to himself as he savored his drink. "Yet another uneventful night."
At two in the morning, he awoke with a start to the rattle of the teleprinter. The Vishakhapatnam station to the north of Madras was announcing gusts of wind of one hundred and twenty knots, a little more than one hundred and thirty miles per hour. Shortly afterward the station on the Nicobar islands confirmed this information. The mild depression of the previous day had transformed itself into a major cyclone. The anger of the god Indra was raging across the Bay of Bengal.
One hour later, an SOS from an Indonesian cargo boat caught up in the storm confirmed that danger was imminent. Its position, latitude 17°25' north, and longitude 91°10' east, indicated that the cyclone was located about three hundred and fifty miles away from the coast of Bengal. It had changed direction sharply and was heading toward Calcutta.
The Sikh lost not a second. Instantly he informed his superior, the chief engineer, H. P. Gupta, who was sound asleep with his family in his government flat situated in a wing of the building. Then he called the local station for All India Radio, the national broadcasting network, and the cabinet office of the Minister for Internal Affairs in order that the people living in the delta area might be immediately informed of the imminence of a "cyclonic wind of very severe intensity." Next he turned to a radiotelephone positioned on a console behind his table. The apparatus related his H.Q. directly to an ultramodern piece of equipment on top of the highest building in Calcutta. From beneath its fiberglass dome the parabolic antenna for the radar of the Indian meteorological department could locate a cyclone over four hundred miles away, trace its course, determine the dimension of its "eye," and calculate the volume of torrential rain it was liable to dump on hitting its target. That night, however, the radar was switched off and the great sky-blue room, decorated with photographs of all the cyclones that had ravaged Bengal in the course of the previous ten years, was deserted. The next hour of observation was not due to begin until seven on Christmas morning.
A s h i s h Ghosh, the young peasant who had been daring enough to return to his village after six years of exile in the City of Joy, had not gone to bed that night. Together with his wife and their three children he had struggled against the onslaughts of the wind and pouring rain which were gradually demolishing his mud and thatch hut. His village, Harbangha, consisted of an assembly of small dwellings in the middle of infertile rice fields, inhabited for the most part by refugees from what had once been East Pakistan and was now Bangladesh. It was one of the world's poorest regions, a marshy area without roads, traversed by rivers, creeks, canals, and estuaries; an inhospitable expanse of land constantly beset by some calamity, by floods, for example, or tornados, tropical storms, droughts, the collapse of its banks, the bursting of its dikes, the invasion of salt water. This was unproductive ground which did not yield even an annual harvest of fifteen hundred pounds of rice per acre for its two million peasants. Life was even harder for the one million inhabitants who possessed not even a paddy field. Risking their own lives, the fishermen tried to keep their families from
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perishing in a region that was enormously rich in fish, but where all fishing was rendered aleatory by the poverty of means. Half a million day workers offered their labor for hire but only at harvest and tilling time did they actually find any work. For the rest of the year they cut down wood and gathered wild honey in the enormous virgin forests of the Sundarbans, an area as large as Mississippi but almost as impenetrable as the Amazon, infested with snakes, crocodiles, and man-eating tigers that each year devoured three or four hundred people among them.
Ashish Ghosh had brought back with him from the City of Joy one of the primary symbols of economic ascent for a poor refugee, a transistor radio. At about six in the morning he switched it on. The static caused by atmospheric disturbance impaired his reception. Nevertheless, through the crackling, he could make out a voice relentlessly repeating the same message. He jammed the appliance to his ear and instantly understood. A few minutes later the Ghoshes were fleeing into the downpour, leaving behind them the fruits of their six years of exile, deprivation, saving, and suffering in the inferno of their slum: their house with its store of seeds and fertilizer, their field, the large pool so arduously dug out, where the first carp had just been born, their two bullocks bellowing in their thorny enclosure, the three goats and Mina, their beautiful cow with her swollen udders and her horns curved like those of the wild sheep of the Himalayas. Ashish turned around to look back at it all through the tornado. Squeezing the arm of his sobbing wife, he promised, "We'll be back." It was then that with eyes lashed by the pouring rain he saw his hut borne aloft "like a flycatcher's nest carried away by a moonsoon squall."
The image of a large whitish snail pierced in the center by a black hole suddenly appeared on the green-tinted screen. At the top, on the left, the digital chronometer announced the time in orange letters. It was seven thirty-six. The Calcutta radar had just detected the monster. Its position—latitude 19° north, longitude 89°45' east—its breadth—three hundred and five miles—and the dimension
of its eye—twenty-two miles—confirmed the alarm messages being issued by all the weather stations in the region. They were evidently dealing with a major whirlwind, with what the Indian meteorologists refer to in their jargon as a "severest cyclonic storm." Half an hour later a detail was to further reinforce their concern. Although the eye of the cyclone, the black hole in the middle, remained perfectly visible, a series of milky spirals had begun to form around the cavity, gradually obscuring it behind a whitish veil. This was evidence that the whirlwind was in the process of becoming swollen with millions of tons of water.
Without losing a second, Haresh Khanna, the frail little technician who had just taken up his post in charge of the radar that Christmas morning, picked up his radiotelephone to alert the meteorological center. Originally from Bombay, the other great Indian metropolis frequently visited by cyclones, Khanna had followed the progress of whirlwinds on his screen on dozens of occasions. Never yet., however, had he seen the eye cover itself with this milky veil. After transmitting his observations, he climbed to the building's terrace. From up there it was possible to embrace the whole city at a glance. Holding his old umbrella firmly overWs head, Khanna could distinguish through the sheets of rain the metallic latticework of the Howrah Bridge with, just behind it, the rooftops of the City of Joy and, to the left, the imposing pink mass of the railway station, then the brown waters of the river with its hundreds of barges, the green expanse of the Maidan, the long brick facade of the Writers' Building, and finally the entanglement of thousands of terraces and roofs that formed the gigantic metropolis which All India Radio was slowly wresting from its holiday slumbers.
Fortunately the monster was still far, very far away, over the sea. The wind and rain that had been lashing Calcutta since the previous night were only precursory signals, the prodromes of the cataclysm.
Fisherman Subash Naskar, twenty-six, owed his life to an "extraordinary reflex action. Instead of trying to take
shelter from the wall of water about to engulf his village, he turned around, plunged into the huge tidal wave, and let himself be carried inland. He would never be fully aware of what really happened, but the next thing he knew, he was six miles away, clinging to the window of a temple. All around him lay disaster: he was the only survivor. It was a little after ten in the morning. The monstrous spinning top had just struck the land.
It was sheer hell, a hell of wind, water, and fire. It had begun with a blinding light like a colossal ball of fire that streaked across the horizon and lit up the landscape. Caused by the accumulation of electricity up among the clouds, this extremely rare phenomenon scorched the tops of all the trees within an area one hundred and twenty miles wide and thirty deep. Then, siphoning up the relatively shallow sea along the coast, the whirling column impelled the resulting freak wall of water forward. Under the combined effect of the wind and the tidal wave, h
ouses, huts, and trees were pulverized, pounded, mangled; fishing boats were sucked up and ejected miles away; buses and railway carriages were picked up and tossed about like bundles of straw; tens of thousands of people and animals were borne away and drowned; thousands of square miles were submerged under a magma of salt water, sand, mud, debris, and corpses. In the space of a few seconds, an area as large as Guatemala with a population of three million inhabitants had been expunged from the map.
Caught in midflight by the raging torrent, like thousands of others, Ashish Ghosh and his family owed their safety only to the proximity of a small mosque perched on a hill. 44 My wife and children hung on to me," he was to recount, 44 and I managed to drag them all as far as the building. It was already packed with survivors. All the same I was able to clamber onto a window ledge and glue myself to some bars, still clinging to my family. We remained there, suspended above the flood, all through that day and the following night. By the next morning there were only about twenty of us still alive." At one point Ashish saw in the distance a family of six people, clinging
as best they could to a tree trunk, but it was not long before an eddy engulfed the fragile skiff together with all its castaways;
Terror reigned for ten hours before the whirlwind veered away and headed out to sea. Two days later Ashish and his family, and the first escapees, reached the approach to the small town of Canning, thirty miles farther inland. Haggard and hungry, clinging to each other for support, they walked like sleepwalkers, without looking right or left. For miles they had struggled through a landscape of devastation and ruin, stumbling everywhere over corpses. The nurse who ran the little local dispensary would never forget the pitiful sight of "that column of survivors silhouetted against the dark line of the sky. Even at a distance you could sense their dreadful distress," she would say. "Some were carrying small bundles or a few utensils. They were propping up the injured, shuffling along with their children clutched in their arms. All of a sudden I caught the smell of death. Those people had seen their parents, wives, and husbands drown before their very eyes. They had seen their children carried away by the floods, their houses collapse, their land disappear."
For three days Calcutta remained ignorant of the magnitude of the disaster. The whirlwind had destroyed telephone lines, radio transmitters, roads, and seaborne transport. Anxious not to find themselves accused of lack of foresight or negligence, the authorities deliberately prolonged this state of ignorance. The first announcements minimized the seriousness of the tragedy. It had been an ordinary tornado, so it was claimed, of the kind that occurred every year anywhere along the Indian coast! And just in case anyone was tempted to take a look for himself, the area was cordoned off by police and border guards.
What a shock it was, therefore, when the first accounts of the escapees began to filter through! The press went wild. It talked of ten or twenty thousand dead, of fifty thousand head of cattle drowned, of two hundred thousand houses razed to the ground, of a million acres rendered
barren by seawater, of fifteen hundred miles of dikes demolished or damaged, of three or four thousand wells made forever unusable. It also revealed that at least two million people were in danger of dying of hunger, thirst, and cold because of the lack of an immediate organized relief effort.
All world catastrophes have had their petty disputes and wranglings over relief and aid. But here a desperate poverty made the need for aid more urgent than anywhere else. Yet it took another three days for the Calcutta and New Delhi authorities to agree on the first rescue operations, three days of which certain individuals were quick to take advantage. The people in question wore the ocher robes of monks belonging to the mission of Ramakrishna, the Bengali saint who in the last century preached mutual aid and love between Hindus and other communities. As soon as the cataclysm was announced, they rushed from Madras, Delhi, and even Bombay. The policemen cordoning off the area let them pass: barefoot angels of charity must not be intercepted. Going about in pairs, they mingled with the survivors and offered to take in as many orphans as they could. So much generosity did not fail to touch the hearts. Children abruptly deprived of their parents by the disaster were quickly rounded up. "Those men were generosity itself," one thirty-five-year-old widow was to testify. "One of them said to me, 'Whatever you do, don't worry about your little girl. She will be quite safe. We shall find her work and in two months' time we shall bring her back to see you together with her four or five hundred rupees in wages. In the meantime, here are a hundred rupees in advance.' I knelt down and kissed the feet of my benefactor and gave him my daughter." Like so many other victims of the tragedy, that poor woman would never see her child again. She did not know that these purported monks were pimps.
The genuine solidarity of the inhabitants of Calcutta, however, would compensate a thousandfold for such imposters. Max would never forget "the explosion of generosity" the catastrophe engendered throughout the city, and especially among the poor of the slums. People rushed in thousands to the headquarters of the various health
organizations, to the clubs, the mosques, and even to the door of his dispensary, to offer a blanket, clothing, a candle, a small bag of rice, a little oil, some sugar, a bottle of paraffin, some cow dung cakes, or matches. "A country capable of so much solidarity is an example to the world,'* thought the young American doctor on seeing all those poor people spontaneously giving the little they had to their brothers in misfortune. Dozens of organizations, most of them unknown, were galvanized into action, hiring trucks, motorized tricycles, taxis, and even handcarts to convey the first relief to the survivors. Together these organizations formed a prodigious Indian mosaic, representing as they did churches, sects, confraternities, unions, castes, sports teams, schools, and factories. Kovalski, Max, Bandona, Saladdin, Aristotle John, Margareta, and the whole team of Indian volunteers from the City of Joy's Committee of Mutual Aid were naturally in the front line of this humanitarian mission. Even Gunga, the deaf mute, was there. They had filled up a whole truck with medicines, milk powder, rice, blankets, and tents. Their load also included two inflatable rafts and two outboard motors, the personal and combined gifts of the godfather and Arthur Loeb, Max's father. The only thing that prevented them from leaving was a slip of paper: the road permit from the authorities. All week Kovalski and Max dashed from office to office, trying to extract the precious magic document. Contrary to what might have been expected, their status as sahibs, far from facilitating proceedings, aroused the suspicion of many officials. Kovalski knew all too well that the bugbear of the CIA was always suspected of lurking behind a foreigner. Despairing of his cause, the Pole decided to resort to a lie. "We're working with Mother Teresa," he announced to the man in charge of delivering the permits.
"Mother Teresa?" the babu repeated respectfully, drawing himself up behind his ocean of paperwork. "The Saint of Calcutta?"
Kovalski nodded.
"In that case you and your truck can leave immediately," declared the man, initialing the pass with a stroke of his pen. "I am a Hindu, but wg Indians all respect saints."
The delta road was a journey to the far reaches of hell. A mere ten miles away from the city, the way was already immersed in a sea of mud. The wreckage of overturned trucks was everywhere. "It was like looking at a naval cemetery," Kovalski was to recall. Wearing a turban of a scarlet red that contrasted sharply with the lividity of his complexion, the driver maneuvered as if engaged in a slalom competition. He cursed, braked, and sweated. With water up to its hood, the heavy vehicle was constantly skidding. Soon the first columns of survivors came in sight. "There were thousands of them, tens of thousands of them," Max was to write to his fiancee. "They were up to their chests in water, carrying their children on their heads. Some had taken refuge on ledges where for six days they had been waiting for help. Dying of hunger and thirst, they cried out, throwing themselves into the water and wading towards our truck. About twenty of them managed to clamber onto it. To make them listen to reason, Kovalski and S
aladdin shouted that we were doctors and were carrying only medicines, and by some miracle they let us pass. A little farther on another miracle occurred. Among the hordes encircling us, Kovalski recognized a regular customer from the little restaurant he frequented in the City of Joy. He was a militant Communist sent by the party to organize the refugees. He allowed us to continue. Aristotle John and Saladdin walked ahead to guide the truck. Soon, however, the engine hiccuped, coughed, and stopped once and for all—drowned.
"We put the rafts in the water and piled our cargo into them. A new night had fallen. There was not a single light for hundreds of square miles around us, but a myriad of fireflies lit up a spectral landscape of shredded trees, gutted huts, and bushes draped with detritus carried there by the whirlwind. Here and there, torn down electric wires had already electrocuted several ferrymen. Suddenly we heard shouting and the roll of drums in the night. Hundreds of escapees who had taken refuge among the ruins of a village perched on a little mound were waiting anxiously in the darkness for help. I shall never forget the triumphal welcome they gave us. Before even showing any interest in what we had brought, Muslim mullahs led us to the
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