Calcutta

THE flood waters which compounded the misery of the
tented refugee cities in India have receded, the mud is
slowly Lying out. The refugee story is stale. But in the
camps of Meghalaya and Tripura, on India's eastern
borders, the nights are already chilly. Each day the
temperature drops a little. Even in West Bengal, as
November rolls on, the misery of penetrating rain and
crippling slush will give way to shivering nights for
nearly 10 million men, women and children.

- According to UN calculations, at least four million
blankets are needed. Two million have been ordered in
Europe because whatever is available in India has
already been purchased. The airlines are flying them in
wherever space is available. The UN is chartering
aircraft for the purpose-but four million will provide
for only 1.2 million families. The influx into India
continues, a few thousands arriving every day.
I remember a woman on the Jessore road. She stood,
oblivious of the rain, staring through me, eyes
unseeing. Her emaciated baby, half slipping from her
limp arms, hung on to her breast, hopefully, as
automatically she pulled the remnants of her tattered
sari around her in a futile attempt at modesty. She
personified the tragedy of the women of Bangla Desh,
bewildered, numb, deprived of home and hearth, of all
security. The individual is easily ignored in the
overwhelmingly large canvas of refugee suffering.

Yet, for each individual the tragedy has brought total
uprooting, unnatural existence week after week, a deep
psychological shock. Can anyone calculate the ultimate
cost, not only in lives, in health, but in the impact of
character, on personality? How many human beings will
recover from this traumatic experience? Women who have
lost everything that meant life - their homes and their
jewellery, which together are often the only safeguard
for the future, utensils, money, in many cases their
menfolk, dead or missing-have lost heart and hope. The
women watch their able-bodied men, the few there are,
sitting, doing nothing, for weeks which go into months.

These are the workers of the land, the fishermen, the
farmers. The vocational vacuum is killing their spirit.
But wherever a man tries to work, there is opposition
from the local population. A man catches fish and tries
to sell it locally, but he is bullied back to the camp.
Another takes his basket of vegetables and squats with
it by the roadside, but there is trouble. Refugees are
willing to work for lower wages than local people, but
no local employer dares to employ them, and with 17,000
educated young unemployed in nearby Calcutta, who can
blame the local population? When the refugees came,
their suffering inspired immediate sympathy. Today,
inevitably, their welcome has worn thin. So the refugees
give up, and the family just sits and waits for the
ration. "The demoralisation of dependence," as one
social worker put it, is already obvious, and hundreds
of thousands are apathetically on the dole.

To see women without enough clothes to carry on normal
life is a terrible experience. The Indian government has
provided food, shelter, medical facilities, water -
stretching its resources periodically to the utmost
limit, taxing its people more and more to find funds for
refugee care. But it cannot provide the extras which are
in reality essentials, like clothes. In such a situation
a woman's whole being is lost. She is ashamed,
miserable, her insecurity magnified. Forty per cent of
the refugees are women. They need about 35,000 saris a
month.

The population of the camps is strangely unbalanced.
There are few younger men, many old ones. There are many
old women, but an absence of girls and women between the
ages of 13 and 35. When journalists and social workers
ask where these women are, they are met with silence.
Ultimately, reluctantly, when a social worker has won
the confidence of a family, the explanation is given.
"Our girls and the women were taken away before we could
escape. But here in the camp, where there is no privacy,
no secrets, where we have to live together with
strangers, often in the same tent, if we talk of such
matters, everyone will know that our women were taken by
the Pakistanis. If even they find their way back to us,
what chance will they have of leading normal lives?" So
nobody talks.

In Agartala, the capital of Tripura, less than five
miles from the border, people tell of hearing a strange
wailing from across the river at night. The little boys
of nine or 10, who boldly slip backwards and forwards
over the border, carrying messages and bringing back
information of what is happening, report that the women
from the Pakistan army barracks are brought to bathe in
the river in the darkness. It is they who cry out hoping
people will hear them on the other side. "We don't want
to talk about our womenfolk who have been taken away,"
explains a refugee. "We are afraid if there is too much
talk about this, the Pakistanis will kill our girls
rather than have the truth come out."

The same silence meets queries about assault and rape.
The women don't want to talk because none of them want
to admit it happened to them. But the reticence, natural
as it is, makes it difficult to collect statistics. A
foreign diplomat suggested that such statistics, if
collected and correlated, could be computerised into the
first scientific proof of genocide by a nation. He
explained how such evidence collected from French women
after World War II helped track down the German soldiers
involved. But the diplomat forgets the human element. In
the camps, silence predominates.

The rapes, the assaults, the atrocities are not mere
statistics. They are the unhealed wounds on human lives,
many of which will never recover. These are men, women
and even children whose needs go beyond food and
shelter, beyond the demands of international politics,
if they are to be whole again. But the silence is broken
often enough to paint a damning picture of man's
inhumanity. Reports coming in from Pakistan telling of
doctors performing abortions on a mass scale, of large
numbers of pregnant women on whom it is too late to
perform abortions, confirm the picture. And there are
the individual cases one hears about. A social worker
tells of a woman raped by nine soldiers, another relates
how a Moslem barrister told her of his three cousins,
missing for many weeks. When they were traced, all three
were pregnant, allegedly by Pakistan generals.

Students in the camps have their own critical problems.
Thousands of them are sitting idle, their education
interrupted, their youthful energies wasted, their
frustration growing. "Get us admission into schools,"
they plead. But technically they are "foreigners,"
ineligible for admission into local schools. Nor will
official government policy permit "official" schools in
the camps, although in some, refugee teachers have
started holding classes. Official schools insinuate
permanence, and India insists that the refugees are here
"temporarily" and must go back to their homes when
normality is restored under a government they can
accept.

So the day to day problems continue. An old man dies and
his son, or grandson must perform the last rites. The
government gives money for cremation but not for the
rites. But family honour demands these must be performed
so "We collect everything that is 'extra'," explains one
woman. "The rations, anything else we may have left and
in exchange we get a little money for the rites." I
wonder what she means by "extra." Sometimes rations are
exchanged for medicines, for they are the only currency
available. One hears criticism that refugees are selling
the clothes sent by relief organisations or selling
rations. Who is to criticise when desperation makes its
own priorities? But even in these straits the human
spirit is strong. When a social worker, who had spent a
month in a small camp of 3,500 mostly working with the
women, trying to help them, giving them moral support
and encouragement, was leaving, a group of women came to
her. "Didi (sister)," they said, "we feel very bad for
in our land it is a custom always to invite a guest for
a meal, and we haven't even been able to give you one in
our homes. Nor could we give you a sari as a parting
gift."