Butterflies over the Water

The boat wound its way over the water cautiously, the men at the helm prodding the depths to see if we had enough clearance from the creek floor. I found it strange that there was so little water in the creek , when barely 36 hours prior, it was said that the ocean itself had swept inland, inundating everything in its path. It was bizarre how all the water had simply vanished; as if the ocean, like a criminal retreating from his scene of crime had tried to make sure it did not leave behind any incriminating evidence. But it had failed, for evidence lay strewn around aplenty: carcasses lying on the creek banks, floating in the water, filling the air with the stench of rotting flesh........

It was October 1999 and coastal Odisha had just been ravaged by the Super Cyclone. I had arrived in Cuttack the morning prior and had been to Paradip the same night. I had found the port town in complete darkness. However, unlike the dark of a normal night, when though night, some light is always perceptible, whether it be the light from homes, shops or streets or the light of the moon and if not that, then at least the faint light of the stars, this darkness was absolute, as if light had died that night in Paradip. And it was not just light that was absent; there seemed to be a complete absence of sound too. It was deathly dark and deathly quiet.

The vehicle lights illuminated the long empty stretch of a road ahead but beyond the limited reach of the headlights, there was absolute blackness and it seemed to me as if we were driving over a road floating in space. The areas on either side were ostensibly villages and fields, had been that is; now they were only vast shallow pools of salt water that glimmered eerily when the headlights shone on them. Slowly as my eyes got used to the darkness, I realised that the highway was not really empty. Rather it was full, teeming with people who with their homes having been washed away, had sought shelter in the only high ground available to them, the highway. It was a sea of humanity that was camping that night on the both sides of the highway. But as I said before, it was a sea of humanity rendered dumb with shock and despair. A few policemen standing guard approached our vehicle and having reassured themselves that we were not some highway robbers, advised us to go back: “You never know when these people might attack,” they said, explaining further, “You see, there is no food and water here!”

That was yesterday. Today we were on our way to Erasama, said to be the worst affected. As we drove through the block, I realized that Erasama had been in one word, flattened. Nothing with height greater than a foot or two was standing upright, neither homes, nor trees nor electric poles. Only the coconut trees stood upright, that is, if you can call being ripped bare of all green from your branches and bent at a demeaning obtuse angle ‘upright’! As far as eye could see nothing ‘stood’, only empty ochre fields which lay drying in the sun, covered with dirty brine water and the rows of bare coconut tree trunks, all bent uniformly in a single direction as if forced to pay obeisance to the sea and the wind.....  And the stench...........! It was just as our Man-in-Charge, in a moment of utter horror had described: “...an all pervading stench of death.....!” We found bodies everywhere, in the fields, on the roads, in the creek.....! In the water, the bodies floated back up and head immersed, bloated into grotesque shapes that defied description. The process of rot was so quick and so unforgiving that many times we were unable to even distinguish whether the corpse was that of an animal or a human being.

And so we went floating down the Hansua, a former creek now turned into a large reeking nullah with knee deep water and floating corpses; our goal to reach food, water and medical aid to the villages situated right on the sea shore, they being the worst hit and the most difficult to access. We sailed daily, our boat laden with relief material sent from all over the country: sacks of rice, blankets, clothes both old and new, and of course medicines. We even had packets of milk that we would ourselves buy from the Cuttack bazaar. We did this for nearly the better half of a month, every single day without fail. And so our routine became fixed: wake up at five, rush to the waiting vehicles, then the long dusty breathless drive on empty roads (and empty stomachs for who would prepare breakfast at that unearthly hour!) to the banks of the Hansua, load supplies rapidly onto the boat, set sail, reach a village or what was left of it , dock on the banks, go ashore, distribute the food and clothes, set up a make-shift dispensary cum clinic and see patients by the hundreds. People rendered ill or injured by the cyclone itself were minimal for the storm had been ruthless; killing mercilessly, taking no prisoners. Those who had to die were already dead now, their nameless bodies rotting in the fields and gullies; those who survived carried only minimal physical scars, may be the odd sprained foot or abrasion, or arm muscles stiffened by cramps bought on by clasping on to a tree trunk for eight hours straight as the ocean waters swept them, hundreds of miles from their homes and beds. As for the scars on the mind, there was no time to tend to those. I would get hundreds of patients at each stop, most of them routine illnesses unrelated to the cyclone. In these villages where in normal times there was no medical setup, no doctor, not even a pharmacy, to have a doctor come to your doorstep bringing free medicines was a novelty and most of them gathered simply to watch me work. The moment we landed I would be surrounded by people, few of them actually in need of medical aid, others simply gathering to watch as there was nothing else to do, no fields to tend to, no boats with which to go fishing, no food to cook, no firewood to light the kitchen fire, and for some no family member left to feed.

Because we came almost every day, soon the survivors in these villages came to recognise us well. At first we were treated as messiahs, life savers, deliverers...but as the days passed we degenerated into being only providers....It was as if the entire onus of ensuring their survival had been transferred to those carrying out relief work. A kind of apathy had set in over the people, a lethargy probably brought on by what I now, thinking back ascribe to PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). The virtue of initiative had dried up in these people. All they did throughout the day was to wait for the relief boats to bring them food. They did nothing else, at times even their make-shift shelters had to be erected by the relief teams. Things came to such a pass that one morning when we landed at a village, we found a human corpse lying on the Hansua’s banks, right there at the point where the relief boats docked. When we asked the villagers about it, they calmly replied, “Sarkar dispose karegi....!” For our Man-in-Charge, that was the last straw. He gave an ultimatum to the villagers that unless they disposed off their dead fittingly, no relief sack would be offloaded from the boat that day. Hearing this, a young boy broke away from the crowd, got a piece of rope, tied it to the ankle of the corpse and dragging it to about 50 feet away from us, shoved it nonchalantly into the waters of the Hansua. He returned and without a word took his place at the line of men gathered to haul the relief material from the boat. Stunned by this blatant apathy, our Man-in-Charge could do little and resignedly issued orders to offload the relief material.

This happening was kind of a last straw for me too. In the beginning there had been only the horrors of the aftermath, the endless destruction, the massive loss of lives, the corpse infested waters through which we travelled daily....Though at first shocked and horrified, because the human mind has such a remarkable ability to adapt, I was soon so inured that I never gave a second glance to the next corpse that went floating by the boat. Death had become to me more commonplace than life. But it was not nature’s cruel hand that was affecting me negatively. It was what people were doing (or not doing) that was eroding my morale. As the days passed, I became aware of so much happening all around that was not correct: the unchecked pilferage of relief material, the apathy of the relief givers and of people in authority, the blatant scramble for publicity by relief agencies,the ennui afflicting the cyclone survivors.... I found myself turning kind of cynical and losing my youthful ideas of selfless service... Outwardly I was fine; I worked diligently, did my job with the same old dedication but inside something had broken. All that enthusiasm powered by youthful ideas of altruism had receded into the background. I was not exactly despairing but I was feeling what one could call a lack of hope, hope for the survivors, for Erasama and for humanity in general. And it was probably the same for all of us in the team.

It was in this frame of mind that we landed on Dohibor. Outwardly this village was the same as any other, brown saltwater filled fields, headless bent coconut trees, total absence of human dwellings and rows upon rows of expectant people lines up on the Hansua’s banks....But as we landed and begun our work, we felt a difference, subtle at first, then as the day worn on, more marked. Though this village had been affected as badly as any other by the cyclone, the people, for some unexplained reason had not lost their initiative. This was manifest at every step of the way; how they had organised themselves into neat shelters which they had erected on their own, the orderly lines of people queuing up for relief supplies, the efforts to secure clean drinking water by utilising our chlorination kits, absence of unclaimed dead bodies which I presumed they had disposed of properly all on their own, the orderliness and the organised community effort in the midst of all that chaos, loss and scarcity...and to surpass it all, an aura of positivity which I could not for the life of me understand how they managed to wear in the face of so much destruction and loss.

And that late afternoon, as we sailed back from Dohibor, I saw on the Hansua, hundreds of pale yellow butterflies hovering over the water. I do not know what these creatures of colour and sunshine were doing over that reeking creek of death but they became a symbol of sorts for me, a symbol of the faith in humanity that the villagers of the tiny hamlet of Dohibor had rekindled in me.