A convoy of vehicles on the Andaman Trunk Road (ATR).

Just beyond, on either side, stretches the home of the Jarawa—lofty rainforests with tall dipterocarps and padauk, myriad trees and lianas, palms, cane, and bamboo. If the forest bears the human mark of the Jarawa, it is subtle and difficult to discern.

The forest of the Jarawa...

Up in the trees, a flock of birds is busy hunting prey. Dressed in smart black, the Andaman drongo forages in the canopy with long-tailed Andaman treepies. The forest resounds with the territorial drumming of the black woodpecker of the Andamans, even as a spectacular dark serpent eagle cries its shrill cry skimming the skies. Towering above the other trees, an emergent Tetrameles, smooth and leafless, holds a dollarbird on a high exposed branch. The endemic Andaman birds mark the uniqueness of the forest, but the dollarbird suggests an ancient commonality with lands across the ocean, for one can see it similarly perched atop great trees in the rainforests of the Western Ghats, in north-east India, and in south-east Asia.

Dollarbird on the lookout from a leafless Tetrameles branch.

Into logged forests

The road hurtles on, like an arrow of time, past the island of Baratang, into a more open forest.

The Andaman Trunk Road brooks no obstruction... and hurtles on...

Huge logs lie by the roadside. ‘Welcome to Middle Andamans‘, proclaims a signboard of the Forest Department. The signboard is only half green—the other half is red. This forest bears the mark of a different kind of man.

Huge rainforest trees cut for timber lying beside the Andaman Trunk Road.

Here, the tall trees are few and scattered. Amidst remnant evergreen trees are many that are deciduous. The undergrowth is dense with palms, shrubs, and saplings, in dense tangles with weeds and vines.

Through the canopy, shredded by logging, sunlight streams to feed the light-hungry weeds in the undergrowth. The alien weeds thrive: the Chromolaena in dense clusters, the Mikania woven into green shrouds over saplings. The forest is criss-crossed with logging coupe roads. Some are overgrown, some erode away, but some remain, like a tenacious scar marking an old, unforgotten wound.

In the forest itself, the ground is thrown up into little mounds. The mounds are covered with a fine sort of soil that termites conjure from earth and wood. Little seedlings germinate on the mounds. There is ficus, of course, but ferns and other plants, too. The mounds are rounded at sawing height off the ground. Theirs is a strangely haunting presence in the forest, like ghosts of trees past. On the forest floor all around are dotted seedlings and saplings of forest trees—pioneers, deciduous, and evergreen—a tenuous cohort presaging an uncertain forest of the future.

Ghosts of trees past: the mounds in logged forest...

Contested spaces

At either end of the road are altered landscapes of settlement, agriculture and forest remnants, seeming destinations—end points—not just in space, but in time as well. Here, alien mynas and native starlings share and contest space, in the continuing biological tussle of introduced and indigenous so unfortunately frequent on islands. Crows and bulbuls, spotted deer and elephants, many animals have been brought and released here, subsequently thriving as feral populations. By the roadside in Port Blair and Wandoor are rain trees, another alien, festooned with bird’s nest ferns and orchids, growing luxuriantly in the humid tropical climate and soil. As people and lifeforms have arrived, the land has accommodated them, providing resources and succour. How those arriving have accommodated to the land is another matter.

After a long spell of logging and a brief reprieve, the forests are on the cutting block again. The island forests rise behind a skirt of dense mangroves whose aerial roots claim purchase at the very edge of land, forming a shelterbelt from the surges of the sea. The mangroves now give way to desolate wastes and burgeoning resorts with the all-important sea-view. The sand beaches that hold the nests of turtles and the roots of manilkara trees are mined away for the homes of men and the foundations of buildings. The soils from slopes and crop fields erode into streams and into the sea to smother with silt the coral reefs—those not already bleached and crumbling from ocean warming or extraction. A tsunami came and went but the tsunami of a certain type of development continues—yet, it seems only a promise to squander in years what peoples such as the Jarawa have sustained over millenia.

A coastal mangrove with its aerial roots: holding on to land, only to be cleared for a resort's 'sea view'?

Will the spread of the alien plant and animal species into the sensitive landscape of the islands ever abate? Will the tussle over space and resource, over lifestyle and culture, among the indigenous and the settled peoples amicably resolve? And yet, isn’t alien and native a matter of perspective, too? Seen with immigrant eyes from the streets of Port Blair, the introduced myna and house crow appear more familiar than the Andaman teal or treepie. To the native Jarawa still embedded in the island ecosystem, whose name for themselves ‘eng’ means people—to them, we are the alien, people from another world barely known or understood. But to us, as people bereft of intimate connection with nature, it is the Jarawa—our name for them meaning ‘the other’, ‘the stranger’—who appears alien. And so it may remain. The Jarawa lives a world apart. A world he can scarcely construct for us without somehow losing it in the process.

Unbidden, a strange feeling then appears on the journey down the road. A feeling, as if we are destined to always be second-comers, carrying an atavistic insecurity originating in early human migrations from the African savanna into new lands. As aliens forever, we cope with insecurity by revelling in alienness, seeking shelter in superiority, making it an aspirational, a developmental goal. It is our proud red against the darkling green of the Jarawa, who are people like us but who arrived in ages past, taking a path towards a destination altogether different.

Our road could yet lead to a different sensitivity and perception. A sensitivity that allows us to make space for diversity—biological and cultural—on the land itself, in our hearts, our minds. A perception that we simultaneously inhabit different worlds and that a more powerful world should not trample a weaker one to the earth. By making space for survival and recovery of other peoples and other species in their natural homes, the forest of the future may be, not a forest of aliens, but a forest of the human and the humane.

This article appeared in The Hindu Sunday Magazine on 1 January 2012.

Our being here is a violation surely, another sacred space invaded in the increasing commodification of voyeuristic experience, and if I am not entirely uncomfortable with being part of this grave-diving party, it is because we are not the first ones here. The giant sweetlips, motionless above the drop-off gives us a patient, tired look as we disturb his hunting ground. There is a quiet disdain in his assessment: with lycra skins, plastic fins, silicone eyes and artificial respirators, we are more synthetic than organic, and rather inelegant aliens in his silent universe. I guess he knows from experience that if he tolerates our presence another hour, either our weak physiologies or our primitive technologies will force us to surface leaving the busy shipwreck to get on with the long, elaborate business of decay.

And as you surface, you look back once more at the wreck below.  From out in the blue the ship is a laceration on the face of the reef, a deep gash that starts at 17 meters and continues until it meets the breakers at the surface. The island of Minicoy has several such wounds on her reef face – steam ships that ran aground on trans-Indic voyages, carrying grain and cotton and spices and travellers between Europe and the Indies.  After 1885 the wrecks are less frequent after a lighthouse was erected on the southern tip of the island.  The lighthouse is manned still; the lighthouse keeper is a gentleman in the old manner – a self-styled naturalist, a collector of flotsam, keenly aware of the historical symbolism of his post, a proud custodian of his craft.  He accompanies us up the winding iron staircase of the lighthouse, and from this height you can just about make out where the wrecks of old wounded the reef before this tower was built.

Wounds heal.  After the grinding crush of iron keel on aragonite coral, after the life rafts are deployed and the passengers rescued, after the cargo holds are salvaged and the ship stripped of every useable part, the reef calls on its resources to try, as best it can, to repair the tear in its ecological skin.  The fish are the first to venture back, and for species that thrive on structure, a fresh wreck can be choice real estate.  The benthos takes a little longer.  Coralline algae will eventually cover the metal remains, and where there is coralline algae, coral is not far behind.  Slowly, the aragonite will grow back again, and although the scars will always show, the reef does its best to embrace the alien structure and make it part of its own complex framework.  Given enough time, the wreck is little more than a cicatrix on the bark of the reef, a mild blemish of rusting metal and flourishing coral.

The reef is good at mending bruises.  From its pre-Cambrian origins, it has spent most of its existence on a turbulent earth, shifting and gurgling with earthquakes and tsunamis, storms and high waves, extreme tides and shifts in temperature.  And by now the threats of ocean warming and El Niño events on coral reefs are familiar tropes to a media-suffused populace.  We have all seen, and  are perhaps even a little weary of those dramatic images of bleaching coral and dying reefs.

When a small disturbance scales up to catastrophe like this, the self-healing capacities of the reef are put seriously to test.  Yet even here, a healthy reef can recover.  Much is dependent on having good neighbours close at hand. If a few of these reefs escaped the big catastrophe, they can seed the bare spaces with coral. Like white blood cells to the site of a lesion, a flood of coral spat will descend on the spot made dead and vacant by the disturbance, and occupy every free space.  And if the reefs still have a fair complement of grazing herbivores – surgeonfish, parrotfish and the like – those opportunistic algae that can quickly bully out the coral will be kept under check. Given a period of relative calm, and this spat will quickly grow, engaging in a serious-as-death struggle with its compatriots for a space in the sun. Within a decade or so, the wound is mended.

Even in a healthy reef, scars remain long after the healing.  Some species of fish and coral may never recolonize a reef if their populations fail.  These absences often go completely unrecorded, because we often have no baselines to help us determine the loss.  The species that remain have strange demographies, dominated by young individuals, or with some ages completely missing from the population.  These populations, like some post-war generation of lost young soldiers, will carry the signature of this loss for a long time after the disturbance has gone.

Back down in the reefs of the Minicoy you can read this signature everywhere. Minicoy bears the burden of its isolation heavily when hit by large disturbances.  The once effulgent abundances of branching Acropora are there no longer, and you suspect (although you have no way of knowing) that many of the genus are probably locally extinct.  The coral that remain are either very large – survivors of the last mass bleaching – or very small – individuals that managed to recruit to the reef after the event.

As you descend to the wreck for one last time, you realise, that viewed in one way, the scornful dismal of the sweetlips on your previous visit, was actually a fair metaphor for the wreck itself.  Much like you, the wreck is a bionic entity – and after all these years, the identities blur between human and natural forging.  This is not new of course. The ability of coral to take human structures and make them its own is well known.  And it does not take long for us to wonder if this ability can be used to help reefs in the process of wound healing – hurry along a repair that would otherwise take decades.  It is a neat idea surely, and it appeals to the engineers in us.  We are a meddling lot, and it is difficult to leave well-enough alone. Already, on experimental and larger scales, there are efforts afoot to restore reefs through artificial means, using many of the same techniques the reef uses when dealing with a shipwreck.  Concrete blocks of different configurations are being cemented to the reef, waiting for recruits of coral to descend.  Complex electrified contraptions are being established, with the purported aim of encouraging calcium deposition.  For many, even these relatively passive means are not fast enough.  Nurseries of coral are being constructed, where coral from the reef is broken into bits and coaxed to grow into individual heads.  These will later be taken and cemented to the reef, to produce, in the reasoning of the coral nurserymen, instant reefs.

If I come across as a tad sceptical, it is not because I do not believe that these techniques of engineering reefs are a solution.  What I am not entirely sure about is what problem they are a solution for.  The dilemmas the reef face today from local and global pressures are complex ecological dilemmas, and trying to solve them with simple – dare I say, simplistic – engineering solutions is appealing surely, but almost certainly blinkered.  If it is our meddling that has brought reefs to the current brink of disaster, it is a vain presumption to believe that all it will take is a little more meddling to right those wrongs.  More seriously for me, it appears to absolve us of deeper responsibilities – to understand the underlying processes that drive the reef’s immune system in the face of disturbance and catastrophe, and to ensure that these processes are protected.  This takes more imagination of course.   It requires a certain humility to recognise the boundaries of our own accomplishments. And it requires an intellectual investment beyond cement and epoxy. In the absence of this knowledge, the future for reefs is uncertain. We are traveling without a lighthouse here, and shallow strands are everywhere.

A version of this post first appeared on the NDTV blog site.

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.