The sail was in even worse shape than we had thought. The first two layers had disintegrated in numerous spots and were hanging like limp rags. All together, the sail had chafed though in eight places. I got to work right away, making patches for each of the rips, starting from the innermost tear, with each one getting larger and more difficult to repair as I worked towards the outside of the sail.
Our sewing machine wasn’t up to the task of penetrating the tough sailcloth, so I applied sail repair tape and patches of new Dacron and had to sew them on slowly by hand. It was difficult and painstaking work, and much more time consuming than I had expected. By the end of the day, Herbert had successfully ascended the mast and replaced the broken block, but I had fixed only three of the eight rips.
I got back to work early the next morning, enjoying the lovely scenery of the island as I sewed. Apart from three people walking on the beach, we hadn’t seen or heard anybody during our time in the bay. It seemed to belong only to the many birds whose joyous calls filled the clear morning air. By the middle of the afternoon, I still had the three largest tears to fix. As I worked in the cockpit, I could again see people on the beach, and soon thereafter I heard shouting and whistling.
Herbert came out and through the binoculars saw people waving branches and pieces of cloth in unmistakable gestures of invitation. We hadn’t intended to go ashore, but the people were so insistent we finally decided to hoist the dinghy and see what they wanted. In every island we had visited, without exception, the people had been friendly. We had no reason to assume it would be otherwise here.
Leaving the kids on board, Herbert and I took the dinghy ashore, where three dark-skinned men stood waiting for us. Even before we disembarked, however, we realized intuitively that something was wrong. As we got out of the dinghy, we went to each of the men with our arms extended to shake their hands. They, however, took our hands only reluctantly, and did not return our greetings or our smiles.
The minute we had finished dragging Junior onto the beach, a fourth man, older than the other three, suddenly stepped out of the bushes and stood before us, grim-faced and glaring.
Then, three more men emerged from the foliage where they, too, had been hiding, the green khaki of their military uniforms providing perfect camouflage. Each of the soldiers held a rifle in his hands, a long, greedy-looking weapon that gleamed darkly in the sunlight. With stony faces and hard eyes, the men silently stepped beside their leader and stood with legs slightly spread, creating a human wall in front of us.
The man whom we presumed to be the leader began to speak.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded. His English was good, spoken with an Indian accent.
We explained our situation and handed over our business card, on which the names of all five of us were printed. The man, dark, lean, middle-aged, and with a thin moustache that would have been fashionable in the 1930s, studied it carefully.
“You must bring your boat to Campbell’s Bay,” he finally announced. “You may not remain here. And you,” he continued, motioning to Herbert, “will stay here with my men. We will take you by Jeep.”
“Oh no,” said Herbert, “if we are going to move the boat, I have to do it. My wife can’t do it alone.”
“What about your crew?”
“But they are just children!”
At the news that the three other names on the card belonged to children, the leader turned to his men for a rapid discussion in Hindi. It was decided that he and two soldiers would come to Northern Magic and escort us to our destination. The reason for this was not explained. It was clear enough that we had no choice in the matter. As they got into the dinghy, tip-toeing so as not to get their army boots wet, the men clicked on the safeties of their rifles.
The kids were inside the boat and didn’t realize we had returned with visitors, never mind uniformed visitors with guns. They didn’t seem too fazed when I told them about our sudden change of plan. Each of the boys came into the cockpit and introduced himself, and there was a definite lightening of the mood when the soldiers saw we really were a young family and not a band of spies, drug runners, or whatever else they had imagined. Our cockpit was full of sail and sewing materials, and I showed them all the work I had completed so far, and the rags of torn sail I still had to finish. They did look impressed.
As we settled into the cockpit, I asked the leader for his name.
“Mohammed … Mohammed Anam,” he said, after a moment’s hesitation. “I’m Muslim, you know,” he added irrelevantly.
“And what is your position?” I inquired.
He hesitated again. “Let’s just say I’m a police officer.”
During the two and a half hours it took us to get to Campbell’s Bay, Mr. Anam asked us many questions but answered very few himself. Some of his questions were very personal, detailed questions about our finances, our religious beliefs, and our views on child rearing. These were topics that might have been more comfortable if we hadn’t been sitting at the wrong end of a loaded gun. Neither of the soldiers, who were well-trimmed, good-looking young Indian men, said a word. They just stood on deck protecting their weapons from the splashing. Each of the men, in turn, went inside the cabin and looked around.
Herbert and I tried to pretend they were our guests, and we were taking them on a pleasure cruise. In fact, we were very much on edge. We had no idea why our boat had been commandeered, why we were being brought to the bay, the purpose of this strange and insistent questioning, and what would happen when we got there. I developed a splitting headache.
Mr. Anam instructed us to write a letter to the chief of police describing our situation. When I asked him the chief’s name, he said just to write “To: Chief of Police.” When I came to the point in my narrative where I described meeting him and the other men on the beach, I asked for the spelling of his name.
“Uh, just put, ‘I met you and your men,’ ” he said, with some discomfiture. Obviously, he, himself, was the chief of police. For some reason he hadn’t wanted us to know that.
By the time we arrived in the bay, Herbert and I, struggling to maintain polite conversation as though we were guests at a dinner party instead of prisoners, were feeling queasy – and it wasn’t seasickness, although I must confess I was secretly wishing that very fate upon our unwelcome guests. The chief had been regaling us with tales of other yachts whose crews he had sent to prison and whose vessels he had confiscated. He proudly pointed out fifteen or twenty wooden fishing boats that littered the shore, evidence of his extraordinary diligence to his duty of keeping unwanted visitors away. All of them had been seized from unfortunate souls who, like us, had entered Nicobari waters without permission.
We asked him why visitors were not allowed. He explained that there were some tribes of native peoples still living naked in the jungle in the island’s interior. He seemed preoccupied with the tribes’ lack of clothing, mentioning this fact at least half a dozen times. It was to protect these primitive, naked jungle people from gawking foreigners, he explained, that boats were not allowed to visit.
He told us to anchor next to a yellow fishing boat that had come all the way from Sri Lanka. “Actually, our coastguard found that boat drifting; its motor had failed and it ended up in our waters,” he said. “We confiscated it, and its crew has been in jail for the past month. They will be up for trial in the next few weeks. They will be convicted, of course.”
“What will their sentence be?” I asked.
“Oh, they’ll go to jail for at least six months.”
The chief took our passports and left, saying he would submit a report to his superiors and wait for their instructions. It was now too late to do any more work on the sail, so we ate supper and went to bed. It was a nerve-racking night.
Next morning I began sewing as soon as it was light. When I climbed into the cockpit, I was surprised to see two armed soldiers standing alertly on board the Sri Lankan boat beside us. Obviously, the police chief intended to make sure we d
idn’t escape in the darkness. We really were under house arrest.
My final sail repairs took almost all day. All in all, I had spent more than twenty hours fixing the damage. During the afternoon, we were surprised to hear another sailboat calling in on VHF radio, asking for permission to stop to repair their steering system. Although their initial request was refused, they continued to make their request until the port control official did not respond further. We assumed he was calling the chief of police on the phone.
In the meantime, Herbert got on the radio, painfully conscious that everything he said to the other yacht could be overheard. He quickly told them about our situation, hoping to warn them away if their repair was not absolutely crucial. “We’ve been brought here … uh … not under our own will,” he explained delicately. “I strongly advise you not to stop without permission.”
Later that afternoon, having gained the reluctant approval of the port control, the fifty-foot yacht Marco Polo, with crew from Italy and New Zealand, anchored near us and was immediately visited by Chief Anam and five armed guards. The passports of the four crew members were taken away, just as ours had been. By nightfall, they shared our predicament. Their repairs were by now also finished, but, like us, they had inexplicably been denied permission to leave.
We accepted the situation stoically, but Romano, the volatile captain of Marco Polo, did not. Both we and the four people on Marco Polo spent the next day under guard on our boats, cooling our heels – or, in the case of Romano, steaming with livid anger. We had no idea when, or even if, we would be released.
That night, we received a visit from the police chief. He was rowed over to our boat by a native islander of the Nicobari tribe (clad in shorts, thank goodness, or else I might have been forced to stare, and that would have gotten me into even more trouble). We had earlier seen him climbing to the top of a tall coconut palm as nimbly as a monkey. Police Chief Anam had brought some ripe bananas and a bunch of drinking coconuts, which the tribesman hacked open with a machete and passed around.
“Do you have any alcohol?” the chief asked, “Beer, or whisky?”
We explained that although we had a few beers, they weren’t cold. That was fine, said the chief, and he and his two companions settled happily down in our cockpit with their warm beers, throwing the empty cans overboard as they were emptied. The tribesman stayed in the rowboat.
“Don’t you have any whisky?” the chief asked again, when the beers were gone.
“I think we might have one very old bottle, half empty,” I answered truthfully. “Do you want me to look for it?”
He paused to consider. “No,” he finally said, “I’ll take more beers.”
We had a spare set of binoculars on board, and Herbert and I had earlier decided that we might offer them to the chief as a token of our esteem.
“As a gift?” the police chief clarified, as Herbert handed them over.
No, as a bribe, you freeloader! I thought vengefully, but instead I smiled. “Yes, as a gift from us to you, to thank you for your hospitality.” I said this sweetly, without choking even once on my words. “Perhaps you can use it to spot more illegal yachts.”
When our meagre store of beers was sufficiently depleted, the tribesman rowed the chief and his cronies over to Marco Polo. Herbert and I went to bed wondering how the crew of that boat would feel about the Happy Hour that was about to be imposed upon them.
Next morning we asked how Marco Polo’s late night visit had gone. Steve, the amiable Kiwi skipper, smiled and pantomimed with his hands the opening of many liquor cabinets. The chief had obviously had better luck aboard Marco Polo than he did on Northern Magic.
“I’m surprised he wanted so much alcohol,” I commented. “He’s Muslim, you know.”
“Hmmm, that’s strange,” answered Steve. “He told us he is Hindu.”
The next day we were given permission – on account of the children needing exercise – to go ashore. At a predetermined time, we landed the dinghy and set foot on the southernmost point in India, looking curiously around at the many people, who looked curiously back at us. There were beautiful women in colourful saris, walking with large flat baskets on their heads, dark-skinned men in white undershirts with dots of colour on their foreheads, shy young children in crisp, white school uniforms, and countless cows, chickens, and ducks. Almost all of the cattle had large open sores on their necks surrounded by hordes of flies. One was lying on the ground while a rooster pecked daintily away at the bloody wound. On the beach, washed up among the other refuse, was an Anker beer can from Indonesia we had served to the chief the night before.
As the children occupied themselves on a tire swing, Herbert and I spent the rest of the morning in the police station, inexplicably watching the police chief fill out paperwork. We were meant, I think, to be impressed with the stylish way he stamped and signed the papers on his desk. Romano, also forced to watch this display of bureaucratic machismo, was fit to be tied. Finally, Herbert cleared his throat and asked me, “Don’t the kids have to do some homework?”
“Oh yes,” I remembered brightly. “I think we’d better be getting back to the boat. It’s important for the kids to keep up on their work, you know.”
Romano watched with narrowed eyes as we were granted permission to leave. He was obviously wondering what excuse he could give to be able to return to his boat as well.
About half an hour later, Romano came knocking. “We’ve got to do something!” he said frantically. “We just can’t sit here like this. How long is he going to hold us? We’ve got to develop a plan! We need a strategy! If my government heard about this, I’d be out of here in a day! This is intolerable!”
While we were talking about the necessity of diplomatic intervention, the police rowboat arrived. Chief Anam had asked us several times if we needed any fruits or vegetables. Figuring he was wanting to make a little money selling us supplies, we had obliged him by placing an order. Now his soldiers had arrived with two small plastic bags of groceries.
Romano, frustrated with our passive, cordial approach, grabbed the opportunity to speak to the men. “I would like to talk to your captain,” he said, in his delicious, exaggerated Italian accent, most of his words ending in superfluous vowels. “Not about boats, and problems, you understand,” he continued, “but about life.” He pronounced these last two words “about-a life-a.”
The soldiers looked back at him in total bewilderment. Behind Romano’s back, Herbert and I made motions to indicate that this weird guy was not with us.
“Go and talk to your chief,” ordered Romano imperiously. “If he has time to see me, wave to me from shore and I will come. Tell him I want to talk about life.”
Half an hour later, Romano got his summons. As he set off to talk about life, Herbert and I debated whether setting him loose was really a very wise strategy. We wondered how the angry, opinionated captain and the police chief with the Napoleon complex would get along.
Several hours later there was a knock on our boat. Romano was back. He had no progress to report and was depressed and troubled by the chief’s continued evasiveness. Then, he went despondently to face his angry crew, who were on the point of mutiny. Later, we learned that all of them had voted against coming to the Nicobars, and it was only at Romano’s insistence that they had stopped at all. In fact, they hadn’t really needed to repair anything. Romano had wanted to buy some lobster.
Herbert and I were getting ready for bed when there was yet another knock. This time, it was the enigmatic police chief himself with, as always, a retinue.
“I have your passports, and you are free to go,” he announced. “The captain of Marco Polo was in my office all afternoon crying about his crew members missing their flights, so I made a special effort and called up my superiors to explain the situation. I didn’t need to do this, you understand,” he added meaningfully.
“They were talking about laying charges,” he continued, “but I assured them that both of you had truly stopped
in distress, and I managed to convince them that no charges needed to be laid.” There was a dramatic pause, enabling us to properly reflect upon the great lengths to which he had gone on our behalf.
“So you may leave. I will be back in the morning.”
We were stunned. Romano’s little tête-à-tête had worked. Or perhaps the chief, after a couple of hours’ exposure to the stubborn Italian, realized it was in his interest to get rid of him as quickly as possible – otherwise he’d have to spend every afternoon listening to Romano’s long-winded monologues. In any event, we were free, and in the morning we broke the good news to the kids. Jonathan was the winner of the “Release from Arrest in the Nicobars” betting pool we had set up the afternoon before.
At nine the next morning our good friend police chief Anam arrived at Northern Magic for the last time. He was in a jovial mood and full dress uniform. He looked magnificent. His lean frame was topped with a tall officer’s hat, he had decorations on his breast, and he even carried a natty little black and brass swagger stick. With a monocle in his eye and an Aryan face, he could have passed for a general in the Third Reich.
Herbert and I had been wrestling with the question of whether the chief was a rogue, toying with us while raiding our liquor cabinets – and, presumably, at some point, our wallets – or just a decent and basically powerless guy doing his job and trying to be friendly. Depending on the day, the hour, or the minute, either seemed to be true. Now he presented us with a beautiful shell, and the scale definitely began tipping towards “decent.”
For some reason, I had felt compelled to put together some tiny gifts for the chief and his wife, in return for his “hospitality.” I was gamely continuing our little charade that we were his guests, not his prisoners, to the last. Herbert had looked at me strangely when I showed him the bag, and just shrugged, “Well, you do whatever you want.”
The Voyage of the Northern Magic: A Family Odyssey Page 23
