Episode 1: One Winter Night

EPISODE 1: ONE WINTER NIGHT

ACT I

0:00

Apoorva: When I lived in India, I lived with my grandfather who I called Baba. Baba’s house was about 5 kilometers from the factory. And what’s a 5K, right? It seems like a pretty short distance when you’re thinking about a run. But in Bhopal, India, it was worlds away. 

     To get to the factory from Baba’s house you’d have to go down this big hill, so steep that I got stuck there many times when I didn’t change my gears fast enough in my stick shift car, and unfortunately often had to be pushed up. You’d have to go down Idgah Road, past the butchers advertising their live chickens and every so often, an exotic turkey. You’d pass Bhopal Gate, a grand archway in the middle of traffic going in literally all directions, and then you’d be on VIP Road, the gorgeous, brand-new highway that runs along Bhopal’s Upper Lake, Bada Talab — the one built on the land where so many of the tragedy survivors used to live. 

     Driving down VIP Road, there’s nowhere else in Bhopal with air so refreshing and cooling. I remember many nights just sticking my head out the window and gulping it in. On the left, you’d see Hamidia Hospital — one of Bhopal’s major hospitals that saw so much in the days and weeks after the fateful night in 1984. 

     And then you’d take a left, going through the maze of shops in Chowk Bazaar, until you hit Shahjanabad Road. The view begins to change here. The sky opens up as most of the brick buildings become only one story tal,l and slowly, they’re built closer and closer together and they become smaller and smaller until you realize these houses were built by their occupants. Occupants that started in shacks and in thirty years, had replaced it with permanent homes. And while you’re observing the colorful brick houses with temples and mosques wedged between them, you almost don’t notice the white brick wall with a blue border that you are now facing.           

     This white wall is all you see of Union Carbide from the outside. 

Molly: Inside, you’ll find rusted pipes, cracked concrete, and overgrown weeds. Immediately surrounding the factory is a flat, grassy area about half a mile wide. Curious out-of-towners stop outside the gates to gawk at the scene. Local kids dare each other to throw rocks at the windows, and cows sometimes wander in from the hills nearby to graze in the surrounding field.  More often than not, those cows end up dead.

[music]

     In the 1970s and 80s, the plant produced pesticides for Union Carbide, an American chemical company that is now a subsidiary of Dow Chemical, a present-day Fortune 500 company. One winter night, on December 3, 1984, a toxic gas leak led to the worst industrial disaster in history, killing as many as twenty thousand people. In the years since the tragedy, over 500,000 have suffered from the long-term health effects of exposure to the poisonous gas. Additional heavy chemicals from Union Carbide unrelated to the gas leak have slowly poisoned the groundwater around the factory and caused a water crisis comparable to Flint, Michigan. 

Apoorva: But what’s notable is that no factory workers died that night in 1984. While the rest of Bhopal, including the police and the hospitals, had no idea what they were dealing with, Union Carbide did. They knew how to save themselves. They knew which way the wind was blowing. And they knew which way to run.

 

INTRO

04:16

[music]

Molly: This is the story of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy; of the men, women, and children who survived it; and the decades-long struggle for justice, compensation, and the right to clean drinking water.

Apoorva: This is the story of the Bhopalis who were shaped but not defined by the disaster; of hope, of resilience, and of memory.

Molly: This is They Knew Which Way to Run. Please note that this podcast contains depictions of death and loss that some people may find disturbing. I’m Molly Mulroy.

Apoorva: And I’m Apoorva Dixit. 

Molly: Episode 1: One Winter Night

 

BIOS

05:18

[music]

Apoorva: Born in Bhopal, I moved with my family to Memphis, Tennessee when I was five years old. I was shaped by a Western sense of independence and an Eastern imperative to respect elders, by the Bible Belt culture of serving others and the Indian philosophy of prioritizing family, and by a stubbornness that didn’t allow me to compromise either identity — no matter the conflict. After graduating from Dartmouth, I chose to move back to Bhopal to live with my grandfather. I’d grown up visiting Bhopal, and it was time that I actually learned the collective memory of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy. 

     I had no idea what that year in India had in store for me, or how the stories I would hear and the experiences I would undergo would change my view of the world and my place in it.

Molly: But it was before Apoorva left for India that the idea for this podcast was born, when she was in New Orleans, visiting her best friend — me. I’ve known Apoorva since we were twelve years old. We grew up together. Spending weekend afternoons by Apoorva’s pool, eating her mom’s homemade Indian food, watching fireworks on the hood of my parents’ car every 4th of July, talking on the phone as often as we could after we each moved away for college. 

     So when she told me she was moving to Bhopal to conduct her research, I told her I wanted to help her organize the stories she would hear in a way that we could share with the rest of the world.

Apoorva: A few years later, here we are. 

 

ACT II

07:06

 

Molly: Bhopal is the capital of the Indian heartland state of Madhya Pradesh, built on a dozen or so hills with several prominent lakes scattered between them. 

     On the night of December 2, 1984, Bhopal was full of weddings. Apoorva spoke with two different women who were celebrating weddings the night of the gas leak. One of them, Malti Soni, Apoorva knew well — she grew up with Malti’s children. At the time, Malti lived in an upper-middle class neighborhood filled with painted brick houses and marble floors and terrace roofs. Only 4 km away, Chironji Bi and her neighbors were also celebrating a wedding in a lower-income neighborhood, a hodgepodge of makeshift houses with narrow dirt lanes between them and loudspeakers lining the streets to hear the Muslim call to prayer. 

     So, Apoorva, how would these weddings have been different?

Apoorva: I’d actually start with how they’re the same. In India, weddings are huge, huge affairs, with hundreds of distant family members and friends coming into town from all over to celebrate the occasion. Back in the 80’s, relatives would’ve piled up on these thin cotton-stuffed mattresses that were not the most comfortable, just laid across the floors of the entire house for the days-long affair. 

     At a wedding like Malti Aunty’s, you would expect to see many bright saris, a lot of jewelry, hours and hours of dancing and ceremonies, especially as the bride’s side of the family waited for the main wedding ceremony to begin. Eventually, the groom will arrive on his horse with his baraat so the bride and groom can perform the different wedding traditions. Of course, I’m consolidating days’ worth of traditions in this description– there’s the kanya daan, the saat phere, the lady’s sangeet and the vidia. 

     And in a lot of ways, the wedding in Chironji Bi’s neighborhood would have mirrored the one at Malti Aunty’s. The main difference would have been the class differences, and the fact that Chironji Bi is Muslim, so the ceremony would have been a nikkah.

Molly: So, your family is Hindu. But from what I understand, Bhopal has a pretty good mix of Muslim and Hindu families. Have you been to both of these types of weddings?

Apoorva: Not me personally actually, but my dad, who grew up in Bhopal, has been to many nikkahs. It’s actually pretty interesting, Bhopal has a long history of Hindus and Muslims living together. The city’s about half Muslim, half Hindu, which is not the case in the rest of India, where Muslims are solidly the minority.

Molly: So, what is that like? When you, who mostly has experience from Bhopal, when you visited other parts of India?

Apoorva: Yeah, it’s funny. It actually gave me a very skewed view of the rest of India. It’s actually pretty different in Bhopal, because of a long history of rule by the nawabs, which were these Muslim rulers who kept their power even during the British Raj. And because of that, there’s all these things that you see, even in everyday language, that’s different in Bhopal than in other parts of India.

Molly: But Hindu or Muslim, rich or poor, the wedding parties — and activities all over Bhopal — came to an end when the gas came. Malti Soni remembers it well. 

Malti Soni: All the relatives had left … So uncle went to sleep and we stayed up to talk. And our noses started burning. We thought it was some food we ate. We were just sleeping and our uncle woke up and came downstairs. We thought that he had woken up because his stomach was upset. But he fell on the way down because of the gas. So then, our nose and eyes were burning a lot.

Molly: The wedding in Chironji Bi’s building was just getting started when they started to feel the effects. As they waited for the groom’s wedding procession, Chironji Bi said the effects were drastic and immediate.

Chironji Bi: We thought it was just burning chillies. As we were waiting, we couldn’t open our eyes. I went to check in the kitchen to get them to stop burning the chillies, but they said it wasn’t them. I opened the back door, and it felt like someone had thrown acid on my face. So people started running in every direction, and people started hiding in bathrooms. My little kids were screaming to save them, that they felt like they would die. So we started to run.

[music]

Apoorva: Almost everyone I’ve talked to about that night describes it the same way: It looked like a scene from Hell.

[music]

 

ACT III

12:44

 

Molly: Across town, the Union Carbide factory had been churning out the deadly gas for hours. It all started at 9pm with a cleaning job. Those working the night shift were hoping to do their work, take their chai break, and finish their shift. 

Apoorva: But that night – Sunday, December 2nd, 1984 – there was a mistake. That night, water was sent directly into a tank that had barely been touched for months — a tank filled with a deadly gas called methyl isocyanate. Methyl isocyanate, or MIC for short, was so dangerous that governments did not allow Union Carbide’s factories in other parts of the world to produce it. The only plants where they did produce it were in West Virginia and in Bhopal. The reason? MIC is five hundred times more toxic than hydrogen cyanide, attacking the lungs and the eyes. 

Molly: Methyl isocyanate was at the factory to make Union carbide’s trademark pesticide called Sevin, but the gas reacts violently and rapidly when introduced to hot water. The night of the tragedy, not only did the gas come directly into contact with water, but the tank containing MIC had been sitting around for so long that rust and other contaminants had built up inside the tank, which put the gas reaction on a fast-track, with skyrocketing temperatures and pressure.

[music]

     This gas was so deadly that any leak should have been stopped within minutes. But instead, it went on for hours. The leak began at midnight, and within two hours, 43 metric tons of the gas escaped from the factory.

Apoorva: The factory had multiple sets of alarms to warn the factory workers of something amiss, but also to alert the nearby citizens. But due to the frequency of minor leaks within the factory, all of the alarms had been turned off. All of them. The night of the tragedy, the Union Carbide workers did not even realize there was a problem, and the sleeping citizens of Bhopal had no way to know that a deadly, poisonous gas was floating, like a cloud, to descend upon them.

Molly: The gas had barely traveled outside the factory fence before it began to creep into people’s homes. The shantytowns around the factory were the first to be hit. These were the homes Apoorva described earlier that occupants have now turned into brick houses over the course of 30 years. But at the time of the tragedy, they were just lean-tos with tin walls nailed together. The Hindi word for them is kachcha, or raw, as opposed to pakka, which means solid. There were no solid walls, no proper roofs or in-door plumbing. So there was no real physical barrier keeping the gas from seeping straight inside. 

Apoorva: Heavier than the air around it, MIC generally sinks to the lowest areas it can reach. So while the whole city suffered, these towns were hit with the full force of the airborne attack. Mixing with the winter fog, the gas crept through the slums around the hills, sending thousands into a stampeding frenzy, and killing thousands more while they slept. And the night was only beginning.

[music]

 

ACT IV

16:31

 

Molly: So Apoorva, I’ve known you since we were both 7th grade. Growing up I never really heard you talk about Bhopal or what happened there. Why is that?

Apoorva: Yeah, what’s kind of crazy is I myself didn’t really know the history of Bhopal. I always just thought of it as the place that my grandpa lived, and that we visited in the summers. It seemed fairly unremarkable. And then, it actually was in seventh grade, I was in Coach Bogan’s class, I don’t know if you remember him. And we had a chapter on, I forget what, but there was a whole paragraph on Chernobyl. And at the end of that paragraph they had one sentence: “And the second worst industrial disaster in the world is the Bhopal Gas Tragedy.” It’s funny because I went home, and I ran up to my dad, and I was like “Papa did you know that this crazy thing happened in Bhopal? And my dad goes, “Of course! I was there.”

Molly: Wow, so you hadn’t even heard about it at all. Your family had never talked about it when you were visiting Bhopal, or even just at home in Memphis?

Apoorva: Nope. Nope. And it’s pretty funny, because it wasn’t just my family. I spent a lot of time in Bhopal. We used to visit every couple of summers. We didn’t move until I was 5 years old. But there was very much this code of silence, and this idea that somehow bringing it up was not worth it, or maybe they were trying to protect me. Honestly, that is one of the main questions I was trying to answer with my Fulbright research. I was trying to figure out how people remember the tragedy now, and maybe why they choose not to. And that’s a lot of what this podcast is trying to understand: how different communities remember it today. My neighbors versus folks that lived closer to the factory, wealthy gas survivors versus poor gas survivors, Hindu versus Muslim. Most of the people I talked to were technically defined as gas victims, but the ways their lives had been affected by the tragedy and how they remembered it today differed radically.

Molly: Earlier you mentioned thinking of Bhopal as just the place where your grandpa lived, and where you would visit every summer, every couple summers. So what was that like, moving back there and living with him there?

Apoorva: During my year in India, I lived with my grandfather, 84 years old, and he was a judge. So he was in the prime of his career when this all went down. And every night at 6 pm, him and his squad of octogenarians would gather for chai. And they watched the people walking by, and talked about cases of old, and I could never really tell what time period they were in. They would talk with the same gusto about a case that was unfolding right now as they would of a case that had unfolded decades ago.

Molly: So where was your grandfather in 1984? What was happening to him during all this chaos?

Apoorva: He was in Bhopal. He was middle-aged, and my dad was in college. His older sister, my aunt, was in college as well. And the night of the tragedy, around 9pm, my grandfather and his family were actually rushing to leave their yellow-and-red-brick bungalow to drop my grandma off at the train station. My grandma was headed to Mumbai that night, and their train was scheduled to leave around 10pm. And if you know anything about trains in India, you know that they’re notorious for  being late. And that particular night, somehow, the train did make it out on time. Here’s my dad telling the story.

Apoorva: Hello, Papa. 

Ashish Dixit: Hello, Appu!

[Laughing]

Apoorva: Can you, no, I need emotion, but like authentic emotion.

Ashish Dixit: Was that fake?

Apoorva: Yes. Okay. Hello, Papa. 

Ashish Dixit: Hello Apoorva.

Apoorva: No, now there’s no emotion. A middle ground. Middle ground. Okay. Hello, Papa.

Ashish: Hello, Appu. Bhopal is where I spent most of my time while growing up. So I studied from seventh all the way till my bachelor’s to my graduation. 

Apoorva: Can you describe what the train station looked like at 8:00 PM the night of December 2nd? 

Ashish Dixit: Yeah, it was like any other day, pretty normal day. Decembers, in India terms, are very cold weather, right? Relatively, so a cool day. And there was nothing, it was, I believe a Sunday, so just a slow day. And the only excitement of the day was my mother was planning to take the evening train to go to Bombay, which is now called Mumbai.

Apoorva: The train station was about 1 km away from the factory, less than a mile, and it was directly downwind. Here’s my dad describing what it looked like 2 hours before it became one of the epicenters of the Gas Tragedy. 

Ashish Dixit: So we reached the station around, I believe, 9:30 PM. And it was jam packed. Bhopal is central India, so it has good railway connectivity for all the trains passing through any part of India, going to any part of it, they pretty much go through Bhopal. It’s one of the major terminals. So a lot of trains were coming in and going out, including passenger trains and goods trains. 

     The regular departure of the train was 10pm, and the station was jam-packed, and there were a lot of people hustling and bustling. So when the train arrived, after all the pushing and pulling, we finally got to the compartment where my mom and dad had their reserved seats. That’s when my dad told all of us that in that hustle and bustle his pocket got picked, and his wallet was taken away. So he didn’t have any money on him, and they were to go to Bombay. For me to imagine my dad’s pocket being picked, since he was a judge, was kind of a very unbelievable event to begin with.

     So by the time we reached home, it was almost beyond midnight, so probably I want to say just after midnight, we reached home. We were very tired from the events of the day, so we probably ate something, or maybe not, and we just all went to bed.

Molly: Huh. Other than your grandfather getting his pocket picked, it sounds like a pretty mundane night at the train station. 

Apoorva: Yeah, exactly. They had no idea that if they had stuck around for even another hour, how dramatically their lives would have been different.

Molly: Yeah, if they stuck around, you might not even be here today. Because they might not be here today.

[music]

Apoorva: Yeah, it’s a pretty somber thought. And honestly in that way, we were so, so lucky. In fact, as we’ll see in upcoming episodes, there are a lot of ways in which my family was lucky. We were there, but we weren’t devastated. It’s true that they barely made it out of the train station on time. But the fact is that when they did make it home, they went home to a well-insulated house. It’s also true that their neighborhood was within the radius of the gas leak, but as we’ve said before, Methyl isocyanate is a heavy gas, and they lived at the top of a hill. So the gas barely made its way up the hill. 

     My family was in the epicenter of the gas tragedy, but they all survived because of Bhopal’s economic geography. The survivors – the doctors, the judges, the educated and the wealthy –  is pretty much the people that I grew up with. Growing up, I never knew the other half of the city that was devastated by this disaster. 

Molly: Just hours after Apoorva’s grandparents made it out of the city on their 10:00 train, the station was swarming with the other half – suffering Bhopalis desperate to flee the city. Located in the heart of India, Bhopal was the largest city for hundreds of miles, and a natural hub for passenger and cargo trains in the area. So even though the tragedy didn’t happen until midnight, there were plenty of trains scheduled to arrive in Bhopal the morning of December 3. But when trains full of corpses began arriving in nearby towns, the realization began to dawn that something terrible had befallen the City of Lakes.

[music]

 

ACT V

26:06

 

[music]

Waheedan Bi: Oh no, not that night. That night is a night where no one was really conscious, aware, alive. So many tears, and I was having so much trouble…

Guddu Bi: We went to see a film that night at Bharat Talkies. I can’t remember which movie. We got home from Saturday night, we went to bed. Soon after, when it became hard to breathe, my mom…

Rahana Bi: People started making noise around midnight. We were asleep, so we didn’t bother getting up. Our neighbors were good people so they knocked on our door and told us to wake up. When we opened the door, we were hit by the gas and we started coughing and tearing up. We couldn’t even speak…

Laxmi Thakkur: We had just finished eating and we were heading to bed. We had a tiny house, kachcha. We used to sleep outside, there was no room inside. So, the kids slept inside…

Apoorva: Around 10pm, in low-lying Bhopal, near the train station and the factory, people like Guddu Bi, Waheedan Bi, Rahana Bi, Laxmi Thakkur, Premlatta Bai, Vishnu Bai, and Rasheeda Bi were living their normal lives, as we just heard. We’ll be hearing from these brave women throughout the series. This is the beginning of their stories: one winter night that changed everything.

Rasheeda Bi: One of my family members was outside screaming that someone has burned chillies and it hurt. When we opened the door, we saw water running down from his nose and ears and mouth. When we went outside to see, the entire place had emptied out. People running by kept yelling, “Run, or we will all die.” Our nephew came in and said that some chillies factory has caught on fire, and so we all have to go or else we all die. Everytime we tried to open our eyes, we saw people falling and running, running over other humans. No one cared for anyone else. I could hear myself praying for death, “Allah, grant me death, grant me death.”

Laxmi Thakkur: Then when the gas cloud started, it was horrible. I was like, who has enough chillies…

Premlatta Bai: All of a sudden at night, we heard people saying that someone burned chillies, and we walked out and started coughing and throwing up. People started dying. In my building, 10 kids died. 2 of my neighbors died. And my kids that went to the train station for work, they were found unconscious at the train station. My kids ended up everywhere…

Vishnu Bai: It was a terrible night. There was a stampede. If you ask anyone, they cannot answer you. All they can do is cough. Some are vomiting, some have diarrhea. Wherever people fell, they would just die there…

[overlapping voices, music]

Guddu Bi: To tell us the scene outside and told us we had to leave because the gas had leaked. My uncle gave me and my sister…

Waheedan Bi: And I was sure my time had come. Running?! Of course…

Rahana Bi: We couldn’t even speak. It was a bad state, and there was such a rush in the street that there wasn’t anywhere to put our feet…

Waheedan Bi: So then we had to chase her down, but by the time we got her…

Guddu Bi: On the way, there was a huge hole near the Bhopal Talkies. We barely didn’t fall in. We couldn’t see anything. We couldn’t breathe. Our eyes weren’t able to close, but I couldn’t see…

Laxmi Thakkur: Our eyes were blinded. Who knows where we were running. My 1 month old son…

Waheedan Bi: I climbed one building. He climbed another building. By God’s grace, we survived that night. As were were running, the clouds were something else…

Premlatta Bi: In all of Bhopal, even the birds couldn’t save themselves, so how were the humans supposed to?

[music and overlapping voices end]

Rasheeda Bi: In the morning at 4 or 5 am, we heard an announcement to return to our houses and that Union Carbide’s gas leak had ended. That was the first time I had ever heard Union Carbide’s name.

 

OUTRO

30:00

 

[music]

Molly: You’ve been listening to They Knew Which Way to Run, a limited series that tells the story of those who were able to escape the destruction wrought by the Union Carbide gas leak… and those who weren’t. 

     In our next episode, we’ll talk more about how the Union Carbide factory and gas leak came to be, the scene in Bhopal the next morning for the survivors, and the many controversies surrounding the tragedy — starting with the death toll. 

Apoorva: We encourage you to check out our website at www.TheyKnewWhichWaytoRun.com, where you can learn more information about the tragedy, see photos of the survivors, and make a donation to NGOs on the ground still supporting survivors and fighting for justice. This podcast series is written, edited, and produced by me and Molly Mulroy. Quinn Mulroy is our sound editor. 

Molly: All the interviews used in our podcast were conducted by Apoorva Dixit both independently and while working with Sambhavna Clinic and photographer Francesca Moore. Our transcription specialist is Avi Dixit, our copy editors are Julia Hamilton and Quinn Mulroy, our cover art was designed by Amey Zhang, our website designer is Ljiljana Brusic, and all of our music is composed by Derek Renfroe. 

Apoorva: Very big thank you to everyone who supported us with this podcast and the following Bhopalis for sharing their stories for this episode: Ashish Dixit, Malti Soni, Chironji Bi, Guddu Bi, Waheedan Bi, Rahana Bi, Vishnu Bai, Laxmi Thakkur, Premlatta Bai, and Rasheeda Bi. Also thank you to our voice actors: Rachana Dixit, Vartika Shukla, Meena Kasargod, Preeti Arora, Durrain Noorani, Nandini Basu, and Jyoti Narayanan.

     I’m Apoorva Dixit.

Molly: And I’m Molly Mulroy. Thank you for listening.