Fireworks explosion that killed 16 in Kerala: Bound by faith, economics and a way of life

The cause of the explosion, one of the deadliest fireworks tragedies in the state’s history, is still under investigation.

Every April, on a single night in the central Kerala town of Thrissur, two rival temple committees stage what is widely considered India’s loudest, most extravagant fireworks display, the climax of a centuries-old festival called Pooram, held on the grounds of the Vadakkunnathan temple, around 15 km from Mundathicode. The competition between the two committees, Thiruvambady and Paramekkavu, is the engine of the spectacle.

Each side hires its own contractor to prepare the show, and the contest is settled in the sky and on the ground at dawn, judged by a crowd of lakhs and litigated for months afterwards on television and in WhatsApp groups. The fireworks have to be loud enough to make your ribs vibrate, the sky-flowers wide enough to remember. Satheesh, 46, was Thiruvambady’s licensed contractor. The standard he was working towards has its own phrase in Thrissur: garbham kalakki, crackers loud enough to make a pregnant woman’s womb convulse.

The field in Mundathicode where fireworks assembled in a field exploded on April 21

The gentle man who played with fire

Satheesh, by every account, was a gentle man. The kind, his wife said, who could not hurt a fly. He drank a bit at night, which in these parts is not more unusual than drinking tea. When he was preparing a show, he took a vrutham, the oath men take before doing something religious — no alcohol, right conduct. “For him, it was like a puja,” said a veteran Thrissur fireworks contractor who knew him, requesting that he not be named.

Joshiy lived next to the unused rice field that doubled as Satheesh’s makeshift manufacturing unit in Mundathicode. He heard what felt like an earthquake, knew what it was, and ran. Sangeeth, a JCB operator working in a neighbouring field, waited for the secondary explosions to subside, then drove his machine towards the smoke and used the bucket to carve a path wide enough for fire engines to follow.

By then, Joshiy found Satheesh. “When I tried to lift him…,” he said, and could not continue. His hands had touched what fire had done to the body and had no words to describe it. Joshiy and the others drove the living, or the barely living, to hospital. One man was conscious enough to beg for his life. By the time the rescue teams arrived, there was nothing left to do but walk the ground. A hand here, a torso somewhere else.

Satheesh’s house, within a few kilometres of the field, felt the tremor. Praji, his wife, was at home resting after a long day of cooking for the workers. The unit’s economics were tight, and the meals came from the contractor’s family kitchen, prepared by the women, who often worked till midnight or 1 am. “I ran out and saw the smoke in the sky,” she said. “I knew immediately it was all over.”

The family rushed to Thrissur Medical College, where they were briefed by Dr Padmakumar. He told them that Satheesh had been brought in with burns that had affected even his internal organs. His right knee was mangled, his left leg fractured. Praji was advised not to see her husband in the condition he was in. He died four days later.

Praji, who works as a helper at a ration shop in the neighbourhood, spent most of this week lying on a yellow mat against the living room wall, a brass lamp lit beside her, two plastic bottles of lamp oil at her feet. Tradition asks this of the woman of the house in the five days before sanchayanam, the post-funeral gathering of the ashes.

The photograph of Satheesh’s father hangs high on the living room wall, garlanded, decorated with a small electric flame. Kamalakshi, Satheesh’s mother, silver-haired and in a white sari, sat in a corner. Asked how long the trade had been running in the family, the mother looked up at the photo and said, “a long time”. Satheesh’s father had done this work, his grandfather too. The elderly woman and her brother Subramaniyan worked it out together and arrived at 45 years as a number that felt about right.

The family had lost other members to the trade. Subramaniyan recounted how an uncle had once gone to inspect an amittu, a sky-flower charge, that had failed to explode. It went off just then and took his head. Another, weighed down by debt, was said to have laid himself down on top of one as it went off.

When guests arrive, Praji sits up. She is, if anything, more composed than the men in the room, who keep returning to the question of tradition and money in a way that suggests they cannot stress the first enough or quite believe how little the second amounts to.

Following the Puttingal disaster of April 2016, in which an unauthorised display at a temple in Kollam killed more than a hundred people, the state cracked down on contractors across Kerala. Satheesh lost his licence and was out of work for eight years. “Even when he was jobless, he didn’t really go for anything else,” Praji said. He got the licence back only three years ago, and was making steady progress to finish the house.

“Soregam (swargam or heavean),” Satheesh’s daughter scrawled on a wall next to where her father’s shirts hung

Festival contractors like Satheesh are paid only at the end, the fireworks veteran in Thrissur said, unlike a band set or a drama troupe, who take most of their money upfront. To fund each show, Satheesh borrowed. Praji pointed at the gold chain around her neck and the ring on her finger: “except these, everything else is pawned.”

Who builds the spectacle, and for whom

V S Sunilkumar, CPI(M) leader and a former minister from Thrissur who has spent years close to Pooram and the men who build it, said, “These contractors are not engineers, they are artists. They work from knowledge handed down. Some of it, they say, is written on palm leaf manuscripts.”

The grammar of these displays is very localised. Those from Thrissur, for instance, like crackers that sound loud rather than burn bright. “Kuzhi minnal, dynamite, gund, these are all items unique to this place. They are not made in Sivakasi,” he said, referring to the Tamil Nadu town that supplies most of India’s fireworks. While much of it is made in Mundathicode, some are assembled from raw material brought in from Sivakasi, with workers cutting, filling and fusing the components by hand.

The amittu, the sky-flower, has to be perfected at the manufacturing stage itself, the design arranged on the ground in the exact way it should bloom in the sky.

Sunilkumar said Satheesh was paid in a different currency: “Janakoottam nalathu parayanam. Committee kaar nalathu parayanam.” The crowd should say it was good. The committee should say it was good. That is what matters.

Except, when things go wrong, people like Satheesh end up paying.

Migrant workers from poorer northern states, lumped together locally as “Bengalis”, are not hired for the work in Mundathicode. Subramaniyan said the work is too technical, too wrapped in local ritual to feel like menial labour.

The wages are around Rs 800 a day, lower than what construction work pays, the risk higher by any measure. Yet, getting hired is harder than the wages would suggest, with entry by recommendation from someone already inside.

So who qualifies? Elderly women, mostly, who would otherwise go for NREGA work and find this slightly better paid and seasonal enough to fit around the rest of their lives. They sit and roll wicks and stick stickers the way an earlier generation rolled beedis, exchanging gossip, eating the meals provided. For elderly women, this is a means of livelihood. For those much older, it is their way of life.

The field in Mundathicode where fireworks assembled in a field exploded on April 21

And then there are the young men. To understand why they show up, it helps to understand where they show up from. Mundathicode is less than a hundred kilometres from Kochi by road, but they could be different countries.

Kochi is where the state’s aspirations have settled. Drugs are seized in quantities measured by mothership size; billionaires fly in by helicopter; traffic chokes roads because there is always money to spend.

Mundathicode is where Malayalam cinema can still credibly stage the older Kerala of rice fields and cow-dung cakes drying against compound walls. Eating at a restaurant is a labourer’s habit; everyone else cooks at home. Many of the men who used to live here are now in the Gulf, or coming back, or going back again.

This is not, in the standard Indian sense, terrible poverty. There is a school and a hospital. But the wealth has come unevenly, and Mundathicode sits at the uneven end. Kochi is two hours away by bus, close enough for the village to know exactly what it does not have. The same phone that plays Pooram footage back to the village that built the fireworks also pipes in reels of Kochi’s nightlife.

For most of the year, the village watches the city. On Pooram night, the city watches back. Pooram is the one thing the deep interior produces that Kochi stops to look at. The men who build it — the contractor, the crew in his shed — are for those hours inside the only spectacle the city cannot stage for itself.

“Rajesh, Vishnu, Manikandan, Hari,” Sunilkumar said, listing the dead. “They were not coming for the money.” One was the makeup man for a leading actress, another was a councillor’s brother. Asked why they came to work in Mundathicode, Sunilkumar recalled Giri, the councillor, saying, “povathirikan patila chetta”. Couldn’t stay away.

Sunilkumar said the architecture of Thrissur’s inner life rests on a handful of obsessions: aana kambam, padakkam, puli kali, pooram (elephants, fireworks, dancers dressed as tigers, the festival itself). The young men have grown up watching the festival. Now, WhatsApp statuses and reels keeping the noise going all year. Somewhere along the way, the watching became wanting, and the wanting became showing up. Some end up in fields like the one in Mundathicode.

Spectacle vanishes, the festival moves on

In the days after the explosion, the spectacle they had given their lives to was being negotiated behind closed doors. The festival went ahead on April 26. It has been held since the 18th century and 15 deaths did not change that, except in scale. The Kudamattam, the competitive umbrella display between the two temple sides, was reduced from an hour to 15 minutes.

The fireworks were a more complicated matter. Each temple trust holds a licensed magazine permitting 2,000 kilograms of explosives per display. Investigators say Satheesh’s unit had been storing well above permitted quantities when it exploded. The day after, the Paramekkavu operator was issued a stop memo for the same reason. So there were no fireworks to display. A crowd of lakhs still came, and assembled in front of an empty sky.

That over-storage is the regulatory fact at the heart of the case, and it complicates the portrait. The same man Praji described as gentle, the man the veteran said did his job as if it were “puja”, was also a man working past the limits printed on his licence. The investigation will assign blame in its own time. What is already clear is that the ceiling was set at one number and the show being asked of him required another.

Posters in Mundathicode paying respects to Satheesh

There were plans, at some point, to bring the fireworks industry under a central manufacturing facility, the kind of institutional support that might have changed what happened in Mundathicode.

Satheesh’s uncle Subramaniyan, in the meantime, has been receiving calls from banks to clear his debts totalling, as far as he knew, Rs 8 lakh. The state has announced Rs 14 lakh in compensation. Pledges have come from public figures based in Thrissur. None of it has reached the house yet.

Praji plans to get back to her work at the ration shop soon. She does not know whether the temple committee had a formal contract with her late husband, or what it entailed. The family grew apologetic when the subject of compensation was raised, almost embarrassed, noting that the temple, after all, did not get the show it had been promised.

What the family has instead is the validation. Subramaniyan said he counted 35 garlands on his nephew’s body when it was displayed at the village school. Ministers, MLAs, the who’s who of the town came, in queues that lasted three hours. The mother and the uncle spoke about it with something like pride, the way you would speak about a son who had finally been recognised in the field he had given his life to. The recognition was the only part of the bargain that arrived on time.