention of a new generation of young people (industry leaders of the future), who I hope will continue to remember what happened and why. Despite the many other books, films and articles covering the disaster, I think the story must continue to be told so that the tragedy is never forgotten, and thus never repeated.
Did you visit Bhopal to research the book?
I haven’t been to Bhopal. At the outset I had a clear vision of the story, and felt that exposure to the real Bhopal 40 years on might shatter that vision. Whilst I researched Bhopal in some depth, I wanted to keep an element of fiction in its depiction.
What was the image or character that first gave you your first lines of the book?
The book begins with Amil suddenly being taken from his home and his family. The opening line, ‘On his tenth birthday, a hurricane tore the roof off Amil Gujar’s house and sucked him into the sky’ is simply what I imagined it might have felt like. Amil’s hair, ‘like the branches of a windswept tree’ derives from a tree that I used to pass in my car every time I visited my mother. Alone on a hilltop, exposed to a wind that only blew in one direction, every branch on the tree pointed in the same horizontal direction, like a snapshot taken in the midst of a hurricane.
What does Amil mean? I kept reading him as Anil…
I believe Amil means ‘invaluable’ in Hindi. I considered ‘Anil’ (air/wind), but thought this would imply that his parents knew of his gift.
What are you working on next? Do you still work as a graphic designer?
I’m currently working on a children’s adventure story set in the Niger Delta in Nigeria, parts of which have scandalously been turned from a paradise into a sea of black sludge by oil companies. I haven’t worked as a graphic designer after 2012. Since then, following publication of my first three novels (a trilogy comprising Shipley Manor, The Flying Fizzler and Rise of the Rattler), I’ve taught at the University of Kent, a job which has brought me into contact with many students from India who have often given me valuable insights into Indian life.
Why did it take you 10 years to write this book? What were the challenges and the pleasures of writing it?
The book was 10 years in the making, first, because it evolved over 14 drafts. I also spent two or three years looking for a publisher who shared my belief that children would wish to read such a book. My publisher, Andersen Press, also delayed publication for a year so that it would coincide with the 40th anniversary of the disaster. All-in-all, it was a long process. While writing the book, I derived most pleasure from creating and getting to know the two main characters, Amil and Chunni, and their world. That is always one of the joys of writing.