Trial by Fire: Uphaar fire and its human toll

A still from Trial by Fire, streaming on Netflix.

At the centre of the miniseries Trial by Fire on Netflix is bureaucratic heartlessness and a special kind of apathy reserved for those involved. How callous a state can be to the lone citizen struggling for coherence and context while grieving is a larger question that ails across eras. All stories real or made up perhaps come to the same truth: are there different ways to look at good and bad?

After losing their two children when a blaze took over a movie theatre in New Delhi on June 13, 1997, a bigger fire threatened to consume the parents who had to deal with red tape, legal hassles, a lengthy road to paltry justice, and even downright threats apart from the heartbreak.

The Uphaar theatre fire took 59 lives, including that of Ujjwal and Unnati, who had gone there to watch Border. Their parents, Neelam and Shekhar Krishnamoorthy, chose not to give up their quest for the facts leading up to the tragedy and, if possible, any chance at justice. The monetary compensation and jailing of the guilty were an ebb and flow despite the best and long-term efforts, consuming lifetimes, by the Association of Victims of Uphaar Fire Tragedy.

The dramatised version of events in Trial by Fire, created by Kevin Luperchio and Prashant Nair, takes viewers through the many truths and brutalities that mark an accident that is personal and yet a public one, not once losing its grip on the documentary-like factual telling. Though based on real events, such celluloid translations sometimes suffer from cloying depiction or a weak narration. No fear of any of that in Trial by Fire, where the tightly edited series presents almost a composite view of events as and when they happened. From minor details to the major ones, all relevant facts are fused together in a chronological order that gives an inside view of everything that happened.

The performances and scenes stand out for their understanding of nuances. Rajshri Deshpande and Abhay Deol bring their acting skills to the harrowing events in a way that makes the grim realities more real. Any portrayal of true events walks the thin line between the synthetic nature of recreation and retaining fidelity and empathy to the original nature of what transpired. Trial by Fire deftly humanises a case buried deep under newspaper headlines and avoidant psyches, taking us back to the helplessness, the chaos, the embittered process.

As a people we continue to fight daily battles against what we call the system: the stonewalling, corruption, bribes, the general uselessness of warring against the inevitable tossing aside of our individual concerns in the face of a larger and more general scenario. What this miniseries, with its seven searing episodes, does is to bring into sharp focus the necessity of just such battles. The greater narrative of mankind demands stories that impart hope, and in the process alert us to the perils of trusting the outer world so blindly that safety in public places is taken for granted.

Also read: Trial by Fire: How Prashant Nair found a story of resilience in Uphaar cinema fire tragedy