The hand of man

With a girls’ trip to the Andamans, I was all prepared for the blissfulness of no pee-pee and poo-poos for a week. The plan was to drench myself in the sun and hang out with one of my closest friends. As an introduction to the islands I picked ‘Islands in Flux’ by Pankaj Sekhsaria and naively readied myself to be transported to an island paradise.

By the time we were over the Bay of Bengal though I was bombarding my poor friend with stories of how the colonised has become coloniser and questioning the very purpose of human existence if it’s just to destroy thousands of years worth of ecosystems. Thankfully my friend has known me for over two decades and is by now quite used to such existential calamities.

What fascinated me most about these islands was the sense of what is ‘local’. It is an amalgamation of invasions from its history as a penal colony, labour and refugee migrations and in the last few decades people looking for a better life. The island’s original human inhabitants have dwindled with exposure. Protecting what’s left of their lifestyle means their food, language, culture remains hidden. So we chatted in Hindi with locals of Telugu origin who took us to eat Bengali thalis.

In our discovery of the islands, we took a walk on Havelock through a patch of rainforest that still remains. By this time I was in the middle of Richard Powers’ ‘The Overstory’ which brought home even more the thriving organism these forests must have been. Stepping out of the cool tree cover, the heat hit as we passed vegetable plots and rice fields and papaya trees. All of our introduced useful plants. On a beach on the east of the island I found a milk can that had drifted over from Thailand, among the mounds of plastic washed on the shore. The hand of man is hard to avoid.

But there is still magic on the islands. You find it standing under a majestic padauk tree, the towering redwoods of the islands. It’s in the reefs that run just off the beaches — I could have spent a lifetime floating over watching the magic beneath. It’s in the people — we stayed at Jalakara where we met their fascinating team — many of them drifters themselves from all over India — finding a home on the island. What we got to experience might not last very long unfortunately — just a week ago decisions were made to improve the industrial competitiveness of the island.