The fictional town of Khaufpur—the setting of Indra Sinha’s
Animal’s People—is based on Bhopal, India, where a 1984
gas leak at a Union Carbide chemical plant caused thousands of deaths
and countless more injuries. (Corporate accountability being what it
is, residents of Bhopal are to this day lobbying for reparations and
cleanup.)
Sinha’s novel is set in a town full of sickness and mutilation as
grotesque and improbable as any fictive realms of magical realism.
Here, though, the divergences from reality reflect not the flights of
an author’s imagination, but the effects of toxic chemicals on the
lungs, wombs, and chromosomes of people unlucky enough to live in the
shadow of a corrupt, shoddily run chemical plant.
The story is presented as a firsthand account, relayed into a tape
recorder by a young man named Animal (so-called since the poisons
released in the accident twisted his spine, leaving him to walk on all
fours). Animal tells us right off that if we “want [his] story, we’ll
have to put up with how [he] tells it”—and how he tells it is in
prose that’s coarse and conversational, riddled with French and Hindi,
often funny at the same time as it’s deeply hopeless.
Animal’s story really begins when he is hired by Zafar, an activist
who has spent years lobbying the “Kampani” (as residents of Khaufpur
call the American chemical company that owns the plant) to take
responsibility for the effects of the disaster. When a young American
doctor opens a free clinic in Khaufpur, Zafar suspects the doctor is in
league with the Kampani, and he encourages locals to boycott her
clinic, though she offers free services they desperately need.
Animal plays both sides of the fence, befriending the American
doctor while working for Zafar; screws slowly tighten as Zafar
increases pressure on the Kampani, and tensions rise between the doctor
and the community.
The last 15 pages of the book are difficult to
read—aesthetically difficult, that is; not emotionally—but
the 300 up ’til that point are brilliant. Animal takes his milieu for
granted until the perspective of outsiders forces him to consider the
reality he lives in—these moments of clarity are brutal, and all
the more painful because of the historical circumstances in which they
are rooted.