Neela: Bhopal, 1984
You always trusted the forest. Here, danger can be seen and is known. The floor is layered with cool leaves that can be used to cover up faces. You’re lying here, laughing and out of breath; your brothers are lying beside you. The first one to move will be tickled by all the rest, who pretend to be monsters and fake-growl with the hunger of thin ghosts. All of you will watch out for the glint of teeth and dazzling, predatory coils.
The dense brush hides tigers, snakes, and a tiny creek that tastes fresh after the rain. Your youngest brother knows the best places.
The edge of the pretend forest, a neglected city garden, is where you and your brothers purchase time by tickling each other or running and scrambling over rocks, as if the four of you never had to work. As if your father never accepted a packet of rupees and four quintals of wheat, one for each of you. As if he never told you, Neela, go. As if he didn’t stop you, when you were nine, from holding onto your mother’s sari. As if he didn’t hold you and your brothers back, including the youngest one, age five, from holding onto your mother’s sari, from nearly tearing it off her body when they wouldn’t let go.
Your hands could be washed of the clay, of the hard coal, and every day your fingers moved more quickly than the legs of men who carried finished pyramids, fresh bricks for the furnace. In summer, you and your brothers first broke coal, then walked without bending into the brick kiln, cloth protecting your mouths from the smoke. December was joy and cold, the fumes of the kiln more bearable when you could rinse your mouths with water, which was not so scarce then. And after working, you and your brothers knew that you could leap over everything jagged you saw. In seconds, you could place many yards between the intimation of a threat, its small or large rustle, and yourself. You could easily outrun strangers’ hands, and rejoice at the chill. Walking outside, into the kiln and back, and then sleeping on the ground of the shanty was still better than working in the factory.
Early one morning, coming back with a vessel of water, you spy a pile of bright folded cotton cloths on the ground and, because of the weight you carry, you carefully make your way toward it, even though you want to run.
December. Your birthday.
Maybe a pavaday from home—a dream. But all three half-naked little boys, the brothers who’d once thrown stones at palaces with you, or come at you with sticks for swords, are sleeping on the ground near the shanty, tensed and at odd angles, as if they’d tried escaping even in their sleep.
Still hoping they’re playing a game, you set down the water and tickle them. You listen for breath, but hear nothing. You’ve understood the danger too late. Eyes burning now, you run. To the forest. You arrive stumbling and unsteady, but are forced to stop because you can’t see anymore. You are afraid.
Once, when you and your brothers were caught trying to run away from the brick kiln, the debt master who’d bargained with your father punished all of you with no water for a day. How light your body felt then, how small, how free, as if you had traveled in some unseen way to your mother.
December is cool and mornings fresh, but your lungs are scorched now. Not for another thirty or maybe a hundred years will the water and land be safe again, as pure and unpolluted as they were hours before. Before the air burned and became a hateful thing.
Eight thousand years ago, children huddled with their mothers in cool caves. Those caves are hidden deep in a forest, miles from here, and would have been so much safer than shantytowns around the factory in Bhopal City, the easily penetrated houses of corrugated metal and scavenged plywood. The walls of those shacks are sheets of plastic with small holes to breathe, set at the height of small children unable to refrain from peeking out.
All three of your brothers, limber and clever boys, were gifted at nosing out delectable refuse, edibles in the garbage. They were like scavenging dogs, little ponies. Long ago they nicknamed you Neelagai—antelope, for your thin quick legs, your skill at finding enough unspoiled food for all of them– and when they pretended to hunt you, none of them could find you here.
Other hunters have found you at the edge of your forest: methyl isocyanate, fleet-footed mercury, and Sevin, the most experienced killer, creeping like ground brush.
You remember rope. Remember being pulled up into the kiln, then told to walk on bricks since. Like the other children, unlike the adults, you were light enough to walk on bricks and leave them whole. Ropes hauled by strong men brought you release. Now instead of rope it feels like snakes coiling around you. Or dense vines, tight around your throat. Water. You need water now, for the burning thirst, the invisible thief of your air. Your chest hurts. You push out poison air but breathe in more.
The death toll among Bhopal’s shantytown families is estimated by the number of shrouds that were ordered. Twenty-thousand, excluding families who didn’t have money for shrouds, fathers who didn’t have money for children. Eyes watering, fathers and older brothers were coughing too much to bargain. After the burning, many eyes turned sightless. Corneas clouded; ulcers branched like thin cacti.
Cacti are plants you’ll never travel to deserts to see. You and your brothers saw some once in a comic book you found in the garbage. A small man with a red beard and a large hat, a cactus with cockeyed spikes. Your youngest brother laughed and laughed, when you tried to imitate that frowning man.
You die knowing your brothers, but not others who died.
In death, you match the image of one young girl, asleep after a bath, who hundreds of years ago was engraved in the emperor’s miniatures by artisans so skilled that, when they finished crafting monuments, Emperor Jahangir ordered them blinded. This forest, where you played, can be trusted to absorb you.
All this was caused by someone important, an American, used to ordering some work to be finished somewhere else, the back of his head under a beam of light from a window that has been opened on a summer day, allowing the Houston air into the office for a few seconds, before his air conditioning starts going full blast.
Chaya Bhuvaneswar is a physician and writer with work in Narrative Magazine, Tin House, Electric Lit, The Millions, Joyland, Michigan Quarterly Review and elsewhere. Her poetry and prose juxtapose Hindu epics, other myths and histories, and the survival of sexual harassment and racialized sexual violence by diverse women of color. Her debut collection White Dancing Elephants will be released on Oct 9 2018, by Dzanc Books and is available at amazon.com as well as indie booksellers. She has received a MacDowell Colony fellowship, Sewanee Writers Conference scholarship and Henfield award for her writing. Follow her on Twitter at @chayab77 including for upcoming readings and events.