India Shanghai and Other Far Eastern Cities

The Columbia Broadcasting System presents Norman Corwin's One World Flight. You are listening to So Shen, one of China's most popular actresses singing a folk song called Suji Shang Su, or Love in Four Seasons. This is one among several voices and sounds recorded inside China.

To be heard tonight on this ninth of a series of 13 broadcasts, based upon Norman Corwin's recent global tour as first winner of the Wendell Wilkie One World Flight Award. This is Norman Corwin. On a sweltering night last August in the middle of the monsoon season, a group of passengers gathered in the office of the China National Airlines in the center of Calcutta,

India. We got there right after dinner, although our plane, bound for Burma and China, was not scheduled to leave from the airdrome 15 miles away until four the next morning. The idea was that curfew was on after dark. The only vehicles abroad at night were tanks and armored cars for a week. Hindus and Muslims had been fighting a religious war

within the city and already more than 3,000 had been killed. At midnight our convoy left for the dumb-dumb airdrome. We rode slowly through deserted streets, passing an occasional burned-out house with embers still glowing. Every now and then our headlamps picked up a corpse, or a group of them, lying on the highway.

They had been there for days, decomposing under the hot sun and the steaming rains. The plane was late starting, and the passengers, Chinese, French, and two Americans, leave land in myself, sat around drinking a warm chemical solution named Lemon Pop.

There were no stars, no moon, no breeze, no traffic, no conversation. Far off on the horizon was a red glow which might have been burning houses. I heard a dog bark somewhere, distantly, and I thought about the dead, lying on the dumb, dumb road.