The dead don’t just go away, they tug at your boat, sit beside for lunch

We are travelling in an Army boat, the Boat Assault Universal Type (BAUT), a shallow, almost flat-bottomed vehicle, with a group of Anand Margis from Bangalore. At Jhatipari, they leap out like Allied Forces do at Normandy in World War II movies. Wading through marshy banks, paddy fields, they retrieve with bare hands, more bodies. The BBC crew which had been stationed inOrissa to cover this big story of death left yesterday. As the waters recede, so does the spotlight. In Bhubaneshwar, they have pegged the body count at around ten thousand but the enumerators have yet to travel to Jhatipari, Kankan, Padampur… the list goes on.

The rat-a-tat-tat chug of the Army boat brings a few villagers onto the banks. They know it means food, water, tarpaulin, rationed hope. But when they see the Anand Margis, they turn away: more bodies. Of kith, kin, but most often of strangers.

Instead, they retreat into a corner and watch the Anand Margis sprinkle boric powder on stagnant water, fish out corpses, often two at a time, pour kerosene on them and cremate them. You look for a flicker of emotion, it’s hard to find.

In the Ersama block which accounted for eight and a half thousand deaths, in village after village, on main roads, in the interiors, in the paddy fields there are piles of ash which scatter away bit by bit each time a vehicle thunders past or when the evening breezegathers pace. A quarter of a soul here, an ounce there. Now, the living want nothing to do with bodies. “They sometimes even eat sitting next to a corpse but they will not dispose it of,” says Captain Mann of 8 Engineers regiment from Agra who is accompanying us. At Jhatipari, a young man approaches our photographer Ashoke Dey: “There are two bodies in the ditch there,” he points out.“Why don’t you dispose them of?” asks Ashok.

The man just stares and turns away.

Both Captain Mann and Acharya Kamadhisanand Avdhoot who looks more like an athletic beach-bummer than the leader of the scavengers impress upon the villagers the importance of disposing bodies. “Otherwise there will be disease and more death,” says Captain Mann to his unheeding audience.

But picking up a rotting, faceless blob of flesh is not easy. It also means acknowledging another death. More loss. “I cremated nine members of my family. I will not cremate even one more body,” says Sapan Rahane.

He lost 14 members of his family.Among them were his daughter and young sister who were perched on his shoulders as Sapan moved to evade the rising tide, first by climbing on his thatched roof and from there moving onto a tree. “I sat with both of them through the night of the 28th, for nearly eight hours when suddenly the gale picked up and I saw my little girl fly away from me into the swirling waters below,” he says.

The gale also forced him off the tree. “Fortunately I got wedged between two thick branches but my sister slipped away,” he says.

A few days after the cyclone he stopped searching for them. There were others to cremate, the living, including his 83-year-old father, to look after. So the corpses and the animal carcasses become a part of life, as just another hardship to overlook.

If they physically stumble upon a body the most Sapan and other villagers like him will do is to push and prod the corpse with sticks upto the banks of the river and then plop it into the waters that first consumed life.

Unknown to themthis is wreaking a greater havoc on their state. Fishing which accounts for Rs 489 crore worth of annual export in Orissa and is one of the main sources of livelihood across the coast has come to a virtual halt. After last week’s report in the local papers about a young girl in Puri who found part of a human thumb and nail in her macher jhol there aren’t too many takers for fish these days.

It will be quite a while before the dead can leave the living.