My music player switched songs to ‘The Wind cries Mary’ just as my eyes wandered towards some trees. A speck of white on one of the tree trunks caught my eye. I looked again and noticed more white circles along the side of the tree trunk.  With a guitar wailing in my ears and my mind doing a scan of the bark for a possible critter, I moved closer to the tree. The white circles had more dimensions than I thought. They were eggs.

The gecko as 'nanny' of the brood

My mind instantly raced back to a rock crevice I had seen many years ago on a hill in Vellore. I had spent many years there during my childhood, exploring the hillsides and seeing lizards of all kinds—rock agamas, golden geckos, garden lizards, monitors, termite hill geckos, and of course common house geckos. Of these, the golden geckos got some scientific attention when the area became part of a range extension in their distribution across India. It was also here that I got to see gecko eggs cemented on the sides of a rock and learnt that this was how some geckos ‘nested’.

Back at Chowra, I walked up to the tree and gazed at the spherical moon-shaped blobs stuck on the tree trunk. There were eight in all, in four pairs, a little distance from each other. I wondered which gecko could have laid such large eggs when there was a movement next to the eggs and there appeared a flat-tailed gliding gecko (Ptychozoon nicobarensis). She was large and beautifully camouflaged against the bark, and obviously didn’t like the look of me, for when I took two pictures of her, she disappeared behind the trunk and out of view. I figured she was mom to those eggs. (Rom Whitaker later told me that she would have laid only a pair, and other females quite possibly laid the rest in pairs, as if in a nursery, with one female taking the responsibility as nanny of the brood.)

Despite my attempts to creep up behind her, she always had the advantage of stealth and camouflage and I had to return in the dark to get a few more pictures. In the evening, she was more approachable and decidedly more active in the comfort of the darkness. She hunted insects along the trunk, spotting potential prey, creeping over, and flicking her flat tail with a flourish, then leaping if need be to return to her perch to munch and swallow her food. She would then look out eagerly with her large eyes for more prey, licking her chaps in with a grin. This was my first brush with wildlife on Chowra (I had seen a few species of birds during the day, but the birds being finicky and airborne much of the time, I didn’t get a chance to observe most).

Gliding gecko hunting at night; note her flat tail.

A few days later, while interviewing a young Chowra couple—beautiful hosts who were the first to invite me to a lovely lunch of spicy fish curry with chillies and rice—we heard a screech and looked around to see children race out from near a young coconut tree where they were playing. They were pointing to a slithering snake on the branch. I left my notebook and lunged for the snake. It was a bronzeback tree snake but with unusual black blotches along its neck. Thin and graceful, it was all the more fascinating for its fearlessness at my approach.

The bronzeback snake

Within a few seconds, it calmed down and all I had to do was give it enough assurance that I was not going to do it any harm. I was the centre of attention, having grabbed a snake. ‘Paich’—the word for snake in Sanenyo, the language of Chowra Islanders—was uttered by everyone as more people came to see the commotion. They knew that it was a non-poisonous snake, but asked me why I wasn’t scared that it would try and get inside me through the orifices on my body—specifically the one in my rear! This was of course the strangest of thoughts, and I quickly dismissed it with a laugh. Snakes slithering through the anus—it was a strange but imaginative connection! Then I had a problem. No one was willing to help me photograph the snake by holding it while I took pictures. I resorted to holding it with one hand and the camera with the other. Thank god for auto-focus digital cameras! I got a few decent pictures before I released it onto the tree, after assuring the villagers of the snake’s decided non-preference for regions like human rears, nostrils and ears.

The snake slithering away (not through the anus!)

This was getting better—first a lovely and large flying gecko and then this gorgeous bronzeback. After a few days of fieldwork, I planned a visit to the swiftlet caves on Chowra. These were located on a cliff within a small forest. We trudged past a few plantations and kitchen gardens beyond the main village before entering the forest. At the base of the cliff, I was asked to wait along with a few others while the owner of the cave climbed up past the craggy rocks, using the roots of a Ficus tree draped over the cliff as handholds and footholds.  We followed suit and I took a host of pictures before we returned in single file to the forest floor. I was the last on the path, when a brown tail in a crevice caught my attention—snake?  All of us had placed our hands in this crevice, using it as a handhold while climbing up and down the cliff. I stopped and peeked in and saw a pit viper, its head resting on its coils, unmindful of our proximity or the use of its den. This was the best yet!

I had not expected to see a pit viper, because I was told they were quite rare on the island. I took as many shots as I could and didn’t disturb it with an intrusive scale count—thinking rather of showing the picture to people who were interested in taxonomy to find out which species of pit viper it was. I was happy and pleased that within just five days of ethnographic work on the island, I came across more than one species of herp. The wind cried ‘Mary!’ as Jimi Hendrix’s song played itself out in my first brush with the gecko, giving me luck and a song to play in my mind—making what was otherwise a focused field trip far more exciting than I’d expected.

The more we speak to people here, Manish and I, wandering from house to house with notebooks, Dictaphones and cameras, the more blurred the boundaries become between the Newtonian world I choose to live in, and the pragmatic metaphysical universe of symbol and myth that Chowra constructs for itself.  At one level the community is held together with some of the most far-sighted institutions – all rules, justice, equity and fair play, maintained by strong bonds of reciprocity and kinship.  At another, the island mindscape is sculpted deep with superstition and living myth.  Giant octopi. Vengeful, ship-wrecking fish.  Ghosts of drowned fishers that swim the reef.  Shamans and the power they can wield over a naïve soul.  And a host of complex ritual and belief that governs the calendar of the Chowra islander.  Christianity takes little away from this, adding yet another layer to this rich tapestry of symbol.

So, this evening, after Lenten Vespers (Abide With Me sung in Car Nicobarese), the islanders walked around the village bare-chested, with banana leaf garlands around their necks, their bodies smeared with pig blood.  Christ on the cross. The Lamb of God. Spirit into flesh. A slaughtered pig.  The 39 lashes. Flesh into spirit. Rites of spring.  All these curiously intertwined images made vividly real on the chiselled red glistening bodies walking around the village.

And just when you are ready to succumb completely to the tribal haze, the island generator comes on, and the bloody bodies all become transfixed to the television in the Tribal Council Chief’s house, watching a lurid Tamil film dubbed into Hindi.  Here too the homogenisation of cultures is proceeding apace.  As we walk back to our sad alien capsule on the border of the grasslands, every household we pass has a small gathering of families paying homage at the altar of their post-tsunami television sets.

And yet…

And yet…

A culture that still smears pig blood on their bodies as a part of their catechesis must surely be more resilient against the relentlessness of something as mere as the cathode ray tube.

Right?

Four and a half years after the tsunami, and it still dominates the land and daily discourse of Chowra.  Dead coral rubble and broken tree branches – rainforest and reef – intertwine together like a crown of thorns around the white sand circumference of the island.  The villages we walk through are dignified shanties, corrugated tin, slashed together with what scraps the islanders could salvage from their old homesteads. A shattered jetty.  Broken roads.  And the ubiquity of government contractors that descend on every disaster with their own particular government-sponsored recipe for decadence.  In the case of Chowra, they plan to relocate and reconstruct entire villages well away from the coast, making this an island that turns its back to the sea.  They are eating away at the central grasslands to build their planned concrete slum, replacing the romantic village roundhouses of grass thatch and wood with square characterless cement matchboxes.  Each family will be given a single nuclear house, thus breaking apart the complex joint clan structure that holds the community together.

Sitting in David’s house – makeshift roof and walls, half-a-century-old floorings – I wonder how long it takes for a community to completely recover from a catastrophe as large as the tsunami.  Somehow I am not convinced, as I eat the lovingly cooked meal that is offered us, that the government policy of providing free rice and lentils for five years running contributes any to this resilience.  Goodness of intent is often the mask behind which deadness of imagination hides.

Yet, through the washed-up, beaten-about flotsam village that Chowra appears to have become, it is clear that resilience is something less mensurable than tin roofs, broken roads and numbers dead.  Stripped of more than I can imagine would be bearable as a community, the island of Chowra responds with a self-possessed certitude in the strength of their community institutions in holding them together as a people.

The Chief Captain, Jonathan, is a man of very few words, but it is clear that everyone on the island reveres him.  He  politely welcomes us to his island, but equally politely conveys his suspicions to us and decides that for the time being, we are to be treated as ‘other’, and have to live in the government ‘guest house’ along with the other ‘others’.  It is a small, firm gesture, but it gives us a clear sense of where we belong in relation to this island.  David, worldly-wise, young, trilingual, is put in charge of us while we are here.

Last evening we spoke to the Tribal Council Chief about the Hokgnok system that provides the principle governance structure of the island.  The Hokgnok revolves around clan groups and plantations, and dictates the patterns of resource sharing within the community.  The small crowd that gathered around us spent over an hour describing for us the Panwahnot, the big Pig Festival that happens every year in November.  It appears to drive the Chowra calendar, and each Hokgnok gets its turn to take charge of the preparations, with help from the other Hokgnoks.  Preparations begin in March, with the preparation of orchards, and the repairing of houses and plantation fences.  When the time arrives, pigs, bananas, chickens, cloth and a variety of other festive items are gathered in large quantities for the start of the festival.  Fifteen days of dancing follow, and it all culminates in a big canoe race.

As they spoke, their eyes lit up with pride at the magnificence of their feasting but also at the strength of the community that allows them to pull it off.  There was something else in their voices as well which I could not completely understand until just before we left.  They spoke about the Pig Festival in a vibrant living tense. I asked them casually about the number of pigs they had killed in last years’ ceremony.  And that is when it came out.  The last time they had celebrated the Panwahnot was a month before the tsunami, and never since.  Yet they were holding on to their present continuous as firmly as they could, as though the maintenance of tense itself was sufficient to keep alive the tradition.

Perhaps there is truth here.  Perhaps this is one of those impalpable metrics of resilience that keeps communities together.  The people of Chowra have enough evident pride to leave me with the conviction that they will weather their changes with dignity and wisdom.  They will celebrate the Panwahnot again, they say. I want it to be true. My only regret is that I may not be here when the pigs are slaughtered next.

This November, they assure me.