DACCA, Pakistan — Munshi's wife cries all the time now. She sits in the flimsy lean–to her husband has pieced together from the debris of the storm, hidden from strangers in the Moslem tradition. Her breasts ache because the baby is no longer there to nurse.

She speaks to a visitor through the thatch.

“It is so kind you have come,” she whimpers in a barely audible voice, “but it is a very bad time. We are ashamed we cannot invite you to sit with us on some thing comfortable and have some tea. But we have lost our daughters, our sons, our property, our cattle. We have nothing. It is a disgrace that we are living on charity.”

The ordeal of her family tells much of the fearful story of the cyclone and tidal wave that swept in from the Bay of Bengal on the night of Nov. 12 and crushed the coastal areas of East Pakistan. An extended tour of the stricken islands and inter views with officials, survivors and relief workers disclosed tales of terror and heartbreak, madness and grief — and a chronicle of public indifference and delay in helping the two million miserable survivors.

In the fields men, taking the place of their lost live stock, can be seen pulling plows across the still–muddy land.

A lone dog, a mangy brown mongrel, survived on the island of Shakuchia. Most of the birds are gone, killed or driven off by the cyclone. That is why no vultures descended on the corpses, which had lain untouched and blackening in the sun until they were haphazardly buried.

An occasional bloated body still washes up on the shore or in a family pond, and hundreds float in the streams and channels. Some of the poorly covered graves still smell.

Villagers wander through the paddies, only their heads visible above the rotting rice plants, searching for bits of debris to fashion into shelters. One boy finds pieces of a boat, a bamboo support from a but and the lectern board that used to hold the Koran at the mosque.

Aminul Huq, who is 14 years old, is the sole survivor of a family of 20 on Shakuchia. His eyes are glazed and he seems to be in a trance. When he walks alone, he falls into a faint.

The whole world is blank,” he drones. “When I try to think of what lies ahead, my head spins and I cannot stand up. From inside I want to cry, but I cannot.”

Aminul, who Is living with an uncle now, wanders to his father's grave every day and asks passers–by to kill him and bury him there. Only the strong and the lucky survived. The storm claimed old men and women and children—especially the children who did not have the stamina to hold onto a tree or a floating dead cow or a roof airing the five dark hours or more that the tidal wave pummeled and rolled over them.

Of the 13,000 people who survived on Shakuchia, which has an area of 20 square miles, fewer than 1,000 were aged 12 or under. Normally young children would make up more than half the population.

The true death toll will never be known for no accurate census has been taken in the region An uncounted number of migrant workers had gathered there for the rice harvest. Thousands of bodies were washed out to sea.

It seems inescapable from the evidence available that at least 500,000 East Pakistanis, poor rice farmers, fisherman and boatmen and their families, were killed. Nearly 2.5 million were left homeless and starving and will have to be sustained with relief food for a year, until the next harvest.

It is the worst natural dis aster of this century; if the toll was a million or more, as some Pakistani newspapers report, it is the worst in recorded his tory. The Yellow River flood of 1887, which took the lives of 900,000 Chinese, is listed as the worst on record.

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Nov. 12 was cloudy on the Ganges Delta and the wind was rising. On Shakuchia, Munshi Mustansher Billa, a 40 year old indigent farmer with three acres of rice who is perpetually in debt to usurious money lenders, was busy with the harvest.

He had heard a storm report on a neighbor's transistor radio, but storms are a part of life here and this one did not sound severe, so he paid little attention. The wind grew stronger in the afternoon and the rain began to slant down. Suddenly, some time after dark, the radio issued a new warning—'moha bipod shanket” ('great danger signal').

Save My Children! Save Me!’

Munshi, his wife and their five children — one of them a boy less than a year old who was still being nursed—huddled worried, in their palm–thatched hut, which sat on a four‐foot high earthen platform that served as protection against normal flooding and storms. As they talked they tried to con sole each other with the thought that they were a mile from the sea.

Then, near midnight, they saw the first surge, waist high. Munshi's wife began to cry: “Save my children! Save me! Take me somewhere safe!” But there was nowhere safe. Her husband ran outside and cut his water buffalo and cows loose to give them a chance.

All at once it was on them— the full tidal wave, a churning, muddy wall at least 20 feet high. It sounded to Munshi. even over the howl of the rain and wind—now 150 miles an hour—like the roar of many airplanes, like the bombing raid it so resembled.

The water engulfed them and swept them off their feet. “Where are you? Where are you?” they cried. Everyone was screaming. Drowning dogs and goats were yowling in terror.

Somehow, as they were swirled higher and higher, the family managed to grab the palm trees around their com pound. The wave pounded them back and forth against the trunk as, choking on swallowed water, they tried to hang on with their arms and legs.

One son, aged 20, was clutching his two sisters while he clung to a tree. Suddenly he called out: “I can't hold them any longer. I have to let go!” Munshi and his wife saw one of the daughters carried away, then the other.

The wave surged again, crashing over their heads, and when they could see the tree again the son was gone. A second son was knocked out of another tree.

Then Munshi's right arm, holding his last son, grew numb from the freezing, stinging rain. The infant slipped away as Munshi, sobbing helplessly, clung on with his other arm.

“You were holding my baby,” his wife called from her tree. “Is he all right?”

“I couldn't hold on to him,” Munshi shrieked, “the wave was too strong.” His wife's wail then seemed louder than the storm.

Without warning the tidal wave began receding with all its fury and snatched Munshi from his tree. He grabbed at other trees, lost one and then another but finally caught hold of the last one in their yard— just in time to hear his wife scream: “My sons are gone, my daughters are gone, now my husband is gone! I am going too. I don't want to live any more!”

She let go and was swept toward her husband, Who grabbed at her, caught her and hung on for an hour or so until the water finally went down.

The first dawn was streaking the sky when Munshi and his wife came down slowly and painfully from the tree.

In water still knee deep they stumbled—weak, dazed, nearly mad with grief—through floating bodies and animal carcasses toward a neighbor's house, hoping to find at least some rags to hide their shame.

The neighbors were dead, their hut smashed, but a stranger, a boy who had survived, found Munshi and his wife some strips of cloth he had taken from trees and corpses. Sapped of all strength, they fell down on the sodden earth and wept themselves to sleep. skin had been scraped raw— on the arms, chest and thighs— where they had been battered against the palm bark. Their clothes had been ripped off by the storm.

Sleeping, Waking, Weeping

They woke after a few hours and staggered back to the void where their but and cowshed had stood. There they slept again, and woke, and wept, and went to a friend's. All the survivors were weeping too.

Bodies, human and animal, were everywhere—stuck in trees, lying in rice paddies, be ginning to surface from the small ponds they had sunk. Most were of strangers carried miles by the awesome wave, sometimes even from distant islands.

People wandered naked, wailing the names of kin who did not respond.

Surrounded by death, Munshi shook with fright. “This must be doomsday,” he thought.

They did not eat that day. Though they were still in shock, the next day, hunger overwhelmed them. Munshi and his wife and their friends began scratching with their fingers in the mud of the blackened paddy fields, hoping that some of the unhusked rice they had harvested and piled up before the storm had been swept there.

After hours of digging they found a few handfuls and ate it raw, though they were afraid it had been contaminated. They had to eat it raw because they had no matches until the first Government relief ‘boat arrived a week later.

Usual Programs on the Air

That Friday morning in Dacca, the capital of East Pakistan, which is a hundred miles to the north, no one had the slightest inkling of the magnitude of the catastrophe—partly because all communications had been knocked out but also because the Government weather experts, despite their “great danger” signal, had described the storm in no more alarming terms than they had a mild cyclone on Oct. 23 that killed 300 people.

The morning newspapers reported that the damage had not been as severe as that of the previous storm. Radio and television continued the usual programs. By nightfall the official death toll was 50.

In Islamabad, the national capital, in West Pakistan, a thousand miles across Indian territory, the size of the disaster was not appreciated by the Government either.

Though newspapers had begun to talk of tens of thousands of dead (by Saturday,) and by Sunday of hundreds of thousands, the Government figure did not rise above 40,000 until eight days after the storm — thereby confusing foreign governments about the disaster's magnitude and delaying international relief.

Gen. Agha Mohammad Yahya Khan, the head of the military government, was on an official visit to Communist China when the storm struck. He returned, as scheduled, two days later, stopping in Dacca to make a brief aerial tour of the devastated area.

“I am very much distressed,” he said afterward, adding that he had ordered all Government agencies to mobilize for relief.

He then flew back to Islamabad—a departure that was to be criticized later by political leaders as indicative of the callousness of the Punjabi‐dominated national Government in West Pakistan toward the Bengalis of East Pakistan. The east ern province has been exploited economically by the West since independence in 1947.

President's Yahya's orders have not been disclosed. For whatever reason, no national mobilization was visible and there was no Government commitment on the scale that was necessary. Even for an undeveloped country with limited human and technical resources, the effort seemed deficient.

Though the Government is a military one, the army was not fully mobilized for 10 days. Though airdrops were the only way to get relief supplies to most of the survivors—roads were washed out and virtually all the boats had been shattered—not a single one was made in the first few days.

Yahya Visits the Region

As the days passed and little was done—those facilities and materials that existed were ill utilized—there was mounting criticism of the relief effort in the press and among the public. President Yahya, after eight days in Islamabad, returned to East Pakistan to oversee the effort and to try to reduce the furor.

On Shakuchia Island Mo hammed Islam Mia, a farmer who lost the younger two of his four sons, spoke venomously:

“The Government did nothing. After seven days two Government officers came in a launch and gave out a few pounds of rice and a tin of kerosene oil for 4,000 survivors. They told us to be patient, that more supplies were coming, then they slipped away at night without telling us”

“Let the world know what our Government did,” he went on. “All the relief work is being done by foreigners.”

Foreign relief — after being delayed by Pakistani indecision, sluggishness and mismanagement — had finally become a massive effort. In all, foreign countries, international organizations and private agencies— led by the United States—flew in $50–million worth of food, clothing, tents and medicine.

They also flew in nearly 30 helicopters and 200 river boats to move supplies to the victims. The British sent four navy ships from Singapore with 800 army engineers and commandos, who fanned out to repair roads and bridges, provide fresh water and bury the dead.

Still, it was 10 days after the storm before this relief effort began to move into full swing. Furthermore, when India — with which Pakistan has fought two wars over Kashmir, the last in 1965 — offered helicopters, transport planes, river craft and mobile hospitals, Pakistan turned them down.

Desolation and Hunger

In the villages throughout the delta the peasants sat in the emptiness of their flattened compounds, desolate, hungry and ill under the cruel sun.

Not far away a police inspector emerged from his sturdy bungalow, starched and freshly shaven after a long sleep, and reported to a foreign journalist that he could not release his pickup truck for relief work until it had delivered the week's food to the nearby police barracks.

On every mud road and lane, people begged and cried out for food. In one village, which had received no rations for several days, frantic peasants swarmed over a small truck that was carrying tins of biscuits. Those who managed to claw their way into possession of a tin were jumped on by several others and thrown to the ground.

Many survivors were close to madness, and some broke. An old man on Jabbar Island who had lost 52 of his relatives collected the bodies, dug a grave and buried them together. Now he sits on the grave and shouts: “Here is my family!”

Laughter Amid Tears

A young woman whose husband and three children perished stood naked, laughing maniacally as tears streaked her cheeks.

“Can you give me an airplane?” she asks. “I want to go to heaven. I want to bring back my children.” She bursts into cackles again.

Ghulam Murshed Choudhry, 31, a member of an influential family on Manpura Island, lost none of his relatives. But his senses left him after 17 days of burying bodies and he was still babbling about the corpses of all his “brothers” when he was finally flown to Dacca in a helicopter for psychiatric care.

It is no accident that the Moslems of East Pakistan are more devout than their brethren in West Pakistan. In the delta especially, all of nature's furies are accepted as manifestations of Allah's will.

“It is the wish of Allah that this wind and water came,” a fisherman said, in a comment echoed all over the region. “We have sinned. It would not have happened if we had not sinned” He did not know what’ sins were being punished; only that the people must have strayed from the path Of Islam.

The burdens of life that have made the peasants of the delta fatalistic have also made them socially introverted—even selfish, by the standards of more affluent cultures.

Life centers on the family and people rarely think of asking for ‘help from others or of offering any. Sharing is an alien concept, except within the family—and even there, brothers do not necessarily share their food.

Because there was so little food available immediately after the cyclone, Manpura villagers rounded up the migrant workers who had survived, put them in boats beached by the storm and shoved them off into the surging Meghna River—telling them to go back where they had come from.

When the first relief workers arrived on Manpura, male villagers besieged them not only for food, clothing and medicine, but also, after a day or so, for more women from the outside. They wanted to replace their lost wives immediately because a woman is a necessity here: She cooks the food, husks the rice and tends the cattle and children.

At a relief center a man began quarreling with local officials because they would not add some saris to his relief bundle of food and blankets.

“What do you need saris for?” he was asked. “Your wife was killed.”

“Yes,” the man replied, “but I want to get married again, and I need them for a dowry.”

There were also signs of greed. Despite the terrible stench and the threat of cholera, some villagers refused to bury the bodies of strangers unless they were paid. Others, after initial hunger had been satisfied, took the same attitude toward unloading relief goods.

25% of Rice Salvageable

Contrary to the first reports, some rice—perhaps 25 per cent of the crop—was still salvage able in parts of the devastated region. The question, was whether it would be largely consumed or sold or saved for seed, without which there will not be a good harvest next year.

Foreign agricultural advisers and relief workers are trying to convince the villagers that they must save the rice and live on relief food until the next harvest, but that is an overwhelming missionary task among people who have barely lived from day to day.

Those survivors who had lived along the shore refused to go back and rebuild on their homesites. Struck by the full fury of "the white monster," they are afraid to go near the water.

Many beggars have been arriving from the outside hoping to cash in on the relief goods. When relief officials offered them 5 rupees (about a dollar) a day to work, they refused. Still other outsiders came to try to grab the land of families that had perished.

Corruption occurred in many places with the local elected officials demanding as much as 20 rupees to put a family on the relief list. Some of the relief goods began appearing in black-market shops.

Nights Were Bitter Cold

The days after the storm were sunny but the winter nights were bitter cold to the warmth–loving Bengalis. De spite their fright they picked from the corpses whatever clothes remained, wrapped themselves in the tatters and huddled together on the open flats for warmth. Women with out clothes hid, some refusing to come out even to eat.

In that way they lived through that grim first week, drinking polluted water, clawing rice out of the mud, finding an occasional coconut, whose milk and white meat they carefully divided, and sometimes—when their bellies were so empty that they were in pain—eating the roots of banana trees.

On the third day after the storm the stench from the de– composing bodies grew so bad that Munshi's ‘group, stunner as they were, started burying them. Holding pieces of cloth over their noses and mouths to keep out the smell, they slowly began to put the corpses in shallow graves‐‐which some times simply meant throwing a layer of muddy earth over them.

On many islands the peas ants merely piled bodies on makeshift rafts and pushed them to sea. “They were floating like water hyacinths for miles,” a survivor said.

Many people never found their dead. Of his five children Munshi found only his oldest son.

Most of the survivors badly needed solace from sympathetic people in the early weeks after the storm. Villagers sometimes waited outside relief tents long into the night, just to talk with, and weep to, the volunteers. Loneliness had descended on the islands once the first terror—hunger—abated.

For days, and even weeks, there was a terrible silence where children by the dozen used to chatter and play—except for one persistent sound, the deep, rasping cough that can be heard across the fields as the respiratory legacy of the storm.

In what seemed a miracle to laymen but was quite unsurprising to doctors, the cyclone caused no cholera epidemic beyond the one East Pakistan normally suffers at this time of year. (Some 200,000 to 300,000 will get cholera this year, and half will die because of the lack of treatment.)

Some people—no one knows how many—died of exposure, dysentery, respiratory diseases and other infections, but in general, the medical problems were no more severe after the cyclone than before.

Hellish as life was hi the ravaged area after the cyclone, it was grim enough before.

Pestilence, cyclones, monsoon floods and vicious economic exploitation are as much a part of the. Ganges Delta as the rice that is the only reason for living there at all.

Few would choose such a precarious existence were it not for the relentless pressure of East Pakistan's exploding population—75 million ‘to 80 million in an area roughly the size of Arkansas, which has two million. (Event if all the Government's family planning goals—are achieved, population will double in 27 years.)

Rich but Crowded Land

No land is left in the northern regions—virtually every arable square inch is being cultivated—so the marginal people, the poorest, are pushed farther and farther southward into the vulnerable, low–lying coastal areas and offshore is lands, some only three or four feet above sea level.

The flat, swampy delta with its three million people—before the storm—is the thinnest–populated part of East. Pakistan but even here about a thousand people live on every square mile—a density as heavy as in some cities and matched only in places like Japan And communist China.

The soil is wonderfully fertile—pure, rich silt brought down from the ‘Himalayas by the massive flow of the Ganges–Brahmaputra river system, the equivalent of seven Mississippis, which veins the region like the back of an old man's hand. But it is this same flow, swollen by the monsoon rains of May through September, that so often floods the paddy fields and destroys part of the crop.

Still, it is the monsoon that makes the crop possible at all, for only when it washes away the accumulated tidal salts and sweetens the earth can the rice be planted. There can be only one crop a year, for after the monsoon season comes the dry season, and no irrigation system exists.

“Sometimes we think about moving to another island,” said Abdul Matin, a 45‐year‐old Moslem priest on Shakuchia who lost six children, one of his two wives and his mother. “But it is only talk. We never take ourselves seriously. Cy clones hit all the islands. No place is safe. There is no peace anywhere.”

While the villagers tried to rebuild their lives, the debate continued, both In Pakistan and in international circles over why the national Government was so slew in moving to the rescue. Most knowledgeable observers attributed ‘the delays to an enfeebled, timorous bureaucracy, a lack of imagination, an inability to make decisions, and a pervasive incompetence — “a bum government,” as a foreign diplomat put it.

The observers generally discount the idea of a deliberate decision to ignore the victims’ plight. Yet they agree that there were elements of the Government's behavior that verged on the deliberate—the fact, for example, that military preparedness against India took priority over the disaster.

At a party in Dacca a week after the storm, an air force pilot mentioned that he was under strain because of long hours of flying. It turned out that he had not been air–dropping relief but had been practicing bombing and strafing runs.

“This disaster has made us terribly vulnerable,” he explained. “The Indians could walk right in and take over. We've got to stay alert.”

No one realized the scope of the calamity for the first two days, and few blame the Government for its lethargy during that time, but the same cannot be said for its reaction after it became known that hundreds of thousands were dead and millions were homeless and hungry.

Because natural disasters are so common and so difficult to control in East Pakistan and because resources are so limited, the central Government, pleading helplessness; has tended to ignore the disasters and invest its resources elsewhere.

This time, foreign press reports and foreign relief efforts focused the spotlight on East Pakistan and embarrassed the Government into doing more than it had before—meager and chaotic as the effort was.

One widely held view is that fear of jeopardizing the elections to a constituent assembly scheduled for Dec. 7 paralyzed the Government into inaction. It was reported to be apprehensive about what might happen if troops were sent into East Pakistan.

On Bhola Island, less than half an hour by pedicab from where, bodies lay decomposing, laughing young men in new white clothes played badminton. ‘The Dacca jet set, in mod bellbottoms, never stirred from the pool of the Hotel Intercontinental. Many families splurged on their presents for The Moslem counterpart of Christmas despite appeals from Government officials to donate the money to relief. Some boat owners tampered with their engines to avoid being called into relief service at rates below their usual ones.

Several students heading back to Dacca from the stricken area on a river steamer were asked by a foreigner why they had not stayed ‘to do relief work. “We are young and cannot do much,” one said sheepishly. “When we get home, we will tell them to send other boys.”

What of the future? Will things improve for the abject people, or will the Government go back to ignoring them again as soon as the foreign relief workers leave and the foreign, press turns to other matters?

Three weeks after the storm a key official told a foreign expert that no rehabilitation program was being planned for the outer islands because they had not been included in the 1961 census.

For all the skepticism, most experts foresee at least some improvements, if only because of the momentum generated by the international relief effort.

The World Bank has proposed a $185–million reconstruction plan, to be tied to its current three–year $1.6‐billion flood control and economic ‐ development program, which has already seen the construction of some walls to hold back the tides. Washington is expected to be a heavy contributor.

Whatever the political future, the development proposals do not come close to what it would really cost to lift this region to even subsistence living. It would take many billions, probably tens of billions just to build a comprehensive water control and irrigation system, according to engineering experts. Billions more would be needed to replace the lost live– stock, crops, fishing boats and farm tools and to provide basic living requirements — housing, schools, medical facilities, electricity and sanitation.

‘Can't Sit and Mope and Groan’

“We can't afford to be pessimistic,” said A.M.S. Ahmad, chairman of the East Pakistan Development Board, who is in charge of cyclone rehabilitation, “because we jolly well have to do something. We can't sit and mope and groan.”

“For one thing,” he added, “it's not impossible.” Perhaps not, but most experts are convinced it would require a massive international rescue effort, and they agree that though the money may come from outside, the inspiration and initiative must come from the people of East Pakistan.

“We know we will have to do it ourselves,” said Kaiser Zaman, a 25‐year‐old business executive who volunteered for relief work. “We Bengalis have a saying: ‘It takes a thorn to remove a thorn.”