Free Churchill's Secret War by Madhusree Mukerjee Page A

children, and, horrified at what she had done, burst into sobs. At Faridpur in eastern Bengal, some workers
were removing a corpse when a woman huddled nearby threw a bundle in their direction, saying, “Take that also.” It was the body of her child. 4
     
    FAMILIAL BONDS DID, however, persist even amid calamity. The husband of Fatema Bibi had plied a ferryboat on a river not far from Kalikakundu, but died of vomiting and diarrhea sometime after the 1942 cyclone. She was then perhaps sixteen and had a baby, Sopi. Her mother had died long before, but Fatema brought Sopi home to the Muslim hamlet of Kalikakundu. The famine then took her father and elder brother, leaving her with a younger brother to bring up alongside her son. Asked sixty-two years later how she and her son had survived, she replied simply, “I lived by looking at his face.” She made it through for her son’s sake, by working as a servant and begging to bring home what food she could. “It was a very hard time,” she said and stopped, too overcome with emotion to elucidate.
    Abdul Rahman was thirteen or fourteen at the time of the famine. Telling his story six decades afterward, he recounted how he had trailed along with an elder brother the day everyone converged on the Mohisadal police station and was lucky to escape the bullets. Later he ate at a nearby soup kitchen, along with perhaps a thousand others, many of whom came from far away. But no one could get more than a ladleful. “It was a thin gruel. How could it be enough?” he asked. “Even that some people would divide up and eat. Lots of people died. Sheikh Khurshed, Intiaz, Latul . . . and many children. We couldn’t bury them or anything. No one had the strength to perform rites. People would tie a rope around the necks and drag them over to a ditch.”
    Gunodhar Samonto, who was living by a canal in Kalikakundu at the time of the cyclone, named the men he knew who died during the famine: Behari Das, Gobindo Das, Bhuson Jit, Hori Jit, Pawnchom Jit, Haradhon Khan, Madhob Khetua, Nityanando Pramanik, Pawnchom Pramanik, and Madhob Rai. Among the female fatalities he recalled Poribala Acharjo, Saroda Acharjo, Surobala Acharjo, and Sagori Giri. Almost all the able-bodied of Kalikakundu had left their homes and
trekked to Calcutta to look for employment, he said. Saroda Acharjo’s three sons found jobs in the city’s wartime factories, and Moni Giri’s sisters Gyanoda and Kulobala also got work, in the brothels.
    Gourhori Majhi of Kalikakundu was eight at the time of the cyclone and living in another village. The family’s hut had fallen, but they had forded the floodwaters to reach a higher house. The starvation started right away, for there was no rice to be had. “Everyone was crazed with hunger,” he said in 2005. Whatever you found, you’d tear it off and eat it right there. My family had ten people; my own stomach was wailing. Who is your brother, who is your sister—no one thought of such things then. Everyone is wondering, how will I live?” For months the boy fed on boiled patalawta (leaves and vines), kochudata (yam stems), and seeds of durbo ghas (lawn grass). “There was not a blade of grass in the field,” he said, because everyone was searching them out for their tiny grains. While Gourhori’s body grew skeletal his stomach had ballooned, a marker of approaching death.
    He would eat at the gruel kitchen, where “the food was like water.” The family had sold its utensils and would accept the soup in cupped leaves, but others would snatch even these out of their hands. The child was fortunate, though, in that his swollen belly caught the eye of a gentleman with the relief operation, who called him aside. “He gave me a few grains of rice and watched me eat them.” Day after day for months the man had fed him, in secret and a little at a time, so that the boy slowly recovered. Tears coursed down the cheeks of the seventy-one-year-old Majhi as he remembered this