‘Trial By Fire’ review: A humane exploration of crime and punishment

In Trial By Fire, the accomplished new Netflix show centered on the horrific Uphaar Cinema fire tragedy, each episode opens with a timestamp, mapping out the distance from the day the incident occurred. In episode two, we witness proceedings unfolding two weeks since the mishap. From thereon, the temporal width keeps expanding episodically, touching upon three months, 18 months, nine years and ultimately halting at the Supreme Court verdict on August 25, 2015.

For a series that chronicles the years a case awaits justice, this format is both succinct and telling. But the technical design also speaks of the narrative route the series opts for; the deliberation underlines its craftsmanship and distinct understanding of crime and punishment.

The glimmer of justice

On June 13 1997, Uphaar, the Delhi theater owned by industrialist brothers Sushil and Gopal Ansal, caught fire due to a faulty transformer. The cinema management’s gross negligence — bolting doors from the outside to prevent non-ticketed entry, complete blackout when the fire broke out, adding extra seats which blocked the exit — led to the people in the auditorium being stuck in the smoke. With no staff to assist, 59 people died of asphyxiation and over a 100 people were grievously injured. Close to three decades later, the perpetrators of the ghastly crime, the Ansals, have routinely bypassed judicial punishment.

In as late as November 2021, they were sentenced to seven-year imprisonment for tampering with evidence but were released in July last year. Things, however, are not all bleak. The glimmer of justice is a result of a group of resilient people, related to those who died in the accident, dedicating several years of their lives in fighting the good fight. They are led by Neelam and Shekhar Krishnamoorthy, the couple who lost both their children to the tragedy.

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In a case such as this, the us vs them narrative is broadly outlined. A group of people committed the crime, a larger group of people suffered. That justice has been delayed widens this gap. And that the show has been adapted from Trial by Fire: The Tragic Tale of the Uphaar Fire Tragedy (2016), a book written by the Krishnamoorthys, only preempts the series’ standpoint. The merit of Trial By Fire, much like the second season of Delhi Crime, resides in its ability to uphold this binary while puncturing the assumption of such easy demarcations. It unfolds with an astute understanding that these factions don’t exist in isolation. Between the ‘us’ and the ‘them’, there lies a section of people whose lives get upended because it can. The show’s reckoning with how the singularity of chasing justice can cause a plurality of casualty marks for its greatest strength.

The heroes and villains

The series begins on a familiar note. The day is June 13 and the year is 1997. The setting is Neelam and Shekhar’s (Rajshri Deshpande and Abhay Deol) lived-in flat in Delhi. Like many in the city, their children, Unnati (17) and Ujjawal (13), are gearing up to watch JP Dutta’s Border at Uphaar. By evening, all is lost. The dishevelled parents arrive at the spot which stands in a state of ruin and chaos (Saumyananda Sahi shoots these moments like the urgency is leaking from the frames). Victims are being sent to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) and Safdarjung Hospital as their family members hanker for access. Distraught, Neelam and Shekhar go to check at both the places. A couple of minutes and a wordless moment later, it is clear; they have lost their children.

The aggrieved parents get gradually privy to the authorities’ oversight. Media reports underline the Ansal brothers’ incriminating laxity as well as their new property in the making – the Ansal Plaza (dubbed in the show as just “The Plaza”), the first mall in the capital. Neelam and Shekhar approach the cops. Reports from the incident specify that a transformer at Uphaar had caught fire in the morning. A team from Delhi Vidyut Board (DVB) did fix it but not quite. What also comes to the fore is the proprietors’ illegal measures that amplified an accident into a tragedy.

All of this is in the public domain. So is the fact that the families of the victims formed an association called AVUT (Association of the Victims of Uphaar Tragedy) and for 26 years have been relentlessly pursuing justice. For the most part initially, Trial By Fire roots itself in familiarity, detailing the intimidating tactics used by the Ansal brothers to undermine the effort of Shekhar to form a group. That Ashish Vidyarthi plays the man who goes about threatening the families aggravates this David vs Goliath tale.

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And then, in episode three, something strange happens. The camera enters his house. From a nondescript thug, the character transforms into a person. On the surface, his flat looks no different from Neelam and Shekhar’s place. His son is studying on the table and his wife is cooking in the kitchen. Even their ambitions are regular. They want to buy a house. When initial arrests are made and Vidyarthi’s character is pressured to tear apart the group, he tells his wife, “These families have already seen so much.” This single detail and his compelling character arc (culminating in a terrific scene in episode three) define the series’ heightened awareness of looking at a well-oiled machinery through the cogs in the machine, stressing through its seven-episodes runtime that when you shift the visual slant, the conventional reading alters: heroes and villains, at least those who we can see, are revealed as creations of circumstances more than intent.

A humane understanding of loss

Written by Kevin Luperchio and Prashant Nair (Nair has also directed the show, collaborating with Randeep Jha in four episodes and Avani Deshpande in one), Trial By Fire not just encourages this reading but designs familiar events with such striking precision that a known story defamilarises. It keeps looking at retelling a story of systematic bias where, in the absence of fairness, a group of people are held hostage to their past. But also underscores the need to see the vastness of victimhood along the way, including who died and who survived. From episode four till six, Neelam and Shekhar’s linear story is interspersed with three other narratives. We see a drifter (Shardul Bharadwaj), a regular Delhi boy, who is on the run from a group of people for being unable to pay money. We see an ex-army man (Anupam Kher) who nurses a grudge against his wife (Ratna Pathak Shah) for coaxing him to take an early retirement in 1961. We also see a lower-middle class man (Rajesh Tailang) whose daughter is about to get married. All three of them have one thing in common: June 13 1997.

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It is an intriguing decision to expand the horizons of storytelling, to acquaint us with people who have mostly been reduced to statistics. But this stylistic choice also hints at the show’s humane understanding of who lost and how much. The subdued brilliance of the series lies in giving faces to those who are waiting and those who are stuck — the circumstantial heroes and villains — arguing that in the wider context they meld into each other. Those who are really the perpetrators hide behind the reflections of others’ shadows.

The origin story of bravery

By choosing people from different strata and illustrating how, much like Neelam and Shekhar, their lives too have been withheld (episode six contains three one shots, crystallising the passage of time; the act never becomes gimmicky for being so telling) since that fateful day, Trial By Fire passes its own judgment: when a judicial system refuses to punish the guilty, they inadvertently punish the innocent. Being behind bars is incidental, being impeded by life is the retribution. Punishment, after all, is a sanction to hold back time.

So much of this narrative ambivalence peaking into vulnerability is achieved through the performances. Vidyarthi delivers a moving portrait of a man who is stranded at the crossroads of conscience and compulsion. Casting Kher as a former army man who laments on losing his last shot at glory and Shah as his wife who is unaffected by his inclinations is as meta as casting can be. But the heart of the show throbs through Deshpande. She not just looks different with every timeline shift but through her perseverance, both as an actor and as a character, uncovers audacious hope as a hidden subtext in stories of delayed justice.

Tales of prolonged unfairness often tend to mimic the chronological lapse of time. The tragedy becomes a footnote in the overarching narrative of persistence. Trial By Fire is a rare show that places both next to each other, compelling one to acknowledge loss as the origin story of bravery. It argues that it matters who did it but it matters more to remember its extent.