While They Slept

By JAMES WALSH

With the head of an elephant and the body of a potbellied man, Lord Ganesha is one of Hinduism's most beloved deities, a god of new beginnings and good luck. As his grotesque anatomy suggests, though, Ganesha, like India itself, was violently put together. Multitudes of peasants in the hinterland reaches of Maharashtra, a western Indian state that is home to the god's most devout cult, had reason to recall his dual nature last week. Villagers concluding a 10-day festival in Ganesha's honor celebrated late into the night with dancing, singing and blowing horns. In Killari, a village of about 15,500 near the Karnataka state border, the ceremonies culminated in the ritual dipping of * the god's idols in the village pond. Around 1 a.m., worshippers straggled home and fell into a deep slumber.

It was a sleep from which most of them never awoke. At 3:56 a.m., an earthquake struck with a deafening roar and a rattling movement that swept across the southern sector of the Deccan Plateau. Babu Singh, 45, a tea-stall owner in Killari, was among the celebrators who returned home late that night. His family had trooped inside to sleep, while he, as usual, bedded down on the porch under an asbestos awning. When the quake hit, he clutched his string cot in terror, then turned to see nothing but a thick curtain of dust where his three-room house had stood. Before being knocked out by the collapsed awning, Singh could scarcely believe the convulsion's power. He said later, "I thought the earth was an exploding bomb."

In effect, it was. By the time vanguards of relief and rescue columns reached Latur district 12 hours later, the scene looked like the aftermath of a carpet bombing. Killari, the village nearest to the quake's epicenter, was 90% flattened, reduced to heaps of brown-and-gray rubble. And Singh, like too many of the other survivors, had lost his entire family: his mother, wife, their two sons, daughters-in-law and grandchildren. By Saturday estimates of the region's death toll were climbing beyond 28,000, the worst quake disaster on the Indian subcontinent in 58 years. Too dumbstruck to weep, Singh pulled the corpses of his family members out of the debris and, as best he could, cremated them on the spot.

The upheaval of earth and of so many lives was a horrific reminder that India is a land where everything happens on an outsize scale. Politically, the modern nation was born in blood amid fearsome Hindu-Muslim vendettas. Geologically, the subcontinent was also created in violent partition. Breaking off from a supercontinent known today as Gondwanaland, the Indian Platform drifted over a deep volcanic plume that raised the lava-thickened Deccan plain. About 50 million years ago, that tectonic slab slammed into the underbelly of Asia, throwing up the Himalayas and producing fault lines of stress that create sporadic havoc across the continent. Hindus look north today to the highest mountains on earth as the home of the gods. Indians also know that the loftiest of the globe's creations are underpinned by destruction. What the people of Killari and such nearby devastated villages as Sastur and Talani did not fully appreciate -- though they had apparently been warned -- was that the latent power beneath their feet is almost never in itself a large-scale killer. Wherever quakes have struck across an arc of the Old World from the Mediterranean to China, the causes of harm, when they are not fires or collapsing dams, are usually primitive pressed-mud or masonry buildings. They are the poorest structures imaginable to absorb ground shock. By first light after the Killari quake, evidence of that cruel fact was abundant. Low-rise huts of brick or stone lay shattered almost everywhere: instant tombs. Most of the survivors lived in wooden houses with thatched roofs -- or, as in Babu Singh's case, were sleeping outdoors.

In retrospect, the living could recount the early warnings of calamity. A recent series of premonitory tremors had raised local fears of a Big One. Latur's top local official, Praveen Singh Pardeshi, denied last week that the anxieties had simply been ignored. The government, he said, had offered to resettle residents in new houses of lightweight construction, but the villagers said they preferred to stay put. They wanted to remain close to their farmlands.

Now they have no choice. By the second day following the quake, which U.S. geologists registered at 6.4 on the Richter scale, the southeastern interior of Maharashtra was to all appearances the no-man's-land in some sudden and inscrutable conflict. Lieut. General A.S. Kalkat, head of the Indian army's Southern Command, was in charge of the relief operations. A career soldier who has fought in three wars, he declared, "I have seen death. I have seen destruction. But I have never seen anything like this." Villagers plodded en masse from the quake zone across the rain-drenched landscape, usually innocent fields of sugarcane and sunflowers, like so many refugees from the battle lines. The dirt roads had become mudholes choked with trucks, buses, bulldozers, mobile cranes and even tanks.

In the stricken villages, columns of smoke from cremation sites rose to meet the monsoon clouds. In the aftermath's earliest hours, Babu Singh was among the more fortunate survivors in having enough wood to dispose of his loved ones' remains. Family members of the victims used whatever spare piece of cloth they could find -- saris, bedsheets -- to shroud the corpses. Babies were tenderly wrapped in towels. But soon enough, the wood and cloth ran out. Hundreds of broken, bloated bodies filled the compound of Killari Civil Hospital. By then, Hindus were being cremated in collective pyres outside, ; while Muslims were buried in mass graves.

A quake registering between 6 and 7 on the Richter scale is very powerful, but it is not at all unusual. The difference that construction methods can make was demonstrated vividly by the two shocks of a few years ago that struck Armenia and San Francisco. Both tremors were measured at 6.9. In Armenia, where squat masonry houses are still the norm, about 30,000 people died. The toll in San Francisco, including heart attacks and the like, was around 67. As Pardeshi, the Latur district official, noted, lightweight buildings designed by Indian government agencies and universities have proved themselves elsewhere in the country.

Similarly important is quick response to disaster. At first, New Delhi seemed disinclined to accept most overseas offers of specialized teams and up- to-date equipment, which includes radar gear and sensors to detect life beneath rubble. Pride in national self-reliance was one reason for the rejections, no doubt. But another, perhaps, was a kind of fatalism about disasters. A senior Indian army official chuckled when asked whether foreign technology might help save lives. "You know, out in the villages our people are accustomed to the toughest ways of life," he said. "If death is fated, in this country we accept it." The worst fate for many Indians would be for this devastating quake to be accepted and forgotten. Until the next one.

With reporting by Jefferson Penberthy/New Delhi and Anita Pratap/Killari