OF CYCLONES and SAMOSAS By Lionel Lumb

 

            For Catholics in eastern India the church on the hill is a place of pilgrimage. Not in the same league as Lourdes and Fatima but nevertheless a place where a miracle flashed from heaven in the name of Our Lady. Our Lady of Succour. Perhaps Her son had a hand in it, too, but he never gets any credit for this particular gift from heaven, so I shan’t give him a capital.

Standing on the hill and looking out to the Bay of Bengal, it’s easy to see why She had to step in to save those Portuguese sailors. They wouldn’t have stood a chance without Her: a straight and soggy shore, no hint of a cove or creek for shelter, and probably not enough time to manoeuvre their vessel around and put back to sea to ride out the cyclone. When their sailing ship was tossed ashore and held together just long enough for them – all of them – to reach safety, they built a cairn of stones on the hill above in Her name.

Later, the faithful in those parts built a church on that hill, they built it high and they built it strong because of the cyclones that churn inland from the Bay. And from  the start they called it a church of miracles.

April and October are the worst months for cyclones. In the air a jet can outrun them, on land and at sea nothing can, and nothing better get in their way. I remember reading about a 60,000-ton cargo vessel that headed to sea and tried to nose into the storm three miles offshore. Minutes later the storm drove it half a mile inland, where it leaned with a dancer’s poise against a grove of coconut trees. The coconuts arced like medieval cannon balls to splatter against the walls of a jute factory down the road. The roof of the jute factory caught a rising thermal and spun away into the next district. And along the low coast, on the islands of fertile silt so generously brought down from the Himalayas by the mighty Ganga and Brahmaputra, the thousands who cultivated those lush outcrops in haste and hope had perhaps no more than four minutes to climb to roofs or tie themselves to trees before the tidal waves swept in and made mockery of humans’ wish to survive.

That’s why those Portuguese sailors were so lucky. They folded their sails, tied down the helm and sank to their knees. In thine merciful hands, Our Lady of Succour, we place our trust, our lives and our hopes. If it is Your wish, spare our lives. Our Lady wished.

Father Gomes told us the story that day to remind us why this was a special place. We’d heard the story several times, but we pretended to listen because any minute now the food would arrive. Our train from Calcutta had steamed into the local railway station at around nine. We’d walked from there along the dusty bund or dyke until we came to the church. A quick visit and we whipped down to the water for a swim and a boat ride. All this in bright sunshine and not even a wisp of cloud. But then the clouds rolled in and the rain came down, beating our food by twenty minutes.

We scoffed the food as fast as we could while the priest consulted the locals. Should we wait it out in the safety of the church, in the assured shelter of Our Lady of Succour, or should we head for the station and catch an early train home? We started for the station.

We’d barely left the church grounds before the rain turned to a downpour, and then became horizontal as the wind picked up. The dusty dyke was now a sheet of glass. At least that’s how it looked. In fact, it sucked at our shoes until we had to take them off. It started to crumble at the edges, especially on the side where a placid drainage canal had become a raging sluiceway of muddy water; on the other, emerald paddy fields now drowned in a spreading, rising lake.

As the wind picked up it tore the shirts out of our shorts and used them as sails to skate us along the slippery bund. Terry D’Costa skated right into the torrent alongside. But he hit a corrugated drainage pipe, and though the breath whooshed out of him he stayed pinned there until Father Gomes doffed his cassock and let it stiffen in the wind like a plank of wood until Terry could grab it and we hauled him back on the dyke. Then we hunkered low and splodged our way through that awful sucking mud until at last we reached the road and made speed to the station.

The railway staff had already bolted the shutters against the wind and locked the doors but they let us into the waiting room, musty but dry. Over our heads an old cloth fan hung heavy with dust, cobwebs and ancient grease stains. I touched a corner of the stiff cloth panel and sneezed as dust drifted out from it. I could only guess at how many years had passed since last it stirred, as a punkah coolie hauled on the drawstring from outside on the verandah while the sweating sahibs ate their mutton sandwiches below.

Now we were sweating. Outside, the cyclone whipped the land at 230 km an hour (we learned later), and as its winds whirled round the station they sucked the air from inside. With the windows locked and the storm shutters closed the humidity built until the moisture dripped from our hair into our eyes, and out of our armpits down our sides, and down our backs until our shorts stuck to the worn leather seats. But we didn’t dare open a window or a door until the cyclone tired of us and went looking for other victims.

Father Gomes found a phone and let the school know we were safe, in case our parents called. Then we waited for a train to take us home.

On the train Father Gomes called us into a circle and we joined hands as he prayed: “Our Lady of Succour, thank you for sparing our friend and brother Terry. Thank you for allowing us to reach the railway station so we could live through the storm. If this was Your way to show us Your power for miraculous intervention, so be it. Praise be to You.”

Terry, a history buff, added: “I wish cyclones had names like hurricanes. Then I could say I defeated Alexander or Genghis.”

Even Father Gomes, a serious young priest, had to smile, and we turned from prayer to the samosas he had thoughtfully bought at the little railway station near the church of Our Lady of Succour.