The opening incident in the book is also based on reports of an actual standoff between the Sentinelese tribe and the crew of a Portugese freighter that was shipwrecked off North Sentinel Island in the 1980s.
My training is in the physics and chemistry of the oceans, not anthropology. In writing this book, I spoke to anthropologists and researched texts and peer-reviewed literature to augment my understanding of indigenous people who once lived or still survive on the Andaman and Nicobar islands. The language, customs and beliefs expressed stem from ethnographic studies of native Andaman Islanders. However, I chose to give Uido’s tribe a fictional name (En-ge simply means “people” in the language of the tribe I met on the islands). This helped free me to amalgamate my knowledge and experience to fit Uido’s story—and to remember that I was writing neither an anthropological nor oceanographic text but a novel. Inspired by the spirit of Jorge Luis Borges, I gave my first loyalty in the telling of this tale “to the dream”: Uido’s dream.
ALSO BY
Padma Venkatraman
Climbing the Stairs
Island's End Page 16