``Can you help us get some information from Orissa? Our entire family is there'', asks Gyanda Mahapatra beseechingly. The wife of the city police commissioner finds her anxiety replicated in Nivedita Swain, spouse of Bharuch Collector B B Swain.

``Our parents and in-laws and all our relatives are scattered over the cyclone-hit areas, and there has been no news from them for the past three days'', they say. ``The phones don't seem to be working.''

Unlike Surat, where the majority of the Oriya migrant population comprises the workforce of diamond units and the like, the 100-odd families who trace their roots to the disaster-struck State are well-established in various public and private sector organisations.

K C Jena, divisional railway manager of Western Railways, is one of them. ``I am very worried because no details are available about the situation in Cuttack, where I come from'', he says. ``But I am happy to learn from TV and newspapers that the strength of the cyclone has subsided.''

The three Oriya families living in the Gujarat Refinery colony have been truing frantically to get in touch with their countrymen in Vadodara and other parts of the country because they cannot contact their families and friends in Orissa.

``My mother was expected to return from Orissa on October 30, but she hasn't arrived; nor is there any news from that end'', says a worried Amrit Misra, whose father A C Misra is a senior manager at Indian Oil Corporation.

``I'm extremely tense'', confesses Satyaranjan Behera, senior accounts officer at Indian Oil Corporation. ``Our relatives all live in and around Bhubaneshwar and Paradip, the worst-hit region.''

Similar sentiments are expressed by Prabhasini Panigrahi, wife of S Panigrahi, reader at M S University's Education Department, and S Patnaik, reader in Political Science. ``We've been scrounging for whatever information we can get'', they say. ``But we're completely cut off from our near and dear ones in Orissa.''

The tension of not knowing the fate that has befallen their families and friends rides high among the dozen-odd Oriya students in the city. ``My hostel-mates have been doing all they can to find out exactly which areas have been badly hit'', says Prashata, who's pursuing a Master's course in Psychology at MSU.

But that is cold comfort at best for the people whose ordered lives have suddenly been threatened by a cyclone 1,800 km away.