A Profound Slow Burn
Netflix’s Trial by Fire (2023) explores the true story of the 1997 Uphaar cinema fire and its long aftermath, presenting a heartbreaking narrative which shines brightest in its exploration of human intimacies.
I was four months shy of 13. It was a time of single-screen theatres, limited T.V. options, and the earliest days of internet accessibility, where it took an hour in the cyber-café to check my Lycos email account. With limited options, it was a time of mass zeitgeist in popular culture—and in the summer of 1997, that pop culture phenomenon was Border.
J.P Dutta’s epic— a fictionalization of the real-life events of the Battle of Longewala during the 1971 Indo-Pakistani War—captured the pulse of the nation. Border promised to fulfil the palette of every Indian cinema-goer, featuring an all-star ensemble cast of superstars, groundbreaking (for its time) action sequences, a soundtrack composed and performed by legendary producers and musicians, the melodrama of heartbreak, mothers, wives, sisters, and friends left behind, themes of grand courage, sacrifice, and ingenuity, an unquestionable tribute to the Armed Forces, a criticism towards war and violence itself, all culminating to compose a ballad of patriotism to the nation.
Border was unstoppable. In India, almost anyone who had the means to watch it, watched it. My school in Mussoorie held a special viewing of the film on Independence Day in 1997, turning the assembly hall into a temporary movie theatre. The film grossed a worldwide total of ₹655.7 million, became the fourth-biggest Bollywood hit of the 90s, collected a slew of Filmfare awards, and became a cultural lynchpin.
The film’s legacy, however, is also tied to one of the most haunting tragedies of its time.
Their trials encompass the first few minutes after the fire, the days of disbelief which follow, the months of consolidating and building a case, the years in court, and the decades that pass as justice is delayed or denied.
On June 13, 1997—the opening day of Border—a fire broke out at the Uphaar Cinema in the Green Park area of New Delhi, while hundreds of eager moviegoers were packed together to catch the 3 p.m. screening of the film. The fire stemmed from malfunction in the electric transformer at the theatre, eventually leading to chaos, stampedes, and asphyxiation. 59 people died, and over a hundred suffered serious injuries.
Among the moviegoers were siblings Unnati (17) and Ujjwal Krishnamoorthy (13), teenagers who lost their lives in the stuffy gas chamber. For the better part of the following two decades, Shekhar and Neelam Krishnamoorthy—their parents—along with the families of other victims, fought prolonged legal battles against the Ansals, the real-estate barons whose company owned Uphaar cinema. In 2016, the Krishnamoorthys wrote Trial by Fire: The Tragic Tale of the Uphaar Fire Tragedy, a recount of the catastrophic incident and their ongoing fight for justice.
It is this book that serves as the primary source in the Netflix adaptation Trial by Fire, a seven-episode web series released in January 2023. Created by Prashant Nair and Kevin Luperchio, the series is an intimate, subtle adaptation of the true story, following the Krishnamoorthys and others across their many battles since Uphaar. Their trials encompass the first few minutes after the fire, the days of disbelief which follow, the months of consolidating and building a case, the years in court, and the decades that pass as justice is delayed or denied.
The Krishnamoorthys are the heartbeat of the series. Abhay Deol—once a youth icon for his slew of alternative-to-mainstream acting roles—stars at Shekhar Krishnamoorthy, a grief-stricken middle-class father, sombre and careful in his approach, who finds himself filling to the brim under the pressure of suppressed sorrow. Rajshri Deshpande is a scene-stealer as Neelam Krishnamoorthy, the determined mother who persists for justice at the face of seemingly-insurmountable odds. In the enormity of this tragedy, Trial by Fire finds its strengths in the smallest privacies of life for the Krishnamoorthys, each specific detail a further twist of the knife, as if the fire that struck Uphaar continued to lash out seething, small flares.
Even before the dust and ash settles, the questions of misconduct become apparent. In different ways, Neelam and Shekhar discover the roots of greed and negligence that caused the fire, that blocked the escape routes, that led to dozens of deaths.
One of the most harrowing tales is of a man named Kishan Pal, a nightwatchman who loses seven members of his family—including the smallest children—to the fire. In a particularly stirring scene from the second episode, Kishan is called upon by a nurse to verify and collect the bodies—the nurse can hardly get him to make a thumbprint on the documentation before breaking down herself. Played by Yashwant Wasnik, Kishan is now laden with these seven corpses, facing an exponentially bleak conundrum. Without words, Wasnik’s physicality speaks volumes, as he transports the bodies back to his modest home, through cramped inner-lanes, before neighbours and Good Samaritans pool together to help him arrange the paperwork for the death certificates, which will then allow him to take the bodies for cremation.
It is in these vivid specificities where Trial by Fire shines the brightest, particularly in the Krishnamoorthys’ household: a pair of children’s toothbrushes by the toilet sink, left untouched and unused for months; the arrival of a pre-ordered birthday cake without a child at home to blow the candles; the steaming whistle of a pressure cooker in an otherwise quiet home. At the surface, Neelam and Shekhar could’ve easily been painted with the same broad brushstroke: grieving parents who seek justice. But the series zooms in to magnify their subtle differences, to present the unsaid tensions between the couple, allowing subtext to fill in many of the blanks.
Neelam pushes forward with a sense of determined rage, a rage that seems to energize her to continue the fight, day after day, year after year, flipping through old documents, chasing down lawyers and politicians, remaining unfulfilled, unsatisfied. No resolution could truly fill the empty vessel of her two lost children again. Deshpande is excellent in this role, in one of the finest performances by anyone in an Indian OTT series. She seethes behind a determined pair of eyes, containing her sorrows with a straight face, fearlessly challenging each bureaucratic hurdle in her way, and then, melting when, decades later, she sees the children of her friends grow older to live the dreams that she had for her own offspring.
Deol’s Shekhar, meanwhile, oscillates between caution and bravery, sometimes supportive of his wife taking the lead, sometimes fearing for her, sometimes taking the backseat, and sometimes facing his demons directly, unable to humanly suppress his emotions from spilling over. In a poignant scene years after the fire, Shekhar finally has his big breakdown when a well-connected person cuts him in line outside the bank teller; out of context, his anger seems unjustified, but the viewer knows that he’s only exploding out with frustration bottled-up for an entire lifetime as a ‘common man’, left powerless, shoved further back in line while others got ahead.
It is in these vivid specificities where Trial by Fire shines the brightest: a pair of children’s toothbrushes by the toilet sink, left untouched and unused for months; the arrival of a pre-ordered birthday cake without a child at home to blow the candles; the steaming whistle of a pressure cooker in an otherwise quiet home.
Later in the series, Shekhar begins to choose escape: meeting an old friend, drinking late into the night, anything to forget the case, the fire… until any glimpse of a cinema hall brings it all back all over again. Neelam, however, stays steady to her duty. These two characters represent the mosaic of struggles faced by families like the Krishnamoorthys, all the while the accused owners of Uphaar cinema continue to walk free.
A number of the families and friends join the Krishnamoorthys to form The Association of Victims of Uphaar Fire Tragedy [AVUT]. They find more evidence of mismanagement at Uphaar, of shoddy safety standards, fraudulent permits, of managers choosing greed over safety. The narrative of Trial by Fire further alleges that strongmen and fixers were hired—presumably by the Ansals—to be bribed into shunning the AVUT; and if the bribes didn’t work, to be threatened with a show a violence.
Some fall silent, some continue to fight, and the series draws the lines of combat: rich and powerful industrialists with the resources to buy the nation’s best lawyers and coerce the justice system itself, versus a community of ‘average’ citizens—aam aadmis and aaurats—who must discover just how inconvenient, inefficient, and unfair the system can be against them.
Meanwhile, the remnants of Border are everywhere. The film enjoys a long run in the theatres and its soundtrack continues to play across radio stations. For most of the country, the film is the ultimate gift of Bollywood escapism; for the victims of Uphaar, however, it’s a reminder of their worst day, screened over and over again.
Time flies, until its suddenly 2015, now 18 years past the incident. These time jumps from episode to episode are often jarring and leave the viewer a little disoriented. Each episode is a leap forward to another slice-of-life scene, instead of a slower transition forward—which I feel would’ve had a stronger emotional impact. The judiciary, meanwhile, move at a snail’s pace, the prosecutors and the accused get older, some of the witnesses and the accused pass away, and the earliest days of the internet evolve into mobile phones and hand-held devices.
At times, Trial by Fire has the noble intentions of being a ‘serious’ courtroom drama (the title is the clearest hint of this), but too much of the courtroom dialogue skips the realism deployed elsewhere in the series. The mundane is now skipped for the sentimental, bigger picture narrative—an impatience that, I felt, was an opportunity lost to show the tragedy of absurdity, a Kafkaesque struggle against seemingly-dull legal intricacies.
While the Ansals continue to dodge blame, Veer Singh (played by Rajesh Tailang)—a Delhi Vidyut Board employee and the last person to repair and check the faulty transformer at the cinema—is made into the scapegoat. In another deft act of challenging storytelling norms, the series now plunges into into Veer’s worldview, as he is villainized and spends seven years imprisoned, while his family merely continue with the daily peaks and troughs of being alive: weddings to be planned, bills to be paid, a separation to be suffered. In humanizing Veer and his family, Trial by Fire presents an alternative perspective of the case, allowing the viewer to empathize with them as victims of the tragedy, too.
The same complexity and interpretations, however, are not offered to the Ansals, who clearly wished to have little involvement another retelling of this case. Trial by Fire treats them as absent overlords, mastering over the puppet strings, but hardly seen or humanized themselves. It is a major blind spot in the series, perhaps echoing the blind spot in the actual trial of the case itself.
By its conclusion, the Krishnamoorthys’ fight isn’t for nought; history tells us that the prosecuting parties were able to expose fire safety standards, eventually enforcing regulations that would make public spaces a little safer in India. The AVUT filed a landmark civil compensation case—and won.
Meanwhile, a quarter of a century after the fire, the Ansals are finally sentenced for tempering evidence, but they have hardly served any time.
Episode 7 presents the slow and disturbing build-up of the actual events on the day of Uphaar. Now armed with the foreknowledge of the future, it makes for a gruelling watch, leaving the viewer both heartbroken and enraged.
Trial by Fire makes a bold decision to save two of its biggest-name stars—Anupam Kher and Ratna Pathak Shah—for Episode 5. They play the Bedis, an older couple dwelling in comfort, but in regret of an alternative life that they could’ve lived. Kher, as Captain Hardeep Bedi, is a former soldier who reminisces about the missed opportunity of representing his country on the field of battle, in the same skirmish that inspired Border. Shah plays his wife Mrs. Bedi, who wonders why she has stuck by the side of a man that hasn’t given her the romantic fulfilments she has deserved.
The Bedis, the Krishnamoorthy children, and many of the other victims of the fire are given centre-stage in the harrowing finale to Trial by Fire, a return to that June afternoon in 1997, to the ill-fated cinema hall. To the opening day of Border. In almost real-time, episode 7 presents the slow and disturbing build-up of the actual events on the day of Uphaar. Now armed with the foreknowledge of the future, it makes for a gruelling watch, leaving the viewer both heartbroken and enraged.
In the darkness of the theatre, we see moviegoers share a moment of intimacy: hands held, smiles shared, all in giddy anticipation for the film, a promise of a few hours of escapism from real life. When the transformer ignites with fire in the basement, a horrifying chaos follows in the theatre hall, which has been locked from the outside by employees hoping to avoid any patrons walking in without tickets. As scenes of battle are projected on the screen, another war unfolds in the dark hall. The smoke rises first, leaving the viewers alarmed, until it fills the hall, till the panic rises. The trauma induces a mass ‘fight or flight’ reaction. People trample over each other in an attempt to escape, only to discover the locked doors. Angry orange flames approach from the big screen below. Fighting for their lives, some push others into harm’s way; some die trying to save their loved ones, some provide acts of true heroism towards strangers.
It’s one of the most disturbing sequences filmed in any Indian web series, with horror that is amplified by the realization of its realism. These are the bare truths. These are parents and children and friends and lovers, people like you and I, packing a movie hall like many of us did at the time—a hall lacking in safety standards or fire regulations—left to the mercy of managers and owners to take responsibility of our lives, strangled in the horror of the same familiar space that provides us with distraction and joy.
Among those trapped are the Krishnamoorthy children, their youngest—Ujjwal—the same age I was at the time, an adolescent watching Border in another packed hall in another part of the country. In the finale, we are close to Ujjwal and his sister again, to the Bedis, to all the other victims. We are reminded that they are more than statistics, corpses to be identified, transported, and cremated. They are lives unfulfilled, and their beloved are haunted by their absence, even decades later.
In its investigation of the Uphaar incident and its long aftermath, Trial by Fire explores multiple themes of the legal and justice systems, class and privilege, loss and depression. But it shines brightest in its exploration of the complexities of loving human relationships: husbands, wives, lovers, friends, neighbours, strangers. Whether it is a hidden birthday cake or a pair of hands surreptitiously held in a movie hall, nothing is more beautiful than this intimacy; but, when tragedy strikes, it feels like nothing could possibly be more heartbreaking.
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Karan Madhok is a writer, journalist, and editor of The Chakkar. His debut novel A Beautiful Decay (Aleph Book Company) was published in October 2022. His creative work has appeared in Epiphany, Gargoyle, The Literary Review, The Bombay Review, The Lantern Review, and the anthology A Case of Indian Marvels. He is the founder of the Indian basketball blog Hoopistani and has contributed to NBA India, SLAM Magazine, Fifty Two, FirstPost, and more. You can find him on Twitter: @karanmadhok1 and Instagram: @karanmadhok.
