The railway station of Madhya Pradesh’s capital becomes the nucleus of mayhem and rescue as one of the worst industrial disasters to have occurred in human history chokes the city to death one night. Amid shocking government apathy and infuriating systemic negligence rise a few unlikely men scrambling to save whatever, whoever they can.
Directed by Shiv Rawail, The Railway Men opens on December 2, 1984, 16 hours before the catastrophic gas leak that killed over 15,000 people in Bhopal. We are immediately introduced to the key characters—Iftekaar Siddiqui (Kay Kay Menon), Bhopal Junction’s upright, conscientious station master, Imaad Riyaz (Babil Khan), a former worker of the Union Carbide Factory (the site and the cause of the calamity) who joins the railways on the fateful day, and Express Bandit (Divyenndu), a thug infamous for looting trains and stations. It is these three men, who didn’t know each other a day earlier, that come together to do everything they can and more until help arrives.
Whatever the promotions may have you believe, this Netflix limited series is a Kay Kay Menon spectacle. He was stellar in the 1999 film Bhopal Express, another movie based on the gas leak but here, he is transcendental. Though the entire cast is commendable, however, Menon brings an irrepressible ache, a haunting awareness to his performance as the duty-bound stationmaster whose moral compass is so steadfast, that it becomes the lone guiding light on a night of abject misery and hopelessness. Kay Kay Menon is the hero we need but don’t deserve.
Divyenndu, too, is terrific as a man forced to extend largesse in crisis because he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong man. The most layered and realistic character in the series, he is the only one with an uneasy conscience. Everyone else around him is either washed in all white or all black. His Baldev Yadav is a clever stand-in for the audience, faithfully mirroring our emotions, reactions, and choices that we would likely have made had we been in his shoes. He gives his dubiousness a casual agility, an easy charm. It is his track with Menon’s stationmaster that holds The Railway Men together even when a few other compartments get derailed.
Then there is Babil Khan as the young, earnest Imaad trying to do right, even when it’s the difficult thing to do. It’s heartening to see Babil choose meaty projects and work alongside his father’s contemporaries with such remarkable restraint and effortlessness. I can’t wait to see all that he goes on to do and become. Since The Railway Men is a Yash Raj Films production (their maiden streaming series), expect stars even in relatively smaller parts. R Madhavan makes an appearance only in the third episode of the four-part mini-series. As the upright, unflagging general manager of the Northern Railways, he is given painfully little to do, arriving at the scene as soon as he can but by the time he does, it is too little, too late. There are also impressive cameos by Juhi Chawla, Mandira Bedi, and Raghubir Yadav.
I like how The Railway Men is structured. All episodes, each about an hour long, have a prologue that opens in a time different than the present, making the frequent jumps coherent, easy to follow, and allowing a 360-degree view of the characters, ensuring no thread is left loose. I also like how Aayush Gupta’s story and screenplay establish the inflammable socio-political context of the time. The Bhopal gas leak disaster happened barely a month after Indira Gandhi’s assassination when the backlash against the Sikh community was at its most incendiary. The story treats the mindless hatemongering and bloodthirstiness for them almost as a parallel arc.
The creative decision to use one of the key men as the narrator also favors the story. Much like in the fantastic 12th Fail, it furthers the narrative from the perspective of someone who has stakes involved but not enough to be blinded by it. If it was a close friend of the protagonist in the Vidhu Vinod Chopra film, here it is a local reporter (Sunny Hinduja) who had been investigating the suspicious ways of working of the Union Carbide Factory and saw it coming much before anyone else.
What doesn’t work is the cinematography. DOP Rubais’s lens is too dewy, too framed, too proper. It is never able to fully establish the urgency, the extremity of the havoc that a catastrophe of this scale must have wreaked. He uses graphic imagery instead to make up for the lack of subtext in his storytelling—close-ups of doctors taking out infected lungs from a dead body, an infant sucking on his mother’s bare bosom as she dies foaming at the mouth, blood washing down the drain. There is no dearth of stock characters too—an ambitious bride with a promising future ahead of her, a heavily pregnant woman, and two young urchin brothers who sing for a living at the railway platform.
Towards the end of the final episode is a wide shot of dead bodies being cremated—Hindus being burned on pyres, Muslims being returned to the earth. The methyl isocyanate in the gas, that leaked from the pesticide plant which had no business of being in the middle of a heavily populated city, killed everyone in its wake bulldozing over manmade divisions of class, caste, and religion. It begs a crucial question—has much changed in the last 40 years since the travesty in Bhopal? Are we sure something similar won’t happen ever again? As important as it is to remember the courage of everyday heroes, we must also not forget that it could have been prevented, that we have learned little from it, or that several cities are tethering dangerously close to collapse.
