Travelers' Tales India

by James O'Reilly

  The boy said, “That was Mrs. Montagu. There’s a lovely painting of her, upstairs, as a girl with long, long hair.”

  His father said quietly, “A very interesting woman,” and came into the room. Lithe, calm, misleadingly fierce-looking with his black beard, Ratanjit Singh had a kind of slippered tranquility that put me at ease. He put his hands in his pockets and said, “She was a great friend of my parents, so my wife and I look after her. She was born in 1892, in India, and lived here until she was seven. Then she went back to school in England for ten years. Her father wanted her to stay there, but she threatened to swim back if she had to. A long swim.”

  “What did her husband do?“ I asked.“She didn’t talk about him.”

  “Ah,” said Ratanjit. “Very strange. After settling here she went back to England only once, in her early twenties, and she married some handsome young man on a dare. It lasted less than a month. That’s when she came back.” He picked up the photograph. “She never married again, but she had a great love affair. With an army man here who was already married. It lasted almost thirty years. He went back just before our Independence, in 1947, and she never saw him again. A few years later he died.” He shook his head.“She was quite a beauty, as you can see. But she was very vain about her looks. She loved to read, but wouldn’t wear glasses, and when her eyes weakened she looked through a magnifying lens. Now she can’t read anymore.”

  Sooner or later the lurking shadow of separation takes definite shape; asserts itself as a harsh reality; a grim presence, whispering the inevitable question; which shall it be?...the rival claims of India and England; of husband and child.

  —Maud Dever, The Englishwoman in India, quoted in Plain Tales from the Raj, edited by Charles Allen

  I said, “What about her animals? I didn’t see any.”

  Ratanjit nodded. “She used to keep dozens, dogs and cats and thirteen parrots in her bedroom. Now there’s only the one.”

  Over tea we were joined by his wife, Pronoti, and their daughter, Mandira. We talked of foreigners’ expectations of India. Pronoti said, “I think it’s films that do the most damage. What was the film you talked of, Ratanjit? Octopussy? Full of snake charmers and fire eaters. People come to India and expect these things. And beggars, beggars, beggars. Tigers everywhere. And elephants.” She sighed wearily. “I’ve almost never seen a snake charmer.”

  It was time to go. Ratanjit walked me down the flagstone path, and said, as an afterthought, “Did Mrs. Montagu sing to you? No? It’s a shame. Sometimes she sings. She still has a lovely voice.” He smiled. “She remembers the old songs.”

  We shook hands, and he wandered back to the house. I stood there, watching the dusk descend and the lights begin to twinkle across the valleys and around me, making Simla an enchanted place.Voices floated to me, a monkey capered in the road; in a few hours those winding roads would be filigreed by moonlight. It was still day, though, an in-between time, and the bungalows were lordly among the trees. Ravens flew out over the pines and cedars; the mists were lifting. As I made my way back, a dark-eyed girl wearing the navy skirt and white blouse of a British schoolgirl passed me, humming to herself and plaiting her long, long hair.

  Anthony Weller is a writer and poet who lives in Gloucester, Massachusetts. His novels include Garden of the Peacocks and The Polish Lover, and he is the author of Days and Nights on the Grand Trunk Road: Calcutta to Khyber. His work has also appeared in such publications as GEO,Vogue, Gourmet, G.Q., Travel & Leisure, Pan, National Geographic, Condé-Nast Traveler, and The Paris Review.

  An Englishman in India is perpetually brushing against the familiar amid the exotic and strange. The familiarity, though, is almost all nostalgia. The Ambassador, India’s favorite car, is a fifties Morris. Mail-boxes are red. The upper middle classes remind you of Shire English, and public-school men. They remind you of the clubland heroes of Buchan and Sapper. They call each other Bunty and Junior and Bobby. They do indeed meet at the Club. They work hard, play hard, drink stiff ones and use a vocabulary that got shot down over the English Channel in 1942. Even when I spoke to someone my age, I had the impression of speaking to my grandfather as a young man.

  —Jason Goodwin, A Time for Tea: Travels through China and India in Search of Tea

  Slow Boat to the Islands

  JOSEPH R. YOGERST

  The Andaman Islands are as far from the mainland as you can get, but they are a good way to visit an India of yore.

  THERE’S NOTHING LIKE A BANANA BOAT TO GET YOU IN THE MOOD for the tropics, in this case the MV Yamuna, a rusty scow if there ever was one. Nothing like her namesake, the noble river that flows past the Taj Mahal, she is part of an old and somewhat decrepit fleet that serves the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal, India’s most isolated outpost.

  The decks of the Yamuna were already crowded with passengers and cargo by the time I boarded her in Port Blair, but I managed to stake a claim to the end of a rickety wooden bench beneath the smokestack. I knew I would be covered in soot by the time we reached Havelock Island, a day’s journey to the northeast, but I felt fortunate to be seated rather than curled up in a tiny space on the deck like the Bihari peasants at my feet.

  We soon cleared the harbor into open waters. My companion for this journey was an energetic young man with dark hair and a bushy mustache. His name was Neeraj, and like many Indians, he offered an eclectic repertoire: he wasn’t merely a guide, but the owner of a fax service and computer dealership, the head of the student union at the local university, a radio DJ, an aspiring roller-skating enthusiast in the Andamans. (In Port Blair, Neeraj had rolled up a pants leg to show me his skating injuries. “I am still learning to brake,” he had said earnestly.)

  I looked around at my neighbors. Sitting next to me was a priest, Father Peter Soares, from the old Portuguese enclave of Goa on the west coast of India. He was on his way to tend to the spiritual needs of eighty Catholic families on Havelock, but he’d done some traveling of his own.

  “I’ve been to Reno!” Father Peter exclaimed. He said that his visit to Nevada was part of a religious tour of America, but I couldn’t resist the obvious question: “Father, did you gamble?”

  He avoided the question with a sly smile and launched into a sermon on the tribulations of being a priest in the Andamans, where he and two other priests were responsible for more than seven thousand people in twenty-seven parishes on three islands.

  Meanwhile on the bridge, a couple of Swedes (blond, tanned, and robust) were hawking a watch (gold, cheap, probably a Bangkok knockoff) to the ship’s engineer. His final offer was five hundred rupees, the equivalent of about seventeen bucks. The Swedes appeared to waiver and finally accepted, stuffing the grubby notes into their cutoff jeans. They held their poker faces until the engineer departed, then they grinned.

  Foreigners need a permit to visit the Andaman Islands. (The Nicobar Islands are off limits to non-Indian tourists.) The permit allows foreigners to stay in South Andaman, Middle Andaman, Little Andaman, (tribal reserves on these islands are out of bounds) Bharatang, North Passage, Neil, Havelock, and Long islands. On North Andaman foreigners may stay only in Diglipur.

  Day trips are permitted to Ross, Viper, Cinque, Narcondum, Interview, Brother and Sister islands, but currently there are regular boats only to Ross and Viper islands. Boats are allowed to stop at volcanic Barren Island, but disembarkation is not allowed and, as yet, there are no regular services. All the islands of the Mahatma Gandhi National Marine Park are open except Boat, Hobday, Twin, Tarmugli, Malay, and Pluto.

  The permit is valid for up to 30 days.

  —Hugh Finlay, et al., India - a travel survival kit

  Late in the day we neared the coast of Havelock. Thick jungle covered much of the island, but there were chalk cliffs along the eastern shore, and from a perch high on the palisades, a white-bellied eagle swooped low over the water to snatch a fish from just below the surface.

  The Yamuna chugged gently around a bend, and the Havelock jetty c
ame into view. As the boat docked, Neeraj leapt over the side and raced into the village ahead of the other passengers. I had no idea what he was up to. Father Soares turned as he began to disembark and gave me the same sly smile. His Reno smile.

  Neeraj soon returned and implored me to follow. Our destination was the Public Works Department bungalow, a modest wood-framed building in a grove of coconut trees near the sea. “I have been to Havelock before,” said Neeraj. “I know you must run to get a room.”

  The significance of his little sprint didn’t dawn on me until I discovered the bungalow was the only place to stay on Havelock and that it had just two rooms. One was reserved for the visiting commissioner of police. We had the other. Everyone else from the Yamuna was turned away. The two Swedes were forced to sleep on the floor of the logging operation’s office; a group of Germans bedded down on the beach; a honeymoon couple from Bombay shared space with the café owner and his family.

  Transportation was another challenge. A rickety public bus sputtered between the two villages on the island, but we wanted to go deep into the jungle to see work elephants, and that could take days on foot. The ever clever Neeraj, however, came up with a solution. He convinced a local lumberjack to give us a lift in his truck.

  The three of us were well into the thick jungle when, rounding a bend, we came face to face with an Andaman mammoth. The huge animal, named Sultan, was the thirty-five-year-old leader of a gang of five elephants.

  Sultan flashed us a typical elephant grin and went about his work, pushing giant logs with the aid of two huge tusks. “Those teeth are worth a lot,” said Neeraj, obviously impressed by Sultan’s dental work.

  Astride the elephant’s shoulders was a young mahout--a refugee from Bangladesh--who directed Sultan with deft heels and gentle taps of a wooden stick on the animal’s forehead. But the elephant hardly needed prodding. He seemed eager to get on with his work and disappointed once the job was finished.

  The mahout jumped down and grabbed a huge papaya from a gunny sack. Sultan munched it down.

  Back at the Havelock waterfront, preparations were under way for a big Bengali wedding. A local girl was to marry a boy from Middle Andaman island, and most of the village women were immersed in the arrangements, fixing speakers to trees, hanging strings of colored lights, and cleaning the local temple.

  Neeraj and I ate fish-head curry and rice at a small café. Gas lamps flickered from the rafters, and a steady breeze blew in through the open windows, the portent of a rising storm. Soon it began to pour, a raging tropical rain that pounded its cadence along the metal roofs.

  Members of the wedding party dashed in from the dark. Would they be forced to postpone the celebration? They implored a small boy to light incense sticks beneath the picture of Krishna. And just like that the storm passed. There was a moment of silence, and then loud music roared down from the trees. Praise to Lord Krishna! The wedding was on!

  The celebration lasted until dawn, with dancing and singing among the coconut palms. Finally we all followed the bride and groom as they made their way to the beach. She was sobbing, barely able to stand, supported between her mother and younger sister.

  “The bride doesn’t want to leave Havelock,” said Neeraj. “She has never been away from this island. But now she must go live with her husband’s family.”

  The honeymooners piled into a canoe with an outboard engine and, with a gentle put put put, headed west, toward the dark green bulk of Middle Andaman island. It was just a half day away, but to the Havelock girl it must have seemed like a distant universe.

  I first heard about the Andaman Islands from Sherlock Holmes. That was more than a decade ago, on the London stage, during a performance of The Sign of Four, the Arthur Conan Doyle mystery that revolves around the theft of a treasure chest of priceless jewels from British India.

  Although he makes but a brief appearance, the key to the mystery is Tonga, an Andaman pygmy who turns up in England with a blowgun on a mission to retrieve the stolen treasure. I knew nothing about the Andamans, but over the years I read what I could about them--which wasn’t much. And in the course of my study I learned that Conan Doyle used some poetic license: there are no pygmies in the Andaman Islands, and the people there don’t use blowguns.

  To set the record straight, the Andamans—the northern part of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands—are a group of about two hundred or so islands and islets stretching south through the Bay of Bengal.

  The more settled areas of the archipelago seem like pieces of rural India that have been sliced off and cast adrift in the sea; bucolic scenes with thatched roof huts, naked boys on the back of muddy buffaloes, and women in silk saris with jugs of water perched on their heads who seem to move in slow motion across your field of vision.

  But many of the islands remain untamed, diverse landscapes ranging from coral reefs to volcanoes that have recently risen from the bottom of the sea. More than 85 percent of the land is jungle, including some of the more impressive stands of rain forest left in southern Asia, with gargantuan trees growing as high as a twenty-story building. The beaches are among the finest in the Indian Ocean, picture-postcard perfect, with a fringe of noble palms and fine white sand.

  Early accounts of the Andamans are filled with stories about shipwrecked sailors who wound up on the menu of island tribes. Indians from the mainland once called the place Timai Thevu—“Islands of Impurity”—because of their inhabitants’ reputation for carving up human flesh.

  Even Marco Polo (who apparently got his facts secondhand) jumped on the bandwagon: “The inhabitants are idolaters, and a most brutish and savage race, having heads, eyes, and teeth resembling those of canine species. Their dispositions are cruel and every person not of their own nation…they will kill and eat.”

  With reports like that, it’s not surprising that mariners generally steered clear of the Andamans. Finally, in 1788, British officials in India dispatched Lieutenant Archibald Blair to the islands to make the waters safe from pirates and cannibals. Blair, a noted surveyor, established the first permanent European settlement, which now bears his name.

  The British were less than impressed with their new subjects: short, stocky, dark people who lived deep in the forest. They were long thought to be related to African pygmies—perhaps shipwrecked slaves. Now, however, anthropologists feel they are “negrito” tribes, more closely linked to peoples of Australia and the western Pacific.

  The negritos shunned contact with outsiders and became murderously violent when strangers encroached on their terrain. After a few pitched battles, the British decided to forgo the idea of using them as workers and pretty much left them alone.

  Today the Andaman Islands’ administration shields the negrito tribes from the traumas of the modern world: pestilence and poverty, as well as tourists and missionaries.“We don’t want to bring them into the mainstream,” says Dr. Madhumala Chattopadhyay, an anthropological researcher in Port Blair. “We take the position that they should be isolated—for their own good.”

  Over the past three years Dr. Chattopadhyay has established friendly contact with both the Jarawa and Sentinelese, people who had spurned previous anthropological intrusions with a shower of spears and arrows.

  “There had been no recorded contact with the Sentinelese in the twentieth century,” she explained, adding that when anyone approached their shore, they fired arrows into the air and shouted threats. But Dr. Chattopadhyay knew that the tribesmen sometimes traded for coconuts with other negrito groups.

  “We approached the shore, but no one came out of the forest,” she said.“After half an hour we dropped a bag full of coconuts into the sea, and the Sentinelese came to collect them. They were afraid at first. They pointed arrows at us. But eventually they averted their weapons.”

  On the second trip the Sentinelese waded into the surf and climbed aboard the expedition boat. Soon the researchers were allowed to come ashore.

  I had applied for permission to visit the tribal reserves, b
ut each time I was rebuffed with a stock response: I might damage their cultural integrity, and they might damage me.

  “How dangerous can they be?” I asked one government official. The man gave me a deadpan look and said: “A Bengali settler was killed last year when he was found hunting on Jarawa land. They ran him through with a spear.”

  Now, two hundred years after the British first arrived, the Andamans have passed to Indian rule, but much of the island chain remains virtually unchanged from precolonial times.

  Only thirty-eight of the islands are inhabited and, in part because of tribal reserves and security concerns of the Indian military, only about a dozen are open to foreign visitors. In fact, you can overnight in only two of the islands—Havelock and South Andaman. That helps explain why only a few thousand foreigners reach the archipelago each year, most of them scuba divers or young backpackers who’ve heard about the islands by word of mouth.

  One morning on South Andaman island, I rose at dawn expecting to have a beach near Port Blair to myself.

  But the shore was already teeming with fishermen dragging nets onto the sand and sorting their catch into wicker baskets.

  Cows wandered up and down the strand, oblivious to the fish, intent on the hunt for discarded coconut husks, which they devoured with relish.

  A little later some early-bird tourists wandered down to the surf, and in the blink of an eye, an ice cream vendor pushed his cart from behind the palms. Not far behind was a distinguished looking man with a beard, crimson turban, and swagger stick in hand, walking swiftly in crisp military fashion, greeting bystanders but never breaking stride. Someone said he was governor-general of the islands on his morning jaunt along the beach.