When Clouds Fell from the Sky

Robert Carmichael

Asia Horizons Books

377 pages, Rs. 399

Carmichael takes the reader on a journey into the causes and consequences of the Khmer Rouge’s savage rule in Cambodia, between 1975 and 1979. An estimated two million people died over this period, which its survivors call “the time when the clouds fell from the sky.” In 1977, the 30-year-old diplomat Ouk Ket headed home to a country with its population enslaved and its borders closed. He was never seen again. Back in France, his wife, Martine, and daughter, Neary, began a search for him that culminated, decades later, in their testifying at the war-crimes trial of Comrade Duch, the chief of the notorious S-21 prison, where thousands of “enemies of the revolution” were tortured prior to their execution.