Drawing on aspects of both docu-drama and fairy-tale, Dominique Lapierre's epic story of man-made disaster in India, Five Past Midnight in Bhopal, delivers its horrific account with a frank and brave intimacy. The hulking pesticide factory had been built by American multinational Union Carbide near the ancient and beautiful city of Bhopal, to take advantage of the huge untapped potential of the Indian agricultural market.

"As inoffensive as a chocolate factory" according to one American executive, this is however, no Roald Dahl tale, despite its grim twists. Instead, it's a chemical catastrophe of devastating proportions, as a combination of slack safety, complacency and human error led to the release of deadly toxic clouds of methyl oxide that resulted in perhaps as many as 30 thousand deaths in 1984. And inevitably, when the wind blows, it does so against the poor and deprived, as it did here, with the majority of the deaths occurring in the shantytown settlements that bordered the industrial leviathan. In retrospect, a time bomb waiting to happen, the repercussions are still being felt in the lungs, eyes, cancers and deformities of those unfortunate enough to come into contact with its fallout.