DOCUMENTING A TRAGEDY: WHY EVERYONE SHOULD WATCH "TRIAL BY FIRE"

By Ahona

In an opening shot that morbidly foreshadows its central tragedy, busy hands light a gas burner in a tight close-up - thus begins Trial by Fire, blue flames laving your screen. Its attempt at reimagining the Uphaar cinema tragedy is harrowingly detailed, more so because there is this prologue-ish documentation of how the lives of the victims were before the tragedy. Most news snippets, concise as they have to be, attempt to contain a tragedy within numbers - "x number of people died in this accident". Trial by Fire, by contrast, puts faces to the tragedy. You are confronted by human lives. And that ordinariness generates empathy. Now they are not numbers. They are people. It reminds me of some of my favourite lines from Albert Camus' The Plague. Camus talks about how tragedies are measured in rough estimates, how approximate numbers of victims become a metric for the impact of the tragedy - as if it is possible to understand the loss of human life in an approximation. That is what Trial by Fire reminds you, as it maps out the events of that fateful day in June, 1997. There is a relentlessness in a tragedy like that, of having to live with the consuming absence of those you had lost, of having to face a system that honours hierarchies of power. It is difficult to focus on the cinematic details in a series so haunting. But part of the show's impact lies in its ability to capture its era with a remarkable authenticity, cutting out a slice from the time through its cinematography and palette, chiselling its characters through their costumes and appearance. They belong to this portrait. Each actor melts into the respective character with a certain sincerity. Further still, it is a deeply respectful show, one that refuses to exploit the tragedy that it is portraying. And it is powerful because of that respect. That is precisely where a series like this becomes so important it documents this tragedy through those who were left behind to process it. It documents, respectfully, the social, legal and emotional battle against this injustice. It shows how its central characters, parents of two teenagers who were lost to the fire, are consumed by the trauma of it. When it shifts to the pursuit of justice, it emphasises on both the labour and the courage of it. This long, arduous protest against unaccountability, against those who trade their conscience for power, is documented with respect for the humaneness of those protesting.

Their protest is not reduced to some heroic tale of rebellion. This protest is a story that is gut-wrenchingly brave because it is so human. Through Neelam and Shekhar, the parents of two teenagers who passed away in that fire, the series shows that those who lost their loved ones to this tragedy lost a considerable part of themselves in its aftermath. Who accounts for the tragedy of the living dead? No news snippet can bracket that in a rough estimate.Think of this love. This love that caused so many people to dedicate their lives to the cause of those who couldn't be brought back. This love that chased and challenged systems of power. Where does it come from, this staggering, consuming love? How does the human heart hold something so powerful? In an essay on the reimagination of histories both personal and political, historical novelist Hilary Mantel wrote one of the most poignantly accurate observations that might explain this "It is almost the definition of being human: we are the animals who mourn."