Corporal punishment Natural & other disasters in India.

Just minutes before the January 26 earthquake hit Gujarat, India--we live in Dehra Doon, north and east of that state--I was thinking about earthquakes. I had read a novel earlier that week in which one of the characters explained how she always made a point of sending her children off in the morning with a loving good-bye because you just never knew what might happen in the course of the day. She had been deeply affected by an account of a school in Italy that had collapsed in an earthquake, killing every single student inside. She could never shake the image of the parents who must have sent their babies off that morning as if it had been any other day.

On January 26, my son had slipped out of the house while I was busy making my daughter's lunch and I didn't say good-bye to him. It was half an hour before I realized it and the story from the novel came back to me immediately. "What if there were an earthquake?" I thought. An hour later, the bulletins from Gujerat flashed across the nation. One of the most poignant stories involved a class of thirty high-school juniors (my son's age) who had been called in for a special exam (January 26 is a national holiday in India, and children generally attend school only to participate in outdoor parades and patriotic displays); their building collapsed and all but four died.

My husband Ravi is one of India's experts on disaster relief and earthquake-safe housing. Within hours of the tragedy our living room had become a kind of command center. He was on the phone to friends in the United States to mobilize funds, speaking to the prime minister's office to determine the areas of greatest need, receiving reports from friends in the affected villages and towns, and meeting with his team to plan strategies for temporary shelters as well as long-term reconstruction and relief.

Until very recently, we had no television in our home. We finally gave in to the children's pleas only a few months ago. So the experience of having blow-by-blow, minute-to-minute accounts of such a nightmarish tragedy was quite new to me. By midafternoon on the second day I could no longer take it, but Ravi, desperate for more information, couldn't bear to turn it off. Just to clear my head a little, I went out for a walk.

A crowd had gathered at the police station which is at the top of our road. I approached nervously (a crowd outside a police station is never a good sign), but what I saw there was worse than anything I could have imagined. Indeed, it took me over a minute of staring to register what I was seeing, and even now I have difficulty believing I saw it.

A man was being tortured. He had been tied in the "chicken" position (knees to his head) and then hung upside down on a pole stretched across two chairs. His bare legs and arms were a mass of angry red welts and his entire body was trembling violently. Aghast, I asked someone in the crowd what was happening and he told me that the police were trying to get a confession about a recent string of robberies.

Knowing that my Hindi would never rise to this occasion, to say nothing of needing more courage than I possessed alone, I ran home to get Ravi and we dashed back in our car. By the time we returned, the man had been untied and now lay quivering on the ground. As we walked past him and into the station, he stared at us dully, clearly in shock.

The chief policeman was gracious. He had no choice, he assured us. The man was a known criminal and by "interrogating" him for two days, he had already recovered a huge collection of keys and several stolen items (he gestured across the room toward a stack of VCRs, cassette players, and TVs). But he knew there was much more and he was determined to get it back. It was his duty.

Ravi spoke with him at length about the difference between interrogation and torture, and reminded him of the Supreme Court decision against the use of excessive force in extracting confessions. Ravi warned him that he would be inviting his own punishment if he continued to violate the law so flagrantly.

We left finally, knowing that our response had been inadequate and perhaps futile. As we were pulling out of the driveway, the chief walked toward the car and motioned to us to wait. He put his head inside the window and said, "Should I do it inside the station then?"

Ravi looked at him for a long moment, speechless. Then he reached out and took his hand. "Wherever you do it, brother, the upper-wallah (God) will be watching. Think of your own humanity. Do you want to do this to yourself?"

That evening, as still more heartbreaking images of infant corpses and grieving fathers were shown on television, I could think only of that man--a thief perhaps, but also somebody's precious child--beaten senseless by another human being and I wondered if there was any hope for us at all. It is as if acts of God are not enough--we have to create our own tragedies as well. And then I remembered that God hung between two thieves and said that yes, we were worth saving.

But here today--caught between the devastation in Gujerat and the police station in Dehra Doon--I can only say like Peter: "Lord I believe. Help thou my unbelief."