Isles In Sea And Shadow

The Andaman Islands are a strange place. Perhaps this is true for many settler societies, which are populated just by whoever feels like coming. In the Andamans however, the general weirdness sneaks up on you. Port Bliar is a city that looks to be doing its utmost to be nondescript and in conformity with the bland provincial towns of the motherland, but soon after you leave the city and get into the hinterlands you begin to wonder just what the hell is going on.

There is one "major" tourist point in the archipelago: Havelock Island, which is by all accounts beautiful, reasonably convenient, and developed just enough for a few tranquil comforts. Needless to say, this is not where Girlface Buddha and I were going. We were heading instead for the northern end of North Andaman, which you may have guessed is the northernmost and least settled of the three "main" islands. Getting there was a tedious pre-dawn crawl up the spine of the islands on the territory's only "highway" the Andaman Trunk Road. In the early morning darkness we rumbled through the boring Tamil and Bengali villages in the region around Port Blair, then made a sudden turn onto the highway itself and into the jungle.

Let me just say that 12 hours on the Andaman Trunk Road reveals that it is not and has never been a "highway". For the entirety of its mind-numbing 300 kilometers it is naught but a single lane of asphalt winding in a most laborious fashion through the islands' small hills, usually with an all-obscuring wall of impenetrable jungle foliage on either side. From time to time the road widens beyond one lane, but these are merely waiting areas where you sit and admire the trees while waiting for a forest police checkpoint, a tribal reserve checkpoint, or a ferry across the inter-island channels. It is horrendously boring, yet still worth taking, because amidst the jungle and the isolation and the tedium you are occasionally reminded that you are passing through India's Twilight Zone, a chain of islands to which India has banished strange, strange things that don't fit into its own psychotic society. If India is a half-naked lunatic dancing on one leg, screeching mumbo-jumbo with a burning torch in one hand and a pink spotted umbrella in the other, the Andaman Islands are a set of deep eyes lurking in the bushes and a distant, haunting laugh drifting on the winds.

For hours we rolled along our little road-channel cut into the teeming, dripping rainforest and there was nothing particularly unusual to report apart from the prominent mustaches on the women across the aisle from me, who were either members of the same pantheistic cult we encountered on Ross Island or were Christian nuns. I didn't see any crosses, so I assumed the former. Then, after a pair of checkpoints we entered into the Jarawa tribal reserve.

The Jarawa are on of the indigenous tribes of the Andamans, a stone-age people of obscure origins who populate parts of the jungle on South and Middle Andaman, where those few who survive carry on living as they have for millenia, and periodically burst into violence against those who encroach on their lands and their way of life. This is what the checkpoints are for: keeping out thoughtless developers, loggers, and other provocateurs while maintaining the only road link to the far-flung settlements on the northern islands. A massive sign at the entrance of the reserve laid out the rules for vehicles passing through: we were to travel in approved convoys only, photographing "natives" was stringently forbidden, and we were bidden in very vague but commanding terms to avoid all interactions with the Jarawa whatsoever. The Jarawa are known to hang out by the road sometimes, and this reportedly often degenerates into a degrading spectacle of camera-happy foreign tourists and the open jeering and other antics of Indian visitors. We didn't expect to see much, if anything, of the Jarawa as we passed through. After a short time, however I glimpsed a group of people ahead on the road, and as the bus diligently roared on by I saw that they were indeed Jarawa. They were dark, almost pitch black in skin, with a rough rather than glistening texture. The one man I got a good look at was shirtless, with a necklace of leaves, and with two large, ghostly patches of white paint in the shape of leaves under his dark eyes. Next to him a younger Jarawa raised a wooden club above his head in a gesture that said in any language "Keep that bus moving." "So," I thought to myself, "that was my one view of the Jarawa, and I won't soon forget it."

In thinking that was the end of our interactions with the Jarawa, I was as wrong as it was possible to be. Only a few minutes after this first incident another group of Jarawa awaited ahead of us. This time they blocked the road and brought us to a stop. Before anything could be done they forced their way aboard the bus and amid a chaos of shouting between the conductors, passengers, and aboriginals, got themselves free passage. I smiled inwardly at this, proof that common sense is widespread among the peoples of the Earth and that the Jarawa do not need the art of metallurgy or any other trapping of civilization to know that taking the bus beats the hell out of walking. The group consisted of a man, a woman, and a multitude of children aged about two to ten. None of them wore shirts. The men and children all wore faded cotton gym shorts such as those I used to wear as a boy, while the woman wore a short brown skirt made of a simple rectangle of brown cloth. They all had short, tightly curled black hair and white paint upon their bodies and faces, each in different pattern. Some had aggressive whorls beneath the eyes, others had their entire faces covered in a grid of white stripes. The mother had a radiating pattern of chaotic white strokes that extended even onto her hair, complementing the strong, sturdy woman's assertive attitude. Her belly seemed to be in the early months of pregnancy and her bare breasts hung freely as she settled on her perch on the arm of Girlface Buddha's seat. Though Girlface herself was only unsettled so far as to shift in her seat as much to my side as she could, this provoked an uproar among the crowd who were incensed to see this near-naked 'primitive' with her offending breasts almost in the face of a wholesome Hindu girl. I, of course, was not particularly disturbed, and was more occupied with that guilty American preoccupation of deliberately not staring at the woman while making a point of also not rudely staring away too much.

The furor, however, was so general that the woman was eventually made to move. This did no good as she instead sat on the arm of a seat belonging to another young Indian girl who actually was deeply upset by the circumstance and soon was cowering miserably by her auntie's side. The Jarawa woman, who had already been moved once for no good reason she could discern, thenceforth refused to budge an inch. Immediately behind her the cultists/nuns were clucking with disapproval and generally nosing about the whole affair while not deigning to touch or otherwise interfere themselves, which sealed in my mind that they were in fact evangelical Christian nuns. The Hindu girl and her relatives, on the other hand, were deep in the throes of a tittie-inspired psychological collapse, and had dramatically withdrawn from the world, focusing with all the intent imaginable on a small Hindu prayer book from which they were desperately repeating prayers and not lifting their eyes even for an instant.

The conductors at this point mostly had their hands full with the children, who aside from not being versed in the bus-riding etiquette of modern peoples, were also just generally being rambunctious young boys, shouting, hanging out the door, and so on. While this all unfolded, another group of Jarawa loomed on the road ahead. They seemed to have weapons and the two groups shouted back and forth as the bus approached. Then, obviously in great cheer and jest, but completely mind-blowing nonetheless, the group of shrieking Jarawa on the road proceeded to assail the sides of our bus with a barrage of stone-tipped spears. This stands above all other incidents as the craziest fucking thing that has ever happened to me on an Indian bus, blowing engine fires, landslides, and struggling livestock all out of the water.

At some point, the children all demanded to be let down and were ejected from the bus with great enthusiasm. I say "at some point" because only residents of this very jungle could possibly have any idea where they were. "Stop by the 17,938th tree on the left", they must have said, because there was no other distinguishing feature for miles. The man and woman remained aboard, and when at length we approached a police checkpoint they were made to crouch and conceal themselves behind piles of luggage, lest we all get in some kind of shit with the cops who are supposed to be keeping us apart. Finally, however, we came upon another group of Jarawa standing by the road with a sullen-looking cop standing guard over them. The conductors somehow compelled the Jarawa to disembark and the lonely policemen greeted them with the unmistakable look of a man standing in the jungle with an unused rifle and a gaggle of misbehaving aboriginals, slowly counting the days until his pension. As the woman rose from her perch, her entire little skirt carelessly slid down to her ankles, revealing all beneath. The bus was stunned into silence as the woman politely but slowly and without much concern lifted her skirt back up to where she wanted it. I however, thought it was fabulous, not for any prurient reason, but because it was simply the perfect finale -I hesitate to say "climax"- to the whole ridiculous episode.

We left the reserve and the Jarawa behind us and finally came to the crossing for Baratang Island. They tell you Baratang is a nice little island where you can go look at nature, but I will inform you that its sole purpose in the universe is to force the Andaman Trunk Road over a pair of ferries. Some people apparently look forwards to this part of the journey. I have said my piece before about people who romanticize travel by boat, but just let me add that you must be new to Asia indeed if the words "Indian ferry" conjure up for you any sort of magic. Apart from the fact that in the newspapers the words "Indian Ferry" are usually followed by the words "Sinks, Killing Dozens", I knew that this ferry trip was goint to entail a lot of standing around a smelly rustbucket in the hot sun with little thought given to the conveniences of shade or seating, and it was so. Then, courtesy of delightful Baratang Island, we were soon again on another ferry, making the crossing the Middle Andaman.

Middle Andaman sucks. End of story. It's big, it's boring, and the bland fields and lumber yards by the road only make you reminisce about the jungle and the lovely dragonfly you saw by palm frond #73,432.

Hours of Middle Andaman ensued, and then, by the grace of the Surveyor, we found that the roads on either side of the channel separating Middle Andaman from North Andaman were actually aligned with eachother, and therefore could be connected by a bridge.

North Andaman is for the most part as empty as can be. The bulk of the island is an impassable tropical wilderness, and after yet more winding through the forest we finally arrived in the small agricultural colonies at its northern end. We popped out of the canyons of green and into a land of small fields, where the brilliant yellow-green rice paddies sat shimmering after monsoon rains on the flatlands, and isles of jungle jotted out of every spot of steep ground. Buffaloes splashed freely among the fields and at intervals stooped figures were shin-deep in the paddies, weeding their modest crops and fetching tools from their bamboo-thatched houses. With great indifference our bus finally chugged to a halt in Diglipur, the main town of the north. Then, with equally great determination to the bus's indifference, Girlface and I got out of Diglipur, because it looked hopeless.

While the town itself was pathetic and grubby, the people to me looked fascinating. They had a look about them I certainly did not expect. Many of them seemed to hail from odd corners of Asia, and I was not wring. A great many refugees have ended up here, one of the few areas of India where there is yet unsettled arable land. Many were Bengalis, as evidenced by the names of the towns... Durgapur, Kalipur, Kalighat. Someone clearly missed their Mother-god. The faces of others spoke of more distant lands, and sure enough many told me they were Nepalis, Burmese, Indonesian, and even a number of people who said they were from the various oppressed hill-tribes of northern Burma.

We eventually settled ourselves in the coastal village of Kalipur, where we rented a bamboo hut from a cheery Tamil woman of apparently Pentecostal Christian bent. Her entire household, which were of the curious Asian hodgepodge I described, were also Christians and said that were not Catholics, but of the "Hoely Espeereet" type of Christian. This, I learned, meant that they listened to praise music and watche Tamil-language evangelical TV at nearly all hours of the day and night. Girlface and I spent four days in the hut, sometimes going out to the immaculate, undeveloped beach where some isolated mangroves backed onto a highly incongruous row of pine trees and the jungle hung over the mountains around the bay casting dark shadows even when the monsoon clouds were lifted. It rained much of the time, and I mean it really, really rained. We spent many hours huddled in the hut listening to the water pound on the roof as if each drop was a soldier in a wet, furious army told to seize our drying laundry no matter the cost.

At night of the second day of rains, the torrent faded to a patter, and over the dripping we heard a wailing man moving about the grounds. We couldn't see him but his voice moved to and fro in an ecstatic frenzy in an unknown tongue that bespoke some strange shamanic ritual. The blinds of the family's home were drawn and I almost didn't want to know what was going on within. Then, piercing the night came the cries of "Hallelujah! Hallelujah!" I swear, I will never see a Southern Baptist minister speaking in tongues and flailing about at the pulpit again without thinking of the night I was mesmerized by a hidden Tamil Christian singer. I tell you, this place is eery even from the most harmless things.

I slept fitfully. Perhaps odd Christian worship was still going on and the cries slipping into my half-conscious mind. I dreamt of magic and spells and animistic conjurations. Awaking to Girlface's prodding, I saw what she was so intent on drawing my attention to: our bed full of dark, bean-shaped cocoons that had appeared in the night. What freakish insectoid form they were I do not know, but I do know this: whatever left them were heinous fucking bastards that ate into the stitching of my clothes, severed the cords of our hanging bags, and indeed assailed with a passion anything string-like in its shape. They ate right through and severed one side of my favorite pair of earphones. Mother. Fuckers. Days later, these vile demonspawn hatchlings are still appearing in our luggage in the most deep and unlikely places and we are disposing of them with the greatest malice. Even more have been annihilated by Girlface's wrath than my own. They really should not have fucked with her pink shawl, as several unborn generations have now discovered on their short-circuited lifecycle to and from the bowels of Hell.

But there are more rainstorms, more strange shadows, and more vile bugs in these islands, and we are going to go from end to end of this twilight archipelago and face them all. Really, seriously, they should not have fucked with her pink shawl.