It's true that Indra Sinha had three lives on the road to writing Animal's People, his extraordinary new novel inspired by Bhopal. But the copywriter, activist and author says the only one he ever really wanted was to be a writer. An award-winning advertising copywriter (voted one of the top 10 British copywriters of all time by his peers), the Indian-born Sinha walked away from his career in 1994 to write 'about things that mattered'.
And write he did, winning accolades for his 1999 best-selling memoir about the then-embryonic internet, Cybergypsies, and his 2002 novel The Death of Mr Love, before realising he'd inadvertently become a Bhopal activist. Sinha, 57, has now chalked up 14 years campaigning for the survivors of the 1984 gas spill at Union Carbide's pesticide factory in the Indian city in Madhya Pradesh. 'I just became more and more involved with it over the years until it became part of my life,' he says.
His 'accidental' activism began in 1993, when Indian community worker Sathyu (Satinath) Sarangi visited Sinha at his home in rural England to solicit his help in raising money for a free medical clinic for Bhopal's 100,000 still suffering survivors. Sinha - known for his work on Amnesty International's ad campaign - agreed, but it took him a year to find the words, he says.
He quit his job, and in 1994 set up the Bhopal Medical Appeal by writing an ad in London's Guardian newspaper. Accompanied by Raghu Rai's photograph of a Bhopali child's burial, it persuaded the public to donate GBP60,000 - enough to build the Sambhavna Clinic and hire medical staff. Sinha went on to mastermind numerous campaigns and appeals for Bhopal, first from
his home in England, then from southern France, where he and his family now live. But in all those 14 years, he says, 'the thought of telling the Bhopal story in a book had never occurred to me'.
Animal's People, however, reveals that the very spirit of Bhopal has seeped into his subconscious much as the gas from Union Carbide's factory leaked into Bhopal's collective bloodstream. The book is, at one level, a coming of age story set in the fictional city of Khaufpur, an Indian city that mirrors Bhopal. At another, it's a grim portrait of corporate and political chicanery.
The novel owes much of its potency to the unabashed bawdiness of its narrator, a 19-year-old boy-man nicknamed Animal, who hijacked Sinha's consciousness and then his novel. 'His language is unbelievably foul and was one of the things I was worried about,' Sinha says, 'because I'm not an impolite person.'