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A listener note.

This episode contains descriptions of harm to children and may not be suitable for all audiences.

It's December 3, 1984, on a cold night in Bhopal, a city in central India.

In a tiny ramshackle house, a young mother rocks her baby to sleep. She's exhausted. As she hummed a lullaby, she prays her husband

won't wake the baby when he gets home from work. He's a packer at the Union Carbide

Pesticide Factory. The walls of the compound are just a few hundred yards

from their home. If she stands on the roof, she can see the men at work on the metal gantries

above the forest of pipework and tanks. Finally, her son drifts off to sleep, and gently the

young woman lowers him to the sleeping mat on the floor and lies down beside him. The room is cold, so she draws the baby closer and starts to drift off herself,

but as she closes her eyes, the baby stirs.

She ignores him at first, hoping he'll drift off again,

but then she realizes her baby isn't crying. He's choking.

Her eyes bolt open. Her son is frothing at the mouth.

She snatches him up as he coughs, his whole body shaking. It takes her a moment to notice

the ghostly pale mist rolling across the floor and filling the room. And then she tastes it,

the poison. It sears her mouth, her nose, her throat.

She knows she has to get out. Holding her baby, she stumbles out of her home and into the alleyway.

But the haze is even thicker here. A neighbor staggers past her, vomiting green bile.

...