BackThe ship to Nicobar
Between islanders coping with the aftermath of a devastating tsunami and the beauty of a wild sea, a journey to the last outpost in India's south
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“So, you are the journalist, huh?" the health department clerk asked. The word had spread. In a ship where most passengers knew each other, I stood out, well, as a notebook-carrying journo; the outsider. “You must write bad things about them. Saale Holchus," he went on.
I had heard that term before—Holchu, “a friend"—for the Nicobarese tribal. It can be anything but when used by the non-tribal minority population.
We were standing on the upper deck of the MV Harshavardhana, moving at a lazy 10 knots per hour, heading from Port Blair in the Andaman islands to Campbell Bay on the Great Nicobar Island. Even though it is the largest island in the Nicobar group, Great Nicobar is barely discernible on a map of India—a tiny dot within the vast expanse of blue where the waters of the Bay of Bengal, Andaman Sea and Indian Ocean commingle: the final Indian outpost in the south. A minor blip on mainland India’s consciousness, Great Nicobar, as much as the entire Andaman and Nicobar group of islands, registered its hapless presence when thousands died in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. We were there in 2005, six months after the devastation.
The morning after the ship left Port Blair, we crossed many small islands. Against the morning sun, some of these, with only a handful of coconut trees left, looked like the crayon drawings of little schoolchildren—seemingly, a picture of idyll. To our right was the quaintly named, hanky-sized island, Trinket. When the tsunami hit, the waves washed across Trinket, which is almost at sea level. They spared nothing, barring a lighthouse and a clutch of trees.
In the early monsoon season with its leech-like tropical humidity, the rains are only a wish away. Soon, the morning sun was hidden by clouds; it started drizzling. The sizzling contrast of colours between the turquoise sea, rainforest green and sparkling white sand beach of Trinket was soon enveloped in uniform haziness. With the rain intensifying, the ship plodded through a scene suddenly transformed into a Japanese wash painting.
Commissioned in the mid-1970s, the MV Harshavardhana is smaller than many modern ocean liners, but large enough to accommodate a few hundred passengers. The cabins are reasonably well-appointed, with wood-panelled walls, comfortable chairs, a study table and bunk beds with wooden posts straight out of an Ismail Merchant-James Ivory British Raj-era period film.
In the dining hall, I found myself seated next to a schoolteacher. Harcharan Singh wore a discoloured yellow turban, his shirt marked by sweat stains and missing a middle button, his face a scraggy mass of beard; not a man given to self-devotion, I gathered. Not under the circumstances, at any rate. Over a lunch of rice, vegetable curry, sambhar and surmai fish, Singh narrated his harrowing tale.
He had lost his brother to the tsunami.
That, Singh said, was the beginning of the family’s ordeal. The government provided shelter and rations but was unwilling to pay monetary compensation till the body was found. Singh, like other members of bereaved families, scanned the coast from dawn to dusk. Ten days later, a bloated body washed ashore. He recognized his brother from a kirpan-shaped gold pendant and a metal bracelet—the fish and marine animals had nibbled at his face. Singh dragged the decomposed body to a dry patch and produced it before a government official to claim compensation.
In one of the corridors, I came across the ship’s chief purser, P. Banerjee. “Pop a sleeping pill if you can’t get any sleep now," he held out a warning. I didn’t want to waste the afternoon sleeping on my first long-haul ship journey. Seeing my puzzled expression, he smiled wryly. “You’ll know soon enough."
Back in the 1980s, my father, a banker by profession and a traveller by heart, chose work that fed his wanderlust; he travelled by ship to the Nicobar islands. He died when I was 9. Even though other details remain fuzzy, a boy’s impressionable mind had stored away the mesmerizing tales he had recounted at the family dinner table, of crossing the Ten Degree Channel—a deep channel of water running 10 degrees north of the equator, and known for its turbulent waters.
In the days of sailboats, pioneering Arab traders in the 15th century used the strong trade winds and surface currents to negotiate these routes. By the 16th century, European traders had joined the flotilla of fortune seekers doing business between West and East. During World War II, the Nicobar waters were charged with the clashing ambitions of the Allied and Axis forces. Even as the dreaded German U-boats entered the Indian Ocean in 1943, the British and Japanese fought for domination.
While the British submarine, HMS Tally-Ho, drowned Japan’s special minelayer in 1944, England too suffered a major blow when it lost its decorated warship, HMS Stonehenge, the same year in the Nicobar islands. Its 50-strong crew was led, incidentally, by David Stuart McNeile Verschoyle-Campbell.
The clear emerald waters are a repository of maritime history, wartime secrets and forgotten shipwrecks. Sleep, I knew, couldn’t compensate for the experience.
The tumult came sooner than I had expected. Under a clear sky, the sea started a slow dance, gathering momentum as we headed deeper into the Ten Degree Channel. Within minutes, the horizon turned topsy-turvy as the ship was tossed around violently, its hulk landing on the water with a resounding splash. Massive waves formed all around us. Even as I held on to the upper deck’s iron railings with both hands, toppling over seemed a distinct possibility. An hour’s choppiness later, my head was reeling from the intense rolling.
Struggling back to the cabin, I lay on the bed as the strong wooden chair fell over with a loud thud. My cabin mates continued sleeping.
A couple of hours later, when the sea had settled back into its usual calm, I made my way to the ship’s belly, where the Nicobarese held most of the bunk accommodation.
Unlike the other Aboriginal tribes in the Andaman archipelago—the Negrito-stock communities of the Jarawas, Onges, Great Andamanese and the Sentinelese; the latter are Paleolithic people yet to be “contacted" by civilization—the Nicobarese have been touched by missionary zeal. Of Mongoloid stock, a majority of them took to Christianity; a small fraction follows Islam. They have been unable to forgo their past entirely, so the religious practices of both Christian and Muslim Nicobarese are known to weave in animist rituals.
Most of them, Banerjee says, had lost a dear one in the tsunami, which also took away their few material possessions. Most of the Nicobarese passengers were, in fact, returning from Port Blair—the nearest big market town, 537km and a two-day ship journey away—with the wherewithal to rebuild lives.
It had turned dark by the time the ship reached the waters off Great Nicobar. The jetty at Campbell Bay had been washed away by the tsunami, and given the low-tide conditions, the ship anchored kilometres away from the shore. In the far distance, the lights of Campbell Bay flickered. We lined up at the gangway, waiting for smaller motorboats to ferry us to land.
Just ahead of me, an elderly Nicobarese couple walked gingerly down the plank. The lady held on to a carton with one hand, clutching her husband’s elbow with the other. Suddenly, she let out a sharp, distressed cry—the carton’s cover had given way and the lid of the pressure cooker she was carrying fell into the sea. Her expression carried the anguish of a futile journey.
A couple of days later, I sat at one of the exquisite white, soft sand beaches of Great Nicobar, contemplating the precarious balance between beauty and catastrophe. I had just seen carcasses of homes reminding me not just of their lonely, marginal presence at the southernmost tip of India, but also of this delicate equilibrium. Inside one home, I found the twisted remains of a tricycle; in another, a cracked wall clock stuck at 8.47; and in yet another, a bleached photograph of two children.
Moments later, I chanced upon a delicate pink-coloured conical shell, its exteriors carved gracefully by the sea. My mind dwelt on the ship journey from Port Blair to Campbell Bay. Beyond the stories of suffering, prejudice, injustice and racial pride, my co-passengers were all victims, vulnerable to the egalitarian reach of a natural disaster.
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