Writing Bhopal: Research Behind Bird of Paradise

Bird of Paradise is a love story, but it stands on top of a real tragedy, and that meant our first responsibility wasn’t writing dialogue — it was research. Before a single line of script existed, our writers spent months with survivor testimonies, court records, and journalism from the years following the Bhopal Gas Tragedy of 1984.

Agneya and Jheel, our two leads, needed to feel like people who could have existed in that city at that time, not mouthpieces for a moral. So we built their world from the outside in: what a hospital in Bhopal was actually short of that winter, how litigation against the company accused of causing the disaster unfolded over the following decade, what a young doctor’s daily rounds looked like before everything changed. Only once that scaffolding felt solid did we let the characters move through it.

We made one decision early and held to it through every draft: the tragedy itself would never be spectacle. It doesn’t exist in the story to shock a player or to manufacture stakes. It’s the weather our characters live under, shaping what they can and can’t forgive, not a plot device that moves them along.

The tragedy is the weather our characters live under — not the plot device that moves them along.

That principle shaped some hard calls. Entire scenes were cut because they used the disaster to score an emotional beat rather than to tell us something true about Agneya or Jheel. Dialogue that read as informative in a research document sounded hollow coming out of a character’s mouth, so it got rewritten until it sounded like something a person would actually say to someone they loved.

We also brought in outside readers partway through development — people with closer ties to Bhopal and to the history than anyone on our team — specifically to flag places where the fiction was drifting away from the truth of what happened, or leaning on it too casually. Several scenes changed as a direct result of that feedback, and the game is better and more honest for it.

None of this makes Bird of Paradise a documentary, and it was never meant to be one. It’s a romance, first and always. But we wanted the world around that romance to hold its weight honestly, so that the love story earns the ground it stands on instead of borrowing it.