[I've been in the outer Andaman Islands for the past few days with internet; I'm back and posting again--Adam]
My talent, on public transportation in hot countries: to always pick the seat that sits directly in the glare of the sun.
“Godammit,” I mumbled as the good ship MV Deringer pulled out of Port Blair Harbor at seven in the morning. Because the Andamans are on Indian time, seven was more like 10am in terms of sunlight, which was shining – bright, white hot – into my face.
It burned me away from my seat and started a slow roast of the cabin, which, as happens in India, when transportation is the subject at hand, had turned into a small Deccan village. Mothers threw out blankets and straw sleeping mats; babies giggled naked in tiny gold bangles; men unbuttoned their shirts and raised their legs onto the seat back in front of them, combed thick hair greased with coconut oil and cleared their throats with mighty HWWWOAAACHs before spitting globules of paan juice out of the porthole windows. Everyone, as you might guess, was sweating.
I’m going upstairs, I thought. It was a six hour ferry ride from Port Blair to Little Andaman island, some 90 miles to the south, and six hours is a long time for even my brown skin to toast under an equatorial heat lamp. But staying in the hold was, by dint of sweat, stink and noise, out of the question.
Above decks: blue. Blue, blue, blue, blue and blue, all the way to the fat horizon. Light danced and daggered over the water; Great Andaman was a dim hump to the West. A school of what looked like county fair toys buzzed over the darkcaps (the weather was too calm to call them white): flying fish, skipping black and silver darts across the salt wind. This being India, the moment was jostled by a paan spitter testing new ring tones on his phone.
Throughout the long, long boat ride I tried to occupy my mind. I love ship travel, but it can be monotonous. And there was no escape from the sun. It searched you out and seared you on deck; any shade only lasted an hour at most before the fire in the sky blazed a few degrees more to the west and caught you in its glare. So I bore it out and curled into a coil of ropes. Every so often I’d fall asleep, wake, read, sleep again. People, lives, passed. The day was good for my notebook:
“A sunshower sprinkles light like a bottlecap in a rain puddle on a plug of sea just below South Andaman/Rutland Island [?].”
“East the ocean, West the islands. To my right, the cold spray; my left, a warm engine box. And South: an Ancient Mariner of an Indian, his John Brow beard flapping in the wind.”
“On the railing: a beautiful Indian girl in a teal salwar kameez that could match the sky or the shallows, a silver bindi set between her eyes, high heels framing the curve of her calves. She brazenly picks her nose.”
Two things interrupted my reverie. One: lunch, one of my worst in India. Overcooked chicken with watery gruel and rice, flavored with the salt of sweat dripping off my nose. Two: a soundtrack. Of the blaring, Indian PA system sort; screechy singer, male crooner, “Eeshi nishi kap chee doooooooooo/Wa ek me hai crackle blerg spizzle.”
I took out my pad again: “The Indian need for noise seems a defining national characteristic. They need loud to ground themselves. Even in the all-encompassing silence of the ocean, they must recreate a noisy village, complete with Bollywood soundtrack.”
I felt better for writing that, but it didn’t make the singing go away. So I started thinking deep thoughts, which is easy to do at sea. Oceans, at the end of the day, are like deserts – OK, wetter – empty places full of long horizons that need ideas to fill the deep silences, or as was the case, broken tanoy. In a state of self-absorption, I thought of myself, and getting here.
In Blue Highways, William Least Heat Moon quotes Native American wise men: “To seek the high concord, a man looks not deeper within – he reaches farther out.” Well, I thought, two years ago I was writing up police blotters in Calvert County and now I’m in the bloody Andaman Islands. Does that qualify? Or is reaching out as much of a mental state as a physical one? But doesn’t the physical act of wandering bring on the mental process of oh Jesus getting too existential…
Instead, I hummed “Fisherman’s Blues,” by The Waterboys and thought of a poem by Ursula LeGuin:
Before God was
Before He bade the land to be
The wind blew on the sea.
Oh my joy – be free!
This wind tousled my hair until the loudspeaker died, mercifully and without resurrection, and I slept amidst the ropes again.
***
“Hello sir. You must be lonely.”
My eyes blinked open: yellow sky, brown man, glasses, look right, oil drum, look left, don’t panic, ocean. Ocean? The Bay of Bengal, dummy. Not technically ocean. Yesitis. Wha? Indian Ocean. Ohyeah.
“Sir?”
“Yeah. Yes. I was a bit lonely.” I got up. Travel writers, who are by nature gregarious, have very lonely jobs. There is no scrape more soul-searing than that of the chair being pulled out at your table for one in a busy, happy restaurant.
The Indian regarded me with curious bird eyes. “Yes sir, I thought you were Indian at first, but I see your book in English and you not talking to anyone, so I thought you might like some company.”
“That’s very kind of you.” I meant it.
I never learned his name, but he was studying to be a priest and was currently a deacon. He was born in Hut Bay and lived in Port Blair and was the first, and certainly not the last, of the incredibly friendly people of Little Andaman I was to meet over the next 24 hours. As we talked, he cleaned his fingernails with a guitar pick.
“Do you like music sir?”
“Sure.”
“What kind?” Pick, flick.
“Oh, everything.”
“Me, I am only liking Western music. Not Indian. Too much…” and he did a very decent Bollywood actress impression.
I laughed, but we had to part ways; the boat was pulling into Hut Bay, the main town on Little Andaman island. ‘Town’ being a relative term. I walked up to an empty bus at an empty bus station. A small man approached me. “What time is the bus?” I asked, not expecting him to know English.
“I believe five o’clock, sir.”
He had a strange falsetto voice that sounded eerily like Daniel Striped Tiger from Mr. Rogers. His name was Matthew, and he worked in the Office of the Electrical Engineer of Hut Bay.
“Where are you going today, sir?” The choo-choo train from the Neighborhood of Make Believe chugged through my head.
"Butler Bay."
"Let us hire a jeep together."
Rocketing over ridges and deep mud ruts in the 4x4, I decided taking a bus would have been a bad idea. The serious bumps interspersed our conversation with ten-second long oomph-and-recover pauses, but throughout I learned about Matthew and his children and their success in school, and was shown Hut Bay's two or three neighborhoods. Besides these settlements and a few thin strips of housing, the island was wild and shaggy. Whether it had been this undeveloped before the tsunami I can’t say, but I’ve heard many Little Andamaners were resettled in Port Blair after losing their houses, and never came home.
Scenes of island normality played out against a set partially built by international aide. Kids played cricket with a hoe while a concrete wall was slowly built between the sea and the highway. Oxfam and World Vision signs were prevalent, and dogs, and dragonflies. We passed large blocks of tangerine pre-fab housing, but it looked like no one was home. The jungle, on the other side of the road, screamed alive with frogs, birds, and some kind of whippoorwill.
Matthew spoke in sad terms of the tsunami’s after effects – everyone here does – but on the whole he kept his spirits as high as his voice. After awhile we reached his house, where he squeaked a friendly, “Goodbye, sir!” A few minutes and kilometers north and I was at Butler Bay. Incredibly, the entrance was gated off and manned by a ticket collector. I paid 20 rupees, opened the gates to a beach that I had heard was all but wiped out by the tsunami, and earned my stripes as a travel writer.
To whit: any travel writer worth the name has to discover an isolated beach. It’s sort of like doing your first hard-core investigative piece as a news reporter; finding a great isolated beach means, in my travel writing measurement, One Has Arrived.
If I am right, I have Really Arrived. Because Butler Bay isn’t just isolated; it’s beautiful, on as remote an island as you could find (remember, there be uncontacted tribesman about 100 miles north), an island washed by tsunami and tragedy. This will sound terrible, but it is in the nature of journalism to benefit from disaster. The wave meant bringing people to this isolated beach could help the local community. And helping local communities is the basic moral justification for the voyeuristic profession that is guidebook writing.
Through a band of purple flowers and palm paths, Butler Bay had been carved out by two shallow breakwaters and an outflowing river into a handshake between the ocean and Little Andaman’s creeks. I looked north and south; sand, palms, sky. Water. A cow meandered by. Anything else was wind and my own voice trying to keep up with the breeze.
Or my body, as I peeled off one sweat-stained article of clothing after the other until I stood, in my underwear, alone on a beautiful beach in the middle of the lush emptiness and barren gaps of the Indian Ocean. I plunged in.
Surfers will discover Butler Bay one day. I am no surfer, but even I knew these waves were made for riding. The short ones punched like a wall; the biggest ones were easily eight feet tall. They came in blue-green and exploded white and red, with foam and sand carved out like dirt from a bulldozer shovel. The water was cool but not cold, warm enough but not sticky so. I didn’t dare wade out more than a few feet; the rips were not subtle tugs, they were shock and awe yanks, hungry for bodies.
I stood in the path of one breaker that rocketed out of a sandbar like a bitch slap from Poseidon. I fell head over heels. I mean that literally; my body did a 180 until my face was eating sand bottom and salt water and my feet were dangling in the air. I emerged, the water seeping into my eyes now, laughing. For 20 minutes, Butler Bay and I danced. For 20 minutes I let the waves crash over me, rode a few, felt the ocean angrily, playfully caress me, cake my hair and arms with salt, pull curtains of bubble over my eyes and wash away dirt, sweat, dust, pain, sadness, want, petty, anger, confusion, the road. I let the waves knock me down and splashed back into them and fell over again until I laughed like a boy running through summer.
Here’s what I know: there is no shower that feels half as good as a natural body of clean water to a tired traveler.
I took out my pad again: “The Indian need for noise seems a defining national characteristic. They need loud to ground themselves. Even in the all-encompassing silence of the ocean, they must recreate a noisy village, complete with Bollywood soundtrack.”
I really like the way you've put this. Particularly as, after so many long bus rides through Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana - complete with deafening Nigerian movies - it strikes a (loud) chord with me too. Most of Africa clearly needs grounding too.
Posted by: Kate | November 17, 2008 at 07:30 AM