Adam's Ambles: Island hospitality

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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.