by Gavin Young
The doctor was eager to know from Francis if people on the Andamans felt isolated. Sometimes, said Francis, but luckily the islands were beautiful, if you liked wild nature. The isolation was partly the result of the difficulty of transport. You had to trust to the steamer service to and from Calcutta and Madras; otherwise there was only the twice-weekly air service to Calcutta, and nothing to Madras. Francis said to me, ‘You must see the old prison. It is now a museum, a national monument.’
*
After breakfast – cornflakes, eggs, bacon, Madrasi cakes with curry sauce – next morning in the spacious dining room, I inspected the library-music room. Indian Muzak drifted around bookcases filled with titles like To Glory We Steer or Ill Met By Moonlight. I gave up a long time to reading the Bay of Bengal Pilot (1978, tenth edition) lent me by Captain Bala:
The Andaman Islands consist of a group of about 200 islands and rocks. The aborigines live in the forests by hunting and fishing; they are of a small Negrito type, and their civilisation is about that of the stone age. The forest-dwellers comprise the Jarawas and Sentenelese, of whom little is known, as these tribes are hostile and avoid contact with civilisation….
Andaman Indians consist of ex-convicts who were released under declaration of amnesty in 1947, together with penal administrative staffs and merchants who settled in the island after the penal settlement was abolished.
Port Blair, the capital, the Pilot said, exports timber, coconuts and copra, and imports textiles and plants, notably pineapples. In 1949 the population of the whole archipelago was eighteen thousand.
The Andamans have some wonderful Robert Louis Stevenson names: Jolly Boy Island, the Labyrinth Islands, Turtle Reef, Elfin Patch, Bacon Bay, Egg Island, Curlew Island, Diligent Strait, Fusilier Channel, Grub Island. According to the Pilot, Viper Island contained several buildings formerly part of the penal settlement. (‘The gallows, too,’ Francis said.) I wanted to visit Mount Harriet, 1193 feet high, which stood over Perseverance Point; at its foot, in 1872, a viceroy of India, Lord Mayo, was stabbed to death by Sher Ali, a convict.
Port Blair was named after Lieutenant Archibald Blair, of the old British-run Indian navy, who arrived there in 1788 with two ships, Viper and Elizabeth, to survey for harbours. He wrote an ecstatic report on the anchorage, the ‘perfect harbour … large enough to contain about fifty sailes of the Line’. Blair planted fruit and vegetables there, and built a wooden wharf. Some artificers, soldiers and two Chinese gardeners were settled there, and the first two hundred convicts followed in 1792.
‘I think Arthur Conan Doyle was really off his rocker,’ the nice-looking Indian lady who was my neighbour in the dining room said sternly. ‘As far as the Andamans are concerned, at least.’
‘How so?’
‘Well, he described a wild pygmy from there, armed with a blow-torch –’
‘Blowpipe, surely.’
‘Blowpipe. And poisoned darts. Well, no pygmies live in the Andamans, although there are some tribals who are quite short, it’s true. He really meant the Philippines or somewhere further east, where there are pygmies, and he should have said so.’
Though I didn’t care to argue, I wasn’t sure that Doyle ever described poor Tonga in The Sign of Four as a ‘pygmy’. ‘Unhallowed dwarf’, yes; ‘a little black man with a great misshapen head’, certainly. My neighbour was the daughter of a settler, a marine engineer now dead, and was returning home after nine years. Of course, she was right about there being no pygmies in the Andamans, but Doyle’s story was rooted in the treasure of Agra and the opportunity the anarchy of the Mutiny had provided for unscrupulous men to steal it. He could hardly have shifted things to the Philippines (where there are no pygmies either). So it is the word ‘Andamans’ that sombrely evokes that ‘fairly fine’ night at Pondicherry Lodge in Upper Norwood in London when Holmes and Watson discovered the body of Bartholomew Sholto, formerly a major commanding native troops at Port Blair, seated all in a heap, with a ghastly and inscrutable smile upon his face, and his limbs twisted in fantastic fashion. And twenty years of building breakwaters in the penal settlement of Port Blair will remain the sentence passed on Jonathan Small, the one-legged convict, who owed a temporary freedom and the satisfaction of revenge to his friend, Tonga, ‘the little hell-hound’ and his poisoned darts from the distant Bay of Bengal.
A sudden change of course. Francis, the teacher, ran down to the cabin saying, ‘Come quickly. They’ve spotted a drifting boat.’
The Nancowry was bearing down on a tiny bobbing shape, and Bala was on the bridge peering at it through binoculars. As we approached it he ordered a long blast of the steam siren to rouse anyone dozing or comatose on a boat that was too far out to sea to be a shipping vessel. Was it a castaway family of Vietnamese boat people?
But the siren’s mournful call went unheard; no one emerged from the ramshackle chicken coop in the stern of what turned out to be a two-decked bamboo raft. Perhaps it was only a Thai or Burmese river ferry washed out to sea by a flash flood. We circled it and hooted again, looking for traces of blood or a sun-shrivelled body, while inquisitive passengers packed the rail. But there was no life or death, only a small mystery four hundred miles into the Bay of Bengal.
On the way up to see Bala on the second evening, I was startled by a flick of something quite large at the head of a companionway ahead of me.
‘Captain Bala,’ I said to tease him. ‘Do you have any bandicoots on board?’
‘Oho, sir,’ Bala said, laughing, ‘that would be impossible. A bandicoot is not a seafaring animal. Bandicoots will come out in the early hours of the morning and dig up your yams, tapioca, sweet potatoes – that’s their delight. Dogs can deal with them. But you will not find a bandicoot at sea – never, sir.
‘Now, rats, that’s different. I’ve seen them sitting up. Big bastards, they are; I don’t like them at all. They gnash their teeth and I respectfully salute them. I remember, once off Madras, rats crept up to the crew’s feet while they slept and began to nibble. It was the socks, you see, sir. These seamen hadn’t washed their socks, so the rats came out to enjoy them. And they gnawed all the sock toes and then all the soft skin of the actual toes, the bottoms of the toes and their edges, so that they were red and raw, though not actually bleeding.
‘When the seamen woke up, they began shouting, “What’s this?” I painted their raw toes with tincture of iodine – you don’t know what will come from a rat’s bite. And then – aha! – I held a spirit lamp under each toe to cauterize it. You should have heard ’em howl, sir. Ooooh, my God, how they howled and cursed and swore, and said dreadful things about my father and mother. But I had to do it. A rat bite, a nibble even, is very dangerous indeed. But the bandicoot, sir, is a land animal.’
*
One night we heard wild cheering, which seemed to be coming from the foredeck. ‘What’s that?’ Captain Bala said over his curry to the chief officer. ‘A mutiny? My goodness, it had better not be.’ He laughed. ‘I haven’t got so much as an air pistol aboard.’ It was passengers applauding an announcement from Port Blair radio that Mrs Gandhi’s candidates in the general election were sweeping southern India. It reminded me of similar cheering in northern India two years before when Mrs Gandhi had suffered a landslide defeat.
The cheering continued until a Tamil film was shown. An enthusiastic audience, including soldiers in sarongs printed with hand-sized flowers, packed into a small space on deck, standing or perched on chairs. The sailors of the Nancowry watched the film from the wrong side of the screen; the image came through quite clearly.
At dinner I asked Bala, ‘Would you encourage your son to go into your profession?’
‘No, I would not, sir,’ he said immediately. ‘It’s a lonely life, sir, a lonely life. I’d steer my son towards electronics – that area. It has a good future.’ After a moment he added, ‘Not that I grumble. I’ll work until I’m forced to stop.’
Fifty-four per cent of Indian masters’ earnings go in tax, so Bala can’t
be a wealthy man even after all those years at sea. At one time he was on the Shipping Corporation of India’s northern run to Odessa, and he has a Russian wife. They had to wait four years before the Soviet authorities would allow her to leave the country and set up house with Bala in Madras.
A passenger – an immigrant worker – fell ill two days from the Andamans. Called in by Bala, the doctor bustled between my cabin and the sick bay. No one seemed quite sure if the man would live or die. He was said to be in a coma; his jaw was paralysed; perhaps he had tetanus. Soon it seemed he might die before we reached shore. That would mean a burial at sea, or locking up his corpse in the fridge. On the other hand, expert hospital care might still save him (although, in the event, it didn’t). So Bala decided to divert the Nancowry, which had been scheduled to make a short midnight stop off Car Nicobar, the northernmost of the Nicobar Islands. Instead, we veered northeastwards, taking a short cut.
At 6.15 a.m. a whitish sun lit the back of Rutland Island, the southernmost of the Andamans.
Port Blair soon appeared as a rash of old mansions and pleasant bungalows spread over low hills, a new wharf, and a small tin-roofed factory with a smoking chimney, all just inside the mouth of a deep bay. On our right, Perseverance Point was marked by a small light, and over it rose a green pyramid of trees: Mount Harriet. Islands dotted the bay; I could see a topknot of trees on tiny Viper Island at the far end against a forest background. Overlooking the town of Port Blair and its tiny port, the great prison displayed a long flank of wall with blank windows, like the side of a liner.
Twenty two
A curlew called from the dark forested mass of an island. Sea eagles, white and chestnut, lazed about the treetops. An elephant carried a log down to the water, like a dog with his master’s walking stick, and laid it carefully in the shallows, where half-naked men were pushing the timber together to make rafts. I felt I was in a soundproofed room or, at least, a timeproofed world. You could choose your century out here.
I had been two days in the Andamans. Bala had finished his chores on the Nancowry and was free until she sailed back to Madras the next day. He had taken me to meet an amazing man, his old shipmate Captain Dennis Beale, who had opened a magic door to the Andamans.
In 1966, Beale had decided, in early middle age, to leave the Shipping Corporation, settle in Port Blair and, as people used to say, ‘follow his bent’. This meant setting up a small boatbuilding business, fishing from one of his tiny launches among the islands, studying the flora and fauna and towing the logs of the timber company to the sawmill at Port Blair. A simple, idyllic and useful existence.
Beale had invited me ‘to potter about’ in the western islands. He loved them and thought I would too. Here, on Rutland Island, men were cutting the timber that his boats would tow.
‘Elephants here are imported from Assam. They’re less temperamental than the ones from Burma,’ said Beale. Smiling, he added, ‘I should know.’
He looked like a Burmese, although he was only half Burmese. His rich English father had owned a rubber estate in the Moulmein area of Burma before the Second World War. Forced to flee to India with his family when the Japanese came, Beale’s father returned to Moulmein after the war. But somehow life there was never the same again, and he died in 1950. Young Dennis Beale, who had walked out of Burma with the family across the Naga Hills clutching a revolver, decided against following his father into the rubber business, and had joined the Shipping Corporation of India instead.
Dennis Beale’s unpretentious house on the outskirts of Port Blair was made of wood and, like many houses in the Andamans, its creaking rooms stood on stilts. Hi-fi equipment filled his front room. Planks of wood were stored under his house, and in the garden, by a row of slim, upright areca palms, his Indian employees hammered a half-finished launch into life. His little car stood in a lane outside. Plates of fried tuna or barracuda stood on one table, a bottle of whisky on another. In a backroom was his record collection: Gracie Fields, Chevalier, Tauber. We had more than one night of song before I left.
‘This is Gavin Young, a writer who’s visiting. I told him you were just the man,’ Bala had said.
I shook hands with a stocky, round-faced man of about fifty, who immediately astonished me by turning and yelling, ‘Hey, Gavin!’
In a second, two boys came running in, sixteen and fourteen perhaps. ‘My sons. Gavin’s the small one, Nicholas the big one,’ said Beale. ‘Surprised?’ He laughed. ‘Just wait, you’ll be surprised again.’ When we reached his hidden bay, I discovered that Beale’s favourite launch was also called Gavin. ‘This meeting must be predestined,’ he said.
Perhaps it was. The Andamans had turned out to be exactly what I had hoped. My visa gave me a week here, and the steamer to Calcutta left Port Blair in precisely a week’s time. On this occasion the timing could hardly have been worked out better. I was staying in a pleasant guest-house, the Megapode’s Nest (the megapode is a big-footed bird about the size of a coot, found only in the Andamans), and my room looked down over the bay and the slopes of Mount Harriet. A few small inter-island ferries crossed and re-crossed the bay. Not many bigger ships came here, apart from the Nancowry and her counterpart on the Calcutta run. Rust-red godowns lined the horseshoe of Phoenix Bay beneath me, and a low line of buildings marked a street or two leading up from the bay to the district of Port Blair called Aberdeen where administrative buildings sheltered behind a fringe of trees.
Port Blair is pocket-sized, about the size of a small country town in Britain or America. It has no newspaper or bookshop, although there is a newsletter, the Daily Telegrams [sic], which, on the day I bought it, carried a front-page article headed ‘Tribal Welfare: Greater Attention to Be Paid’. The government college had, I was told, a good library. Bars are banned by law, though drinking is not; a wine store is open three days a week.
*
The Indian government, more than most, takes a sensible attitude to forests. The Andaman trees – perhaps the oldest trees I’ve ever seen – were still close-packed, even after the selective trimming we were witnessing. Bala, Beale’s two sons and I stood in the airless, sticky heat of their shade and watched the elephants stacking immense timbers. Using trunks, forefeet and tusks, they advanced and retreated, bowed and rose again, in a kind of minuet. Their mahouts, perched on their heads, were their dance masters, ordering their movements by kicking them behind the ears with bare feet. The timber company also used buffalo, twin-yoked, grunting up and down the red paths dragging logs with chains.
The forests of the Andamans are not undergoing the indiscriminate ripping out of trees without reforestation that decimates forests in Borneo, Celebes, Brazil and elsewhere. The government seems to have seen the danger in time.
‘Here’s a story,’ said Beale. ‘A female elephant resented the drunken ill-treatment she was getting from her driver, so she “rampaged” his house, as they call it here, and killed him. Although people said she seemed to have a demon, she only killed him; no one else was injured in any way, although the houses in his village were very close together.’
Bala said, ‘There’s a story going round Tamil Nadu. Some bloody fool gave an elephant a coconut full of bleaching fluid to drink. He lived a long way off, but she had recognized him and she waited. When he came back to the same place five years later, she killed him. Tossed him – wheeee – high in the air.’
Around the islands the water was deep and dark. Through the Labyrinth Islands, we passed Alexandra, Jolly Boy and Pluto to Macpherson Strait, where the water was shallower and gave out a green-blue luminosity as though the light were coming up from the seabed.
Bamboo stalks poked upright in the water, marking channels between rocks and pinpointing ridges of murderous coral that glowed below the surface only when the sun was out. ‘Daylight navigating,’ commented Bala. ‘Very difficult at night round here.’
Dennis Beale’s three Bihari Indians steered the Gavin up from Rutland, and we trailed two lines over the stern. Near
a pair of coralbound islets called the Twins, Beale’s sons yelled, ‘A fish!’ Another yell: another fish on the other line. Then a shark came after them, its torpedo body a stream of silver only inches behind their tails. The Biharis hauled in the two tuna just in time; as the second was half out of the water, the shark threw itself up in a last vain snap of jaws. It might have left us nothing but two heads.
Off the white beach of Snob Island we caught rockfish and the beaked parrot fish, exquisitely coloured – yellow flanks speckled with turquoise, pink fins with turquoise fringes.
On Redskin Island we swam in water like glass. Bala wallowed and dived into a big, dark cave, roaring like a sea monster to scare Beale’s sons. ‘Oh, my God, I thought I saw a sea monster in there,’ he cried, laughing. There was a canoe on the shore and a hut with sugar-cane leaves for a roof and sugarcane or bamboo walls. A very dark man in a white sarong who walked to the water’s edge said he’d come here from southern India three years before. He lived on this island alone, spending his time fishing and noosing the spotted deer that infested the undergrowth.
When the light began to fail, Beale stood near the Gavin’s Bihari helmsman as we slipped homewards through unlit rocks. Against the darkening background of the sky the cliffs of huge trees made silhouettes of battlements, pinnacles and spires. ‘Thora obaju,’ Beale’s voice murmured. ‘A little that way. Tik hai. Okay, fine.’
An eagle beat its way home. Ahead, where Dennis Beale moored his boats, were the lights of small fires and spirals of smoke. Charcoal burners carried sacks ashore from a heavy wooden barge. Fishermen flicked their skiffs about a creek, rowing while standing upright, wagging oars that they also used as rudders. ‘Ruko,’ said Beale to the helmsman. ‘Bandhao. Stop. Tie up.’
We waded barelegged to dry land. I could see through the open doorways of a few shaggy houses men and women sitting around fires that illuminated their faces orange-red. The silence of the sea, the surrounding islands and the trees settled around us as comfortingly as an old overcoat. I didn’t even mind the mosquitoes that attended us as we drank a sundowner of Honey Bee brandy on the beach before the corkscrew drive back to Dennis Beale’s house on stilts and an evening with the records of Sinatra and Vera Lynn.