This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. To much of the outside world, the city of Bhopal, India, lingers as an emblem of industrial disaster, the place where a 1984 toxic gas leak from a Union Carbide plant killed thousands of people instantly and up to 15,000 over time. Manzoor Ahtesham, a Bhopal native who was one of the most significant contemporary voices in Hindi literature, showed his readers a far more complex place. To be sure, that disaster often hovers, metaphorically and otherwise, in his works. In one of his most acclaimed books, “The Tale of the Missing Man” (1995), his alienated antihero was with a prostitute behind his wife’s back on the night of the gas leak.

Source: New York Times May 08, 2021 19:15 UTC