A Slippery Edge of Hope

Simone Clarke from Perth, Australia was an independent research scholar in social anthropology. So apart from enjoying places like any other tourist, she had her professional demands met during her forays into new societies and cultures. Laying bare dust from the issues of race and ethnicity, she looked far more mature and introvert than her blonde figure of 40 years, adored with charming bluish eyes, would have appeared in any other profession.

Our happiness we carry on our face. It is a thing desirable and appreciated, so much so that we sometimes mask even our pains under the make-up smile. There are pains that we prefer to carry hidden. Not for something very important. Just that it is suitable to the image that we carry or want to get. There was an undercurrent of an ever-persistent pain beneath the upper, worldly layer of Simone’s countenance. Married twice and single now after the second divorce, she was faced with the imperatives of redefining life altogether. Her two marriages lasting seven years had been spent in, for no major fault of hers, conceiving a child. The doctor’s report was merciless nonetheless. It put up a heartless stop to her maternal hopes. The urge to be a mother was so heavy that it had toppled the cart of matrimony, scattering little mundane pleasures of married life. However, such instincts are too lofty to peter out; these turn into even some loftier form of urge. Guided by some new mysterious version, her head held confidently high, she appeared profoundly calm. She could absorb herself more freely in the study of others’ sorrows, pains, history and cultures. Undoubtedly, she felt better attuned to her profession than others.

The civilizational superiority vaulting in an arc, triumphantly written in the impressively drawn skyline of her home city, was becoming boring for her. Life was just petering out with ungracious eloquence. If not be a mother, she felt drawn to the prospects of doing something as important as being a mother. She was really hungry for some impressive work. The other night her businessman friend Andrew Watson had spoken in sneering, derogatory tone about the aborigines, her favourite topic of research. As she was drunk, her response to the deliberate misdemeanour was quite unrestrained, and she ended up slapping Mr. Watson’s 45-year-old not so impressive face, followed by a rather long recitation of her thesis. The Latin song’s bellicosity was, however, superior to hers. People were still dancing, thinking she was yelling an encouraging song at them.

Life just moves on. The moments flow, filling up the vacant dots left by the preceding ones. Andrew had left the place. The seat vacated by him was now occupied by Pratyaksha Mohanty, an Indian student of sociology studying in a college in the city. The words aboriginals, primitive tribes, hill tribes, Risley, Dr. Hutton, Sir Baines which peered through the stormy sea of music and reached her studious ears in a very impressive manner. She was much impressed with Simone’s unrelenting passion for the subject. That night helping the drunken anthropologist to reach her rented room, the little bit of conversation was enough to start a friendship. The fire of friendship, after all, merely needs a cosy, sympathetic spark.

“There are still aborigines in India in the most inaccessible and isolated spots,” Pratyaksha was telling her on their third meeting next week. “Their primitive state is just charming. A mere look at them from a distance takes you thousands of years back. It seems they have beaten time. It’s still. A silence. In staying the same they appear to have beaten all mad race. It’s savage. It’s beautiful. Shaped by nature they seem inseparable part of the flora and fauna around them. Far away in the safety of the sea lie a group of 573 islands in the Bay of Bengal. About 1200 kilometres from Calcutta and Chennai each. How beautiful the sea, the protector of their primitiveness appears. Even during the storms, the water seems harmless, just shoving naughtily these peals on its bosom!”

The girl was coming to terms with newfound liberty and a few drinks found her completely poetic. “The Andamanese, Jarawas, Onges, Shompens, and Nicobaris. True sons of nature. They are naked. From birth to death they are the same. Like babies forever. They haven’t been polluted by the spools of knowledge. We call them primitively backward just because we have run too fast. Too fast in fact to even lose ourselves in the stampede. They don’t struggle to come out of their modesty. The government is worried about their extinction. But the militarisation of the islands is far more risky to their survival. They face erosion of identity, displacement and freshly arrived diseases. Mind you, some of these groups are in pitiful dozens only!”

Like a concerned mother Simone gave a worried sigh. Of course she had read about them. But the description was very powerful. She was transported to that distant place; lost in the ringing merriment and cast- and creed-less luxuriance of these naked bodies far away in the lap of the sea. Given the state of her mind, the world had acquired a strange complexity, an overbearing callousness. She could feel its weight. She craved for a far simpler world, a weightless society, a sort for gravity-less air to float aimlessly. She felt like dousing her identity into that unchanged world which was left untouched by the colossal spadework of time over the centuries.

“And how safe they appear in the lap of the sea!” Pratyaksha was rejoicing radiantly.

The reason for the Indian girl’s flight of fancy was that she had spent a couple of years in Andaman and Nicobar, where her father was a station commandant at the Car Nicobar Indian Air Force Base. Staying there in her officer’s enclave, her girlish drifty young spirits would take her to the remote corners of the islands. She liked the shy, scared, apprehensive aborigines; liked their naked unpretentiousness; was pained at the sophisticated, steely rods penetrating their mysterious kingdom defined by the forces of nature. It was wonderful how a few hundreds of each group could enjoy so blissfully in the alien environment surrounded by snakes, spiders, and scorpions. Not much more was required for Simone to know where her next assignment lay. She needed to be out of the web of her present. She had to dive into the pools of unruffled simplicity. Perhaps that would free her of the major worries of her life—tensions that were stalling her present. She needed a brushstroke to paint everything colourless, to write very simple lines again.

It was really warm and sunny in Australia this December. Sunrays beat down with hideous ease. The call from that ancient, untouched world appeared fiercely urgent. It was a relief to leave the simmering land for some time.

“North India is reeling in mist and cold,” the Indian girl gushed with vacillating sensation, as they boarded the plane to Chennai.

Through the entire journey, Simone’s heart dived and surfaced excitedly like some love-lorn dolphin in the sea below. Her enticing ogle at the bluish calm waters of the ocean below created a pleasant sensation at a place where a kid might have kicked had she conceived. A woman possesses the basic instincts of a mother. In the womb of her heart, love and care never fall short of seeds to conceive the things that make this world a better place.

“Mother sea is so fertile! So many creatures and beautiful cultures like these Andaman and Nicobar tribals in her womb,” she felt envious.

Many times she had asked the stewardess at what time they would be passing over the islands. She was glued to the plane’s track on the screen in front. Much to her disappointment, she was told that the islands did not lie on the route.

They spent three days in Chennai with Pratyaksha’s old bachelor uncle. The old man’s jarring philosophising was tolerable only because of the cushion support provided by the gentle, mild and calmly condescending south Indian version of the winters.

As the ship sailed for its 1200 kilometres journey in the Bay of Bengal, she was struck by the sea’s malleable luxuriance. The scholar in her was bristling adventurously at the prospect of studying, analysing and becoming a part of those shy, almost naked bodies protected by the fortress of sea from all sides—away from the ear-splitting noise. As the ship cut across the waves, the sea breeze vouchsafed tranquillity. Sea miles were spread in luxurious austerity. Sea, the untidy chessboard of wavy moves, to change and not to change at the same time. Its faded green ripple carried an enormously elderly aura. 

“The waters are the same. The sea hasn’t changed. In its cradle they also float unchanged,” she thought, smelling the deeply rhythmical sense of infinity sashaying over the waves.

Reaching the Air Force Base, she felt a few knick-knacks of paradoxical feelings. The place was very orderly. However, this type of orderliness, the main-stay of the civilized society, wasn’t what she was in pursuance of. She was looking forward to overlap the pleasantly disordered, knotted, ruffled lines of those primitive civilians. Her friend’s big, healthy father, his orderly impassiveness curtly signed by a well-trimmed moustache, looked like a beholder of civilizational monotony; as if he was under the charge and duty of destroying all civilian disorder in one swash like the angry sea of the mythical watery deluge of all religions.

However, appearances are just poor carriers of first impressions. It sometimes raises only false alarms. Contrary to the impression he carried, Station Commandant T. Mohanty was a thorough gentleman oozing with magnanimous humility. He knew that the formalities of receiving a guest ought not to blind oneself of the immediate task at hand, i.e., the purpose of visit. So, very promptly with the verve and enthusiasm of a young pilot on his first unaided flight, he made arrangement for the Australian lady’s ‘mission with the aborigines’, as he called it.

Sactius, perhaps the only graduate tribal from the area, working at the Air Force Base, was called for services. This affable, unpretentious man moved with short, quick steps as if pacing up and down to build a bridge between ancient times and the present. Abundant with simplicity, he performed his tasks with an extremely enlivened energy. He was perhaps the only link between the big sophisticated and orderly world of the airmen and the small disorderly world of the adivasis. He was aware of it and seemed to cherish the position, all the way eager to stamp his utility in the modern world. He spoke halting Hindi, not so halting decent English and fluent Nicobarese apart from numerous little linguistic sinews that enabled him to get his message conveyed to the remotest ‘sons and daughters of nature’.

Sactius was a Jarawa, whose clan’s 300 to 400 members resided at Jirkatan. During colonial times, his grandfather had become a favourite of his English teacher, an English Jailor, and let loose an inertia that reached to the third generation in his lineage and the grandson ended up getting educated. From his hard fought information, Simone’s anthropologist mind struck on two tribal groups. The first included 103 member Onges residing in Duncan creek. These were nomads and passed their days in gathering food. The other was 105-membered Shompen, primitive mongoloid aborigines, living at unknown place in the Campbell Bay. Apart from these, Sentinelese inhabited the North Sentinel island, Jarawas were found in middle Andaman and Andamanese lived on with primitive means on Strait island. Further, dozen or so villages inhabited by about 20,000 people were a peculiar admixture of civilizational surge and primitive recede. On top were the Indian military detachments. The hundred odd members of the Shompen community attracted her aboriginal fancy the most. Sactius was a bit apprehensive about her chosen group for they were the most isolated, most untouched and most primitive of human beings. However he was supposed to help her and he did the same.

The sea appeared the writer of this primitiveness. The island bound by the sea looked like a big canoe floating with the preserved signs of antiquity. A tiny world beyond the push and pummel of competition; self-regulating and self-perpetuating the little slice of calm here. Their existence defined by the gently swaying waves along the frilled and rugged coastline; coconut trees dotting the mighty father’s reach and the mangroves happily and naturally surviving in the intertidal zone. The swaying fringe of the sea seemed to tickle a calmness that clambered into the onlooker’s soul.

“The sea is mother, the maker of this island’s tribal culture. It protects its isolation like a mother keeps the infant safe in her lap,” she thought with a warm, pleasant, maternal sigh.

Mankind has surpassed all animals on earth. He has outgrown the nature and in the process acquired claws, hoofs, and teeth that put anything still part of nature to run for safety. Their learned foot’s encroachment into the territory of Shompens was like throwing a stone into the calm waters of a pond. It created a ripple that was heard above the roar of waves. It was like this little world had come out of its slumber. The air gently gliding across coconut trees suddenly scampered to carry forward the urgent message. The world of Shompens jostled like a stone-pelted beehive. The outsiders were met by hostile looks. There was raw and animal fear in those big white eyes. They retreated into the little forest. There was occasional stone throwing also. However, any escalation on the attacking scale was prevented by the two armed young men attached to their party by her friend’s father. Pratyaksha had preferred to spend her days at Port Blair. Christmas was about a fortnight away.

They were like unwelcome guests, the host having moved out leaving the house empty. Distances are but bridgeable if at least one end is open to connect with pure, harmless intentions. Simone knew it was a big challenge to allay the raw fear in them. Love but can dispel all doubts. She knew it and was confident of pushing out fear from their naked bodies. Simone carefully chose a spot and pitched their tent. It was about 500 yards from the primitive habitation, if it could be called habitation at all, abandoned presently for the scared souls had retreated into the forest. It was a mere assemblage of grass, tree branches, and wood. A different world, a carrier of a unit of antiquity, a world so different from the world of gleaming, shining skyscrapers she had come from.

There was another anglicised tribal called Hurbartson who joined the group after they had set up the camp.

The smoke of painful memories a bit clouded the sun above her. Simone moved her hand as if to shoo away everything related to that old world. Walking along the beach this sunny forenoon she was mulling the strategy to start first delicate steps on the path to communicate and mix with the Shompens. The line of foam along the coastline made her soul pay obeisance to the sea’s protective fencing around these tiny dots of islands, where these little human groups still survived as raw agents of nature; totally untouched by the civilised surge. She looked into the forest where the aborigines had moved into, creating further distance from the world beyond, and a sense of ennobled antiquity seemed to beckon her from that silent world.

A genuine smile can win over all lines of apprehension on a suspecting face. True love can douse the fire of hate in any heart. Peel off the predatory skin of aggression and encroachment from your mannerisms and you become a naked simple human being, as near to nature as an aborigine, even though you might be wearing clothing. She felt all this and planned to show her group’s harmlessness. She had watched some documentaries on television in which animal lovers had become friendly even with lions in forests, winning over their trust, breaking that almost unmovable barrier between the man and the animal, and setting up a bond of love. This task was less daunting because these were humans after all, even though in primitive stage. The things that are done with real passion very rarely fail us. Her maternal passion to integrate with their primitiveness, and Sactius and Hurbartson’s linguistic abridgement of this communicative predicament found them winning the confidence of these innocent souls, who had never seen totally clad savages from the other world from so close quarters. Their prehistoric nakedness and Palaeolithic struggles for survival struck the social anthropologist in her with awe and reverence.

An old man’s curiosity was the first one to be caught in their cordially set up net of friendship. As if to impress them, he stigmatised his nakedness with a scant grassy tuft hiding his modesty in the middle, walked up to half the distance between their abandoned huts and the alien camp. He appeared to be out on some adventure, having convinced himself of the absence of mortal risk in taking a few steps in the outsider’s direction. Peeping into the air around the camp, he drank something from a coconut shell and started to chew and suck at handful of nautilus shells as if these were the peanuts of his world. As if to flaunt their cultural advancement, he then started cutting his long hair using a stone ship. Very cautiously, Sactius and Hurbertson started gesturing and speaking words that might be understood by the old Shompen. From a distance, a female figure possessing enormously developed buttocks was anxiously watching. She appeared at the cusp of panic for the old man’s sake. Taking many minutes for one step she reached a tiny grass shelter, entered while looking with utmost care in all directions, and came out wearing a skirt of Padanus leaves as if she was afraid of nudity under the prying eyes of the outsiders’ covered bodies.

Their boating and fishing foray around the Nicobar group—comprising Bamboka, Chowra, Little Nicobar, Pilo Millow, Tilanchang and Trinket islands—involved their version of the farthest limits of creation. Looking from the little hole of their secluded existence, she peeped insecurely at the bigger world of alien people with alien proportions of clothing, language and gestures. Her body was tattooed with varied patterns, designed with animal leisure during their endlessly free hours. The old man’s body too was tattooed with ochre shades. Body-painting appeared more important to them than clothing. Their primitive reddish ochre artistry on the skin is believed to be a protection against abundant evils that stalk the seas and the forests.

The woman was perhaps the old man’s daughter, or we aren’t sure whether such a relationship was known to them or not. The socialised tribals in the camp went a few tantalising steps forward, speaking all the words they could muster up from the rudimentary verbal kit of these people still surviving in almost Palaeolithic conditions. The old man and the hefty woman appeared visibly impressed with the antics of their civilised brethren from the outside world. Hurbertson took out his shaving kit and started shaving before the curiously bewildered eyes of the primitive mongoloid aborigines. The old man too picked up his stone chip and tried to shave his beard, but having failed to do it, he started cutting the hair around his sagging jaw. Now, the way of doing it was the only thing which distinctly hyphenated the tribal and the outsider. This link—in the form of lather and razor on the one side and stone chip on the other—between the past and the present was caught by their raw instincts. Maybe in their virgin, animalistic instincts, they must have understood that these outsiders were not from some unknown place of the devil spirits they were so scared of. The next hyphen was bestowed by eatables from both sides of the fence, the very next day. The campers ate theirs, the tribal theirs. Cakes, biscuits, canned meat, bread on one side and unsalted, raw fish, dugong, honey, turtles, and brew made of strange roots on the other.

Curiosity took to the foot trails leading to the forest nearby and drew the aborigines one by one, following each other, convinced of the absence of risk. It was like catching their trust with the cord of love. And they trickled out, slowly taking cautious steps, always on their toes to scamper back if there was some danger. It was a shaky bridge made of twigs and branches of feeble trust. And it got consolidated.

It’s the same humanity linking the ancient and the modern. Next week Simone was ecstatically fishing in the shallow waters of coral reefs. She joined the womenfolk in holding little nets made of plant fibre and barks; while her male colleagues faltered with bows, arrows, and wooden harpoons. Going into the open sea without rigger canoes was particularly scary, but they bore it man and womanfully because the trace of understanding that emerged on the brightened faces of these isolated beings was the best thing they could aspire for in the universe. The Shompen males seemed more eager to hide their nudity in comparison to the females. Some of them covered their groins with little pieces of animal skin serving as loincloths. They shyly giggled, as if feeling more awkward of their covering. The sound of sea waves chimed like music eulogising this meeting of the ancient and the modern. The two sides mixed through the language of looks, smiles, laughter, gestures, and sounds.  

Sailing out in the open sea with these unpretentious human beings, so heartlessly defined backward in terms of the indices of development, she sensed the primordial feel of unstigmatised, unpolluted humanity.

“How sadly we, the monsters of knowledge, have defined their infinitely free and wildly unconstrained existence in terms of the two parameters of relative isolation and backwardness,” she grudged within herself. “And this inaccessibility and alienation so paternally vouchsafed by the pride father,” she cast a look of genuine gratitude at the gently surfing waters of the Bay of Bengal.

The best of their efforts gave the minimum to survive. It saved them from the worm of greed and planning too much about future. They lived just for a day. It was, from their standards, a bit better catch this day. Sea, the gentle sea, and sometimes the angry one, had been kind. Walking in a file through a mangrove they performed a sort of sea ceremony. They knew the mangrove’s utility from their simple experience. The mangrove acted as a natural dyke, allowing breeding, spawning, and hatching for small fish. In a jutting coral rock among the stilted vegetation, they had dug out a little cave. There were strange engravings that would pass as prehistoric painting. An elderly man with a very happy face and watery, pale eyes, wearing a skin-mask and a beaked headgear, made guttural sounds in front of some sacred stones.

She recalled the last time she been to church. She had fervently prayed, hoping things will change to give peace to her mind in the way she wanted. Our expectation from the unknown hasn’t changed at all across thousands of years, she thought looking at the aborigine priest. It was the same God for this stone-age tribe, expected to be appeased on a bribe. With a porcupine quill the old man pierced the neck of a pheasant. The bird fluttered for its last moments. With needle-like sharp bones the old priest criss-crossed the dead bird and put it before the sacred stones. It was followed by shouts and strange cries. Faith, even in its most rudimentary form, is the anchor of our existence, she thought. In her life she had swung between belief and non-belief. She wanted to keep her belief now, because she was happy. And there they came back along the lapping waves of the Bay of Bengal, putting little bowls of palm leaves in the water to float, offering flowers to the foamy beach, and sprinkling water over their naked bodies. The ebony hair of a young Shompen caught her attention. The naked youth was handsome in his own ways. Do they fall in love, she wondered. He carried a bow on his shoulder and a grass belt, tucked with four five wooden arrows, around his waist. An Indian military helicopter went overhead, cutting air with a wobbling rumble. Instinctively, the ebony-haired youth drew out his bow. But before he could take out the arrow his eyes met Simone. His fear gave way to a sheepish grin. There were peals of laughter around. The world seemed to have changed for this prehistoric tribe, at long last.

The only bond linking the group that knew too much and spoke more, and the one that knew too little and apparently spoke even lesser than the pets in the bigger world, were few classless, raceless exclamations—a warm smile, an unrestrained laughter, wispily silent but understanding language of the eyes, gestures from full heart, cemented by few words and phrases spoken by the two tribal men who had had a brush against the outside world.

The nagging pain of her soul was gone. She had been sucked back into pre-historic times, away from the present. She never knew the past could give such solace to the self. Amidst their nakedness she was also peeling off layers after layers of frustration, dissatisfaction, loneliness, irritation and anger. These were the trash of the world beyond the sea.

Brilliant sleepy islands, coral reefs, and saltwater crocodiles. (She had stood on the shore with the pores of her skin drawn tight as the Shompens unsuccessfully tried to hunt one.) Luxuriant tropical forests, in which Nicobari Macaque, Imperial pigeon and Narcondum Hornbill hooted, flapped their feathers, flew into the blue skies, painting their freedom on the bluish canvas. It was a small world, yet so substantial; substantial in its beauty, in equal proportion to the immensity of the sea.

The tropical sun kissing her fair skin, the air ruffling her silky hair, she had stood, her hand supported on the sacred stake, in a wood-cleared patch of the forest. There were graves around. With a pinch of irritation, they in the other world, where she came from, derogatorily summarised the culture of such ancient tribes with terms like corpse worshipping cult, ceremonial cannibalism, cannibal practices and animism. She but, as she closed her eyes, could feel some vibes of the primordial religion. Humanism.

At nights the academician, social anthropologist in her kept her awake. By candle light she wrote hungrily and profusely about their survival, diseases, emerging signs of malnutrition, imminent loss of control over natural resources, displacement and ill-suited rehabilitation, and to top it all the erosion of their long-held identity. She felt gloomy and sad about the future, but then the gently lugubrious music of the tides hitting the corals and the lighted portion of the sky by the lighthouse somewhere in the Campbell Bay promptly gave her assurance that these Palaeolithic traits, which have so mischievously side-tracked the modern man’s path to culture and civilization, will survive forever because the sea is with them, and these few dozen naked human beings are so comfortable and at peace in their bare skin that to imagine them otherwise would be a sin.

The 70,000 years old primitiveness of their DNA, so paternally protected by the sea since their arrival via Indonesia filled her with primordial awe and raw respect for the forces of nature that shaped human destiny in such fantastic ways. She was in enchanting awe of these human beings, who lived as freely as animals without the chains of modernity, culture, nagging responsibilities, constraining commitments and many other headaches born of the modern-day society.

One night the tiny hamlet was alive with festivity. Their bodies painted with charcoal and vegetable dyes, they danced in a circle around a fire that had been lit after an hour-long struggle with the fire stones. She felt like helping them with a matchbox from her tent, but dropped the idea, considering it an intrusion into their primitiveness. As the fire rose, they jumped and hooted, as if in awe of this strange spirit. They placed the skulls of their ancestors around the fire, dancing in slow, abundant movements, now and then taking out their necklaces of sharp, little bones to touch the skulls, as if seeking blessing to ward off the evil spirits.

The beautiful day of December 25.Christmas. The sun was shining with magnificent eloquence. White fluffy clouds hang in the blue with selfless calm. Sea waves hit the corals with verve and zest. She had always participated in Christmas celebration with a heady ecstasy. Even today she carried the usual festive spirit. She was surprised by her enthusiasm to involve these simple tribals in celebrating her faith. The night was planned. What a Christmas night it would be, she thought deeply inhaling the sea air. Souls’ musicality and the sea’s at a distance. She felt like embracing the sea, their protector.

Hathu, the man who took first tottering steps towards acquaintance with the aliens and Aatu, his daughter, the big bottomed female who apprehensively arrived at his side that first day, were Simone’s favourite in the hamlet. Aatu’s one-and-half year old daughter always sowed titillating seeds of flowery hopes in her barren womb. Just a single look at that tiny primitive creature, inexplicably and infinitely fulfilled the thirst of her maternity, completed her. The night was a real beauty, the one that you tend to remember for a long time. The stars shone at their best in the curious sky. With innocent wonderstruck eyes, the child was ogling at the rag-tag Christmas tree so painstakingly prepared by the outsiders. Sactius as Santa was the centre of aboriginal attention. They danced around a bonfire—this string of primitive and cultured humans holding their hands, their feet moving unhurriedly forward and backward, both sides introducing their moves now and then into it, both trying to imitate the other’s steps. The gentle cadence of their body movements was in sharp contrast to the robust notes of strange drums made of animal skins. The festivity went on well past midnight, in fact into the wee hours of the next day. Time, but, here was the least botheration. They lacked everything, but not contentment and time.

However, even the immediate future is impregnated with so many uncertainties, haps, and mishaps that many a time our little joys of the present make us heavily indebted to the coming time. Thus, while here on this tiny island, a little group of humans was enjoying perhaps the pleasant most festivity of their lives, thousands of kilometres away, who knows there might have been subsurface undercurrents of chaos waiting to hatch at any moment to give birth to the ugly child of doom and destruction.

Throughout the revelry, Simone’s hungry maternity had been copiously satiated by Aatu’s little daughter. This little naked black angel kept on looking and smiling at her with her big eyes. Several times it had dozed off to sleep, only to wake up and cry to be taken in the white woman’s lap. The ever-increasing curiosity in her eyes that had hitherto seen so little of the same peaceful life made her round face acquire a peculiar expression of understanding that belied her little span of time on this tiny island. Simone couldn’t help picking the baby girl many times during their dancing and singing. She danced around the Christmas tree, holding the baby with one hand around her bosom and stretching out the other to hold the tiny hand in a couple’s dancing posture. Much to some inner satisfaction to the ever-waiting mother in her, the girl cried every time somewhat apprehensive Aatu took her back.

Time thus dived with its importance into the depths of the sea. It was not before 4 o’clock in the morning before everyone in the tribal hamlet and Simone’s camp was fast asleep. Nobody was awake when a tired twilight handed over the baton to a dithering and worried day; worried with its rayed responsibility to see the humanity safely advanced by one more day, by one more step. Another day, thus, dawned. It was none other than the fateful day of December 26, 2004—the day of Asian Tsunami disaster. The day when it appeared as though God had abandoned millions of people around the coastal areas and tiny islands in South and South East Asia to the doomed watery arrows of catastrophe. Dangerously interlocked plates off the coast of Sumatra were readying to trigger a killer quake of magnitude 8.9 and let loose unfamiliar and unknown disaster all across the region.

This geological monstrosity had its focus about 1,000 kilometres south, south east of Port Blair. At 00:58:50 Coordinated Universal Time (06:28 IST), massive geological plates pushing against each other released devastating force that shifted a 1,000 kilometre section along the plate boundary, triggering a massive displacement of water. Starting from the point 3.298ͦ N, 95.779ͦ E, the disaster spread out in all directions in the form of 10 metres sea walls travelling at a speed of 500 Km/hour. Now, who got deluged at what location and at what time is irrelevant. It was mindless act of nature beyond all human comprehension. This silent disaster struck unsuspecting nature and humans. The Tsunami-ravaged sea became a cruel weapon in the hand of death and destruction.

The whole of Car Nicobar group of islands, like so many other places in the region, was suddenly struck and assaulted by monstrously huge walls of water. In just one chaotic moment tiny pearly islands, so safely ensconced in the embroidery of coral reefs and mangroves against the erosion of gently surfing tides on any normal day, were turned into pathetic heaps of muddy debris. The assault was so severe that every type of resistance in the path of massive waves dragging overland was easily ripped apart. Like a massive earth mover, the tidal waves pushed rubble and mud in front of them and then while retreating almost everything was sucked into the sea. Then it rose again. The last remnants of the devastated fronts were thrashed by this heartless assault of nature. Carnage crept miles inland. The horrific tidal waves crashed four five times and left the whole lively places under dozens of feet of water. It was just impossible to believe if anything at all remained unscathed by this Herculean water assault. The same peaceful and protective sea that had cradled the pristine isolation of these islands and their dwellers now became the instrument of annihilation.

Monstrous tidal waves thus triggered an unprecedented and unseen disaster. The primitive instincts of these people might have propped up some inexplicable instrument to save themselves from this watery deluge, if they had been awake at the time while the Tsunami was stealthily moving towards the island. But no, they were caught all asleep. Some mysterious behaviour of the dogs and fowls had given some vague hints of the impending disaster. However, their masters were not awake to interpret their behavioural change. Abnormal noises and hurried scampering, 10-15 minutes before the onslaught, thus went unheeded. All were peacefully asleep when the sea’s deadly pout struck the beaches, mangroves, and coral reefs.

The first tidal wave lifted Simone’s tiny tent as a prize at it 10 metre cusp. She did not know when and how her sound sleep was broken, and how the slumberous first steps towards one final eternal sleep were taken. The canvas was ripped apart by the surf and foam. Rolling in the mud, clothes ripping apart under the pressure of the water as the returning wave sucked her towards the sea, she could reflect only this much that how could the sea that was a good half kilometre from her tent do this; and the very sea that was the proud protector of these islands’ geography and the dwellers’ aboriginality.

A horrific catastrophe; a quick, brutal attack of nature. With some unknown contempt, the sea drew back and came hurtling for the second charge. The second wave was even stronger and she was dragged a full mile, as the small bits of her senses, still alive to the fury around, calculated. The sea had exploded suddenly. Her battered body convulsed and struggled instinctively like a tiny insect driven by the danger to its life. As the second seaward sucking started, she found herself clinging to something with all her might. The water ebbed and her jammed senses gained a bit of foothold, showing her pathetic most signs of life. It was a surprise to be still alive, to just know this much that she could feel herself.

The third wall of water struck again dragging her further away from the coast. In between the half cycle of this watery wall’s forward aggression, her soft female body got struck into the branches of a palm tree as the watery deluge thundered past. When time explodes, turning death surer than life, ones chance of survival, if one is lucky to have one, is the biggest stroke of luck in a lifetime. She was almost squeezed to death. When the wave sucked inwards, the tree gave away but she clung to the trunk, holding onto her luckiest moment.

The fourth strike found her sticking to a strong bamboo bunch, a mighty old thing by the side a ridge. Providence had struck her to the highest water mark of the tidal waves. She was taking a stock of her remaining senses and trying hard to convince herself that she had survived and would live. Clinging like a badly battered and bruised lizard, she saw the lessening ferocity of the Tsunami swiping its hand of death over the ecology of this island. The island appeared to have been gobbled by the sea. Fearing another strike, she ran with all her might up the elevation. Clothes tattered and mud-soaked bleeding wounds meant nothing to her now. Life is far more precious than mere cuts and wounds. We somehow adjust as long as we are alive.

Dragging her devastated self to as safe a place as she could manage, till the string of her furtively feminine effort broke, she lay down and closed her eyes and ears to the sea’s angry rumbling. In the injured vacuum of her inner-self, vast fearsome Tsunamis were still striking at her soul, and no longer able to bear it, she got up like a person coming back to life from death itself. The havoc wreaked around convinced her that her survival was nothing short of a miracle. Sometimes you cannot be happy enough in proportion to your luck. In the face of death and destruction, you still feel a victim, however lucky you might have been.

“Oh you sea, why did you take away your offering so mercilessly?!” she shouted at the muddied land around her.

The pain in her visible and invisible wounds was now creeping into the corridors of her senses. She tried to find any vestiges of life in the destroyed and flooded canopy around her, but only the gory spectacle of swashed vegetation caught her eyes. Her first pain was over the almost sure loss of the identity of this Palaeolithic group that had been braving the nature’s sweet–sour shoves for thousands of years. The sea had preserved their identity, and in one stroke taken it away. It was sea’s absolute right, anyway. It’s too big.

“How could their forefathers seafaring in their rag-tag boats reach here far into seclusion from the faraway lands of Asiatic and African mainland? And now their existence eaten away in one single swipe like this? How? Why?” she had her share of unanswerable questions against the chance hand-outs of providence that hammer our existence suddenly, illogically.

The pain of losing her fellow companions stalked her soft sensitive self. She thought about her four fellow campers who had been selflessly helping her in her research. Before she could get into more worrisome aspects of her own precarious position, her dead reverie was broken by a child’s cry. Hope darted back like a still bigger tidal wave into her broken self. The social anthropologist in her ran drawn by the sobbing notes of the poor destitute.

She had forgotten her own almost hopeless position. “The name of the Shompens is still alive!” she drew out a moment of happiness out of the death-work strewn around.

She moved unmindful of human or animal bodies coming her way. Life is always better than death. A single person alive is better than hundreds of dead bodies. It helps you to live and survive. It gives you hope. ‘Hope’ struck her in the form of big, teary eyes of the child as she approached it. She had a co-sharer of luck. Out of the millions of acts of natural calamity, one single smile of fortune and fate flashing like lightning across the darkest of cloud to give her the smile of a lifetime, despite all the reasons to the contrary around. Aatu’s girl was lying on a providentially outcropping rock. And below, dozens of feet downwards, the half-drowned lifeless body of the unfortunate mother was lying.

The primal maternal instinct had found the tribal mother safely clutching her child till almost the last onslaught of Tsunami. However, the last punched snatched the child away to the safety of this elevated rock waiting their like a cradle to catch the last Shompen scion; while the unfortunate mother was snatched back to the pool of death. Her big-bottomed, mud-smeared figure was lying as the water was slowly ebbing away to its ultimate reservoir after the terrible avalanche.

“Hope...Hope...Hope...” the famished mother in her was crying.

Primordially hungry maternity in her clutched the tiny life as safely as possible. Now her life became doubly precious, because the fate of this girl, perhaps the sole sinew from the primitive fabric of the Shompens, was linked with hers.

“Perhaps some others are still alive!” hope raised its head as the child came back to life in her arms, after being drawn as near to death as possible.

However, the sheer magnitude of devastation belied all such expectations. She saw destruction wreaked around as far as she could see. Exactly same was the fate of those few hundred (572) emerald islands once safely couched in marvellous isolation. The unique cultures spread over 38 inhabited islands; and dense tropical forests, myriad varieties of flowers, birds and animals strewn splendidly over the rest had been mercilessly trashed. The airbase at Car-Nicobar was gone in a swash. The fate of hundreds of airmen unknown—among them Pratyaksha’s father—as death hurriedly wrote its list of mortality. Phoenix dockyard at Port Blair, so proudly built by the Britishers in 1829 and lately upgraded with even more proud by free Indians, was also completely tattered. Like thousands of other lives, the fate of Pratyaksha was also unknown.

In the face of such tragedies even our fundamentals change. She had loved sea, loved it like crazy since her childhood. The surging sea now was the most fearsome thing for Simone. The mother in her took the little child deeper into the island, lest the sea should strike again and snatch the child from the warmth of her bosom overflowing with maternal love for this probably the sole survivor from the family of Shompens.

She was walking along a low ridge that was now drying after being submerged under the watery onslaught. The water to the inner side had not retreated creating a fearsome muddy pool. Her shell-shocked senses were again hurriedly awakened by the raw fury of a crocodile whose jaws were greedily striking at the hard shell of a leather-back turtle. Another game of death; right there in the jaws of death. It sent down a shudder down her spine. Snakes and scorpions, out of their flooded holes, now caught her scared eyes more than once. She would have shrieked loudly if not for the safety and warmth provided by the girl child on her bosom.

Even help needs some help during such times. As it happens during such calamities, to get some providential relief means one has to wait by days, not hours. You can show anything except impatience. The only thing that comes handy is wait. And a prayer on your lips. She was thus stranded for the next three days on this tiny island totally cut off from the world. Her struggle for survival was overshadowed by her ‘motherly struggle’ for the child’s safety. She had never felt this much of responsibility any time before in life. It was an overpowering emotion. She felt what it means to be a mother. Your baby is a part of your enlarged self, and dearest than anything related to yourself.

Yes, she was mother to her! Tears welled up in her beautiful eyes as the little tribal’s lips groped over her shapely breasts, furtively seeking some drops of life. She had to yield to the little one’s efforts. Lifting her ruined T-shirt, she offered her uninitiated motherly self to the child. Like a little hungry puppy, it painfully nibbled and smacked her nipples like a hungry colt is unmindful of the cow’s pain while it strikes its muzzle forcefully into the udder. It was painfully ecstatic. There was no milk in her bosom; but the nutrient liquid of love and care was sprouting in gusto from her heart. The child nibbled for a long time, possibly imagining that it was drawing something out and slept in the process. The pleasant sensation of being a mother extollingly showered upon each and every ounce of her body and soul. For the rest of the time she contrived many a motherly things from the leaves, strange fruits and barks—tasting everything well in advance herself to feel any harmful effects—to keep the child’s wide eyes shining hopefully in her lap.

Meanwhile, rudimentary steps towards the biggest ever relief efforts in Andaman and Nicobar islands had been started. The Crisis Management Group’s meeting in Delhi pledged all patent help to the victims. Army troops, ships, helicopters, and naval and air force personnel were making day and night go side by side to provide succour to the victims. Tons and tons of generators, pumps, bleaching powder, food packets, tents, clothing, medicines, and aid and relief workers were being loaded down on the decimated islands. Relief camps were being set up. Sniffer dogs prowled purposefully to locate the buried bodies in sand and muddy rubble. Helicopters flew very low over formerly habited islands to spot some sole survivor still struggling for life. During nights the sounds of aircrafts plying over made her cry with helplessness. However, every time she cried the child cried even more and she had to stop and smile through her teary eyes to calm down the little thing. Hope in her was ever-persistent in raising its voice at the cusp of eternal optimism. During the day, she knew her sole chance of being spotted by the rescue helicopters lay in running and furtively gesturing along the coastline. To add to her ever-accelerating fear, the islands were being intermittently shaken by many aftershocks of both major and minor types. She knew she had to continue pursuing the chance of life, for herself, and for the girl child equally importantly, or even more so.

Thanks to the unified command of the Army, Air Force and Navy and also the coast guard, on the third day she came across an airdropped food packet of essential rations. She jumped in air like she had come across the biggest treasure in the world. Many a time during those three endless days, life seemed to sing a melody in her ears as a helicopter hovered over the island while she ran and waved furtively beneath; however much to her chagrin it flew away, dithering and uncertain which way to take. She was now getting desperate. All with her hope she was but merely a speck on the ground, and it was too much to ask from fate that she be spotted by some chance helicopter that might come that way.

She knew the fire would be the best means of being spotted, but how to light a fire. Fire so ubiquitous in her world! Life in modern society is so convenient that to think of lighting a fire with stones is almost unthinkable. She had the scion of an old society in her lap. Perhaps to survive now she too would have to act like these primitive savages who had all the time in the world to light fire with stone sparks. She collected stones that she deemed fit to create sparks. Then she was on the mission to collect the driest tufts of branches, twigs and leaves. She then sat on the huge task to create the modern times easiest connivance, fire. Her hands got blisters, the sun changed direction and most of the stones turned to little pebbles by the time some chance spark of her sweating efforts caught an edge of some dry leaf and she fed its warmth like she was feeding life itself.

There was hope, there was fire. It was evening. She had to keep the fire going through the night and raise smoke the next day. She did not sleep lest the fire died, killing her hope as well. Next day, all worn out, her fingers swollen and blood clots evincing the signs of her efforts, she raised smoke like she was fighting for life. This time her efforts did not go in vain. The trail of smoke was spotted by the pilot of a rescue helicopter. It was a beautifully hopeful forenoon on December 30 when she and the daughterly figure in her arms were dragged up the rescue ladder into the noisy windy machine. They were as helpless and broken as a woman and a child can be in such tragic and testing circumstances of the last four days.

She did not know in which relief camp she was put along with the little tribal girl. Life still was pitiable as can be expected in a relief camp. There was a danger of viral storm letting loose the arrows of mortality upon the survivors, who had lost almost everything in so little time. The incidences of Vibrio cholera, a bacterial infection, put the anthropologist in her on high alert for the safety of the tiny primitive flower from the isolated world, whose underdeveloped immunity to such out-worldly diseases might pluck her away in a stroke. Public health specialists, staff nurses and paramedics were stretching every sinew of their doctoring efforts to prevent the outbreak of such diseases. Simone wanted the primitive flower to be away from the uncertain world of medicines like Cephalexin, Sulphamethaxazone, Roxid, Metrinidazole, and so forth. Nearby, bodies were decomposing due to the tropical conditions in the makeshift morgues; the skins turned reddish black and many a finest physiques erased by the cataclysmic assault of water. Three days at the relief camp were unimaginably long. So on the fourth day, when she managed to board a ship to Chennai with many other survivors, it appeared like a new life and world altogether.

Things were no better on the mainland either. It was a battered world. She was on the verge of breakdown, but those little eyes of hope somehow provided her strength. She knew she was up against a long and tiresome struggle to adopt a life that might be doomed otherwise. It’s an irony that social and administrative apathy allows thousands of destitute children to die and be exploited without any issues, but there is a cry at the top of the administering voice if somebody tries to salvage a flower from the garbage. She too had to fight. The Australian Embassy provided her much support during the long, tedious struggle to adopt the girl.

Finally, she boarded the flight home with tears in her eyes and ‘hope’ in her heart. She had named the girl Hope. Out of all the tragic events, she was returning as a more complete human being. Well, that’s life—incomplete without hope.