"The day before the
gas leaked was a Sunday. My friends and I were playing in the evening and after
that we watched a movie on the television.
I must have gone to sleep around 9 pm. It was cold and I had covered myself
with a rug. Sometime in the middle of the night I heard a lot of noise coming
from outside. People were shouting "Get
up", "Run, run"."Gas has leaked".
My elder brother Jawahar got up and said "Everyone
is running away, we too must run". I opened my eyes and saw that the
room was full of white smoke.
The moment I removed the rug from my face, my eyes started stinging as if
someone was burning a lot of dried chillies and every breath was burning
my insides. I was scared of opening my eyes. The gas was getting in through
my mouth, through my nose; we got ready to run. All six of us, my brothers
and sister came out together. My sister was carrying my youngest brother
Rajesh in her arms. My father refused to leave the house and my mother stayed
with him, so we left them and ran towards the cremation ground. After a
while my sister and my little brother got separated from us. The gas was
thick and we couldn't see where they had gone. The four
of us who were left, held on to each other's hands and walked on.
While running Mahesh and I fell into a ditch full of dirty water.
As we reached the main road we could see a lot of people lying around. We
did not know whether they were dead or unconscious. One man, Gupta, was
sleeping with a rug over him. Mahesh crawled under the rug with him and
he made place for the rest of us too. But after a while, as we could not
breathe it got very uncomfortable under the rug. So we got up and started
walking towards the bus stand. Near the wire shop we came across some bathrooms
which were closed. My brother kicked the door down and all of us got inside.
I covered my younger brothers Mahesh and Suresh with my coat and put them
to sleep. My elder brother kept sitting outside looking out for our parents.
I asked him to come in, but he was worried about them and would not come in.
He started vomiting outside, some people in the neighbourhood gave him
water. We were not talking to each other, just sitting and worrying
about our parents. I did not know that the gas could kill people but while
running away I had seen a little child crying beside his mother who was lying
near the road. so all kinds of dreadful thoughts crossed my mind. Early in
the morning we set out for home. My eyes were swollen and my chest was aching.
On our way back we saw a lot of dead cattle lying around and a lot of people
too. My brother could not walk, so Mahesh and I held both his hands and
pulled him along.
Nearer home I saw my friend Santosh's grandfather lying dead. Balmukund,our
neighbour was dying and they rushed him to the hospital. My uncles who
also live in Bhopal but in a far off basti had heard about the gas leak
and came looking for us. They were worried about what they would find. But
they found all of us alive. Later when I went out with my uncle to buy jaggery,
on the way to the shop I saw a lot of dead bodies of men, women and children
lying in front of the Union Carbide factory gate. I was also trying to find
our cow and found her in a street coughing. My dog lay dead. Two of my friends,
Santosh and Rajesh also had died. My uncles took all of us to their home
which is fifteen kilometers away. We sat under a tree and all the people
in the locality came over to look at us. Then, some of them arranged to
have us taken to the hospital."
Ramesh
Today, a 21 year old apprentice at a tailor's shop, Jai Prakash Nagar
