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Ersama: the abode of the living dead

George Iype in Ersama

The flood waters are receding but the tales of tragedy that the super cyclone left in its wake in Ersama will never fade.

As the neck-deep waters slowly begin to drain into the sea 18 days after the killer typhoon devastated Orissa, Ersama, a cluster of villages in the coastal district of Jagatsinghpur, is today the abode of the living dead. This is the area on which nature fully vented its fury.

The century's worst cyclone has wiped off Ersama from the map. Out of the official death toll of 9,524, Jagatsinghpur's share is 8,119. And Ersama suffered the heaviest with more than 4,500 persons buried in a watery grave.

But as government officials, army personnel and voluntary relief teams cut new roads and travel in country boats to reach some of the marooned villages near Ersama, the official death toll looks like a joke.

The army and voluntary relief agencies have their own statistics. The cyclone hit 12 coastal districts of Orissa displacing at least 25 million people and killing 351,979 cattle -- that is the official version. "If the cyclone killed more than three hundred thousand cattle as per the official figures, how come that only 9,524 human beings living in mud houses died? If you are talking about the actual death toll, it should be anything between 50,000 to 100,000,'' snaps a volunteer with World Vision, a leading international voluntary agency.

Macabre scenes of death and destruction -- the corpses, the uprooted trees and damaged rail tracks -- and the unbearable stench of decayed corpses and carcasses assail you everywhere. The sea has completely washed away the mud houses the villagers lived in. The few concrete houses that Ersama proudly possessed have been reduced to rubble.

At Nandan, a devastated small hamlet near Ersama, daily cremations and burials continue as more and more bodies surface as the water recedes.

On Tuesday, 36 people were cremated in a mass pyre. Soumyajit Patnaik, a 40-year old carpenter, wept silently. A team of rescue workers from the Delhi-based Nehru Yuva Kendra Sanghatan had collected the bloated bodies for cremation.

Six among these bodies were Patnaik's dear ones -- his father, mother, wife and three children. His two daughters lay twined in their final embrace while his little son had his fingers wound around his mother's leg.

"Life will never be the same to me. I wish I too had died with my family," Patnaik moaned as he narrated the horror of spending 24 hours in the mud and water. "I didn't know where our house stood. I didn't know what had happened to my wife and children. The winds carried away our house and the water separated us," he recalls. The army rescue team found Patnaik unconscious under an asbestos sheet.

Army officials directing relief operations in Ersama admit that hundreds of people are still marooned in many far-flung hamlets. The cyclone destroyed all the bridges that connected these villages.

"We have not been able to access some 30 hamlets in Ersama because there are no roads to go to these places. So we are using country boats to reach these places. All over the place you see corpses floating on the water," Colonel Subroto Saha, commanding officer of the 5 Assam regiment said.

Army and government officials say at least 30,000 people are caught in these 30 villages. "We really do not know how they are surviving. But we are making fast progress to reach out to all the villages," said a state government official.

But locals say it is the state government's apathy that resulted in Ersama's heavy death toll. "It is 18 days since the cyclone hit us. But the government has not yet been able to bring enough country boats to go across to the submerged villages," Subrata Ray, a village pradhan at Nandan said.

Ray lost four of his family members -- his wife and three children. He is now left with two sons aged 15 and 18, a completely destroyed house and two acres of saline land where he will never be able to grow anything. "I have not been able to find the bodies of my wife and three children. The water swept them away and I will now pray to the sea for their souls," he weeps.

Ray says had it not been for the terribly slow pace of the state government, many of the villagers could have escaped death. "Hundreds of people have died of hunger and diarrhoea because even after 10 days after the cyclone they were drinking dirty water and eating nothing," he points out.

The catastrophe on the coast hit the Bengalis more rather than the native Oriyas. An overwhelming majority of the coastal settlers along Paradip in Jagatsinghpur district and Rajnagar in Kendrapara district are Bengalis.

Santanu Mandal, a Bengali migrant in Jagatsinghpur, says at least 15,000 Bengalis must have been washed away to the sea. "I came here from Midnapore to work as a boatman 15 years ago. I want to go back to Midnapore before a cyclone strikes again," Mandal sobbed. He has made up his mind.

While most Bengalis are packing up whatever remains of their belongings to go back to West Bengal, scores of Oriya adolescents wait for buses and trains in Cuttack and Bhubaneswar. Their aim -- migrate to some far off place like Bombay, Delhi, Calcutta, Surat or Hyderabad and start their lives anew.

"This cyclone has destroyed us," says Suraj Kripal, 24, who along with eight others have been waiting in Cuttack for a train to Delhi for the last four days. There is no hyperbole, not even despair in that dreary remark. It's the tone of resignation, of surrender to forces more than any individual can resist.

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