`This' was also where a hundred and fifty families lived before the cyclone. Only one person survived the deluge. A 60-year-old woman who no longer lives here.

Like excavators we discover shards of pottery, a pack of scattered playing cards, a bicycle, its axle twisted beyond redemption, a lantern half-filled with water, the same that swept away its owners, an aluminium school satchel with a corroded pencil box, a tattered quilt tangled in the bushes, a sari weaved in the white sand. Spools of tape from an audio cassette which children from neighbouring village haveskilfully strung up like a Christmas tree, gently sway in the breeze to some unheard music. This is the low-lying side of Sonadia village where lived the Harijans and the immigrants from Bangladesh, men and women who travelled inland via Midnapore, who don't account as the dead because in the state rolls they never existed.

On a raised mound is a palm tree. Four framed photographs dangle precariously from the scales of its bark. Of Lakshmi, Ganesh, another depicting the nine planets as deities -- shukr, shani, budh, mangal. Overlapping that is a school photograph, a class of children posing with their teacher. The same man appears in the fourth photograph taken obviously with the other teachers of the school. The remains of Hemant Karan, a Maths teacher at a middle-level school in Japa. And then in one corner is a heap of gutted ribs and soot. `The policemen burnt the bodies of Sir and eight members of his family here,'' says Mondal.

No one will know what happened to `Sir', his family, his neighbours onthat dark night when a ferociously roaring sea surged in, the heavens poured and the wind, howling at 250 kmph, competed for destruction. Did they face heart-pounding fear or was death instantaneous? Did they scream? For now, there is only calm and the barest whisper of the wind.

Across the 480 km long coast of Orissa, from Puri to Balasore, several villages or chunks of villages, as in Sonadia, have been washed away. They exist now only as specks in a map. Altering forever the demography and psyche of a land. At Dhobei, a few kilometres from Sonadia, the only graduate of the village, 35-year-old farmer Khirahatti, has been killed. ``He was a wise man. He taught us many things,'' says his father-in-law Dharendu Pradhan. He also saved his village. On the evening of the 28th as Khirahatti was returning from the neighbouring village, he heard the cyclone warning on the radio. He ran back all the way and exhorted his villagers to shift to the bedi across which is on a much higher ground. ``He kepttelling us that the water would surround us soon as he helped evacuate 50 families,'' says Pradhan.

The waters came in as Khirahatti and his seven-year-old son went back to recoup their own belongings. Three days later the villagers found the bodies of the father and son clasped to each other. Now, there is just a skull, no one is quite sure whose, and remains of an educated life: A green book, its swollen, stiffened pages curled like wavelets. While most of it is in Oriya, the back of the book section is in English: A contribution of poems. Friends by Miss Asha Mohanty, Literacy and Family Welfare by Miss Pushpa Mohanty. The introductory poem is by Mister Srikant K. Sarangi Ist year (Eng. Lit.), Love and Death.

``Death is so quick and Life is so very shorts (sic) and fragile/ why waste your brief spans of life in anger and hatred and violence/Love and love always to defeat death that lurks near the corner.''

Apart from the aged father-in-law, there is Khirabatti's youngwidow. No one knows what will become of her. Widows and orphans. ``Virtually every family in the area has been fragmented leaving thousands widowed or without parents,'' says Jagdanand who prefers not to use his second name, the chief coordinator of Centre for Youth and Social Development (CYSD), a Bhubaneshwar-based NGO. Caught up in the exigencies of giving immediate material relief neither these agencies nor the Government has any long-term plans for them. Travelling across the coast one sees many young boys with shaven heads and girls sitting forlornly, or swinging listlessly from fallen trees. The only time they perk up is when they see a car or a relief truck.

They come and peer through the tinted glass of the parked car. ``Biskoot?'' they want to know. While the children are being temporarily taken care of by neighbours, widows, especially the younger women are much worse of. Those who have returned to their parents' houses are not given their quota of Government relief: 200 grams of rice, 40 gramsof dal, 10 grams of salt per day, as they have been de-listed from the area's voters' list. At a time when every grain of food is precious, these daughters are beloved but a burden still. Widows who stay with in-laws are forced to go and fetch relief material from camps several kilometres away, and are often asked to go and beg on the main roads.

At Bodeilo in Ersama block last Friday, a 22-year-old widow committed suicide. Allegedly, she had been forced to beg. If the cyclone washed away lives, its aftermath has snuffed out dignity.