BHOPAL: Of the 11-12 books written on the heart-rending Union Carbide gas disaster of 1984, Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, one of six novels shortlisted on Thursday for this year’s £50,000 Man Booker Prize, has the singular distinction of being the first fictionalised account of the after-effects of the tragedy which claimed the lives of nearly 6,000 people here.

Animal’s People is not the first literary endeavour of the former adman-turned-novelist, who now lives near Toulouse in the south of France, but this book might well be the closest to his heart in view of his intimate involvement with the Sambhavna Clinic, which he helped establish in 1996 to cater to the medical needs of those maimed by the gas explosion. Situated within 400 metres of the Carbide factory on a two-acre spread, the clinic is a virtual oasis amid the slums of old Bhopal.

The clinic’s managing trustee, Mr Satinath Sarangi, a longtime associate of the writer, told this newspaper that Sinha’s involvement with the clinic’s birth was purely fortuitous. Sinha, as creative director of the London-based Colette, Dickinson and Pearce in the early 1990s, was tasked with developing ad campaigns for Amnesty. One of them was on the 1988 gassing of Kurds at Halabja in Iraqi Kurdistan. Bombed for three continuous days with nerve gas on the orders of Saddam Hussein, over 5,000 people perished, and tens of thousands were left injured. The gassing made cancer, TB, and other terminal illnesses commonplace for its victims.

Bhopal’s experience with a similar tragedy, said Mr Sarangi, proved handy. In fact, the first meeting of the writer with him (Sarangi) took place in London to specifically check if the treatment methodology on Bhopal’s gas victims could be replicated on the ailing Kurds. The author was among the select few who had initiated the setting up the Kurdish Relief Fund. As his links with Bhopal thickened, the seed of Sambhavna was sown, and £50,000 raised through campaigns.

Once the clinic became a reality, on one of his visits to the city Indra Sinha happened to meet a gas-maimed victim, Sunil Rajput, on whose experiences Animal’s People is based. Sunil, said Mr Sarangi, had barely stepped into his teens when he abruptly lost both his parents, three sisters and a brother on the ghastly night of December 2-3, 1984. It undid him completely, making him suicidal and driven to fits of insanity. He committed suicide last year after several unsuccessful attempts.

Those close sessions with Sunil also had a deep impact on the writer’s mind, prodding him to chuck advertising and take up fulltime writing. How much it affected him, said Mr Saranagi, can be gauged from the touching tribute to Sunil titled: “The life and death of a mad Bhopali child”.

Sinha wrote: “Sunil, for much of your short life, you believed that people were coming to murder you. ‘Nonsense’, we, your friends, would try to assure you. The sky’s blue. We are all here. You have done no harm to a soul. Why should anyone want to harm you. ‘I guess I’m mad,’ you’d say, who could see nightmares and hear voices bellowing in his head....”—Dawn/The Asian Age News Service