The Naked Tourist

by Lawrence Osborne

  The armed guards got on the buses.

  The three-vehicle convoy moved off, and Vinod put on some pop music, a band called Dhoom, which means “pleasure” in Hindi. I had the impression that it reassured him amid so much annoyingly pointless nature.

  We ate our sandwiches and I stared glumly at hours of passing forest, the forest that really is so boring when it is genuinely wild and is being watched from a car that cannot stop. In the airless heat, immense gurjun trees stood perfectly still above glades of pandanus palms. We passed logging parties with packs of elephants clearing spaces with chains and saws, the foremen packing rifles. On some parts of the road, dirt-poor Bengali farms had sprung up, carving a few paddies out of the jungle, their skinny buffalo tended by boys in dhotis, but soon they seemed suffocating, like model villages built inside caves. There were even occasional repair crews armed with primitive box-shaped steamrollers like armored cars of the Russian Revolution and buckets of pitch. They looked up as we passed, with the haunted eyes of helots.

  I asked Vinod if we might pass a Jarawa on the road.

  “Very bad guys.” He scowled. “Thieving guys.”

  A subtle tension was now emerging between us and it had something to do with the black men. Was I siding with them against the Indians?

  “Vinod,” I said, “I’ll give you thirty dollars if you stop when we see a Jarawa.”

  But he shook his head.

  “They are watching us from the bus!”

  And he was indeed driving right behind the bus, his hand pressed almost continually on the horn. The bus driver was doing the same as the convoy took the endless hairpin turns. With three horns never desisting and the screams of Dhoom, we were a caravan of cacophony. It began to grate on my nerves.

  “Vinod, can you get off the horn?”

  He looked back with contempt, as if I was the last person to offer advice about this wretched road.

  “We drive like this, sir.”

  “Yes, but off the horn for thirty seconds, can you?”

  The head jiggled, and the horn continued droning. It was of course an anti-Jarawa siren. I put in my earplugs. In the middle of a pristine jungle, in earplugs!

  At the tip of South Andaman Island you have to take a flat-bottomed ferry across a narrow strait to the small island of Baratang. The forest turns into mangrove swamp studded with frilly orange flowers. The Indians got off their rattling buses decorated with magic eyes and weeping faces of Jesus, under which the words “Jesus Saves!” could be seen again and again. Hinduism seems to have receded before a wrathful monotheism more in keeping with frontier realities. The Indians got off their buses and stretched their legs, waiting for the ferry. Their eyes anxiously scanned the forest. They knew they weren’t meant to be here, that it wasn’t their land. The midday heat scrunched their faces. Where were the funny black men? I walked down to the stone jetties, from where the shrilling cicada song of the jungle projected over flat, glassy waters. I was feeling jarred and irritated, though now suddenly seduced by the mangroves standing above the water on multiple legs, like huge spiders. “Back to the Stone Age”? The ferry was not the Steinzeit, but a hundred yards into the forest might be another matter. An end to the comfortable rituals of beds, chairs, and washbasins, an end to TV world and “travel.” But there was no way of getting in there.

  On a comatose boat, we crossed over to Baratang Island.

  On Baratang’s northern side yet another ferry takes you over to the much larger but sparsely populated Middle Andaman Island. We drove due north, through lonelier forests. It took the whole day to cross the island, and Vinod and I haggled about the horn and other things. I was growing furious. Each time he honked, I snapped at him.

  “Not again, Vinod. I said don’t use the horn.”

  His head jiggled and he put on his gangster shades.

  “I am driver,” he muttered.

  A few miles into Middle Andaman we came to the hideous pit of Rangat, its principal village. Like all the settlements of the Andamans, Rangat boasts little more than a main street of chai stalls, markets offering the cheaper debris of modernity, and the supply stores of impoverished farmers. After Independence in 1947, the Andamans were settled mostly by Bengalis ready to farm and log a formidable wilderness. After the 1973 war in Bangladesh, a flood of Bengali-speaking refugees joined them. I bought some mangoes and wandered around, the object of stares containing neither empathy nor curiosity. Vinod sat on the car and smoked. He waved to a passing pretty girl as if he knew her. I went to have a look at a small lodging called Dream Hotel encrusted into the side of a hill of debris and surrounded by dogs, but Vinod protested that for that night’s accommodation he had called ahead to reserve a room in a “four-star” government place ominously called the Hawk’s Bill Nest. “Very fine place,” he said urgently, staring at me through his shades like a hit man. “You will like it, sir.”

  The Hawk’s Bill Nest lay on a lonely road near the sea, a pale orange wreck that had not seen a visitor in seven months. The gates were rusted, a few letters missing from the sign, and firmly padlocked. A drowsy youth in a loincloth appeared; he stared through the bars for a long time before producing a key.

  By now I was beginning to have doubts about this whole enterprise. Into what hotelier nihilism was I now headed? As the gates creaked open, I felt a neocolonial dread.

  Government hotels in India are not really hotels; they are casual employment outlets for young men on permanent vacation. A group now roused themselves like sunning puppies disturbed by a bone thrown from a passing car. They looked stunned to see us, raising weary heads from the backgammon board where they had probably been playing for weeks uninterrupted. Alas, there was not a capable woman in sight, which meant that nothing would be done well. This was to be an exclusively male form of torture.

  The rooms were named after nearby islands. Mine was named Barren, which was appropriate since there was almost nothing in it. No sheets, a single bar of Ayurvedic soap, and no water in the bathroom. A panel of crude switches looked like something from Apollo 12. Eye-killing lamps were fixed to the wall like interrogation instruments, one red, one blue. Would they start flashing alternately in the middle of the night? A maze of concrete passages, stairways, and iron grilles completed the tropical prison look while downstairs a flashy photo mural of a beach dominated the dining room, similarly barren. There was no one there. In the lobby, the boys had gone back to their backgammon board sprinkled with baby powder. They were all thin as poles, with huge rubber flip-flops. When I asked for a towel—just one—they groaned and rolled their eyes, as if being asked for proof of the existence of God. The dialogue unfolded with feverish colonial misery:

  “Ah, towel we are not having, sir.”

  “Sheets?”

  The heads jiggled. “Sheets we are not having, sir.”

  “Where are the sheets?”

  “Sheets locked up in kitchen, sir.”

  “Well, unlock the kitchen.”

  Heads jiggling. “Not having key, sir.”

  “Well, get the bloody key, then.”

  “Cook is having key, sir.”

  “And where is the cook?”

  “Cook in Rangat, sir.”

  Unable to think of anything else to do, I made one of them ride into Rangat to get some whiskey. He came back with two of the local brands: Antiquity and a noxious brew from Seagram’s called Royal Stag. There was a stag on the label. It was a mix of scotch and “carefully selected Indian grain spirits.” I went to my room, locked the door, and drank the Antiquity.

  Presently, Vinod offered to drive me down to nearby Amakunj Beach. Night was falling and a storm gathering.

  A wild forest of Alexandrian laurel comes to Amakunj’s edge, dropping whole trees on the beach as driftwood. I waded out into a gray sea. Lightning ripped into the haze and the blue shapes of small barracuda flashed about as if disturbed by the aerial electricity. Stepping into the forest, I ripped off a pandanus fruit and tried to eat it. If the Jarawa ate
it, why not me? In the menacing dusk, a few aquamarine fishing boats skimmed past, gunwales dripping with blood, but I must have been invisible—too incredible an apparition?—because no one waved. The pandanus tasted like unripe grapefruit, but I ate it anyway and, sitting on the coral drenched in seeds, I had the first sense of being somewhere on the edge of the world but not really in it.

  At midnight, the cook arrived drunk on a moped, full of swaggering malice. He had the storeroom key. His eyes were yellow in the kerosene light and I had to haggle the key out of him. We went to the storeroom and he snatched out a towel and a sheet.

  “Inventory!” he cried, by way of explaining something.

  I went up to Barren and took my Royal Stag onto the balcony, overlooking a strangely autumnal-looking sea. I felt morose, belligerent. I began drinking heavily. A blood moon emerged through tamarinds; the gurjuns creaked like a ship’s rigging. An hour later the electricity went off, never to return. On the road, I saw shadows moving about like disoriented smugglers. I stayed awake until four, when we were due to move off again, and when the dawn tea arrived with a plate of wet biscuits, an ant crawled up from the biscuit onto my lips and bit me in the eye. Within an hour, I looked like Quasimodo. The boys were spooked. Vinod smiled cruelly, and in Rangat we stopped to get some antiseptic ointment.

  The day’s drive was exhausting. At the tip of Middle Andaman lies the torpid flyspeck of Mayabunder, its bluffs looking out to a low horizon of intense greenness—the empty jungles of North Andaman.

  On the bluffs stood a government hotel and restaurant, to which Vinod took me because it was “on the itinerary.” Whose itinerary? I wondered. There was a spectacular gazebo built right on the water at the bottom of a dizzying flight of steps. I labored down to get close to the sea’s cool and to watch the waves smashing on the rocks. After forty minutes, a scowling waiter appeared, clearly annoyed at having been obliged to make the same trip down. He had a Salvador Dalí mustache and polished shoes.

  “Drinks cannot be here, sir. Please, upstairs.”

  And he ushered me out of the gazebo and back up the four hundred steps. There was another gazebo up on the cliff with beautiful views, but the shade shook his head again. No, that gazebo was “closed” as well. Visitors had to eat indoors.

  “Why?”

  “It is rules.”

  Perhaps it was the eye. He was looking fearfully at it.

  “An ant bit me,” I said. But his nod was doubtful.

  The dining room inside was suffocating but decked out in High Alpine style. Perforated lace curtains, pine chairs, and exhortational wall pictures of excessive surreality, mostly to do with Switzerland and snow. Under one view of a high ski slope was what looked like a slogan for Viagra: “Harder the rise, happier the taste!” Vinod went off to eat by himself, and I was left alone with the fried fish and dal. A youth snored under the washbasin, as if in the grip of a lunchtime nightmare. What was I to think of this mad setting? Obviously the hotel was empty, and who the hell ever came to Mayabunder? One is so used to the infrastructure of mass convenience, to collective conviviality and ease, that as soon as one drops out of this system a sense of paranoia comes quickly. I felt that I was inside some sort of totalitarian contraption designed to make me feel as if I was on holiday.

  I went over to Vinod’s table and rudely told him that for the next leg of the journey he was to drive a little faster and keep off the horn. In reply, he laughed at my bloated golf ball eye.

  “Do you always come to this dump on your tour?”

  He nodded sadly. The Indian families liked it.

  “You do not like, sir?”

  I was beginning to feel that Vinod was playing me for a sucker. I was always being rushed along, even when there was obviously no need whatsoever to rush. We had left at an ungodly hour so that we could catch the ferry on time in Mayabunder, but now it turned out that there was no ferry leaving yet, that in fact there was no ferry at all: we would be walking across a bridge to North Andaman, a bridge that had been damaged by the tsunami and could not be crossed in a vehicle. A different car would therefore be waiting for us on the other side. That car wouldn’t be there for another four hours, however. He shrugged. That was why we were in the alpine restaurant.

  A journey is never a simple thing. The hitches and the boredom, the missed connections and the empty hours are the price that must be paid for leaving one’s real life and entering an unreal one. On the other hand, this temporary unreal life has its advantages. You have nothing to think about except the logistics of the journey itself, in all their maddening detail and stupidity. With time even these details take on a poetic urgency. How far is it to the bridge? Is the car waiting on the far side of said bridge? It is only when you are thoroughly submerged in such questions that you begin to become unconscious.

  On the way to the bridge we stopped at a beach and ate some mangoes. While I stripped off and plunged into the water, Vinod remained impeccably dressed and watched me from the car, eating his mango with a penknife. Everything I did seemed to be in contrast to him, in antagonism to him, though I couldn’t have said why. Between here and the bridge, however, he didn’t use the horn once. We got out at the checkpoint and hired two porters to carry our bags to the far side. The bridge, it turned out, had suffered a three-inch dislocation during the earthquake and couldn’t be repaired. A gang of men rolled oil drums across with us, and on the far side a drunk Karen with penis exposed insulted us all in broken Hindi. The water was black, slow moving. Our new car was waiting in the shade of the trees.

  The anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, who roamed the South Seas a century ago just before the age of Margaret Mead and Lévi-Strauss, has described the ecstasy of being immersed in primitivity, an emotion that we can feel less and less. There are moments, he wrote, “when you merge with objective reality—pure nirvana.”

  When Paul Gauguin was on Tahiti in the 1890s, he made a valiant try at understanding Tahitian culture. But ultimately that wasn’t why he was there. He was there to learn how to take off his clothes. In his little book Noa Noa, we have an account of what could be called Crusoe Syndrome:

  My body, constantly nude, no longer suffers from the sun.

  Civilization is falling away from me little by little.

  I am beginning to think simply, to feel only very little hatred for my neighbor—rather, to love him.

  All the joys—animal and human—of a free life are mine. I have escaped everything that is artificial, conventional, customary. I am entering into the truth, into nature. Having the certitude of a succession of days like this present one, equally free and beautiful, peace descends upon me. I develop normally and no longer occupy myself with useless vanities.

  As we drove through the North Andaman jungles, I thought about the scene where Gauguin goes into the forest to chop down rosewood trees with his Tahitian friend, Totefa. In a fit of madness, he starts lashing out at all the trees while his ax sings to him, “Destroy in thee all love of the self!” It’s a crazy scene and it ends with a primitivist cry:

  Yes, wholly destroyed, finished, dead, is from now on the old civilization within me. I was re-born—

  But that “old civilization” obsessed Gauguin much more than the real Tahiti. How could it not have? Escapism is always an escape from something that dominates you. At the beginning of Noa Noa, Gauguin quotes Baudelaire: “Dites, qu’avez-vous vu?” Tell me what you have seen. But Gauguin is not telling us what he has seen; he is not recording the decaying colony in all its picturesque complexity. He is describing himself in all his picturesque complexity. No wonder his Tahiti has inspired so many tourist decors. It was all about the “I.”

  I stared blankly at my own forest, unable to feel a way into it. No one could tell me what its native name was. Vinod began using the horn again; I leaned forward and shouted at him not to.

  “But it is curvy,” he protested.

  I said there were no Jarawa here. We had not seen even one, much to my chagrin, and he was
using the horn to scare off the Jarawa that I wanted to see.

  “Jarawa,” he muttered, and blew out his cheeks. Was this a safari looking for humans? These forests were empty, anyway, they were lost in a wide sea. The Jarawa had left it a long time ago.

  Four hours later, we were in Diglipur. It’s a rough-and-tumble country town, all heat and dirt. Around a psychedelically colored temple, a hysterical political meeting was taking place. “Vote for Mr. Bakhta!”

  A few miles beyond Diglipur, Ariel Bay must be the most remote village in India. The sea looms up, islands appear in the distance, flashing their sands. Nipa palms shade small houses embedded within rose gardens and pinanga fences. An archaic emotion floods through you.

  It is the original British settlement on the Andamans, but nothing of the former overlords remains. The bay is filled with sunken boats hit by the tsunami, their funnels and bows rising from the water at rakish angles, with logs and floating debris that will never be cleared away. There’s one street, open to the fields.

  On the far side of the village, the road becomes a narrow track scratched between paddies. Children stand by it like small copper statues, motionless, their eyes wide with amazement. Where this road collides with the rain forest around Saddle Peak, the tallest peak in the Andamans, the Turtle Resort looms up on a hillock of its own, as if guarding that road’s end. It is owned by the same management as the Hawk’s Bill Nest, that is, the Republic of India.