The Gulag Archipelago

Port Blair is an ugly place. Not in an Indian the-streets-runneth-foul-eith-sewage kind of way, but more in a Latin American grungy sprawl of laid-back disorder kind of way. By Indian standards, Port Blair is tiny for a regional center -it only has 100,000 people or so, but it still seems excessive. I can't imagine what economic force keeops people there. As far as I can tell, the only things the Andaman & Nicobar Islands export are timber, coconuts, and anthropology studies.

Port Blair was founded by the British. There were of course other people here first, but -and you will be shocked to hear this- most of the native tribes have dwindled to the brink of extinction and now live on ill-secured "reserves" in the jungle. The population of the Andaman Islands consists now mostly of Tamil and Bengali immigrants who have made the settled areas of the islands, in the words of one proud fellow I spoke to, a "mini-India". Fortunately, mini-India does not display all the excesses of its mammoth sibling such as pulsing mobs, thumping Bollywood music, people indiscriminately lighting fireworks in the market, and general soul-rending poverty. There is, however, a thriving business in whiskey-steered rickshaws, 1:1 ratio of mobile phone service shops per capita, and -on an island chain whose endemic mammals consist only of shrews and bats- cows everywhere.

Girlface and I woke up somewhat late after our first night in Port Blair (the journey there was rather sleep-depriving) and were annoyed to find that the day was already half over. India is one of those countries that insists on lying entirely in one time zone, regardless of how much sense it makes. While this might be a feasible stretch of geographical reality for the bulk of India, the country has a lot of odd nooks. Look at a world time zone map, especially the area around Bangladesh, and tell me nobody in the government here is being obstinate. They do of course claim to have a good reason: India has only one time zone (and this one time zone is half an hour "off" the usual scheme) to reflect the fact that the "real" prime meridian has been fixed since ancient times in the holy city of Ujjain, predating the unsanctified Greenwich line by over a millenium. All this, however, would be mere trivia to me if it weren't for the fact that the Andamans are quite far away from India. The Andamans are are so much closer to Southeast Asia in fact that in certain parts of town you can still see bunkers built by the Japanese during World War II at the western extreme of their ill-fated island-hopping adventures. Anyways, the stubborn time zone conformity means that the sun goes down by about 5:30, giving the slobs in government offices a perfect excuse to shorten their business hours.

Fortunately half a day is all you need to see most of what Port Blair has to offer. It has never been a beacon of culture and refinement. In fact, the most notable part of its history was being a tropical British gulag. The British built it to be a penal colony, not the way Australia was (an exile for petty crooks, Welshmen, and other undesirables), but as an isolated torture camp for uppity brown people who had the nerve to resist the occupation of India. The Andamans were less New South Wales and more Guantanamo Bay. Pretty much all of Port Blair's "sights" are depressing. The worst of these is the "Cellular Jail" above the harbor. It is a horrendously ugly brick building from the early 20th century built on the tower-and-spokes design still common in American prisons today. The idea, it seems, was to keep hundreds of freedom fighters and political activists in solitary confinement, allowing them out only for their daily quota of being worked to death on crude menial labor. It's now a museum where you can go read about the prison and the Andamans' colonial history in general, which is not to speak of much since people who live in the vicinity of torture camps don't usually take to doing anything too exciting.

Far more pleasant was our visit to Ross Island, a little islet about a mile off shore. As we approached on the ferry I began to winder why the British had built their colonial administration center on Ross Island, a place so isolated from the people they were ruling, and realized I had answered my own question. Ross Island was also a prison camp but later settled into its role of being the place where white people lived, with a church, a tennis court, and all the other niceties of civilization which demonstrated how much God wanted Eden to look like Sussex. It seems however that He must have lost some kind of bet against Shiva, because an earthquake came along and destroyed it. Now Ross Island is a cool place to visit for the sight of the quintessential Victorian brickwork being swallowed by the jungle.

Things were a bit odd, however... a feeling we were to get throughtout the archipelago. For starters, most of the other tourists wandering around the isle were a group of white-robed Indian cultists with flowing cloaks and shining medals on their breasts, having quite a fabulous time in between the frequent monsoon bursts that sent them all scurrying into little cult-huddles in the picnic shelters by the jetty. By far the cultists' favorite feature of the island were the curious spotted deer that somebody must have imported from the mainland and left to wander in the jungle and ruins for purely aesthetic reasons. We passed many deer on the way to the lighthouse, watching them freeze the way deer do as we stared at them from beneath the massive trees we chose for our often-needed rain shelters.

Later, somehwere on our way from the lighthouse to the vine-strewn Presbyterian church we managed to stumble into the worst guarded Indian Navy base ever. We didn't even realize we were in it until we came out the main exit and found a sign that read "Coastal Battery Ross Island--Indian Navy Territory Restricted Area" and some puzzled coolies wondering how we got in. Though, to be fair, I'm the first person to actually arrive on this island with conquering intent since the Japanese. I just want the one little island. I'll strengthen the defenses a bit, install a jacuzzi, fix the volleyball net, and maybe add an artificial volcano with a giant mind-control beacon and an army of bikini-wearing ninja guards. Y'know, the shit Ghostface needs.