Cloud of Anxiety Lingers Near Indian Test Site

When Haji Shamshudeen felt the ground sway under his feet and saw the plates and spoons tumble from the shelf inside his home in this sweltering desert village, he believed that the world was coming to an end.

“I ran outside,” the farmer and herdsman said, “and prayed to God to be spared.”

Now two of Shamshudeen’s five cows are dead, two-thirds of his 300 goats are sick with diarrhea and getting dangerously thin, and many neighbors here in Chacha, a farming hamlet of 150 families, feel weak and ill. Last week, one man tore off his clothes, began to rant and was taken to a mental hospital.

Shamshudeen, bearded patriarch of a household that includes his four sons and their spouses, blames the problems on the same awesome and mysterious power that earlier this month ruptured and emptied his underground cistern and cracked the red sandstone walls of his house.

“It was the tests,” said the 45-year-old resident of this settlement five miles from India’s Pokaran range, where five nuclear explosions were set off May 11 and 13. “It is the tests that have driven up the temperatures so much that my cows weren’t able to stand it.”

India’s decision to stage its first nuclear tests since 1974 has pushed neighboring Pakistan to test a bomb of its own and may serve as the impetus for a nuclear arms race on the South Asian subcontinent.

But here, in the scrub-dotted Thar Desert of western India, where temperatures have reached a near-record 118 degrees so far this year, people fear that the blasts have been the cause of more immediate and personal woes.

“After the 11th, my nose has started bleeding three or four times,” said Multana Ram, 60, a farmer of mustard and millet whose sun-blasted village of Khetolai is less than two miles from the test site. “My knees ache; I can’t bend my legs.” His wife, Ram said, has had bouts of fever over the last two weeks.

A doctor who visited Khetolai after the tests told Ram his problems were caused by the intense seasonal heat. The mustachioed man, whose paunch is a sign of prosperity in this impoverished region, thinks that he knows better.

“It is the heat and the gas generated by the explosion that are causing this,” Ram said. The farmer remembers a dark brown cloud rising into the air and dust blowing into Khetolai for two hours on May 11, the day of the first tests.

Indian authorities, both in New Delhi and in this remote and sparsely populated district 70 miles from the India-Pakistan border, insist that the explosions, which were carried out underground, pose absolutely no health risk. And the scorching temperatures are not confined to the area near the test site: Nationwide, the heat wave has killed nearly 500 people in the last month, an Indian news agency reported Friday.

Shanker Lal Sharma, the highest-ranking government official in the town of Pokaran, said he personally has checked 12 reported cases of nosebleeding and found only two: one because of a burst boil, the other caused by somebody putting his finger in his nose.

“These villages are perfectly safe,” Sharma said.

As for property damage--people in Khetolai claim that 196 of their 262 stone-built homes were damaged by the shock waves--Sharma said he believes that it may be an exaggeration to get government aid. “If I had a crack in my house,” Sharma said, “I could blame it on the explosion too.”

M.C. Vyas, the chief physician at Pokaran’s government hospital, spent seven days touring villages around the test site soon after the explosions but said he found nothing drastically different. Classic symptoms of radiation sickness from lesser exposure include nausea and vomiting immediately after exposure, followed about two or three weeks later by infections and pinpoint spots of bleeding under the skin.

“Have you seen anybody with a bleeding nose? Or with heat rash?” the doctor asked a visiting reporter. “When it is [113-120 degrees Fahrenheit], these are usual phenomena. They happen not just in villages near the army site.”

But in the hospital courtyard, Yakub Mohammed, who lives in the Lathi settlement eight miles from the test range, was languishing on a rope bed, waiting to see Vyas for health problems he blames on the underground blasts.

“Since then, my legs have been itching, and I have stomach cramps,” the 50-year-old man said.

Since May 11, local teacher Surej Karan Purohit has tabulated reports of as many as 100 people taken ill in Chacha, Khetolai, Lathi and three other villages near the Pokaran range. Other people agree that there has been a surge in health problems--even if they hesitate in blaming the nuclear blasts.

“Seventy-five percent of the people here have been affected, but it’s not consistent,” said Hari Ram, 22, whose diploma as a school physical education instructor makes him one of Khetolai’s best-educated residents. “People feel breathless for three to four hours, then they are normal. The next day, their skin starts itching, and then it’s something else.”

On the porch of the village’s dairy cooperative, Ladhu Ram, 60, resplendent in a floppy white turban, was sitting with some of his neighbors as the purity and water content of the milk taken from local cows was analyzed in glass tubes. “I am short of breath, my eyes are watering, and my hands itch--I can’t sleep at night,” he said.

Like many other people in this part of Rajasthan, India’s hottest and most arid state, Ladhu Ram laughed at the explanation from government officials that his symptoms were caused by the weather.

“This bomb they set off--this was not a holiday firecracker,” he pointed out.

The people in the villages often feel they are on their own. When Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee visited the Pokaran site May 20, he helicoptered over a crowd that had been waiting for hours in the burning sun to see the Indian leader and ask for his assistance. People in Khetolai also petitioned their representative in Parliament to find the funds to build a hospital but have heard nothing.

Sharma, the government official, admitted that he does not have the funds to provide continuous medical attention in the settlements near Pokaran, some of which can be reached only by camel. For the moment, villagers who complain of shortness of breath have been forced to count on a home remedy: a glass of fresh buttermilk.

The nuclear tests were enormously popular with the Indian public, and one group of militant Hindus has announced its intention to erect a temple to the divine force Shakti near the Pokaran range. But in the villages closest to the blast site, the explosions are more likely to be cited as a cause of misfortune.

Cows are said to have developed sores on their udders, goats to be suffering from tumors and debilitating diarrhea. To an outsider, it all seems unscientific and undocumented--but people who live in Chacha and nearby hamlets are not at all reassured by official statements that nothing is amiss.

“They say these tests are right for the country,” Shamshudeen said as he showed the cracked walls of his house to visitors. “But we people who live here have to put up with all these things. It’s not right for us.”