The Naked Tourist

by Lawrence Osborne

  Labyrinthine and stark, the hotel seems to have sunk into the vegetative life of the forest; thousands of insects purr in its boarded-up corridors. But a genial cook called Mishtry greeted us and promised to open the padlocks of the pantry and find us pillows. The room was decayed. A large picture of the historic Cellular Jail in Port Blair hung between two nightclub lamps, this time one yellow, one red. All the rooms were padlocked. Soon after arriving, however, there was a frantic knocking at my door. Outside, in the dusk, a tall silver-haired man stood in slippers and dhoti. A huge hand slipped desperately into mine, and before I knew it I was locked in a frantic embrace with “Mike.” Mike owned a thing called the Coconut Resort across the road.

  “You come my place,” he whispered, bending closer, “we are having no visitors, my place much better. Promise? Please, sir! Coming visit and having tea with me tonight!”

  He clenched me with both hands. The eyes were wild.

  “Coconut Resort, sir!”

  The dining room was brightly lit, eight fans whirring, but the boys slept in a torpor by the reception desk. The sea roared close by. Mishtry apologized for the lack of amenities. But were there towels at least?

  “Towels we are not having.”

  The head jiggling began. Bread?

  “Bread we are not having.”

  “Butter,” I tried.

  “Butter we are not having.”

  Running water? The head bobbed. “Not having.”

  “Is it locked up?”

  “Not having key, sir.”

  Later, lying in my room, I turned on a baroque air-conditioning unit attached by a cable to the wall. There was nothing, but they had air-conditioning at least. Raising the bottle of Antiquity to my lips, I felt a sudden triumph—the triumph one feels in enduring entirely irrational obstacles and adversities that should never have been there in the first place. “I’ve got fuck all here, but there’s a cool breeze from the air conditioner and a bottle of ersatz scotch at the end of the world! Not bad!”

  Then, with a shuddering moan, the power went off.

  At once the heat returned. I struggled onto the balcony and looked down at a garden plunged in darkness. Mishtry was down there, looking up plaintively from amid a herd of long-horned cows, his face faintly picked out by a sliver of moon. He jiggled his head. The cows jostled around him.

  “Power we are not having, sir.”

  For the next few days I hired local fishing boats and roamed around the empty islands scattered around the waters off Ariel Bay like miniature versions of the Coral Island.

  The biggest of these is called Smith and Ross—it is actually two islands joined by a sandbar that is exposed at low tide. A boat called The Shark goes there in the morning after the rain has stopped. Fishermen sometimes go over with the three Independence War veterans who live there, bone-thin men with hard, bitter faces, hauling lines tied to coral chunks and oyster shells for knives. It is a dreamy voyage; the climate is volatile, constantly electrified. There is a vaporous tension in the air—rainbows, mists, mirages. It is a virginal panorama, so unmanipulated that you immediately doubt its veracity. The islands look like optical illusions and then, with a dull start, you realize that what they really look like are brochure images. Sitting in the waterlogged boat I felt like a prospector searching out new locales for the Four Seasons. All this talk of the Andamans being the next Maldives or Seychelles had only reminded me how much I loathe the Maldives and the Seychelles, classic Wherevers that had gladly accommodated the utopian fantasies of their clientele. But then the Maldives had indeed looked just like this prior to 1972, when twelve Italian writers had been invited to the islands by the international investor George Corbin. The gates were opened; resorts were built using the precious coral that kept the Maldives afloat.

  Many writers have called the pre-1972 Maldives a utopian paradise. Thurston Clarke, in Searching for Paradise, called it “positively Atlantan,” an Atlantis that is waiting to be sunk. After scheduled jet service began, 42,000 tourists in 1980 quickly became 400,000 by the year 2000. Male, the Maldives capital, was turned from a “dazzling white city of coral paths and houses smothered in orchids” into a replica of Honolulu. Before, the sultan owned the only car and people got around on bicycles and sailboats. Paradise! Afterward, the traffic jam and the concrete skyscraper, the brand resort hotel and the parking lot. The same thing would happen to Port Blair, or even to Ariel Bay. To which the Indians always sighed coolly, saying, “But they are already shit holes, sir.”

  The Shark drifted into the shallows, a crossbar anchor was thrown, and we waded ashore, the old man carrying his wife on his shoulders. As soon as they were on land, the old couple walked off into the jungle without saying a word, and I was left on the sandbar.

  Inside the jungle, the trees were so high that the ground was almost dark, though there rose from it spectral spear-shaped white blooms as tightly rolled as cigars. Clusters of creamy rambai flowers and vanilla orchids burst out on the mossy slopes farther in. As I climbed upward, on hands and knees now on slippery alga, I could hear my heart pounding and I caught myself preparing for Papua, for an Asian forest that would be like this, only worse. But, more than that, I could not decipher it or eke a meaning from it.

  “If modern wanderers are to repeat the thrills which early travelers experienced,” Margaret Mead wrote from Samoa in 1925, “they will have to cultivate the much neglected senses of taste and smell.” And this is what the jungle gives back to you. “The movies and the phonograph have effectually eliminated the other two senses and touch doesn’t seem to have much of a role here.” I had never thought about it before, but it is likely that the great diaspora of Western travel is a blind search to rediscover the senses. Mead admits it openly. The smell on Smith was frangipani, rotting orchid, seaweed from the drying rock pools permanently exposed by the tsunami, just as on Samoa it was slightly fermented overripe bananas, an odor that was “like that of bee-stung grapes.” I had never been in a jungle before, just as Mead had never been on a malaga, a Samoan “journey” to visit remote markets, and I found that those two senses—taste and smell—suddenly stirred as Mead had suggested. It’s as if acids and oils on the air are naturally obvious to the human nose and tongue; you can suddenly “taste” your surroundings. The sensual world reappears, as if it had been hidden behind a wall.

  On the long drive back to Port Blair, the tensions between Vinod and me continued to smolder around the question of the Jarawa. Quite unexpectedly, on a lonely stretch of road in the forest, we passed a group of thatch huts sunk in the sunless interior. They flashed by, dark gold in the shadow. But however startling this apparition, it was not quite as startling as the semielegant young Indian man standing on the hard shoulder by a motorbike, smoking a cigarette. The huts were obviously a Jarawa camp and I asked Vinod to slow down.

  “Policeman!” he cried, and he hit the gas pedal hysterically.

  I touched his shoulder brusquely. “Stop right now!”

  He refused and the head jiggling began. “Not stopping, sir!”

  Was it an excessive respect for authority or a tedium that could not admit itself, an impatience to get back to the bright lights of Port Blair? We almost came to blows, or severe words at least, but in the end I had to let it go. At the Baratang ferry, however, I unexpectedly found the motorcyclist again. He was reclining on a wall with a pretty Bengali girl in an outlandish pink sari, and far from being a cop, he was one Dr. Pronob Kumar Sircar, M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D., research investigator with an organization concerned with the Jarawa known by the incredible name of Andaman Adim Janjati Vikas Samiti. In other words, a scholar assigned to look after “tribal matters” on the Trunk Road.

  Pronob spoke fluent Jarawa and quietly followed the buses on his motorbike. He was bashfully delighted to meet a foreigner, though it was not at all clear what he was doing there. Was it true, I asked, that he was following us to make sure we didn’t break the rules?

  “Oh yes, certainly.” But he laughed
with great charm. “I am undercover!”

  I saw that Vinod was glaring at us.

  “Is it true,” I asked, as urbanely as I could, “that one cannot talk to a Jarawa?”

  “Perfectly true. But would you like to talk to one?”

  “If it could be arranged.”

  “No big deal. There are some over here. Come.”

  He motioned toward a miserable hut by the road shaded by a padauk tree, where a gang of Indian soldiers had gathered. From the nudges and giggles I surmised the presence of aborigines. On the way over, Pronob gave me a quick speech about the Jarawa.

  The Bengalis were teaching the Jarawa a lot of bad things: obscene slang, tobacco smoking, and so forth. Contact had been calamitous for them. Paradoxically, however, little is known about the Jarawa. They speak a language totally unrelated to any language group in India or even Asia. Recent DNA tests on them by teams at the University of Hyderabad have suggested that they are an incredibly rare group of genetic Africans who migrated to the Andamans via India seventy thousand years ago. Friendly contact was made with them only in 1974. Since 1998, they have come more frequently into settler areas, but for the Burmese, whom they know as poachers, whom they call bema, they keep their ancient hatred—every Jarawa carries an arrow specially set aside for killing bema. The arrow itself has a special name.

  The Jarawa make their living from both the forest and the sea. Their love of seafood can be gleaned in their word for sea—nappo daang daang incho, “water where fish thrash about.” They make beautiful woven baskets and large fiber belts that serve as body armor. To make arrowheads, they trade tin and iron from the Bengalis and flatten it out with stones into superb blades. Families are patriarchal; men hunt while women gather and fish. Despite their low numbers, anthropologists are surprised to find that no incest exists among them. And yet they are all closely connected through kinship.

  Pronob was as nattily dressed as the Jarawa. I couldn’t quite figure out what his job actually was—a mix of forest ranger, informal policeman, and tribal counselor?

  There were police inside the hut, fingering ancient rifles. Pronob bargained with them to let us in. And there on a miserable wooden cot lay a tiny black man wearing a necklace of dried leaves. He lay as if ill—the Jarawa often drift into posts in search of medication—but in one hand he waved a short arrow with a ferocious metal head. “Paatov.” He smiled. Arrow. Then: “Thaahoodintaavpaatov.” Arrow for killing Burmese! Everyone laughed. Opposite him sat a beautiful boy so delicately and finely drawn that I mistook him for a naked girl. His chest was painted with red clay, and he wore bright red wool armbands. His cheeks were whitened with ash. The man on the bed reached up and shook my hand, handing me the arrow to feel. The policemen laughed and he laughed with them—but he was an animal trapped among keepers. He asked for his arrow back and took my hand again, rolling it over in his and murmuring to me.

  “He say he have tummy ache,” Pronob translated. “But he happy to see such big man here.”

  I walked over to the boy and held out my hand. But the reaction from him was exactly the opposite. He abruptly recoiled his shoulder away from me and grimaced. The large white hand seemed grotesque to him, untouchable. His left hand fingered a large bow laid flat on the cot.

  Pronob translated again: “I cannot touch you. Don’t know what you are.”

  It’s rare that you meet another person who cannot make up his mind whether you are human or not. The fear flashing across the eyes—mixed with a slight disdain—was deliciously strange. As was the paranoia of the Indians around them. What were they so afraid of? In a moment, I was forcibly whisked away.

  Two hours later, black bodies appeared on silent feet, slipping out of the jungle like inquisitive birds.

  Now, they were a stranger sight. One was dressed like any Brooklyn rapper, though he carried a thickset bow and yellow clay was smeared around his eyes. His name was Pu, and he asked me in broken Hindi if I wanted to buy his bow. Before I could accept, the Indians hustled him away to an abandoned house nearby, where the other Jarawa seemed to be congregating. Others milled around the buses. A tiny boy with a baby strapped to his back stopped in front of one bus’s fender and suddenly ran his fingers, then his cheek, against the still-warm engine grille. Two tall warriors loped by with spears, their chests and faces smeared with geometrically patterned red clay. Wild grass was draped around their necks, and they wore the Jarawa’s characteristic bright red wool armbands. Strings of pink beads hung on their hips. They glared at us and at the Bengalis. The ripple of apprehension was palpable and the Bengali girls cowered. Vinod tried to hurry me away. “Very violent guys, sir!” But I lingered and our eyes met. What I saw, however, was not a pristine “savage” but a half-broken, scavenging forest dweller attuned to the tourist glee of passing Indians. The Jarawa were already canny in the ways of eenen.

  One of them came up to me slyly and thrust out an ashcaked hand. He said something in rapid Jarawa that was clearly meant for the two of us, since it was evident that my skin and height had surprised him, amazed him even. But of course there was no way I could decipher the words. He came closer for a second, before the Indian soldiers moved toward him, and I thought that his hand darted forward to brush my chest. A blessing or a curse? In that moment, moreover, I realized that it was not I visiting him, but he visiting me. I was the curious, exotic “wild man” standing in the rain in my strange pink shirt and bizarre-looking hat. He was as much a tourist as I was. He therefore smiled, and there was a sparklingly cruel look in his eyes. It could have been regret that he didn’t have a camera.

  Vinod, of course, was furious.

  “Very bad guys, these ones. And you were talking to a policeman!”

  We argued about it in the car as we headed south.

  “I thought they were rather pitiful,” I said flatly.

  “You not knowing these guys, boss. Pretty tough!”

  But I soon spotted the bow he had bought from Pu when I wasn’t looking. On the road, he loosened up and admitted that he often took pictures of them with his cell phone and showed them to his girlfriend. He also had a fine collection of Jarawa bows and arrows in his flat. They were all rogues together, in a sense. Everyone took pictures of them except, of course, foreigners.

  “Vinod, you are a complete fraud.” I laughed.

  “Ah, you also, sir!”

  “Fair enough. Sell me that bow, though?”

  “No, no, sir. Bow is for girlfriend.”

  By the time I got back to the Fortune Resort, my eye had swollen to the size of a small tangerine. As I walked into Charles Correa’s lobby, which now seemed elegant with its Bruckner symphonics and fish tanks, there was a gasp from the staff followed by merriment. It is socially acceptable, it seems, to laugh at a man’s eye if it has been bitten by a venomous myrmex. I ordered room service, Antiquity on the rocks, and collapsed onto the bed with a fever, smothering the eye with an ointment from reception. Thank God, I kept thinking, I am flying to Bangkok tomorrow morning. For I had planned Bangkok as a medical stopover as much as anything, a place to avail myself of cheap malaria medications, some dental work, and perhaps some other more esoteric preparations for mind and soul before the far more radical leap into Papua. The weaknesses and flaws had already been exposed by the Andamans. Large cracks had appeared inside me, the signs of imminent breakup. I was drinking heavily; the heat was unhinging me. I kept thinking of the colonial class in their stand-fall collars and three-piece suits. How stoic it seemed, beyond reason. Of course, in most countries they had their cooler hill stations, but not here. I turned on the TV and watched the Calcutta stations as night fell and the fishing boats lit up across the bay. My hand was shaking. I could not put two thoughts together; all desire had seeped away. A purification? A breakdown of the corpuscles, the molecules, the atoms? I took two Ambiens, but the sea kept me awake. The sea always keeps me awake. Fucking nature, I thought. What I needed now was two weeks in Hedonopolis.

  HEDONOPOLIS

/>   In the lobby of Thailand’s most august hotel, the house string quartet had just struck up “The Blue Danube.” The high notes were a halftone out of tune and nobody was dancing, but the lobby still brimmed with the fever mood of Hedonopolis, the world’s pleasure capital. I slumped in one of the lobby chairs and watched the Japanese executive groups and the farang businessmen with their Bangkok girls flirting to the sound of “The Blue Danube” under huge bell-like lanterns. (The term farang derives from français. The French were the first Europeans that the Thais encountered, in the seventeenth century—and so all Western foreigners are still called farangs, a word by turns neutral and ominous.) The Oriental has something maniacal about it—circular fountains of unreal flowers, ornamental elephants, ubiquitous mirrors. Here is the apex of the nation’s tourist sector, the nub of it all. Thai film stars swept in on their way to the Normandie restaurant. A nervous farang in a pinstripe suit with a six-foot ladyboy bar girl picked their way slyly toward the elevators. I looked down at the suede shoes I had just laced up in the Somerset Maugham Suite, where I was lodged with a carved four-poster and a satyric portrait of the old boy. As the couple were politely intercepted—the Oriental is one of the rare Bangkok hotels that cannot bring themselves to condone amour entre hommes, despite its adulation of Somerset—I had a premonition that if I converted to Buddhism it was possible that in the future I would be reincarnated as a kathoey, a ladyboy; or else as an eel, I could not decide which. I looked carefully at the shoes—they looked hedonistic after the forests of the Andamans. The couple sat right next to me, and the ladyboy noticed them as well. She shot me a brilliant smile and a shoe compliment. “You very bad man!”

  In his book Very Thai, Philip Cornwel-Smith offers the opinion that “the country probably has no more homosexuals than any other … but … the Thai physique, smooth skin, love of beauty, refined culture and tolerance enables more of them to flower.” When they have been sex-changed, they are often a hallucination. They are “sirens of street culture since ancient times.” Thais also call them faa chamloeng, “angels in disguise.”