Just after midnight on December 3, 1984, a white cloud slipped over the walls of a pesticide plant in Bhopal and sank into the sleeping streets beyond. Mothers woke choking. Children ran blind. By sunrise, bodies lay in lanes, on hospital floors, beside carts and bicycles abandoned in flight. How could one ordinary night become the deadliest industrial disaster in history—and why were so many of the plant’s defenses already broken when the gas began to rise?
Gas Over Bhopal tells that story with the force of a thriller and the weight of hard history. It follows the making of a modern factory in a growing Indian city, the cost-cutting and warnings that went ignored, the fatal minutes when water entered Tank 610, and the long night when hundreds of thousands were left to breathe poison with no alarm, no antidote, and nowhere to run. Then it carries the reader into the courtrooms, hospital wards, protest marches, and bitter settlements that turned catastrophe into a generations-long fight.
Vivid, scrupulously researched, and driven by the lives of workers, residents, doctors, and survivor-activists, this is not only the story of what happened in Bhopal, but of why it still has not ended. For anyone who wants history that grips the throat and refuses to let go, this is that book.
