Little over a week ago, during one these sessions, he went off tangent, into an impromptu verse about the cyclone and the devastation it had caused. ``It was as if he went into a trance,'' says Shivnarayan, a voluntary relief worker. Since then Rout's behaviour has also been marked as rather erratic. He moves around muttering about baarish, paani.

Volunteers at the relief centre say he's exhibiting classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Across Ersama,Bhadrak, Astarang, there are others as traumatised as Rout. At village Nokkipur, teenager Dulla Rani Bhol, eyes pursed, hands around the head, refuses to move from her crouched position in the corridor of her pucca house. Two days before we visited her, Dulla Rani who has been abandoned by her husband, lost her baby. ``During and after the cyclone we didn't get food for several days so all her milk dried up and she couldn't feed the child who subsequently died,'' explains Dulla Rani's mother. The girl has since gone into shock.

At Cuttack general hospital there is a case of a woman who has turned mute after battling the waters for two nights and two days.

With barely enough doctors to treat people for dehydration, cholera, cuts and wounds, there's little hope of treatment for those suffering from post traumatic stress syndrome. ``Probably they'll end up branded mad,'' says Satya Misra who is documenting these cases for the Bhubaneswar-based Centre for Youth and Social Development (CYSD).

The syndromeis not specific to humans. In the Japa gram panchayat, villagers report cases of dogs gone mad. Driving across the coast, the landscape tells its own story of trauma: thousands of coconut trees bent in a choreographed movement, their leaves caught flying forward like long hair, acres of flyaway paddy, century old banyan trees collapsed, their roots like a jungle of wires in a gaping electric box.

On the main road near Rahama, six poles are doubled up in a line as if in a tug of war with an unseen adversary, a bus with its top blown away, girders of an unfinished construction caught genuflecting to a higher force. The entire countryside seems frozen in a moment of flight.

The paddy crop, the coconut trees are ``alive,'' says Prashant Naik, special secretary to chief minister Giridhar Gamang and additional secretary, finance. ``Only they will never yield any fruit or grain,'' he says.

Unless the landscape can be revived, it will be impossible to rehabilitate the people, says Naik. When the sea like avengeful intruder advanced 30 kilometers into the hinterland it salinated acres and acres of paddy-fields, the main source of cultivation, silted tube-wells, destroyed cattle and trees and swept away fishing nets.

In villages there is loss, desperation and overriding bewilderment: Just where to begin. At the secretariat in Bhubaneswar, bureaucrats wager on how long it will take to get things back to ``normal.'' Moving restlessly in the corridors of the makeshift relief camp Rout sings in Oriya. His voice soaring: We're the children of India/ Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan/ This is a call to defeat the cyclone/Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan.