Cover Story: Orissa Journey to Ersama: Silence of the Grave

Destitute and desolate survivors roam corpseladen Ersama. Special correspondent Ruben Banerjee and Senior photographer Sharad Saxena spent two days of horror in this wasteland.

Binay Panda's compound is as full as always. His wife, five children, cattle, a tin suitcase, a few cooking utensils and a battered bicycle jostle for space. But unlike the times of old, there is no noise from the children, no clanging of pans. There is just an eerie silence, interrupted by the gentle lapping of water.

FACTFILE

ť 35 of the 200 villages have been wiped out.
ť 80 per cent of Orissa's 10,000 dead lived here.
ť No more than 20 boats are distributing food.
Profile: Ersama in coastal Orissa was once a land of lush paddy fields and coconut groves where 1.2 lakh farmers and fishermen made a living.

Don't believe the peace. It is the peace of the graveyard that I find in what's left of Panda's home in Sarbapatho, a village in the once-fertile land of Ersama in coastal Orissa. Wife Suchitra's body sprawls in a corner, decomposed beyond recognition. Nearby in a heap of rotting flesh lie son Gour and daughter Champa, alongside the carcasses of the cattle. "I had lovely children, but see how they look now," sobs Panda, 46, who survived because he wasn't at home when the storm hit.

Helpless, I put my arms around him, but, really, what can you say? A pauper overnight, he can't give them a decent funeral. He has no kerosene and all the wood is soggy. "One day of nature's wrath," he says hopelessly, "has snuffed the life out of me." There are thousands like Panda, almost mad with grief, hunger and desolation as they breathe the stinking air of cyclone-flattened Ersama, a block in Jagatsinghpur district where the super cyclone made landfall on October 29. This is where, with hard, driving rain, a gale at more than 250 kmph simply blew people, trees and whole houses away, where the sea was churned up so massively that huge surges of water up to 7 m high and 15 km across swallowed the land.

Two weeks later, as the sun peers out and the water begins to recede, Ersama -- and its horrors -- is resurfacing. And its people are adrift on a sea of utter hopelessness. "I should have died with my family," Panda cries. "Without them, without my home, I am the living dead." Officially 10,000 are counted among the dead, but the toll could be much, much more. There is no trace of at least 35 of Ersama's 200 villages. The cyclone simply wiped them off the map. Those which survive are ghost villages, like Panda's Sarbapatho. Before the storm, it had 65 homes. Today only three on higher ground survive.

For the first week, Ersama was under neck-deep water, cut off from the rest of India. Many villages in the interior still are. As a stumbling administration, backed by the army and thousands of volunteers begin spreading out across ground zero, the grisly tales of death and devastation pour in, securing Ersama's notoriety as Orissa's graveyard.

Colonel Subrata Saha of 5 Assam Regiment, and a veteran of the UN peacekeeping mission in Angola, hasn't seen anything like it. "The devastation in 24 hours of this fury was much more than what the Angolan civil war caused in 25 years," he murmurs from under the mask he wears tightly to escape the all-pervasive stench of death in Ersama. I nod sickly, as I press my handkerchief to my nose. The photographer and I spent two days here and it's been a harrowing time as we probed the outback of Ersama by boat.

There are corpses and animal carcasses wherever we go. Some bob in the once-picturesque creeks, hundreds are stuck in the slush of the banks. Wherever we dock, villagers crowd us, reliving their nightmares and begging for food. "Diyo, diyo (give, give)," they chant, they entreat, they scream. Destitute and desperate today, it is hard to believe they were reasonably prosperous farmers, fisherfolk and landowners in this once-idyllic land of lush paddy fields, coconut groves and creeks.

Today Ersama itself is humming with activity and the roads that lead from the highway to the town is crammed with relief trucks. But apart from what comes by way of the occasional army foray, little is reaching the people -- more than one lakh of them -- in the sprawling, still-flooded interiors where roads have been washed away or breached.

Thousands go hungry and without medicine or food, they are being swept by disease. The unattended corpses could contaminate groundwater. If that happens, block officials whisper among themselves, another disaster is at hand. Already one tubewell has been sealed. Others haven't been tested. People with diarrhoea and dysentery -- the early symptoms of a gastro epidemic -- are trickling in.

"This is a time of apocalypse," admits S.K. Jha, Orissa's additional relief officer who oversees relief from Ersama. Air-force choppers still drop food packets while army boats ferry food and medicines where they can. Over 1,000 tonnes of food and medicine have been sent in by the Government, another 250 tonnes by about 50 voluntary bodies.

It's still too little, too late. Every morning since the relief operations began as late as November 5, Colonel Saha pores over maps to decide which might be the hungriest region of the day. But the army has only six boats running. Government officials, stupefying in their foolishness, first decreed that only local boats be hired at existing rates. They had to be reminded that most of the boats were turned to toothpicks by the cyclone. Only now are they sending in 10 country boats from elsewhere.

Yes, Ersama is the focus of worldwide concern and sympathy, but its misfortunes grow by the day. Communication links between Ersama and Bhubaneswar are tenuous. Ham radio sets are available to block officials only between 10 a.m and 5 p.m. Otherwise it's the police wireless for urgent messages. Electricity and phones? They don't exist any longer. There are no blankets and the region has only a small portion of urgently needed polythene sheets to cover food and medicines. The Government has rushed in kerosene though. That's thoughtful. Now if only they had sent some lanterns. Ersama's future, for the moment at least, seems as dark as its morbid present.

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