Cyclone Of Death

By JAMES WALSH

The lightning flashes

and threatens, the

foam-fields hiss,

the sharp white

terrible mirth of

brute Nature.

Sea-Waves by Rabindranath Tagore was published exactly 100 years ago, but the great Bengali poet's subject is timeless. His April of cyclones, "blind forms of being," was this year's last day of April for Bangladesh. Twenty- foot walls of water. Demonic winds of crushing force. The horror left behind: 125,000 lives lost, and still counting. A world used to human-scale catastrophes -- plane crashes, say, that kill a few hundred at most -- cannot absorb the biblical dooms that visit Bangladesh. Straddling the conjoined mouths of the Ganges and Brahmaputra, two of the Indian subcontinent's mightiest rivers, the country is regularly drowned by flood crests surging downstream or scourged by whirlwinds from the sea. Of the 20th century's 10 deadliest storms, seven have devoured their victims at the head of the Bay of Bengal.

In the twinkling of an eye it ended! None could see

When life was, and when life finished!

The aftermath of a fierce cyclone looks like a judgment. But no reasonable attempt to comprehend Bangladesh's afflictions could find a moral in them. In 1970, a year before the birth trauma of the Bangladesh republic, a cyclone may have taken half a million lives. The number was only a guess: survivors, typically poor rice farmers and fishermen on exposed delta islands, can never afford to count the lost. Their suffering -- starvation, cholera, typhus -- is just beginning. Tagore identified April with Rudra, the Indian storm god, but Sea-Waves is really a meditation on "brute Madness." Wonders the poet: "Why in its midst was the mind of man placed?"