Look, how decrepit I look. Look at my son Shoab. He is mentally deranged, a veritable skeleton with swollen veins on his legs looking like curled snakes desperately clinging to two dried-up logs. Doctors have diagnosed this disease, but I don’t remember the name. Both of us are the only surviving members in the family and are maimed forever.
I couldn’t educate my son and he has become wayward. Last week, I had to cough up `5,000 as bribe to drunken policemen, who barged into my home in the dead of night with my son. They said he was a criminal. How would I know?
My sickness barely permits me to go to my college, where I am a clerk. I am bed-ridden most of the time. My chronic breathing problem aggravates so often that it is safe to be at home. At least half-a-dozen times every year, when breathing becomes acutely difficult, I have to be admitted to gas relief hospitals.
Doctors say my damaged lungs are beyond repair. I am living on borrowed time. Life is miserable and the future, bleak. Shoab is 33 and of marriageable age, but no offer has come for him. One offer came, but with a condition: transfer your home to your son’s name. How can I do that? What is the guarantee that his future wife will not grab the house and chase me away?
Remembering the past saddens me, as my happiness lasted barely three years into my marriage. I was a 23-year-old happy-go-lucky graduate in Kanpur when my parents married me off in 1979 to Ashraf Mohammad Khan alias Ashraf Lala, a fitter in the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal. For a young girl, who had never worn a burqa, my in-laws’ conservatism came as a shock. Although they were largely hostile to me, my husband was caring. That was a great solace to me. Soon, we had two children—Arshad and Shoab. Those were happy days.
My husband, who was a union leader in the Union Carbide factory, would often tell me about the lethal gases his factory produced. I had not imagined that within five years of marriage, these gases would kill my husband and elder son.
In 1981, three years before the gas disaster, Ashraf was working in the factory when a valve malfunctioned and he was splashed with liquid phosgene. He was dead within 72 hours. The Union Carbide management concealed his postmortem report. My in-laws proved unwitting co-conspirators with the management. They would not let me come near my ailing husband’s bed in the hospital. However, I was paid Rs. 50,000 compensation.
Soon after the death, my in-laws deserted me. I was devastated. Succor came from SH Khan, a co-worker of my husband. I subsisted with my two children, aged 18 months and seven months, by doing tuition and sewing. Those were difficult days, but life somehow moved on. Little did I know that more misery was in store for us, three years ahead.
On December 2, 1984, I boarded the Gorakhpur-Bombay train with my children from Kanpur, where my parents lived. Ironically, I had delayed the journey due to the advice of my Hindu neighbours to start off on an auspicious day. When the train approached Bhopal station at 1.30 pm, a ghostly silence pervaded the place. At the platform, I saw coolies running around desperately, fear writ large on their faces.
Suddenly, we started coughing and choking as some pungent gas assailed our nostrils. Not realizing what had happened, I dragged my sons to the waiting room. The scene there was chaotic and dreadful. It was like jahannam (hell). Women were wailing over dead bodies and I heard somebody shrieking that poisonous gas had leaked from the Union Carbide factory. Everybody was coughing violently, their eyes bloodshot with irritation and tears. Arshad and Shoab collapsed on the ground, coughing and vomiting.
Confused and terrified, I ran to Khan’s place. Mercifully, they had not fled. When Khan asked about the children, I told them that they were in the waiting room. Khan despaired, saying I had left them to die. I panicked and ran back to the station. The road was littered with the dead—humans as well as cattle. When I reached the waiting room, I found Arshad, my four-and-a-half-year-old son, dead. Shoab had survived, I was told, because he had soiled his pants and, as a result, the gas he had inhaled had passed off. That was not the end of my miseries. The ordeal had only begun.
With my three-year-old ailing son in my lap, I had nowhere to go. My in-laws had already disowned me. The disaster made them even more cruel. My husband’s elder brother got himself photographed with Shoab, posing as his father, to claim the Rs. 10,000 ex-gratia offered by the state government. Somehow, I learnt about it and reclaimed the compensation. Khan once again stood by me.
With his help, I managed to get accommodation in a hostel, where I lived for 10 years. In 1987, I got a job in a woman polytechnic college on compassionate grounds. My economic condition has improved, but my health continues to deteriorate.
After a while, I moved into a rented house in a predominantly Muslim locality in the walled city. All attempts to get my ailing son educated, failed. I tried to find solace in the fact that thousands of women were suffering the same trauma as me.
Compensation arrived almost a decade after the disaster, when we were given a flat amount of Rs. 35,000 each. But medicines consumed the bulk of that money.
Thanks to proactive help from bhai (Abdul Jabbar, the convener of the Bhopal Gas Peedit Mahila Udyog Sangthan), I have managed to get periodic treatments in hospitals. Otherwise, I would have died long ago like lakhs of other gas victims.
The compensation of `8 lakh I got in lieu of my elder son’s death helped me build this small house. Let us see, how long I manage to live in it.