My four sisters were lying dead oh the floor, and I saw that they had killed my mother. While I was there they shot my brother-he was a bachelor of science. Then a soldier saw me and slopped me with his knife. I fell to the floor and played dead. When the soldiers left Iran, and a man picked me up on his bicycle and I was brought here."
Suddenly, as if she could no longer bear to think about her ordeal, the girl left the room. The hospital doctor was explaining to me that she was brought to the hospital literally soaked in her own blood, when she pushed her way back through the patients and stood directly in front of me. “What am I to do?” She asked. “Once I had five sisters and a brother and a father and a mother. Now I have no family. I am an orphan. Where can I go? What will happen to me?”
Victims
“You'll be all right” I said, stupidly. “You're safe here.” But what will happen to her and to the thousands of boys and girls and men and women who have managed to drag themselves away from the burning villages whose flames I saw lighting up the East Pakistani sky each night? The hospital in Agartala, the capital city of Tripura, is just half a mile from the border, and it is already overcrowded with the victims of the rampaging Pakistani army. There is a boy of 4 who survived a bullet through his stomach and a woman who listlessly relates how the soldiers murdered two of her children in front of her eyes, and then shot her as she held her youngest child in her arms. “The bullets passed through the baby's buttocks and then through her left arm,” Dr. R. Datta, the medical superintendent, explains “But she regained consciousness and dragged herself and the baby to the border,” Another woman, the bones in her upper leg shattered by bullets, cradles an infant in her arms. She had given birth prematurely in a paddy field after she was shot. Yet, holding her newborn child in one hand and pulling herself along with the other, she finally reached the border. “Although I know these people, I am continually amazed at how tough they are,” says Datta. Still, there are some who cannot cope, I stepped over two, small boys lying on the floor, clinging to each other like monkey; “Refugees say their village was burnt about a week ago and everyone in it was killed except these two", the doctor says. “We have had them for three days and we don't know who they are. They are so terrified by what they saw they are unable to speak. They just lie there holding on to each other. It is almost impossible to get them apart even long enough to feed them. it is hard to say when they will regain their speech or be able live normal lives again".
New Jersey Congressman Cornelius Gallagher, who visited the Agartala hospital, says he came to India thinking the atrocity stories were exaggerated. But when he actually saw the wounded he began to believe that, if anything, the reports had been toned down. A much-decorated officer with Patton in Europe during World War II, Gallagher told me: “In the war, I saw the worst areas of France, the killing grounds in Normandy, but I never saw anything like that. It took all of my strength to keep from breaking down and crying."
