Bangladesh News

Four days into the hurricane, in Majher Killa, the furthest corner of Dublarchar and the worst-hit area, still reeling from the devastation with bodies being recovered; and the need of the moment is water. Eight more bodies were found here and many more are feared buried deep in the forest.

Dead sea snakes and fish floated in the water as our boat approached the island frilled by leafless trees. On the ground, it is sheer devastation itself. First come the reeds, once six to eight feet tall, now flattened to the ground. A few people are trying to salvage a fishing net from a canal.

In the middle of the grassland sits a group of fishermen. They seem to have no purpose in life; just sitting still. From here, no trace of any fishermen’s colony is visible. Then we cross a canal and find a village, or what remains of it. Some bamboo sticks, pillows and mattresses are strewn around. People are trying to find anything they can to rebuild those simple huts.

Somebody has left a few Muralis (a kind of local sweetmeat) to dry on the shelter’s roof. A boy comes, picks up a few Muralis, put them in his mouth, then spews them out. They have become inedible.

In the middle of a square a few bamboo sheets are spread flat and some blackish grainy things are spread thinly on them.

A man standing there picks up the grains and shows us. “This is what we are left with,” he says. A bad stench assails our noses rice rotten by water mixed with sand. “We can’t eat this. If you eat, you will be like him,” and he shows a man sitting under a tree looking lifeless. The man has diarrhoea since last night and is dehydrated by now.

“Do you have some water? Just a little?” asks a boy. “We don’t have any pond left.”

But just a few feet from him is a big pond full of clear water. “What about that?”

“No, you can’t drink that. It is now sea water.”

Already a group has formed around us. They look at us with pleading eyes. “Water? Any water? Please!”

We had only a litre bottle of water with us, and here they are too many. Almost everyone in the village is now asking for a little water. We hide our bottle in the backpack.

“The boat is coming. Wait,” we tell them and walk to the cyclone shelter, the only concrete structure on the island. We climb to the roof and have a bird’s eye view appalled! As far as we can see, it is just destruction. Not a single thing left standing. And scores of trawlers and fishing boats nine, ten, eleven, twelve…. we stop counting. All either stuck in the forest half a kilometre away or perched high on the ground. Now we know why the staircase to the cyclone shelter is broken a busted trawler lies a few feet from it.

“At least 100 trawlers either sank or were damaged on this island alone,” said Kamaluddin, joint secretary of Dublarchar Fishermen Group that runs the fishing business here.

Some people have been trying to put things together gathering whatever is left intact and rebuild the huts. Some have collected the scattered dried fish that were washed away and put them to dry again.

“You come this way,” a man with jaundiced eyes beacons us. We follow him without a word into the forest. All around us are trawlers, intact and busted. Then we come to a pond and find a body lying on its bank. Bloated and deformed, emanating a horrible stench while nobody cares to remove it. It is now 9:30am.

“Do you have water?” the man now asks, making clear the intention behind his unsolicited help.

The idling fishermen and labourers show some signs of life when the navy set up its medical camp. Men with mangled legs and broken arms, with injuries to heads and limbs, and with diarrhoea make long queues as Lt Commander Surgeon Amzad starts dispensing shots of antibiotics. A man is carried here and the doctor says he is just minutes away from certain death.

“These people need water. That is the priority, or the diarrhoea situation would worsen in a day or two,” he says.

Navy is supplying water, but the need is much bigger. On the entire Dublarchar, only one pond remains suitable for collecting drinking water from. The rest are just filled with pure sea water.

“We have to go by boat to Meher Ali Island to collect water and it is a tough job,” says Islamil, a fisherman. “Diesel is scarce.”

And even scarcer is any private relief; actually other than the few maunds of rice transported by the big businessmen who run the fishing business here, no private relief has reached the marooned.

Then we find a body being buried. Jagannath Das, general secretary of Dublarchar Fishermen Group that runs the big business here, is dead. We are standing by the remains of the mangled house of Jagannath just a few bamboo poles and polythene sacks.

Jagannath refused to leave his home even though he knew the hurricane was coming. He simply would not leave his treasure of dried fish. And so his son also could not go to safety. Jagannath was sitting on the sacks of his fish when the waves hit him and washed him away. His son, Tushar Das, survived because he managed to grab a bamboo pole, floating for hours.

“We waited for four days for a trawler to send his body home,” Tushar says. Marks of injuries on his chest. “We did not find a single trawler. So we are putting him to rest here.”

And that is the tragedy of Dublarchar today. The man who would control all the trawlers could not find a single one left to carry him home.

But then he was lucky, if it could be called “luck” at all. His body was at least identified and buried. We find four more bodies, all floating in the canals of the Sundarbans. One tangled in a net and another stuck to a tree. People are still trawling the ponds in search of their missing ones.

As we walk back from the cyclone shelter, we find a silent column of people walking behind us. Then they catch up with us. “Please take us with you,

just put us on some road, we want to go home,” they whisper.

“Please give us some water, please! Please give us some food! Please! Please! Please!”

We know we have no control over these things. We are just some helpless journalists going from one water marooned place to another, and then to a ship anchored in the middle of the bay.

We start walking faster. We are now fleeing from the haunted island.