Jeher Lal says he was born sometime on the night of December 3, 1984, Bhopal's night of darkness, not long after 43 tonnes of deadly Methyl Isocyanate (MIC) gas leaked into the cold winter air, killing thousands of men and animals in a matter of hours.
That night, his mother, Pano, had rushed out of their house in the densely populated Shahajahanabad area not far from the Union Carbide plant, her eyes burning. "My eyes had swollen, I could not see anything. While running I fell down. After that I have no recollection of what happened." Pano says that in all the melee, she was assumed as dead and taken to the Raslakheri crematorium where she gave birth.
Later she and her newborn son were taken to the Hamidia Hospital where the doctors named her son "Jehar", in memory of the poison that blighted the city the day he was born. The name wasn't easy to live down, Jeher found, and so was altered slightly to the more acceptable "Jwahar" in his official papers when he was in class four. "My parents sent me off to study to our home town in Kalahandi district of Odisha and my friends there would laughs at my name. So I changed it," says Jeher, as he's still known widely in Bhopal.
It hasn't been possible, of course, to get over the effects of the poisonous gas he'd inhaled as an infant. At 30, Jeher is slightly built, the result, his mother believes, of the gas. "He does not put on weight however much he eats, she complains. But what bothers Jeher more are the breathlessness that comes over him every time he does any form of strenuous physical labour and the attacks of anxiety.
It has prevented him from fulfilling his dream of getting a college degree and finding a job. "I was in class nine and the board exams were approaching when I got an attack. My parents brought me back to Bhopal where I was treated for four months. When I went back, the exams were over and the headmaster of the Navodaya school where I studied refused to take me back saying I did not have enough attendance. I moved to another school and then another, but it wasn't the same," rues Jeher. He now works as a mason in Kalahandi, his earnings helping to support his parents and four younger siblings.
But he's back in Bhopal this time of the year, to take part in the rallies and protest meets held to mark the anniversary of the Bhopal gas tragedy. Then he finds himself as something of a mini celebrity sought out by journalists from India and abroad who want to meet and talk to the man whose birth coincided with the deaths of thousands in the city. He's given seven interviews this year and has a file with a few newspaper clippings featuring him.
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