INDIA: Flowers of Evil

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In the rain-soaked Eastern Hills of India, the bamboo forests flower only about once in 50 years. And to the wiry little mountain men of the remote Mizo Hills district, the flowering is a dread omen of approaching famine. They believe that the tender shoots and the seeds encourage a vast overbreeding of jungle rats. Once this food supply is exhausted, the rats—many as big as young house cats —assemble and, like a disciplined army, march across paddies and vegetable gardens, eating everything. The broadest and swiftest rivers do not deflect them; as if hypnotized, they plunge into the water, and if not drowned, emerge on the far shore, appetites sharpened.

Eighteen months ago, when the Mizo Hills burst into spectral bloom, the frightened tribesmen—70% of whom are Christians, mostly Baptist converts—frantically appealed to the Assam state government for help. When the bamboo last bloomed, in 1910-11, and before that in 1860-62, they said, the rats came. Assam's bureaucrats dismissed such prophecies as superstition. But the prophecies have come true: thousands of rats have left the jungle, attacked the clearings, and stripped everything bare. Too late, the state government sent in rat poison; what was not "lost in transit" fell into the hands of profiteers. Result: the entire 1959 rice crop was a failure. With granaries fast emptying, four-fifths of the district's 250,000 population were reported on the edge of starvation.

Last week, as reports drifted down out of the inaccessible mountain coves that at least a dozen persons had already starved to death, and a dangerous famine was imminent, three Indian air force transports and two Indian airlines cargo planes began airdropping 40 tons of rice daily. Mizo Hills Christians in their little palm-thatched village churches, and animists who still worship nature deities, offered concerted prayers that when the April rains turn the brown hills to emerald green, the bamboo will not bear its evil blossoms again.