Twenty-six years ago the city of Bhopal erupted in toxic fumes; sixty days ago the Indian Supreme Court delivered a disappointing verdict to compensate still-suffering victims. While the latter digest what little they’ve been awarded and newspapers publish concluding facts and editorials on the subject, it’s worth taking the time to read Indra Sinha’s ANIMAL’S PEOPLE and remember that sixteen and sixty years from now, Bhopal will still sting from the gas tragedy of 1984. As Sinha’s main character explains halfway through the book, “time doesn’t exist…Hope dies in places like this, because hope lives in the future and there’s no future here, how can you think about tomorrow when all your strength is used up trying to get through today?”Twenty-six years ago the city of Bhopal erupted in toxic fumes; sixty days ago the Indian Supreme Court delivered a disappointing verdict to compensate still-suffering victims. While the latter digest what little they’ve been awarded and newspapers publish concluding facts and editorials on the subject, it’s worth taking the time to read Indra Sinha’s ANIMAL’S PEOPLE and remember that sixteen and sixty years from now, Bhopal will still sting from the gas tragedy of 1984. As Sinha’s main character explains halfway through the book, “time doesn’t exist…Hope dies in places like this, because hope lives in the future and there’s no future here, how can you think about tomorrow when all your strength is used up trying to get through today?”
A well-oiled machine in a factory hums with efficiency; India screeches and groans and whimpers, bearing the weight of one billion people. Some carry trays of vegetables on their backs calling out to customers, some stand with bent knees straight gazes fingers curled around a cricket bat as millions of eyes watch on, and some tap their feet with lazy urgency as they summon their drivers from airconditioned doorways. People face forward, their attention arrested at every angle by movie posters, honking trucks, buzzing crowds, brimming skies. When they look down, it’s to avoid garbage, shoo away a stray dog, or spit. Rarely is it to listen to a young boy with stumps for legs who locomotes around the slums of Khaufpur on a board with wheels.
ANIMAL’S PEOPLE is a book whose main character, Animal, makes the reader do just that, forcing him to confront exhaust pumps and feel the sun’s rays refracting off the burning roads. He is a young boy braving poverty and puberty with no legs, a birth defect, and he multitasks with attitude, dancing around pedestrians’ knees, developing a sore neck talking to people twice and thrice his height, and cursing passersby who annoy him. Animal teachers the reader to move a little slower, albeit more doggedly, towards food, friends and fights, proving over three hundred and fifty pages that he is the ideal narrator for a book about his people. Sinha operates close to the ground, creating his characters’ stories with an eye on their footsteps. Animal challenges the reader to acclimatize to a new topography; fitting for a city that now sits wearily on a fatal foundation of poison, for a community of people dehumanized enough that a main character prefers being called ‘Animal’ to anything else.
Animal is an orphan in a city orphaned by justice. Khaufpur is the fictional town that houses a factory responsible for the plague killing and affecting generations of its residents. The heart of the gas tragedy beats with each page of filth Animal shows the reader: “Platforms, ladders and railings are corroding. Its belly is a tangle of pipes like rotting guts…Look throughout this place a silent war is being waged…yet that night was a freezing night of stars.”
Animal’s friends and family share hearts and memories and money and homes between them since everyone lost something vital “that night.” Their voices rise with opinions and opposition, they orate about justice, protests, redemption. Animal faithfully shares these conversations with the reader in his unique language: he berates the “kampani,” wonders about the “jarnalis” eager for Animal’s story, learns “inglis” and confides in a doctress from “Amrika.” The closest person he has to a mother is a French nun, Ma Franci, and they share a methyl isocyanate-laced language of pidgin French and Hindi that only they understand. He loves a girl, Nisha, and suffers for it, expressing his unrequited love for her with pidgin attempts with words and scars on his knees from climbing trees. No real Indian story is complete without a love triangle or quadrilateral so Animal spends many pages on Nisha’s love, Zafar, and his love for judicial vendettas, while Nisha’s father and an American doctor navigate their own personal tragedies together.
Each street of Animal’s slum offers another story of devastation out of the days months years generations following “that night.” The poor writhe in smoke and dust, but the reader experiences fresh food and ripe relationships in Nisha’s part of town where musicians and doctors and philosophy exist. Animal learns about melody from Nisha’s father, hope from Elli doctors, research from Nisha, patience from Zafar, attachment from Ma Franci. His lust for happy endings—personally and publicly—propels the narrative through Khaufpur’s struggles and victories against the wretched factory’s retching curses: he desires girls, enlightenment, independence, pride, humanity, respect. Sinha bestows each of these on Animal in ways expected and unexpected; a parallel to the predictable and unforeseeable damage Khaufpur endures and overcomes, thus becoming a city worth writing about.
The Bhopal gas tragedy will always be worth reading about. Sinha’s book, a 2007 Man Booker Prize finalist, is a brutal and riveting place to start.
Book: ANIMAL'S PEOPLE, Indra Sinha, Simon and Schuster, 2007.
No comments:
Post a Comment