Adam's Ambles

Andaman images

Pictures from the Andamans online here and here.

Deep discussion in Diglipur

This, I thought, as the bus ran under the blue shadows of five in the morning on the Andaman Trunk Road, is the deep jungle. Here, explorers might have once wrote, Be the Forest Primeval. It was early because we had to leave early, at half past silly o’clock—I’m sorry, four. It takes over 10 hours to ride the bus from Port Blair, in the southern part of the Andamans, to Digilpur, the northernmost town accessible to visitors. The road takes you through jungle, over rivers, into the reserve of the Jarawa tribe and back to the jungle, the mangroves, the rivers, the channels, the mud and green dream of unscathed Arcadia.

It was a hard road, although not as hard as it has been in the past. There have been improvements; some, small, a pothole filled, a crack smoothed. But still: a bumpy ride, and crowded as well. And patience had to contend with more than the usual pick up, drop off stops of Indian bus travel; there were also interminable waits for slow ferries across the root-brown bodies of water that run through Middle and North Andaman islands. The boats were small, barely able to carry the weight of bus passengers, let alone buses. The water was shaded by dead vegetation into a bubbling tannin soup; underneath, saltwater crocodiles ranged out on silent patrols.

At the entrance to the Jarawa Tribal Reserve, we slipped into convoys of passenger cars, buses and supply trucks. The Jarawa have been contacted by the Indian government in the past, but remain (probably sensibly) hostile to outside influence. Given the choice of death or forced conversion to 'civilization', they prefer isolation, but the Andaman trunk road runs through the heart of their land. So we are told not to contact them in any way possible, not to feed them or interact, beyond, of course, piloting several tons of steel over their backyard.

In the past and still sometimes today, I am told, passengers on buses through the Jarawa reserve have laughed at the islands’ indigenous people, pointed at them and made monkey noises and snapped pictures with their mobile phone cameras. I am dreading the chance this will happen today. But maybe we just won’t see the Jarawa period; they have apparently grown very elusive. Sensible, again.

I fall asleep; it is still early in the morning. My head falls into my chest until it doesn’t; for some reason I snap up, and look out the window, and there: in palm skirts and nothing else, four to six Jarawa women and children standing by an SUV pulled over on the side of the road. I have no idea what the SUV is doing there, if it is just stopped or broken down. The Jarawa look at our bus as it passes. I imagine their faces are expressionless, but who can say; we whiz by. On a day long trip these five seconds, plus a snatched glimpse of an older man lugging long piles of dried leaves and branches, are the only time I see Jarawa. And I know I will remember this moment, of seeing a living Stone Age tribe, for the rest of my life. My hypocrisy is blatant; I disagree with the Trunk Road, think the Andamans don’t require development, think the Jarawa should be left in peace even as they occasionally trade with and kill the Bengalis and Telugus who have settled near their territory. But the indelible image and experience I will take from these islands is a glimpse of black Jarawa skin emerging from the jungle. 

The road went on. I got off in Rangat, in the middle of Middle Andaman, specifically so I could purchase a ferry ticket to the tourist center of Havelock Island . The ferry office was unaccountably closed. I sighed, realized I needed to catch the next oncoming bus for Digilipur, and asked around about the time of boats leaving for Havelock. The answers were all different; no one in the dirty, mud-spattered (there’s even a nearby mud volcano) town seemed to know when the daily ferries, their main connection to the outside world, arrived. A plurality told me one in the afternoon, and I decided this was as good as information got.

A young man with slanted Asian eyes approached me as I waited for the bus. He introduced himself as ‘Alex,’ tried to get me to hire his minivan to the next town for about 100 times the cost of the bus fare, and looked very Burmese. 

“Karen. I am Karen,” he said, naming one of the hill tribes that lives on the Burmese border. The Karen were converted to Christianity by the British, were thought to be a Lost Tribe of Israel due to their belief in a first man and woman who were tempted by a snake, have always resented the Burmese and once held my own grandfather prisoner for two years. In the 1990s, the Karen fought the Burmese government while led by self-proclaimed magical twin brothers. Many were settled here in the Andamans during the latter days of the British Empire.

I looked at Alex and showed him my Burmese tattoo. His eyes widened.

“Ah! Let’s go to a bar! Your bus isn’t coming for one hour!”

I followed, thinking I’m About to Drink With the Tribe that Almost Killed my Grandfather. For two years my Po Po (Burmese: grandpa) was held in a Karen jungle compound. He was rescued by a commando team that included a mixed-race Anglo-Burmese, and escaped tossing grenades from the back of a speeding jeep. A scar still runs up his arm today, his souvenir from the Karen.

Mine was to be shots of terrible Indian whisky cut with water. I usually don’t drink from the tap in India, but I figured whatever germs were in the local water had to be dead from the ether-flavored spirits. Alex quickly became drunk. Falling down, babbling drunk. He tried to convince me to come with him in his van to Digilpur, swore to pay for both of us. I looked at two Indian men sitting at an adjacent table who were listening to us and made the universal “glug-glug” bottle motion with my hands. They nodded, then shook their heads when Alex reiterated his offer for a ride. Every time I refused a ride Alex would agree, then loudly ask, “So, will you ride with me? I’ll pay!”

Eventually, he became so drunk he shut himself off to the outside world.  I tried to slip out to the bus stand, but Alex followed me, babbling the entire way and speaking in garbled Hindi at passers by. When one angrily mumbled something, Alex let out a torrent of Hindi in which I recognized the word, “bastard.” The Indian heard it too; he scowled, turned around and bitch slapped Alex in the street.

I stared. Alex took the hit, and started mumbling about giving me a ride again. I said no firmly, but he was gone to the world; he just walked forward, his words a drunken cloud. I let him pass, and boarded the next bus to Digilpur.

That night I dined in a bamboo guesthouse with two majors of the Indian army. One was Kashmiri, the other from Uttar Pradesh; both were intelligent, friendly and inquisitive. We stayed up till three in the morning, drinking and discussing Hindu philosophy.

“I have a new son,” said the Kashmiri, with a beard as red as a slow sunset. “And I am naming him Arjuna.” Arjuna is the noble prince and hero of the great epic of the Mahabharata.

“Arjuna is OK, but he’s too good for me. He has no flaws. I admire Karna,” I said, naming the noble leader of the evil Kauravas, rivals of Arjuna’s clan, the Pandavas. The army men smiled and nodded approvingly. Karna is one of the great antiheros of Indian literature, a man who is good but human, bound by loyalty and circumstance to fight for the bad guys even though he is one of the most upright characters in the saga. 

“It disappoints me that Arjuna and Rama [hero of the Ramayana] are so spotless,” I continued.

“Rama does make one great mistake,” said the Kashmiri. “He forces Sita, his own wife, to enter a fire to prove her purity. I could never do this.”

In the Ramayana Rama asks his devoted wife, who was held prisoner by the handsome demon Ravana for a year, to prove her fidelity by walking through flames. Sita passes the test, but in the uttara kanda, a final chapter later added to the original Ramayana, Rama’s subjects become suspicious of Sita a second time when she becomes pregnant. Rama is torn between believing his love, who has been far away on distant shores, and the whispers of people close to him. Mistrust wins. Rama banishes Sita and his kingdom falls into ruin.

Years later, twins appear in Rama’s now crumbling palace and recite the deeds of the prince in the form of an epic song. Rama realized the twins are his own sons, and summons their mother, promising to reinstate her as queen – if she undergoes the fire trial once more. Sita instead asks the Earth to swallow her if she has ever been anything but faithful to her husband, and as a chasm opens beneath her, she earns a well-deserved last laugh. Rama, who tried to trust but could never overcome his worst suspicions, dies alone.

“You must listen to your duty, but also your heart,” said the major from Uttar Pradesh. “When duty has no compassion…” and he trailed off.

I like this idea, but it is not always borne out in classical Indian literature, which I quote so much because this country is still attached to its old tales. A 1990s television serial of the Ramayana remains one of the most watched programs in television history; sessions of parliament were canceled so politicians could watch.

In classical Indian ethics, duty trumps personal morality. In the Bhagavad Gita , Arjuna stands before the field of battle in which he must fight the Karuva clan, which is largely made up of his own relatives and friends. The warrior asks the god Krishna why he must kill people he loves in senseless civil war. Krishna replies that this is the will of dharma, karma and fate; Arjuna is but one facet of the universe, which is unfolding in a great and silent plan. His own limited understanding does not avail him, cannot help him. His duty, his dharma, is to kill the Karuvas.

To the average Westerner, including myself, such morality seems callous. Arjuna’s individuality is not a determinant of right action; it is a hindrance to right duty. But to Indians, that place within a greater sense of being is the sign of a caring universe, an existence that doesn’t leave us in existential isolation, but embraces the fate of every drop of existence. We all have a Purpose, a philosophy that is the basis of caste. In the West, a street sweeper is looked down upon, but in classical India the sweeper is conducting the will of God; his place is as important in the grand scheme of things as Arjuna’s.

Of course, in reality caste is abused and a street sweeper will die long before a prince, and in much more destitution. But such is the sweeper’s karma; if he sweeps well, he may be a prince in the next life. This deterministic side of Eastern philosophy is, I’ve found, often completely ignored by the New Age yoga yuppies seeking spirituality on the Indian trail, the ones who believe vegetarianism, deep breathing and leg stretching makes for inner peace. I’m not saying it doesn’t, either; only that Hinduism, like any religion, has elements that make me uncomfortable.

But then again, the army majors disagreed with Rama’s treatment of Sita. India is a dynamic society, “with one foot in the 19^th century and the other in the 21^st,” as the Kashmiri put it. Poverty is still endemic, corruption rampant, the environment degraded, but compared to ten years ago the average farmer can now afford a cell phone and a TV, connecting him to an outside world that was once as fabled as the tale of Rama. Caste is still in place, but the door out of it is opening, even if few people can squeeze through it. The structures that have kept India stable and continuous for over 2000 years are beginning to crack, but to paraphrase Kipling, there is too much of India and she is too old; this country will not change overnight, even if the change is happening at a rapid pace.

The army men are a good example. Modern, well-spoken and clearly well-educated, they are devout Hindus who find a place for the old morality in the modern world. They've even used the strictures of ancient social hierarchy to justify progressive institutional policy. When I asked them why India, almost alone of Britain’s other Asian colonies, has not gone through a military coup despite having hundreds of ethnicities and dozens of insurgencies, they answered, “Caste.” The way of the warrior, the Kshitraya, is to obey the commander, not to assume command. The old Indian Army code was quoted to me: “My unit, my country, and last, my comfort.” This was why the majors respected Indrajit, the faithful son of the murderous Ravana, over Ravana’s brother Vibishan, who defects to the side of the good Rama. To the army men, loyalty to your side was the ultimate measure of character; if Indians were loyal to anything but India, this country, which is in reality a continent, would tear itself apart.

"The Indian army remains the last great secular organization in this country,” one of the majors said, “and we pride ourselves on this legacy.” The majors were Hindus themselves (although they admitted our long drinking session and other all-nighters with men in their units were evidence of frequent lapses), but saw the need for a system that eschews religion for merit. Yet in its way, this rejection of religious interference in army life was a product of religion. It is in the nature of Hinduism to absorb other cultures and create from their synthesis, to accept different ways of worship under it's wide umbrella. "Hindu" at the end of the day, is simply the old Persian word for India. The original word is but a description for the people of the subcontinent and their myriad beliefs. Spirituality is undeniably there, but within that all-encompassing faith there is also the flexibility of social mores to induce a form of tolerance we in the West call secularism.

Yet this society, in its desire to expand, is also guilty of intolerance. “We have such an advanced country now. It’s a shame we can’t share it with, say, the Jarawa,” said one of the majors. Here was progressivism reversed, the desire to share Indian society with a people who rejected that society, at the price of the welfare of the people themselves.

“Nonsense,” said the Kashmiri. His colleague from Uttar Pradesh piped in. “They all want to watch TV and wear clothes, we’ve seen it.”

“The same way many Indians see commercials for Western lifestyles on their TVs. Is that right? Should Indian culture be sacrificed because the West comes off as more flashy and attractive on the surface?” Indians are keen debaters and I rarely feel as if I score points in this country, but that comment elicited a smile and a nod from the two military men.

Eventually, the night wore on. We drank our last bottles of whisky and retired to bed. The majors promised to give me a ride in their jeep to a ferry the next morning. We were all wasted, but they were army men and swore they were used to drinking all night and waking for reveille the next day. I trusted them.

“See you at sheven?” I slurred.

“Sheven!” they shouted. We went to our huts.

Island hospitality

I played in the ocean until 5pm, when night starts to fall in the Andamans. Matthew had mentioned there might be guesthouses nearby, or they might have been swept away by the tsunami. I asked a local on the road how many kilometers to the nearest lodge and he smiled and said “Chola.” The word came out so confidently I felt like it must be a number below three, and didn’t bother to check the Hindi ‘useful phrases’ section in my Lonely Planet, buried at the bottom of my pack.

Several kilometers and hills later, I pulled out the book and read it by the light of my cell phone. I was on a road in deepest, darkest jungle. The moon shone overhead about eight months pregnant, but its blue light was filtered into deep shadows by the trees.

I flipped through the phrasebook to the numbers section, pressing and repressing buttons on the phone to keep it lit, reading by the ambient glow of 21^st century technology in the middle of a crocodile-infested coconut and mangrove thicket.

Numbers, numbers. Ek, do, one, two…where the hell is chola?

There is no chola. Hmmm.

Shit.

The moonlight was broken enough by the palms to be striped and dappled; the waves at Butler Bay were crashing like thunderheads on the edge of earshot and the sea breeze was cool and gentle. It was a beautiful night, and I seriously considered sleeping under the stars. But the dragonflies were buzzing in the leaves, and if they were here, there was stagnant water, and if there was stagnant water there would soon be mosquitoes, Andaman mosquitoes. I imagine they suck blood with the force of a liposuction hose.

Just then an engine rumbled and the liquid dark was broken by dry, piercing yellow: headlights. I stuck out my thumb, hoping for the best, and pretty much got it: the bus, one of the empty and tired ones from earlier in the day, heading towards Hut Bay. I got off on the edge of town, near a strip of restaurants. I settled on one, which was to be, in so many ways, the Right One, and strode up to the owner, who gave me a once-over and shouted over his shoulder, “Prabil! Engleez!”

He was slender, short, much more light skinned than his father and smiled a lot. Prabil was born here and was on vacation here, helping the family shop, he said, but spent most of his time studying in Bangalore. He called to his mother, who called back to dad, who served me roasted balls of flour topped with something like spicy baked beans, chopped onions and chilies. It was delicious.

Prabil’s English was impeccable, as was that of his friend, Amit. The same could not be said of a sarong clad man who, upon learning I was American, almost lost his eyes from popping out and his cheeks from grinning. He immediately subjected me to a friendly interrogation in Hindi. Prabil and Amit translated, until they couldn’t from laughing.

“He wants to know what you think of the minister of Kolkata. We’re trying to explain you have no idea who the minister of Kolkata is.” An assembled crowd of onlookers chuckled. Someone else asked me if Barack Obama was Muslim; they seemed sure of the fact, but not in the bigoted manner of a small-minded American voter. They wanted a Muslim US president. I take it back: defining a man as bad or good based off his religion is small-minded.

We drank chai, smoked cigarettes and talked in wide circles about politics, philosophy, etc. It actually felt as if I were back in Kolkata, where this sort of rambling, café style intellectualism is a defining feature of the Bengali people, who should have been colonized by the existential French rather than the mercantile British.

Prabil finished a chai, shook the dregs onto the dirt and smiled at me.

“We are so glad you are here. We have had so few visitors since the tsunami.”

“More will come,” I said, thinking of the nothing-but-good write up I was going to give Little Andaman island.

“We hope so.”

I asked where I could find a guest house and Amit offered to take me to one on his motorbike. On the way, we stopped outside of a small temple.

“Just a moment,” he said, before pausing and looking back to me. “Would you like to come in?”

“What god is here?”

“Kali.”

Kali has been stigmatized by Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom into the fearful face of Hinduism. She is the black-skinned Goddess of Destruction, the manifestation of Parvati’s, Shiva’s devoted wife, rage. If each Hindu deity is a shard of the universal human soul, Kali essentially represents feminine wrath, yet also motherly protective instincts, hence her common name: Kali Mata. Mother Kali.

The Lady of Death – dancing on the corpse of her husband, garlanded in human skulls and limbs, her long tongue red with the blood of her enemies – occupied a small shrine fronted by a rubbish bin painted with a bright Donald Duck. In the shrine courtyard a family was sitting on the pavement stones, relaxing and gossiping in the wet night air. They smiled at me and Amit and handed him a coconut. Amit walked to the front of the shrine, lapsed into silent prayer for a moment, and hurled the coconut at the ground, shattering it into milk-moist brown shards. He handed pieces to myself and the family, the flesh cool and delicious in the humidity, and took a daub of tikka powder to his forehead. As we remounted his bike, he fumbled in his pockets and realized he had lost the keys, and for the next 10 minutes he scrabbled in the weeds behind the abode of the Demon Slayer for the ignition to his Honda.

We drove through the village and I felt like a beauty queen; everyone called out to us, smiled, waved. Indians are often friendly, but this was something different; the desire, I decided, of people on an island to see something from another shore. Everyone’s curiosity was slightly overbearing and charming. Little Andaman was giving me a hug.

“How did your English get so good?” I asked Amit. He seemed incredibly fluent for having grown up on such a small island.

“I am a contractor. After the tsunami I worked a lot of projects with groups like World Vision and other NGOs, and usually, we had to speak English. But I also enjoyed the subject.”

“With your English, you could easily get a good job in Bangalore, or Hyderabad—“

“No!” Amit shouted, although his anger wasn’t directed at me. “I was born here in Little Andaman, I grew up here, I will die here!” He couldn’t stand, he said, the mainland, and given how green and good and blue and beautiful my day had been, I couldn’t blame him.

After I checked into the guesthouse I took a walk around tiny Hut Bay until a monsoon broke over the village. Running through sheets of rain, I heard a ‘thunk,’ thought nothing of it, and got back to my room with a bare skin of soak for my trouble.

***

The next morning, when it was time to check out, I realized the thunk had been my wallet flying out of my short pockets. I walked up and down the road where it had been lost, not expecting to find it – I was carrying about $200 cash, a small fortune here – and my expectations were pretty much met. My credit cards were gone; my passport and restricted area permit to the Andamans were still in place.

Not wanting to waste what little cash I had on an autorickshaw I walked three kilometers to the Hut Bay police station and filed a report. Although I am not generally a fan of Indian police, who are often overbearing, arrogant bribe takers of the worst developing world sort, the local cops on Little Andaman treated me well. For two reasons, I reckon; one, I had been the only tourist on the island in weeks and no one wanted me to leave with bad impressions. And two, I knew from a stint as a cops reporter for a small town newspaper how to fill out a police report (still filed in English here; the British used English to administer a country of over 90 major languages, and the modern Indian government has seen no reason to change this state of affairs). My deftly executed account stunned the police (all three of them) in the Hut Bay precinct; I got the sense, given the way they had started to give me meticulous instructions on writing up the incident, that filing police reports is something the average villager doesn’t do well.

Probably because they are terrified of the cops. They treated me well, but it was obvious the same couldn’t be said of their fellow Little Andamaners. I met Amit in the morning and explained what happened, and both him and Prabil fell over themselves offering to help me – Prabil saying, “I am so, so sad now” – but neither of them wanted to accompany me to the station.

“They’ll ask us questions,” said Amit, and his inflection and eyes clearly indicated such questions would not be asked nicely. Prabil said he’d happily hook me up with a friend in Port Blair who could help me wire money from my US bank account, but he wanted nothing to do with the cops as well.

So I dealt with the police on my own. The chief of the precinct, clearly happy to have a high-profile case (idiot foreigner loses wallet) on his table, personally drove me to my hotel, where the owner, who had regarded my lost wallet story with undisguised suspicion, fell over himself in supplication. Chairs were pulled out for us, drinks proffered, fans literally brought to blow in our faces.

The chief cocked his legs up on a table and shot out a rapid stream of staccato Hindi. Tense: definitely Imperative. The hotel owner struggled to keep up. Tense: well, if there’s a Supplicative in Hindi, this was it. After a few minutes, the chief got up (after his aides pulled the table away from his legs). He turned to me.

“I will pay for your room.”

“Wow. Thank you, sir!” I said, slipping into the Supplicative myself. The owner piped up from the wings, and the chief’s smile widened.

“Ah. Sorry. He will pay for you room.”

I turned to the owner and thanked him. The thinnest of smiles tortured its way across his lips.

Outside, the chief greeted a large man whose bearing, clothes and tone of talking (Tense: Backslapping-acitive) resolved themselves into the obvious identity of Big Man In Little Andaman. The fact that he did not basically fall at his knees at the sight of the chief indicated some importance.

The chief and the man made friendly greetings and began talking, occasionally gesturing at me. The man turned towards me, genuine concern in his face.

“I am so sorry sir. Here, take this.” He passed over 500 rupees, about $12 but good for a day’s worth of food and lodging here.

Earlier that day I had figured Little Andaman was possibly the worst place in the world to lose your wallet. A few hours later, I decided I couldn’t have asked for a better spot to make such a careless mistake. Amit and Prabil helped me get to my evening boat back to Port Blair, and the sea was dark and at night. My journal:

During the day, the line between the sea and sky is straight and clearly delineated. As night comes, the borders blur until the world is all dark blue. But for black clumps on the water –land – and pin holes in the sky: stars.

Catching waves

[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.

Ethnography in the Andamans, Part 2

[This is part 2 of a two-part post; the first bit is here]

DK said there were full-blood Burmese in Port Blair, including some monks, and promised to take me to them the next day. Privately, I wondered if any of the priests were refugees from the Saffron Revolution of September, 2007. Many monks had fled overland into Thailand; maybe a few had also escaped the country by boat?

Up the steps of another cracked, blue building, and a row of footwear at the base; a sure sign of Burmese residents. And facing away at the first landing, walnut skin crinkled by sun and years, a robed monk sat in the relaxed posture of his people, peeling garlic with a thick knife.

He turned towards me. “Hello.”

I put my palms together, bowed my head and explained what I was looking for: folks like him.

He peeled the garlic slowly. A dog hopped on his bench, yawned dramatically, and snuffled its head between its paws the way dogs do. When the monk spoke, it felt like every word was measured lengthwise and crosswise with a small ruler before escaping his mouth.

“No Bah-mese today. Some in Chennai, getting medical treatment. Some on other islands. Just me. And one more.” He yelled over the porch; someone yelled back; he turned to me. “He’s getting tea.”

I sat down. A little Indian girl walked out of the house and began playing with a toy cell phone, blaring faux ringtones. In India, you’re never too young to make a lot of noise. The monk of a prophet who praised silent contemplation, plus tolerance for others and universal kindness, smiled at her with indulgence. Slow indulgence.

Cut, peel, rip; naked clove in the metal basin between the legs.

Some robes and Burmese calendars hung inside the austere house, floored, like a good Burmese home, with oil-smooth, forest-at-night dark teak wood. “Can I look inside?” Maple syrups poured faster than his nod.

Here and there: pictures of Shwedagon pagoda, pictures of famous Burmese monasteries, husbands and wives in Civil War-sepia photos, the women with hair piled into elegant buns and men shining in their best silk longyis (sarong) and gaung baung, a sort of lopsided turban. A stack of disintegrating books on Buddhism strained a table; I picked up Buddhist Therapy and lingered over a chapter on letting go of longing.

“Were you born in Burma?” I asked, coming outside while an unseasonable soft rain of garlic skin fluttered over the porch.

“No.” Slice. “I am from Assam.” Tear.

He was born and raised and lived in that Northeast Indian state for many years. Look at a map of India; the protruding arm of the Northeast States lays in a distinct geographic and cultural region that is, by rights, more a blend of Tibet and Southeast Asia than subcontinent. That is why the Burmese claimed the wet valleys of Northeast India in the 19^th century, and that is how the British found the justification to add their kingdom to the Empire.

But this has always been a land that resisted the claims of any but its own, its indigenous tribes of Tibetan-descended nomads and Vishnu-worshipping plains-dwellers and yes, Burmese Buddhists. In the grand scope of world affairs, Assam’s hills, some of the rainiest on Earth, have given the world two globally recognized goods: tea, and the bih-jolokia, or poison chili, the hottest natural variant in the world. How hot? There is a measuring table for this sort of thing: the Scoville Scale. A shot of Tabasco gives 2500 Scoville Units of heat; bite into a Jalapeno for 8000 or a Habanero for 300,000. The bih-jolokia laughs at you, standing in some quasi-mythical level of spiciness: 1,041,427 Scoville Units. Guatemalan Insanity Pepper, you’ve met your match.

But what you read about in Assam today is separatist violence; some 70 people were killed a few weeks ago in a bomb blast in Guwahati, the state capital. The news merited a few days on the front page here; I never heard it mentioned in the West, whereas similar casualties from the London bombings dominated headlines for a month. “Wrong zip code,” say reporters when a family is killed in the projects and no one covers it, but wrong zip code is nothing compared to wrong country code or unpronounceable capital.

The monk had been silent for several minutes. “I was a monk at the Mahasi in Yangon – Rangoon,” I said, switching between the old and new names of the city, trying to find some common ground. But there was none. This wasn’t just a half-breed’s attempt to connect being stonewalled by the full-blood, I realized; this was a full-blood who has seen less of Burma than me. I felt as if I was wasting both our time. I bid farewell, walked to the bottom of the steps and put my shoes back on.

***

Unlike the aquarium, Port Blair’s tribal museum, run by the Anthropological Survey of India, is well-executed. But as much as I was here to peruse the exhibits of fishing rods, spears and fetish icons of the indigenous Andamaners, I was also seeking out an expert. The pilot’s words had not left me; “And to your left, ladies and gentlemen: the Stone Age.” I wanted to suss out these ‘savages.’

Spears, baskets, bows, arrows, a twist of bark fashioned into a corset-like chest guard; to protect from branches or weapons? A picture: a Shompen man standing naked but for a loin cloth, somewhere deep in the forest. That there are still people who live like this; it makes me curious and yes, automatically judgmental. It seems as if their lives are survival. What else can they accomplish with these bare implements? Cunningly crafted tools, yes, but the Wheel is the Wheel and it was never invented here. Then again, the Mayas never got the hang of the wheel either, and they measured eclipses, used zeroes and counted 365-day years. And left great stone buildings in the jungle.

What of the people here? Their traces seem that: traces, sketches, bare outlines of humanity. The settled, indigenous Nicobarese are agriculturalists, and they leave some material evidence of culture: painted statues, wooden houses. That might as well be a lost city compared to what the hunter-gatherers produce.

But the Sentinelese place a wild pig skull on the floor of their lean-tos for some unknown reason, and there are small geometric patterns painted onto the Jarawa chest guard, and in the latter’s barely discernible language anthropologists know one word: lalay. Friend. My eyes are trained to seek sparks in things, histories and philosophies, but as Arkady puts it in Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines, some people measure intelligence by their ability to alter the external environment, and some, by their ability to preserve it.

I met a Montanan and his Canadian girlfriend in the museum. He was a nice guy, but a bit of a Spicoli; long, drawled “duuudes,” no qualms about entering a nice Indian restaurant in full backpacker grime and gear (imagine if some dirty, loud and demanding young Indians who spoke three words of English between them walked into a nice family restaurant back home and you’ll understand why Indians are remarkably patient to put up with backpackers). He had a love of risk I recognized and remembered.

“Why take malaria pills, man,” he said over dinner later that night. “That stuff just fucks with your body anyways. If you’re gonna go, you’re gonna go. I don’t wear a helmet when I get on a bus here, y’know?”

He had read a few books, so he knew everything. He explained to his girlfriend, “Yeah, so in the US we have, like, the First Amendment, which lets you say stuff, but right after that passed they made another one that says you can’t talk shit about the government.”

“The Second Amendment is the Right to Bear Arms,” I said.

“That’s the First.”

“No, the First is free speech.” My inclination to boil was doing a good job of lightly simmering.

“Right, but after that there was some other law.” Pause.  “Right?” That was the first uncertainty I heard in his voice. I didn’t want to embarrass him in front of his girlfriend – he was a nice guy – but school’s school.

“Are you talking about the Sedition Act?” I asked.

“Uh…maybe. Yeah!” He smiled.

“I think that was overturned. Over 200 years ago"(actually,it expired with John Adams presidency in 1801--woops).

He said, “Right, right,” but I suppose that gave him enough room to save face and for historical accuracy to be preserved.

In the museum we stared at a Jarawa lean-to.

“I hear you can go to the north islands and just, like, chill with the tribes,” he said.

“I wouldn’t want to,” I replied. “They sound like they don’t need to be contacted.” Maybe that’s paternal of me, but first contact seems to follow a depressing pattern around the world: two societies with different levels of technological accomplishment meet, and the ones with steel, no matter how well intentioned, grind the ones with stones into dust. Maurice Vidal Portman, the British officer in charge of administering relations with the native Andaman tribes, put it well in the late 19^th century: "Their association with outsiders has brought them nothing but harm, and it is a matter of great regret to me that such a pleasant race are so rapidly becoming extinct. We could better spare many another."

Before I left the museum, I knocked on the door of the office of BK Das (DK, BK: Indians have a knack for names that match American fast food icon acronyms), an anthropologist employed by the Indian government. A small, dark man with a bushy gray mustache and gold-rimmed glasses sat behind a desk covered with cards for local businesses and a tide chart of the islands. A young Bengali with a wide-brimmed bush cap sat across from him. I interrupted their conversation, rudely, I’m afraid.

“Mr. Das? My name is Adam Karlin. MA, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.” Yes, I sounded like a pompous ass. But credentials go a long ways in India, and for all of the nation’s patriotism and anti-colonialist pride, degree letters from the UK come off as particularly impressive; I once made the above statement to enter a temple in Madurai, and the caretaker, who looked as if he’d never left Tamil Nadu, smiled and said, “Euston,” the London neighborhood that abuts my old university.

Das gestured me into a chair, and without much prompting, we started discussing the state of the indigenous islanders.

“The Great Andamanese now number 55, and of their seven original clans, only two remain. They have been resettled onto a small island, where only a handful speak the Great Andamanese language.” The anthropologist used his hands to accentuate the statistics.

“Will they survive?”

“In a mixed form, but they have had to intermarry to continue their existence, and in the intermarriage they have lost their cultural identity.” The other tribes were not in quite as dangerous straits, but their futures were also uncertain.

“The Onge remain in their reserve in Little Andaman island, and they occasionally come out to trade. Some are learning Hindi, but in that process they also risk losing identity. The Jarawa remain isolated.” This, I had heard, was partly true; the Jarawa stayed in their tribal reserve, but the main highway through the islands cut through their jungle, and sometimes they were mocked by Indian tourists as they stood on the road. In addition, a common if illegal trade had developed with Bengali and Tamil settlers in the interior jungle towns. Das confirmed all of the above was true, and shook his head at the fact.

“And what of the Sentinelese? Have you seen them? Gone on any of the expeditions to make contact?” I asked. I may never meet a man who had come as close to a living Stone Age culture. I asked DK the night before if he knew any fishermen who would take me to the edge of North Sentinel, out of bowshot, just to see it. He shook his head vigorously.

“No! Fishermen do not go that way unless they want to be killed. It is far too dangerous.”

As an ethnographer attached to official government research missions, Das had seen both the island and its people – before they shot arrows at his boat. The projectiles fell short of their mark, but they drove the scientists away.

“Now we don’t go out as much. We don’t try and initiate as much contact because it seems fruitless. But every now and then some visiting dignitary will come here and…” he trailed off.

“Demand to be taken along on a contact expedition to the island of the savages?”

 Das laughed. “Yes. Exactly.”

“What,” I asked, “Was it like to see the Sentinelese? Not just as an anthropologist; what was it like to experience first contact as a human being?” I silently added in my mind, Who else in the world has done so?

Das’s smile made his mustache take in his cheeks. “They are different, you know? Bigger and…bigger than I expected. They moved fast in their boats, and they seemed strong, and healthy. There can’t be more than 150 of them,” he added, with palpable sadness.

“Do you think they knew, from other tribes, what has happened to other Andaman natives since they interacted with the Indians? If so, that might explain why they don’t want contact.”

Das shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t know. Who can say?” It could be that, or the isolated island was just that: too isolated. Even in this world. Long, I thought, may it remain so.

Ethnography in the Andamans, Part 1

“And to your left, you will see an island that is inhabited to this day by cannibals. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that is North Sentinel Island, and the people there are still living in the jungle…”

The thin whine of the captain’s overhead announcement went on while I winced at the un-PC description. Then, hypocritically, I stood up to peer out the window. An old woman in a Tamil sari, her nose plugged by gold medallions, stood in my way. So much for spotting the mysterious savages of  North Sentinel Island.

The Indians, for awhile, came every year: with coconuts, buckets, candy. Contact was made a few times; during the others, the Sentinelese shot arrows and threw spears and, in so many words, drew the ‘Welcome’ mat inside. Theirs is the most isolated human settlement on Earth, and perhaps the last uncontacted human society in existence.

And I missed spotting their home from the air, a passenger in a plane run by a beer company. I was flying Kingfisher airlines, bought by the enormous Indian brewery of the same name. Maybe when I get home I can charter a flight on a Budweiser prop, or take flight lessons on a Michelob piper cub, but until that day my relationship with the skies and an alcoholic beverage brand remain limited to a two-hour flight from Chennai to the Andaman Islands.

This is where I am: a place explorers marked on maps with ‘Here be Monsters,’ with dog-headed men, men with faces in their chests, men whose ears hung to their feet and men who hopped on one leg and enormous, springy feet. Where a true tribe of man has cut itself off from the settlement, conversion and development – and here we may use the word in the context of the scar of prefab subdivisions – that has reduced the Great Andamanese, who once numbered 7,000, to 55 survivors.

Who lives here, in these islands at the end of the Earth, closer to Burma than India but looped into Indian time, so there is sunlight at 4:30am and night falls by 5pm? Indian settlers, mainly: from Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, the Punjab, Jharkhand, Kerala. The flowery rapid lilt of Tamil replaced by the staccato ha-chah-chah-keeri-hai of Hindi, which is how the tongue sounds to my untrained ear. Nicobarese, from the islands of the same name just south of here, looking Malay or Burmese, who they are likely descended from. They’re the only native tribe to grow under Indian rule thanks to their embrace of Christianity, agriculture and other measuring sticks of ‘civilization.’

And the Onge and Jarawa, also native islanders, now numbering in mere hundreds; black negritos who would not look out of place tracking Birds of Paradise through the Solomon Islands. Their diet, as well, seems to have been carried over from a menu on Guadalcanal: wild pigs, root vegetables and birds shot from the sky with arrows that have been turned, in the past, on the local Indian population. Perhaps with some justification.

I’ll add the caveat that Indians here are not like the ones on the mainland, and are proud of the fact. To my surprise, most Indian Andamaners, while descended from settlers, are now native born, and to the last, they all say they prefer their islands to the mainland.

“India is too bloody polluted and loud,” says one.

“Everyone in those cities is trying to cheat you,” says another.

“When I get to the mainland, all I want to do is turn around and come home.”

I can’t blame them. I have been spending time in Port Blair, capital and largest city of the Andamans, and even this small settlement, busy as it is with mainland tourists and merchant vessels, feels like a stage set city just holding off the encroachment of what really dominates these islands: green and blue, jungle and ocean, a Pas de deux of natural forces swept along with salt wind so the entire chain is like an illustration pulled from the cool spectrum of the color wheel.

The shades may be gentle, but the land is hard. From the surface of a small passenger ferry to Ross Island the Andaman environment looks as user friendly as an instruction manual; teal water so glittery you have to will yourself to stay in the boat and not immerse your face in the waves’ sun sparkle. But on Ross itself, former British capital of the islands, you see nature is not, in fact, so kind. An earthquake in 1941 flattened this town, then called the ‘Paris of the East’ (at the time there must have been a round dozen cities with that nickname, including one I’ve already tramped through on this trip); what the quake didn’t tear apart the invading Japanese did. Their presence was no less temporary and devoured by nature; clambering over a ridge I kneeled into a Japanese machine gun nest that was split apart by ficus, fig and banyan root, the concrete upheaved and uplifted, the cubby hole entrance a root-mass doorway. The gunner’s window looked out onto fringed palm and blue sea, but even those postcard waters can be cruel, building and peaking when the land shakes and coming as a tsunami to reclaim an ocean’s due, like in 2004, when some 7,000 islanders -- including a fifth of the remaining Nicobarese – were drowned.

The waters are not all death though. There is some amazing marine life here as well, although you’re not likely to find it in Port Blair’s aquarium. No immersive halls of sharks here; just row after row of fish preserved in formaldehyde, and a few live ones in tanks that a visit to your local pet store could top. In one jar, eyes more glazed and fishy than usual, a striped corpse silently screamed at me through glass; the pinned card said ‘Clown Fish.’ I scribble in my notebook, “I’ve found Nemo.

***

Like all outposts and border settlements, the Andamans don’t lack for characters and eccentrics.

“Burmese Buddhist Mission in Port Blair,” was painted in salt-faded white on a light blue wooden building around the corner of yet another Gandhi statue. Above a small entrance: the seven-colored Buddhist flag. I walked in and nobody there but a few carpenters sawing a plank. A woman glimpsed me from the edge of a curtain in an apartment set into the foyer of the building; her eyes vanished behind a wall. I shrugged, moved on up the steps into a wash of sunlight and a small, Burmese stupa. The familiar, upturned bell shape design, the golden-robed Buddha with his Cleopatra eyes and Mona Lisa smile, a slight smirk that says, “I’ve found it,” and the loops of the script inked into my arm made me almost gasp with longing to be in Southeast Asia again, to walk barefoot over marble tiles and watch the slow shadow of Buddhas and monks grow low and slow past the lick-flame of dozens of orange candles.

I sat and meditated in the stone courtyard for awhile; ironically, I have gotten better at sitting in place even as my job increasingly flings me far and wide. But it was hot, as it gets here; the sun is white, and I mean that literally, white and heavy and strong, baking the land with the after steam of the rains so it constantly feels like you’re in a wet furnace. I have found new sweat glands here, and put old ones into overtime.

I walked back into the foyer and out into town. A man stood at the doorway to the niche apartment. Indian, and something else, something East Asian and given to epicanthic eye fold.

“What are you looking for sir?”

“Well,” I said, and tried to figure out how to explain this one, and settled on just coming out with it, “I’m looking for Burmese. Are their Burma people here?”

He eyed me. “What is your intention?” In the West the phrasing is rude and accusatory, but I’ve found in India (and especially among Hindi speakers, where questions are asked in a polite imperative form) what may feel like an abrupt command or query is only good manners lost in translation.

“Well, I’m half-Burmese, and…”

“Really?” The man’s eyes widened. “And from?”

“From USA. America.” I said Amrika, the way most Indians pronounce it.

“Ah, OK, OK! Come inside! Have some coffee!” He barked something at this wife, and I saw her Indian and something else eyes, the ones that had been watching me before, shuffle out, robe-clad, into the kitchen. On the walls were posters of the snowy alps with inspirational quotes, the sort of thing your teacher my have hung on the walls of a 4^th-grade classroom, an inexplicably popular decorative motif from Kenya to Port Blair. Next to the posters was a picture of a sexy Disney princess look-a-like wrapping her arms around a distinctly phallic candle twice her size.

My host, DK, smiled at me. “I’m half-Burmese too. And so is my wife.”

My coffee dribbled. “Really?”

DK explained. The Andamans have always attracted misfits and refugees, and were held by the British for many years besides. The Raj settled Burmese loggers here in the deep jungle of Middle Andaman, and others arrived by boat; pirates, fishermen, poachers, perhaps even the Sea Gypsies, water nomads who spend their lives under sun and salt in the backwash of the Mergui Archipelago.

When the Indians took control of the Andamans after independence they needed security forces to tame the wild islands and protect their new settlers. So they settled on the Punjabis, the loyal, turban-clad men whose names end in “Singh,” or “lion,” the commonality of all Punjabi surnames. A Singh had come, DK said, and fallen in love with a local Burmese girl, and the radio control operator for the docks in Digilipur, northernmost settlement in the archipelago, was born.

“My daddy loved my mummy very much. My wife has a similar story. Say something in Burmese to her! She understands, even if she cannot speak it!”

She must speak a damn sight more than me, I thought, but I thanked her in Burmese for the coffee and she grinned.

“So DK,” I asked, “You work with boats here?”

“Yes, yes,” he said. His eyes glowed; I want to say it was the cheerful spark all Burmese eyes eventually betray, but his hospitality was as much Sikh as Southeast Asia, and outside the language of cultural stereotypes I could get physical with my cliches as well. DK was a big man with broad shoulders, and his friendliness was of the shoulder thumping, overbearing guy school of camaraderie, a vaguely menacing affection that is entwined in some Y chromosomes and doesn’t alter across the world.

“You ever get out to the little islands?” I said.

“I go to the Nicobars often.” He paused, and his voice dropped a clear register. “I had to go many times after the tsunami.” The eye light suddenly vanished. “So many friends, so many acquaintances – dead.”

The Delhi government, which runs the Andamans and Nicobars (the islands are a union, i.e. federal territory, rather than their own state, similar to Washington DC) responded well to the disaster, DK said. After three days. But for 72 hours it was chaos, and homegrown rescue convoys, and people helping each other if they had survived, as the majority of the forest people did. After the land shook, they told interviewers, tribal lore told them to seek the high ground.

DK crewed a boat that sailed to the Nicobars and saw miles of aide relief, food supplies, medicine and dehydration pills and water purification tablets, all sizzling under the equatorial sun on the docks. He took nothing, he says – what use did he have for other people’s food and medicine? In his home they were safe and spared. No, there others, so many others, to help…

The conversation had taken an emotional toll on DK, so I tried to gently shift the subject.

“Are the Nicobars beautiful?”

My host’s face immediately regained its fire. “Beautiful? Oh, so beautiful, like a mountain in the sea all alone.” I wasn’t sure how this was different from the other 577 Andaman Islands (38 inhabited), but let it slide.

“That’s why you’re not allowed there,” said DK, and it is true; foreigners may not step foot in the Nicobars. “If you came,” and he started laughing, “no one would go to the Andamans any more! They’d all come to the Nicobars!” His laughter howled in the house, and I thought: one day, the Nicobars, one day.

I asked DK and his wife if they wanted to pose for a picture. They happily agreed, and when DK sat down, he splayed his legs over his living room chair the way my grandfather does in Rangoon. There’s something in the national memory of Burmese that instructs them to occupy a space with as much comfort as possible, and this is why, I believe, I can sleep on almost any train, plane or bus in the world.

Andaman idyll

Sorry for the delay in blog posting, but I am currently in the Andaman Islands, which are waaaaay the heck over here.  I.e. very isolated.  And while they are beautiful and the people are friendly (except for the ones that want to spear you), internet isn't that great.  So I will post when I can. In the meantime, am pretty much well and happy and everything else. Smooches, Adam.

USA. USA. USA.

I woke up at 6:30 this morning, around 8:00 at night back home. Its 7:50 am now and the Socialist-Islamist bloc that runs MSNBC (new readers: that’s sarcasm) just called Ohio for Obama. Most of the news here is ABC/CNN/CBS/MSNBC coverage cross-linked with the major Indian news networks. Every few minutes the American news switches over to Indian commentary, and it’s clear the Indian pundits prefer Obama as a candidate.

For that matter, most Indians I’ve met on the street prefer Barack as well, and the general tone and tenor of their support is wrapped up in race. The idea of a black man running the most powerful country in the world seems to have re-affirmed an Indian belief in the potential of the American experiment, although with that said any re-discovered love of America is mollified by several large grains of salt. America is still seen as a country that cannot always be trusted, as a nation that throws its weight around needlessly, etc. And it’s notable that another source of Indian love for Obama is the democratic candidate’s tough rhetoric towards India’s great rival, Pakistan.

8:00 AM: Obama takes New Mexico.

I support Obama. A lot of people vote based on their jobs, and I suppose I do too. I think Barack Obama is the ideal travel writer’s candidate. His international background speaks to the cosmopolitan, worldly ‘new’ American who stands in direct contrast to the isolation and insularism of the Sarah Palin ‘real’ American. His intellectual energy and curiosity are at the heart of the impulse to explore the world outside your borders, but his basic commitment to core democratic values has distinctly American overtones. So when I see his international and domestic appeal working in tandem, I can’t help but think Barack Obama speaks for almost every independent American traveler I’ve met on the road: people who hunger to discover the world, want to learn from citizens and philosophies of other nations, yet remain anchored and in character essentially American. He speaks for me. I don’t just want to get a beer with Barack Obama; I want to ask him about going to school in an Indonesian madrassa while drinking kopi susu in Jogja; I want to split a Tusker and some choma with him in Nairobi; I want him to show me the best spam spots in Honolulu.

Yes, I like Barack’s policies and I hope he re-hires Samantha Powers if he makes it into office, because she’s one of my favorite foreign affairs professionals. But – and you can paint me a hypocrite, because I usually argue policy above personality –the man’s character and yes, color, also attracts me. The Indians and the Africans I met in Kenya are right: this is the time to elect a black man because the world’s power base is moving from white to brown/black. With a black man – and not just any black man, but an internationally raised, mixed-race, extremely intelligent and charismatic one – at the helm of the nation, the USA will have the best qualified commander-in-chief in position to navigate the difficult waters of a decade that is going to experience a shift of the global center of gravity. We will be led by a man who can naturally connect to a largely post-colonial, brown-and-black world that regards America, with justification, warily, but also (and sometimes simultaneously) hopefully.

I take it back about liking Barack for his race. In truth, I like him for his post-racial identity. I like the idea of a world where color and cultural background are seen as elements of, rather than integral to, identity. Barack Obama personifies the above impulse (and has written about it eloquently) to the greatest degree of any American presidential candidate.

That’s enough of my punditry. Back to the news…

9:00 AM: Breakfast. I eat my eggs and bread quickly, down three cups of juice and a coffee, and rush back to the TV.

Around 9:40AM: Obama wins. CBS calls it, then MSNBC, now CNN. I yell, and I’m crying and laughing at the same time.

9:54 AM: McCain gives an excellent, gracious and dare I say, moving concession speech. He was the best of his breed. But his choice of Palin put me off him in a serious way. Still, this is a lovely sentiment: “Today, I was a candidate for the highest officer of the land I love so much, and tonight I remain a servant of it.” Wow. You can sense his pain as he walks off stage, gives Palin a cursory handshake, her husband less of one, and stiffly accepts a hug from his wife.

9:59 AM: I’ll work late tonight, because I*have* to watch Obama’s acceptance speech.

10:03 AM: An African American pastor comes out and gives a Civil Rights-era worthy introduction to Obama. “Give to us a new hope. We pray for president-elect Barack Obama…endow him with an unshakeable spirit.” It’s a beautiful prayer, and makes sense given Obama’s African-American background, but perhaps too religious for me. But I have a feeling Obama will provide a dose of secularism…dammit, why don’t the pundits shut up. “…the beacon light on the hill that all nations may see. Bless us…that we might truly see the time when your kingdom may come on Earth. Let us not rest on these laurels…”

10:05 AM: Some guy (sorry, don’t know name) gives a nice rendition of the pledge of allegiance. A horn honks outside. Of course; it’s India. But I like to think its some local happy about Obama winning. Wow. Obama won Florida, Virginia and Colorado.

10:26 AM: Obama comes out to give his acceptance speech, flanked by wife and kids. I can’t say I like Michelle’s dress much. Everyone is chanting ‘Yes We Did.’

10:27 AM: “Hello, Chicago. Is anyone out there who still doubts if America is a place where anything is possible?”

10:28: GODDAMN YOU INDIA YOU CUT THE POWER NOW!?!?!?!

10:29 AM: Power back. Barack, here’s your first executive order: repair India’s utilities.

10:31 AM: Tells kids they’re getting a new puppy. Aw. And now speaks of his grandmother.

10:39 AM: “In parliaments and palaces and those huddled around radios in forgotten corners of the world: Our stories are singular but our destinies are shared. A new dawn of American leadership is at hand.” See what I mean?

10:44 AM: Yes we did. Sigh (but happy sigh). Back to buses and dodging cows…

Into the hills

A quick route to hating Tamil Nadu is to frequently ride state buses.

To say they are badly designed is to state the obvious without context. More accurately, they are mysteriously badly designed. It is as if two demented engineers determined the most uncomfortable embellishments possible on a high-density public transport vehicle and included all of them on the drawing table:

 “Metal crossbars where the knees are?”

“Don’t stop there. How about making the seats small enough so the only way of avoiding the cross bars is sitting absolutely erect?”

“Wait, wait. Let’s do that, and add crossbars on the windows!”

“Right where the arm goes?”

“Exactly. And – and this is the kicker – we’ll throw in two more crossbars: one where the head could rest on the seatback in front of the passenger, and one beneath the seat so you can’t store a large bag underneath you!”

“Great! And they’ll be no luggage compartment underneath! Folks will just have to put their bags in the aisle!”

“Or on their laps!”

“We should really get a prize for this.”

In fact, a Tamil Nadu state bus is essentially nothing but crossbars, wheel wells and, occasionally, a seat. It is as if the skeleton of a bus were assembled with care, while the rest of the vehicle was carelessly, and sometimes incompletely, tacked on as an afterthought. In India, they have been my personal hell.

Train travel is generally a pleasant experience here, but because I mainly make short hops between towns, and because buses run so much more frequently, more often than not my movement has been tied to the tyranny of the bus stand. To get to where I am now – the hill stations of the great, green Nilgiri range – I had to take a series of long haul buses between Kanyakumari, the country’s southern tip, into the junction towns of Madurai and Coimbatore. Then up, slowly and painfully accompanied by the groan of gears and my own moans of discomfiture, into the cool spaces the British reserved for their summer escape from the dusty heat of the plains.

The lowland road, cutting through palms and plantations, radiated a lemon yellow heat. I felt it move like a sort of dusky sin wave through the clouds of red dirt kicked up by the traffic. Despite riding Indian buses for almost a month now, today my internal wires coiled and snapped, and I found myself writing in my notes, “Damn this heat. It takes an hour to travel 30 km.”

Too bloody true. State buses stop in every town, so the journey is a hideous stop start relay that stretches the limits of travel sadism.  Entering each town is a slow navigation through a web of cattle, villagers, autorickshaws, incessant honking. Then pull into the bus stand and people fight their way off and fight their way on and we stop and idle and the driver makes a little conversation and we’re off again, fighting a new path out of the town, challenging a new throng of sweating humanity to reach the open road which is only occupied by the bus for 15 minutes or so and then the next town, the next half hour of grinding to and from another fly blown bus stand.

Yes. Well. What can I say; it wasn’t an ideal journey. But eventually the topography of the route shifts, alters, and the bus began climbing into the night and the mountains at the same time, so the senses are jarred by both a slow drag upwards as opposed to a flat push forwards, accompanied by the loss of sight and perspective, now all dark outside, black and – increasingly – cold.

It is eerily silent. Night-bound mountains should be quiet, but not their roads. Why do Indian drivers honk their horns as a warning or announcement everywhere in the lowlands, where vehicles are usually in plain sight, but keep quiet here, where a truck could come careening around the corner of a blind turn at any minute? On one trip, to Mudamalai National Park , we crawl and climb through 36 out of 36 hairpin turns; at one point the mini-van we’re in runs out of juice and we lay stalled and helpless on the face of the mountain. Buses and cars whip around blind corners, and our tires never feel far from the edge of the road. A sign promises: Road Fatalities: 2006: 1; 2007: 0; 2008: 17. On the bright side, there were a lot less injuries this year. At one point I truly start to feel the sinking seepage of fear when I realize the Indian passengers – the same people who give their children small explosives to celebrate the holidays – are nervous.

Road tension carries its rewards. I can’t tell you how good the air felt when it first brisked me in Kodaikanal. There’s no heat and humidity like the tropical kind, especially the densely populated tropical kind, and there may be no relief like the first rush of cool you get at a hill station. This was the whole point of the institution, of course: colonial air conditioning.

They are also clean and, in some ways, calm, compared to the massive cities on the plains. I walk by a public toilet and write: “That must be the only public latrine in India that doesn’t radiate the odor of piss.” Indian tourists abound, but if the weather drops below 50F they bundle up as if Siberia has come upon them, and their energy seems sapped by the cold. To ward against it they buy silly earmuffs covered in fuzz, or drink, or both. Still, while the spaces around the hill stations are quiet and crawling with trekkers, in the towns themselves India’s volume remains cranked to (almost) full.

In Kodaikanal, in the Beatles-esque titled Strawberry Hills hotel, I end up banging on my neighbor’s door at 5am and telling them to, in so many words, shut up and turn their TVs down. Only the Chinese can compete with the Indians when it comes to making noise, which raises some pressing questions. First: what will happen when these nations take their due place as our lords and masters? It is as if a relentless tide of noise pollution – Bollywood squeal, Hong Kong dub, House music hell – is looming like an auditory tsunami on our horizon. And second: why are meditation, serenity and enlightenment associated with these most raucous, chaotic and loud of nations? How, I wondered, watching an elephant ford a stream under a slanting sunset, as a man belched loudly and with pride after draining some cheap whiskey from a paper cup, did Buddha become Buddha here?

Let’s be fair: America and anywhere else in the world doesn’t lack for loud cretins. But they manifest themselves in unexpected places here; say, on a wildlife game drive. Entry to the afore-mentioned Mudamalai National Park is restricted to official buses that ply a 45-minute loop through the only un-plastic polluted forest I’ve seen in India. At the ticket area for the park we are told: “Do not wear bright clothes. Be quiet in the bus to avoid scaring off animals.” But these signs must contend with the reality of so many Indian holiday-makers. Baby is taken along; why should a crying infant miss the chance to see a tiger? Dad wears his best pressed shirt and pants and shoes and, being not just dad but Dad, the patriarch of the Indian family, talks loudly and overbearingly and certainly doesn’t have time to listen to the requests for silence made by a hapless parks employee. Teenagers are loud as they are anywhere in the world, and the women – yes. If “dark clothes” means “your brightest sari, accentuated by your best bangles, earrings, nose studs and necklaces,” then they are adhering to dress code.

Most interesting/annoying is the fact the domestic tourists on the safari I embark on do not seem to have much interest in seeing wildlife. They board the bus, the driver tells them to be quiet, and they carry on chattering as if he has never spoken. We pass spotted deer; a baby cries, a few people lean over with cameras, dad talks loudly about something, mom fans herself. This is essentially the unbroken chain of our sightseeing. The national park isn’t there to be seen so much as it exists to serve as a new backdrop to wherever the package tour everyone is on leads to next. The Western tourists on the bus were seething with rage at this behavior (I was mad too, but I tried to convert the feeling, with varied success, into mild bemusement), an ill-defined sense of cultural confusion and post-colonial political correctness keeping their anger in check (who wants to be the white person who tells Indians how to behave in their country?).

With all of this said, I have enjoyed my time in the Tamil Nadu hills. The wild flowers bloom here in brilliant drops: lavender, gold. Between Ooty, Kodaikanal and the plains, I feel as if I am experiencing all my seasons; dusky autumn, bitter winter, spring by daylight, and the lowlands: a return to summer, a season I am still coming to terms with.

The colonial houses, or what remain of them, embellish the stations with a trace of 19^th-century romance. I walk by one, crumbling into a grove of pines and blue gums. More than the chill or the overgrown garden or the faded lintels above the door or the name Westbury Villa, it is the crows that make this Ooty garden villa seem like England. And the hill station natives have quirks; they seem more liable to push their eccentricities than the busy Indian of the lowlands. On a boulder overlooking one hairpin turn, I see a handsome young Indian man stretch out his legs and perch his chin in his hand like a Greek sculpture celebrating youth.

At night, flame flowers hide their faces from the cold, best warded off with a bowl of thugpa (hearty Tibetan noodle soup) sold in numerous Tibetan cafes or a slug of brandy, or whiskey. My old Pondicherry mate Francois has joined me here, and one night, surrounded by a United Nations crew, I was reminded of why I fell in love with backpacking in the first place: joking with an Israeli, a British couple, a German stoner, girls from France and the Netherlands, while the Belgian and the American go shot for shot with each other on cheap bottles of Bagpiper and Ekshaw.

Maybe farsight is brought on naturally by the perspective a mountain affords you. I ride an autorickshaw back to a bus junction after the sun sets. The dark blue night flashes by and the air feels like soft knives and smells of wood smoke, and the lights will o wisp the valley below, and I feel the old tug of the road.