Swept away

Baker,Age: 47

On the night of September 10,Gobinda Pradhan had just pushed the kneaded dough into the oven when he heard a whoosh sound that soon become a roar. Before Pradhan could react,a gush of water swept through his bakery,snuffing out the fire in the oven and washing away the flour. The nearby Kushabhadra river,a distributary of the Mahanadi,had breached its embankment. Five days after the deluge that affected over 14 lakh people in 19 districts of Orissa,Pradhan came back to his tin-roofed bakery—just across the Gop-Konark road in Kusupur village—where he baked breads,cakes and biscuits with his wife Nilandri and sons Sridhar and Sisir. The water is still knee-deep and Pradhan doesn’t know when he can start work again.

“The water went down a little last night,but it is still enough to reach my waist,” says Pradhan,a lungi wrapped around his lower torso and a gamchha around his head. Empty plastic packets that once contained maida and sugar float around. “I came here just an hour ago. Nothing is left to be recovered. All that I am trying to salvage are the tin trays,” says Pradhan as he stood still for a few minutes,counting the losses in his head. A few feet away,some workers of his bakery were fishing for some movie CDs floating in the water.

Before he started his bakery,Pradhan used to buy bread and cakes from other bakers and sell those in Nimapara town,9 km away. But he wanted to start his own bakery. So he took a loan from a local moneylender at a high interest rate of 36 per cent per annum and added some of his savings to start his unit.

“I had ten 500-gram packets of sugar,25 packets of 50-kg maida and more than 18,000 pieces of bread,cakes and biscuits. We worked till 11 p.m. that night as I had orders pending. But the water came and sunk all my work. The bakery was almost submerged,” says Pradhan.

The flood comes after a drought in Orissa—till as recently as August 16—with the state only receiving 50 per cent of the normal rainfall for that period. But with the Mahanadi overflowing with discharge from the Hirakud reservoir,the Kushabhadra river also swelled ominously,causing a massive breach near Gop in Puri district.

So far,the floods have affected 21 lakh people in 4,096 villages in 19 districts,including Puri,and left 30 people dead. While 1,278 villages were cut off due to the flood,over 2 lakh hectares of crop area was waterlogged.

“When we fled the bakery that night,there was water everywhere—rising up to the chest,” says Prdhan. He managed to get to his mud-brick house but that too was washed away. Now he stays with his family at a relief camp off the Gop-Konark road.

When the water that burst free of the Kushabhadra river finally empties into the Bay of Bengal,it will leave behind a land and people mired in uncertainty. Pradhan has no idea when he can rebuild his bakery and his house. “Only God knows what will happen to us.”

Kunjabhihari Bhoi

Landless Farmer,Age: 60

Kunjabhihari Bhoi takes one end of the pink towel slung on his left shoulder,wipes his brow and shuts his sunken eyes in despair. For the last five days,60-year-old Bhoi and his family have sat on the neighbour’s rooftop under a blue polythene that is barely enough to cover everyone. The grandchildren bawled while the daughters-in-law tried to boil some rice that they had managed to take out as they fled the flood.

The water that gushed in on the night of September 10 has all but receded but it has left Kunjabihari’s mud-house in Kusupur village,Puri district,flattened. “When the water came,I was feeding my cattle. I ran towards the house of my neighbour Bholanath. The water was almost 8 feet high and my hut was gone in minutes. I couldn’t find my cattle either,” he says.

On Thursday,five days after the deluge,Kunjabihari came down from the rooftop of his neighbour’s pucca house to look for relief for the 13 members of his family. “I am still waiting for some food and polythene,but there is no sign of it. I have hardly slept in the last four days. It rains at night and we can barely stand under the polythene. There is no place to lie down,” he says.

Officials of the state government say more than 1.7 lakh people have been given relief. Bhoi looks at the relief vans that are speeding down the main road and nods his head dismissively. “Four days ago,the chopper threw food packets,but it led to the death of Sanaullah Khan from Muslim basti. Sanaullah is very frail. He was running after some food packets that were thrown several metres away from the village. He slipped and was washed away. What is the point of giving relief when it is thrown here and there,” asks Bhoi.