The Last Island, page 16
Right alongside the road, perhaps ten yards ahead of us, was a man. His skin was intensely black, and he was perhaps thirty-five or forty years old—old enough to have known a time before bus rides and bicultural schools—with a white-and-orange cloth tied loosely around his narrow waist. One of his hands held a long, curved bow, and over the opposite shoulder hung a quiver of arrows.
The first thing that registered with me was his body. Naked, perfect, as taut and upright as the bow. This is what a human body is supposed to be, I thought afterward. This is what our ancestors evolved toward for two million years. A body made to leap and climb, to chase and elude.
Then we passed, and the man was right alongside. My window was still rolled down, and it felt suddenly intimate to have our faces so close, no barrier between us. I did what seemed like the right thing in that moment—the polite, shared, human reflex—and smiled.
The hunter looked right through me, his eyes as cold as any I have ever seen.
My previous visit to the Andamans had felt like a journey. This one began to feel more and more like a trip. Are journeys even possible anymore, I wondered? Is it just that my heart has grown older and less expansive since the last century ended, or has the whole world?
While in Port Blair, I spent an entire day looking for Bala and his family. After the 2004 tsunami, I had feared the worst, remembering their frail hut a few hundred yards from the beach. But there was no way for me to contact them: I had lost the slip of paper with Bala’s last name and address. All I remembered was the general area where their village had been, and the nearby cove with the fishing boats that had brought me to North Sentinel. I also had a copy in my phone of a photo I had taken of Bala in 1998. With the help of an interpreter, I spent hours crisscrossing that part of Great Andaman, looking for anyone who might know of the family’s fate. We could find no trace of the village; commercial sprawl from Port Blair seemed to have engulfed the area, and the interpreter told me that no one lived in thatched huts or fished in boats like that anymore. Many of the people we spoke with were surprised to hear that I had visited the Andamans so long ago, and wanted to know what it was like in those days—most of the islands’ inhabitants seemed either to be too young to remember the twentieth century, or to have arrived from the mainland after the tsunami.
At last, someone directed us to a quayside where half a dozen grizzled old men squatted in a low shed, mending their fishing nets. They took turns peering at the picture on my phone. Finally, one of the men looked up and told my interpreter that he remembered Bala, his wife, and their three sons. They had been unharmed in the tsunami, he said, but Bala had lost his fishing boat and his livelihood. Like many islanders after the 2004 cataclysm, the family had departed to join relatives on the mainland. It was unlikely there was anyone left who would know their current whereabouts. They had melted away into the ocean of a billion citizens of India.
There was still another place I wanted to visit before leaving, one that hadn’t been accessible to me in 1998. Little Andaman Island lies at the far southern end of the archipelago, a lonely scrap of land. I’d been told in Port Blair that it was a place where I could find the old Andamans, the frontier Andamans of twenty or fifty years ago. Getting there requires an overnight eighty-mile journey on a sporadic ferryboat. It had remained closed to foreigners until just two years before, when the Modi government, in a move to boost tourism, lifted restrictions on almost thirty islands in the archipelago.
I already knew Little Andaman from Maurice Vidal Portman’s diaries. It was the remotest place he had explored—a place where, he claimed, he had singlehandedly “tamed” the native Onge. I imagined him there walking the pristine sand, playing Schubert on his violin.
I didn’t plan to visit the descendants of the indigenes Portman had met, however. They live now in a restricted tribal reserve at the southern end of the island; these onetime hunter-gatherers now depend largely on food supplied by the Indian authorities. Malnutrition rates, alcoholism, and infant mortality are reportedly high. In 2008, at least eight Onge men and boys—almost a tenth of the tribe’s remaining population—died after drinking the contents of a bottle that they had found on the beach, which they believed to be an alcoholic beverage; it was actually a toxic chemical solvent.
I’d heard that Little Andaman was the place where John Chau stayed during the weeks before his doomed mission. He believed it was the best place in the islands to keep a low profile. He also thought it was the best place to train his mind and body: the one most similar to North Sentinel of any he could reach.
Connecting the undersea fiber optic cable at Hut Bay, Little Andaman Island, January 2020.
Indian fishermen on the Andaman Sea, Little Andaman Island, January 2020.
As the ferry approached the quay at dawn and passengers disembarked at the little settlement of Hut Bay, I found a place that felt, at first, like the old Andamans I remembered. Towering trees hemmed the gleaming beach. The island had almost no cars; locals navigated the potholed roads on mopeds or hitched rides in rattletrap jeeps. A big construction project was underway in the harbor—a new jetty?—but the ramshackle shops in the bazaar, with their quaint signs (“k.r. nathan & co., general merchants”) gave the satisfying impression of a movie set from an old Western. I found a family-owned guesthouse, really just a row of tin-roofed cubicles, each with a sagging cot, a plastic chair, and a mosquito net. It felt like exactly what I needed. At last, too, I seemed to have found a place with no cell service whatsoever. I tossed my iPhone into the bottom of my rucksack and felt a rush of joy to think of it lying there for the next week or so: an inert, irrelevant black brick.
A line of towering trees stood across the road from the guesthouse, with glimpses of the beach beyond. I set out to explore and soon felt like I was in Portman’s world. The tallest of the trees, no doubt, were here when he landed. The buttress roots of the largest behemoth reminded me of those in his photographs of North Sentinel, the ones with ersatz Sentinelese hunters crouching against the monstrous pale roots.
As I drew closer to the ocean, though, I found that this place was far from primeval. Heaps of trash drifted like snow in the niches and crannies of the buttress roots: lost flip-flops, tampon applicators, and—most of all—dozens upon dozens of discarded water bottles. The beach itself was even worse: I almost stepped on the daggerlike shard of an industrial-size lightbulb. Several days later, one of the locals told me that the flotsam mostly came from far away, drifting on the prevailing currents. An inspection of the water bottles on the sand proved he was right. A few had floated over from the Indian mainland, more from Thailand, Burma, Bangladesh, Malaysia. The plastic castoffs on a hundred yards of this beach probably represented more human beings than have lived on North Sentinel Island for the past thousand years. Surely the same trash washes onto the beach there. The Jarawa language, even before the tribe was in regular contact with the outside world, had developed its own term for Styrofoam: the white wood of the sea.
Still, I found some peace on Little Andaman. My phone stayed in my bag. The sun rose early there—before 4:00 a.m.—but I was up most mornings to watch it break the horizon of the Indian Ocean, go swimming, and then sit on the plastic chair outside my cabin and write in my journal. The family that ran the guesthouse was friendly and kind, and I was their only guest. The husband, Jogesh, told me in broken English about his early years on Little Andaman, in the 1970s, when a few thousand Hindu refugees from East Bengal were settled here to clear the land for coconut plantations. His wife spoke no English at all and stayed in the kitchen, cooking delicious fish curries and fried plantains. Their two sons, Santu and Atanu, were in their mid-twenties; they came and went on their mopeds. Every evening, Jogesh blew a conch shell that summoned the family to prayer.
One night after dinner, Atanu, the older brother, lingered to chat. He asked me questions about myself and told me proudly that although he’d lived most of his life on Little Andaman—and had only been to the Indian mainland once—he’d earned a degree from a small technical college on Great Andaman. Now he was a construction site supervisor, working on the big underwater cable project.
This, it turned out, was the construction I had noticed down in the harbor at Hut Bay: the terminus of a high-speed fiber line that would run fifteen hundred miles from the mainland, bringing 4G service to the archipelago. By the end of the month, it would reach Great Andaman, at a terminal in Corbyn’s Cove, one of the dwindling number of places in the islands still named after some long-dead Englishman: the assiduous keeper of the Andaman Home.*
The connection at Little Andaman would take a bit longer—maybe several months. Atanu couldn’t wait.
“You know, I’m twenty-seven years old and I don’t know how to use the internet,” he said, indignation rising in his voice. He felt marooned here on his native island. He had heard about Facebook and YouTube but never used them. Now, at last, he would join the modern world.
I formed a stronger bond with Atanu’s brother, Santu—two years younger and smaller, quieter, with an adolescent wisp of mustache. He hadn’t gone to college; his only work now was as a part-time mail carrier. And unlike Atanu, who talked mostly about the future, Santu dwelled mainly on the past.
One evening, I mentioned that I wanted to get away from the beach a bit and explore the inland of Little Andaman. The next morning, he offered to take me. We rode a mile or so on his moped to the trailhead, at a place where the palm-oil plantations met the forest. We weren’t really supposed to venture farther, he said—too many people had gotten lost back here—but he knew the way well.
Before long, the second-growth trees gave way to deep jungle. As we walked, Santu pointed out different species, telling me their names in both Hindi and English: the clustered orchids, the slow, furry bees, and the lizards so unused to humans that they didn’t run away when we reached out to touch them, until the moment that our fingers grazed their backs. He told me which plants could be woven to make the wall of a house, which ones his mother made into pickles, which ones you should rub on a cut to make it heal, and which one his schoolteachers had used on him when he misbehaved.
These are things that all the kids of his generation on Little Andaman learned, he said. They were the things your parents taught you so you could start making your way capably through the world. Santu spoke of his childhood as if he were an old man recalling a faraway time.
He told me about the day that everything changed on the island. Santu was ten years old then, and Atanu twelve. They were playing near their house when they heard their aunt shouting from next door. A big wave was coming, and they needed to run. The brothers could see it in the distance, and they sprinted as fast as they could away from the beach, toward higher ground. Three or four minutes later, the tsunami came. It engulfed every house near the shoreline—everything that Santu’s family owned was lost forever. Fallen logs and fishing boats became hurtling projectiles that ran people down as they fled.
They had rebuilt—and were proud of how much of their old lives they were able to reconstruct—but things were never quite the same. There seemed to be fewer fish in the ocean now, and more trash. Kids no longer explored in the forest; the island had better infrastructure, and families could get televisions. Some bought cell phones, too. I was surprised—I’d thought there was no coverage at all on Little Andaman. That wasn’t quite true, Santu said. If you knew just the right spots along the beach, you could find a signal. Kids got phones so that they could watch movies. It might take all weekend to download, but once you had a couple of good ones, you could join the popular clique who clustered together, watching.
Santu didn’t like how things had changed, admitting that even he spent more time indoors now, and much less time out exploring. He was embarrassed to admit that more than a year had passed since he’d hiked this trail.
“You know when the last time was?” he asked me. “You know about the American guy, Chau?”
I told him I did.
“John Allen Chau,” he said, as if proud that he knew the whole name. “I took him out here. You know he stayed at our guesthouse?”
I didn’t. So he had spent his time on Little Andaman with this family—with these four people who were starting to feel like my family.
Chau lingered a week or so here before going back to Port Blair to meet the fishermen who helped him make his final journey. Except for that one hike, Santu said, the American kept to himself. He took breakfast with the family, then went out to run on the beach, to swim, and to ride around the island on his motorbike. Maybe he went to the Christian church in Hut Bay. He never mentioned the Sentinelese. Never brought up religion.
I asked what he and Chau talked about on their hike. “He was interested in mysterious places,” Santu said. “I told him that I was, too. That I wanted to travel to the pyramids in Egypt, and the city on a mountain in Brazil. But just mysterious places. Not unknown.”
We both fell silent. We had stopped at a wide spot in the trail. The fact of Chau’s death—of that other American’s death—hung heavy in the air between us.
The police came afterward, he said. They spent a couple of days interrogating the family about the strange young foreigner.
I asked Santu whether any of them cried when they heard the news. He didn’t answer.
I asked whether his family said prayers for John Chau.
He made a soft sound that I thought was a yes.
Santu was often up at daybreak. He went down to the beach with his dog, Rani. They chased each other around and played in the surf, and I would see them sometimes when I came down early to swim.
One morning, a few days after our jungle hike, I walked to the beach and found Santu and Rani there, as usual. But this time, the young man and his dog weren’t playing in the surf. They were sitting together companionably on a high, broad promontory of rocks, beneath a bulletwood tree. Santu had his knees drawn up, his head down.
I walked over and asked him what he was doing. Santu looked up, embarrassed. He had been hunched over his phone, hoping for a signal.
In the first days after Chau’s death, many evangelical groups denied any association with his ill-fated journey. He was not even an authentic missionary, they said—merely a lone eccentric. Newspaper reports, too, made him sound less like an apostle of the Gospel than just another hyped-up, dim-witted American backpacker, the kind who would fall off a cliff trying to take a selfie.
But in the weeks and months that followed, some evangelicals began to publicly embrace Chau. In April 2019, a Kansas City–based organization called All Nations, whose stated vision is “to see Jesus worshipped by all the peoples of the earth,” held a fundraiser in his memory; one of the organization’s staff members performed a song in which he imagined Chau and the Sentinelese worshiping together around Christ’s heavenly throne.
In fact, as journalists dug deeper into the story of his death, they learned that far from acting alone, Chau had received guidance and support dating back to his undergraduate days working with the Missions and Outreach department at Oral Roberts University. He undertook extensive training at an All Nations boot camp, where inductees were taught to strive for a “wartime mentality” befitting crusaders going forth into battle against the forces of Satan. One role-playing exercise involved confronting a village of “natives” armed with fake spears. Chau also received language training at another missionary-run school—perhaps where he learned the few words of Xhosa that would fail to gain him much traction with the Sentinelese.
Some of Chau’s missionary friends said that he had been obsessed with the idea of bringing the Gospel to the islanders since he was a teenager, and even imagined himself residing permanently on North Sentinel. He traveled to the Andamans on reconnaissance several times, and before his final trip, he drafted a twenty-seven-step plan for Christianizing the Sentinelese, which he shared with a small circle of supporters.
Even after Chau’s untimely demise, some evangelicals continued to urge further missions to North Sentinel. Paying tribute to Chau on the first anniversary of his death, the head of a missionary program at Baptist Bible College in Missouri wrote: “My prayer for and plea to my students is that they would catch the spirit of John Chau.” Moreover, he called upon other evangelicals to take up the young martyr’s “holy task,” benefiting from the experiences chronicled in his diary: “Let’s think fairly about Chau’s preparation and strategy, then improve upon those things, if possible.”
A year later, a member of a group called The Gospel Coalition admitted that Chau had not only broken Indian law in pursuit of his evangelical mission, but also risked transmitting some deadly disease to those he sought to convert. Still, the writer argued, this is a perfectly acceptable risk: the fate of the islanders’ immortal souls weighs more than their mere earthly survival.
Surely anyone with a modicum of sanity and human decency recoils from this. But I should confess that in my more pessimistic moments, I have sometimes wondered whether Chau’s secular critics—all the well-meaning bloggers, tweeters, and activists who want the outside world to leave North Sentinel Island in eternal isolation—are just as delusional, just as much in thrall to their own mythology. Visions of the Sentinelese dwelling in happy perpetuity on their island are probably almost as unrealistic as visions of them dancing eternally with John Chau around the throne of Jesus.
For the truth is that we—the other eight billion human inhabitants of this planet—are already encroaching inexorably on their tiny preserve, as relentlessly and recklessly as in the days of Maurice Portman. Climate scientists predict that rising sea levels may leave much of the Andaman archipelago underwater within less than a century. Global warming, overfishing, pollution, and plastic debris will continue a campaign of devastation against the plants and animals that North Sentinel’s inhabitants depend on to survive. The island’s perfect isolation, unmoored from ordinary space and time, is our own self-consoling fantasy: as long as the Sentinelese remain, we can tell ourselves that our planet is still, to some tiny degree, inviolate. We see those islanders through vision as fogged with our own preoccupations as Columbus’s first glimpses of the Caribs.
