Incendiary Circumstances (3 page)

Clearly the central government is aware that there is a problem, for the relief operation was restructured on January 2, reportedly at the personal intervention of Sonia Gandhi. What is more, several senior members of the ruling party have been dispatched to the outlying islands, not just for token visits but to make sure that supplies are properly distributed. These are welcome first steps, but it is essential for the central government to move quickly to create a more responsive and efficient disaster relief operation in this region, not just for the management of this disaster but for the long term. If anything can be said with any certainty, it is that the tsunami will not be the last seismic upheaval to shake the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

In 1991, after lying dormant for two hundred years, the volcano of Barren Island became active again, and there are reports that it erupted around the time of the earthquake of December 26. On
September 14, 2002, a 6.5 magnitude earthquake occurred near Diglipur in North Andaman Island; now there are unconfirmed reports of a minor eruption in the same area. The signs are clear: no one can say the earth has not provided warnings of its intent.

 

In Port Blair I found that the tsunami's effects on the outlying islands could only be guessed at. The refugees in the camps spoke of apocalyptic devastation and tens of thousands dead; the authorities' estimates were much more modest. There were few, if any, reliable independent assessments, for the civil authorities had decided that no journalists or other "outsiders" were to be allowed to travel to the outlying islands. The reason given was that of the battlefield: too many resources would be spent on their protection. But no battle was under way in the islands, and the dangers of the tsunami were long past. Public ferry and steamer services linking Port Blair to the outer islands were in operation and had plenty of room for paying passengers. And yet journalists, Indian and foreign, who attempted to board these ships were forcibly dragged off.

On January 1 there was an unexpected parting in this curtain of exclusion. A couple of senior members of the ruling party came to Port Blair with the intent of traveling farther afield. It was quickly made known that an air force plane would be provided to take the ministers, and a retinue of journalists, to Car Nicobar the next day. This island, which is positioned halfway between the Andaman and Nicobar chains, is home to some 30,000 people, and it houses an air base that makes it something of a hub in relation to the more southerly islands.

Hoping to get on this plane, I duly presented myself at the airport, only to find that a great many others had arrived with the same expectation. As always in such situations, there was considerable confusion about who would get on. After the ministers had boarded, a minor melee ensued at the foot of the ramp that led to the plane's capacious belly. Knowing that I stood little chance of prevailing in this contest, I had almost resigned myself to being left
behind when a young man in a blue uniform tapped my elbow and pointed across the airfield. "You want to go to Car Nicobar? That plane over there is carrying relief supplies. Just go and sit down. No one will say anything."

I sought no explanation for this unsolicited act of consideration; it seemed typical of the general goodwill of the military personnel I had encountered on the islands. As if on tiptoe, I walked across the tarmac and up the ramp. The plane was a twin-engine Soviet-era AN-26, rusty but dependable, and its capacious fuselage was lined with folding benches. The round portholes that pierced its sides were like eyes that had grown rheumy with age; time had sandpapered the panes of glass so that they were almost opaque. The cargo area was packed with mattresses, folding beds, cases of mineral water, and sacks of food, all covered with a net of webbing. Some half-dozen men were inside, sitting on the benches with their feet planted askew beside the mass of supplies. I seated myself in the only available space, beside a short, portly man with thick glasses and well-oiled, curly hair. He was dressed in a stiffly ironed brown safari suit, and he had an air of irascibility that spoke of a surfeit of time spent in filing papers and running offices. He was muttering angrily when I came aboard: "What do those people care? What have they ever done to help anyone...?" Ofall the people on that plane, he was perhaps the last I would have chosen to sit beside. I was keen to make myself as inconspicuous as possible, while he seemed determined to draw attention to himself. It could be only a matter of minutes, I thought, before the airmen evicted him. Inexplicably, they did not.

When the engines started up, my neighbor turned his attention to me. "These big people think they are so great, but what help have they given?" I assumed this to be a general expression of disgust, of the kind that is to be heard on every train and bus in the country. But then he added suddenly, "Let them go through what I have gone through. Let them suffer—then they would see..."

This hit me with the force of a shock. His well-laundered safari suit, his air of almost comical self-importance, his irascibility—
there was nothing about him that bespoke the victim. But I understood now why the airmen had ignored his rants; they knew something about him that I did not, and this was their way of showing compassion.

In the meanwhile the tirade continued: "If those politicians had suffered as I have, what would they do? This is the question I want to ask."

I winced to think of my first response to his mutterings. "What exactly has happened?" I asked. "Tell me."

 

He did not want his name published, so I shall call him "the Director." This indeed was his official title: he had been posted to Car Nicobar in 1991, as the director of the island's Malaria Research Centre and had lived there ever since. He was originally from Puri, in Orissa, and had been trained at the University of Berhampore. During his tenure in Car Nicobar, he had married and had two children, a son, who was now thirteen, and a daughter, who was ten. His home was in Malacca—the seafront township I'd heard about in the camps—and his office was just a few minutes' walk from where he lived. In this office he had accumulated a great wealth of epidemiological knowledge. Car Nicobar had once been rife with malaria, he told me. In an island with a population of just 30,000, the annual incidence had been as high as 3810, even as recently as 1989. But during his time there he had succeeded in bringing the rate down to a fraction of this number. It was clear, from the readiness with which he quoted the figures, that he was immensely—and justly—proud of what he had achieved during his stay on the island.

On December 25, 2004, the Director was in Port Blair, on his way to New Delhi. Since he was traveling for official reasons, he had left his family in Malacca. He spent the night of December 25 in a government guesthouse—the Haddo Circuit House, which stands close to the water. On the morning of the twenty-sixth he was woken by the shaking of his bed. He stepped down to find the floor heaving and realized that an earthquake had hit the town. As
he was running out of the building, his mobile phone rang. Glancing quickly at the screen, he saw that his wife was calling from Malacca. He guessed that the earthquake had struck Car Nicobar too, but he was not unduly alarmed. Tremors were frequently felt on the island, and he thought his wife would be able to cope. The guesthouse, meanwhile, was still shaking, and there was no time to talk. He cut off the call and ran outside; he would phone back later, he decided, once the tremors stopped.

He waited out the earthquake outside, and when the ground was still at last, he hit the call button on his phone. There was no answer, and he wondered if the network was down. But he had little time to think about the matter, because a strange phenomenon had suddenly begun to take place before him: the water in the harbor had begun to rise, very rapidly, and the anchored ships seemed to be swirling about in the grip of an unseen hand. Along with everyone else, he ran to higher ground.

The islands of the Andaman chain rise steeply out of the sea, and the harbor and waterfront of Port Blair are sheltered by a network of winding fjords and inlets. Such is the lay of the land that the turbulence that radiated outward from the earthquake's epicenter manifested itself here not as an onrushing wall of water but as a surge in the water level. Although this caused a good deal of alarm, the damage was not severe.

It was not long, however, before it occurred to the Director that the incoming swell in Port Blair's harbor might have taken a different form elsewhere. The Nicobar Islands do not have the high elevations of their northern neighbors, the Andamans. They are low-lying, for the most part, and some, like Car Nicobar, stand no more than a few yards above sea level at their highest point. Already anxious, the Director became frantic when word of the tsunami trickled down to the waterfront from the naval offices farther up the slope.

The Director knew of a government office in Car Nicobar that had a satellite phone. He dialed the number again and again; it was either busy or there was no answer. When at last he got through,
the voice at the other end told him, with some reluctance, that Malacca had been badly hit. It was known that there were some survivors, but as for his family, there was no word.

The Director kept calling, and in the afternoon he learned that his thirteen-year-old son had been found clinging to the rafters of a church some 200 yards behind their house. Arrangements were made to bring the boy to the phone, and the Director was able to speak to him directly later that night. He learned from his son that the family had been in the bedroom when the earthquake started. A short while later, a terrifying sound from the direction of the sea had driven the three of them into the drawing room. The boy had kept running, right into the kitchen. The house was built of wood, on a cement foundation. When the wave hit, the house dissolved into splinters and the boy was carried away as if on a wind. Flailing his arms, he succeeded in taking hold of something that seemed to be fixed to the earth. Through wave after wave he managed to keep his grip. When the water receded, he saw that he was holding on to the only upright structure within a radius of several hundred yards. Of the township, nothing was left but a deep crust of wreckage.

"And your mother and sister?" the Director had asked.

"Baba, they just disappeared..." And now for the first time the boy began to cry, and the Director's heart broke, for he knew his son was crying because he thought he would be scolded and blamed for what had happened.

"I was strict with him, sir," the Director told me, his voice trailing off. "I am a strict man—that is my nature. But I must say he is a brave boy, a very brave boy."

Having spent thirteen years on the island, the Director was well acquainted with the local administration and the officers on the air base. Through their intervention he was able to get on a flight the very next day. He spent the day searching through the rubble; he found many possessions, but no trace of his daughter or his wife. He returned to Port Blair with his son the same evening, and the two of them moved in with some friends. Every day since then
he'd been trying to go back, to find out what had become of his wife and daughter, but the flights had been closed—until this one.

"Tell me," he said, his voice becoming uncharacteristically soft. "What do you think—is there any hope?"

It took me a moment to collect my wits. "Of course there is hope," I said. "There is always hope. They could have been swept ashore on another part of the island."

He nodded. "We will see. I hope I will find out today, in Malacca."

With some hesitation I asked if it would be all right if I came with him. He answered with a prompt nod. "You can come."

I had the impression that he had been dreading the lonely search that lay ahead and would be glad of some company. "All right then," I said. "I will."

 

At the airfield in Car Nicobar, the Director arranged a ride for us on a yellow construction truck that had been set to the task of distributing relief supplies. The truck went bouncing down the runway before turning off into a narrow road that led into a forest. Once the airstrip was behind us, it was as though we had been transported to some long-ago land, unspoiled and untouched. The road wound through a dense tropical jungle, dotted at intervals with groves of slender areca palms and huts mounted on stilts. Some of these had metamorphosed into makeshift camps, sprouting awnings of plastic and tarpaulin. It was clear that the island's interior was sparsely inhabited, with the population being concentrated along the seafront.

Earlier, while the plane was making its descent, I had had a panoramic, if blurred, view of the island in the crisp morning sunlight. No more than a few miles across, it was flat and low, and its interior was covered by a dense canopy of greenery. A turquoise halo surrounded its shores, where a fringe of sand had once formed an almost continuous length of beach; this was now still mainly underwater. I saw to my surprise that many coconut palms were still standing, even on the edge of the water. Relatively few
palms had been flattened; most remained upright and in full possession of their greenery. As for the forest, the canopy seemed almost undisturbed. All trace of habitation, in contrast, had been obliterated. The foundations of many buildings could be clearly seen on the ground, but of the structures they had once supported, nothing remained.

It was evident from above that the tsunami had been peculiarly selective in the manner of its destruction. Had the island been hit by a major cyclone, not a frond would have survived on the coconut palms and the forest canopy would have been denuded. Most human dwellings, on the other hand, would have retained their walls, even if they lost their roofs. Not so in this instance. The villages along the shore were not merely damaged; they were erased. It was as if the island had been hit by a weapon devised to cause the maximum possible damage to life and property while leaving nature largely unharmed.

We came to an intersection that was flanked by low whitewashed buildings. This was the administrative center of the island, the Director explained; the settlement of Malacca lay a good distance away, and we would have to walk. After getting off the truck, we came to the district library, a building of surprising size and solidity. Like the surrounding offices, it was unharmed, but a medical camp, manned by the Indo-Tibetan Border Force, had sprung up on its grounds, under the shade of a spreading, moss-twined padauk tree.