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Miasma in Erasama

It's a pretty evening. The sun is low, golden on the fields and trees that surround us. Birds twitter and a small cluster of egrets wings gracefully overhead, going home. There's a hint of a nip in the air. Yes, it's pretty almost to a cliche, this evening, one like you might expect to spend almost anywhere in rural, farmland India in the middle of November.

Only, as far as I can see in any direction I choose, the paddy is not quite the familiar brilliant green I'm used to. Instead, it's a dirty yellowish-brownish-green -- because the crop is dying, rotting away. The fields are filled with a visibly festering, sometimes bubbling muck. Telephone poles lie in it, twisted and trailing forlorn wires. Most of the trees have fallen; on the few still standing, the leaves have been blasted off. The palms look as if someone has smacked them hard. Everybody talks of how, with the loss of the tree cover, the temperature in the area has already risen appreciably. And the columns of grey smoke that dot the scene tell the tale I now know well. Bodies -- cattle, sheep and humans -- are being burned where they dropped.

This is Erasama block in Jagatsinghpur District, Orissa, a couple of weeks after a cyclone slammed into the state. The destruction and death it caused are impossible to comprehend, believe or describe. And yet I'm here, looking around at this fantastic mess, trying to grasp how to do all three.

This evening, I am with an orphan. A television crew I've bummed a ride from has been given specific instructions to find one and put him on air. Television news directors, what can you say. Anyway, after pursuing this goal through most of the day, they have finally located this frail boy among a number of villagers taking temporary refuge in a school building. They have been trying to interview him. I am no expert in television techniques, but I could have told them when I first saw the poor kid: he won't be able to speak. He has a dazed look about him, an air of battered hopelessness. Sure enough, with the camera rolling and a mike thrust into his face, he can only mumble a few sounds.

After they've tried for a while and turned to other things, I sit down with him. "Look", I say, "I have no camera, no book, no mike, nothing. I'm just here to be with you." I know nothing else to say, really. But the boy tells me slowly what he could not tell the mike. He lives because he had visited a relative near here; when the cyclone came he ran over to the school and took shelter. His four brothers, three sisters and parents are all gone. The only people he knows any more in the world are the few families who are here with him. I am stunned into silence, unable to understand a loss so enormous, so complete, so sudden.

Another day, I climb into a truck with a gang of theology students from Delhi. The drill is now, after several days on the job, familiar to them: collect rubber gloves, face-masks and gumboots; pick up bags of bleaching powder; fill drum with kerosene; throw jerry-cans into the truck. All that done, enveloped in bonhomie and good humour, we set off. Only 15 minutes out of Erasama town, we make our first stop and the good humour is gone.

A young married woman -- "see her bangles?" someone says, "that's how you can tell she was married" -- has not been fully cremated. She lies in her pile of blackened wood, her arm and bangled wrist sticking out as if beckoning to us. Working with a solemn efficiency, the students gather more firewood, add it to the pile, drench it all in kerosene. Someone lights a match and we stand back, watching one more of the thousands this beast of a storm took from us turn to ash.

We work steadily, into the late afternoon. It's nerve-wracking, nauseating, back-breaking work, under a relentless sun. Much of the available wood is damp, so collecting enough for a pyre is always difficult. The carcasses are rarely in accessible spots. Often they lie among thorny bushes or out in the middle of a putrid field. The cattle, particularly, are heavy, rotting and stinking; shovelling their bodies onto the pyre needs at least three strong men, three strong stomachs. Cows, sheep, more men and women. One time, and here I cannot fight back the tears any longer, a tiny baby. Just a small black mound of cloth, hair and skin. Lying there as if flung.

Day after day after wearying day, the students have been making these trips to dispose of carcasses. Others are doing the same soul-crushing job: volunteers from the RSS and the Ananda Marg, a couple of middle-aged nuns in their grey habits, a team from the Rapid Action Force of the Central Reserve Police Force and more. Together, they must have dealt with thousands of carcasses by now. And yet I can see, and smell, bodies easily enough. On a long boat ride to a village reachable only that way, I see cows and humans floating in the water, tangled in the weeds, caught against some unseen underwater obstacle, lying on the river banks and sandy beaches. How much killing did this cyclone accomplish before it spent itself? How will we ever know?

Two Englishmen are here from Oxfam. They want to test the water in all the functioning wells in the area. The tidal wave that washed over the district submerged the wells for several days; so the water is definitely at least saline. The Oxfam team's first results are in by the time I join them on one of their outings. Not encouraging. The well water is contaminated with fecal matter. Diarrhoea and cholera are possible consequences. In the devastated village we visit to test more wells, the people who gather around to watch us at work report dozens of cases of diarrhoea, several resulting in death.

Later that day, I have a long chat with a doctor from a hospital in Bissamcuttack who volunteered his services to the relief effort. He was told to camp at Ambiki, a small village that is just becoming accessible by road but wasn't so when he arrived. In an Army boat, he reached there and set up a makeshift clinic in a small shed ravaged by the cyclone. Twenty minutes later, he had his first patient, a teenaged girl with diarrhoea. Over the next four days, he and his team -- two doctors, three volunteers -- treated over 140 patients. 63 had diarrhoea, 13 were severe cases. Nights were a sleepy blur of rotating shifts, changing IV feeds. Mornings saw a complex operation: move the patients outside one by one, sweep the room clean of the night's diarrhoeal mess. All certain evidence of the health threat the Oxfam guys are looking for.

That night, I find myself struggling with the magnitude of all that's happened here. The problems seem to multiply without pause. The cyclone killed thousands immediately, but that was just the start. Electricity and telephone lines are snapped all over. Hundreds of thousands of cows are dead; milk is already in short supply. By the thousand, houses and other structures have been simply flattened.

Two weeks after the cyclone, water contamination is a serious threat. There are telltale signs of outbreaks of disease: diarrhoea and cholera from contaminated water, malaria from stagnant ponds and paddy fields. Across a huge area, the standing paddy crop, only days from harvest, has been destroyed; some of the country's most fertile soil has gone saline and barren overnight. This last seems to me to be a particularly grave issue. How do you regenerate soil, desalinate it, on such a massive scale? While that happens, how will those who depend on this land live?

And there are more worries. Whole communities have been destroyed. Families turned into a memory. Orphans all over the place. Thousands are suddenly paupers. Early, misguided relief efforts have already produced the tragic scenes being reported: cupped, begging hands reaching out imploringly are all you see as you speed through villages in the district.

How will all this be tackled? Who will tackle it? The answers don't come easily.

In a subsequent column, I'll try to give you an idea of the efforts that are on now to bring Erasama back.

Dilip D'Souza