Dispatches From the Edge_ A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival - Anderson Cooper [7]
“Oh, we went to town on that one,” Chris says, his eyes wistful at the memory of it all. “Photos, eyewitness accounts, the whole nine yards.”
When we finally track down the hospital administrator, she confirms that Jinandari was dead when she arrived. Because the morgue here had been demolished by the tsunami, they transferred her to another hospital. Even if she had been alive when she was pulled out of the water, the travel time alone to and from the hospitals would have killed her.
We decide that the least we can do is try to find Jinandari’s body. Since we’ve come this far, it only seems right to see it through. When we reach the second hospital, we’re directed down a long corridor and into a large, sun-filled room. It’s the temporary morgue.
From outside, the room looks like an art gallery in New York’s East Village. Hundreds of small photos line the walls. At first it’s hard to tell what the photos show. You have to go up close, and even then it takes a moment for the images to snap into focus. They are pictures of the dead. More than a thousand of them. Every body that was stored here, every corpse, had its photograph taken, in the hopes that someone might be able to identify it.
No one ever talks about what the water can do. It’s all here, however, color captured on film: the submersion, the struggle, the exhaustion, the fear. Water flooding into lungs, babies coughing and vomiting, hearts stopping, bodies convulsing, heads snapping back, startlingly white eyes popping from mud-smothered faces, tongues swelling into blackened balloons, necks bloating like those of giant toads, bones breaking, skulls crushing, teeth being ripped from heads, children from their mothers’ arms.
In movies, people drown peacefully, giving in to the pull of the water, taken by the tug of the tide. These pictures tell a different story. There is no dignity in drowning, no silent succumbing to the water’s ebb and flow. It’s violent, and painful, a shock to the heart. Everyone drowns alone. Even in death, their corpses scream.
Nurses with face masks scrub the mottled floor with stiff brushes and brooms. Until a few days ago, the room was filled with bodies lying side by side on the floor. They’ve now been buried in a mass grave on the outskirts of town. It’s the third time nurses are trying to disinfect the floor, but the rot and puss have seeped into the cement. There are flies everywhere. Phil puts his camera down for a moment to change batteries. “Don’t put that on the floor,” the head nurse warns him, worried it might pick up bacteria. Hard as they’ve tried, they can’t get the smell out. The stench of bodies is still there, buried under layers of bleach.
I’ve brought with me photos of Sunera and Jinandari—school portraits, the kind for which kids have to dress up, comb their hair, sit still. Each child smiles straight into the camera lens. I know Jinandari is somewhere on this wall of the dead, but staring at the pictures of the corpses, I know I’ll never find her. The bodies are too decomposed.
“We should go,” Charlie says, and I know he’s right, but I keep forcing myself to look at the photos, stare at each face. I figure it’s the least I can do.
Finally, we head out to find the mass grave, and reach it just as the sun is starting to set. There are no signs, just a swath of red clay stretching for hundreds of yards in a clearing in the woods. A bloodred slash in a forest of green, upturned earth as far as the eye can see.
Two women stand at the grave’s edge. They live just behind it, in a small clearing.
“Why did they have to dig the graves here?” one of the women asks. “Now the ghosts of the dead will haunt us at night.”
There are no headstones, no markers. The bodies are carried in by bulldozers and dumped into pits. New graves continue to be dug. No one knows for whom. The