Day 1 - Nicobar Diaries

9th November 2017, Andaman and Nicobar Environment Team (ANET) field base, Wandoor

We got here late last evening, just in time to kick start the field season with all the ANET veterans and Sanjay's* food - cooked in his characteristic there's-a-party-tonight haste. 

With a lot on my mind, I hardly got any sleep last night. I completely awoke with the sun at around 5 am, listening to the Andaman shama's oddly husky song. I was ready to go to the Forest Department and plead for work permits way before I needed to be. Akshay** was still asleep, recuperating from the previous night. I was sitting outside the ANET hall waiting until it was time to leave when I saw four young skinks that seemed to have just hatched. I watched the tiny, skinny, glossy fellows until they all dispersed. Even at that early stage, it seemed like they had their own personalities. Two scurried away in a terrible hurry, one was ever-cautious (finally choosing to take shelter under the stone slab he emerged from) and one basked openly and began foraging. I must have been watching them for nearly an hour.

We stopped at Delanipur for breakfast (hello again, Kerala parotta) and some scooter inquiries which got me nowhere***. We then went to A's office in the Van Sadan building - I was meeting her for the first time. She was dressed in a crisp, well-ironed, classy-coloured saree; she got up and shook my hand. She immediately seemed like a person who is both well-aware of her power and careful about how she uses it.

Together, we drafted a letter to B, requesting the provision of permits without my proposal going through the Research Advisory Committee. It was utterly useless, though. He was a large-headed, spectacled wall off of which my pleas bounced back and smacked me in the face. He asked me to meet C instead.

Although C looked like an intimidating diamond merchant who was cheesed off with the world, he seemed to be the only person from the Forest Department who had the clarity of thought to know how and when to break through the bureaucracy. He sat back in his large, black chair, rubbing his eyes as though in exasperation, while he told me things like****:

1. You have to tell these department people to keep their ideas to themselves. When their work load is light, they end up harassing people like you with unnecessary meetings.

2. Are you mad? Who asked you to submit a proposal to begin with? You've got yourself into this mess. You don't even need permits.

3. Damned people, all sitting around like they're unemployed. No one does any real work, they just spread tension.

4. (When A mentioned that I was worried sick about not getting permits) Oh no, then why did I tell her to go ahead? I could have kept her in tension for another 10 days (followed by hysterical laughter).

5. You just want to stand on the road and look at monkeys like a tourist would, right? So go! Quietly head to Great Nicobar and don't hand in any more papers.

 He didn't even look at my paperwork. I couldn't tell whether to be relieved or worried further about the unofficial shadiness. But then again, it isn't unofficial or illegal since I don't really need a permit. I decided to stay relieved. I called the Deputy Forest Officer in Campbell Bay (Great Nicobar Division) and informed him of the situation. It was all good (?).

Somehow, I had the go-ahead I needed on the FIRST DAY. My schedule suddenly moved up a couple of weeks and I had nothing but logistics to figure out.

On the way back to ANET, I stopped by Switz Bakerz for a celebratory piece of cake. The moment I squeezed onto the Subhashini bus, heard the familiar playlist of obscure Bollywood songs and shared a nod of recognition with the conductor, everything began to sink in and feel normal. Plus, I had Sanjay's cooking to look forward to at the end of it all. 

Took a walk up to the beach with Akshay before turning in at night. On the way back, I looked up at the sky and remembered my walk along the same path on the last night of our marine biology course in the islands. That night, I had welled up immensely, wondering if I'd ever have the opportunity to come back to this place which felt so strangely like home. I felt silly in that moment for ever worrying.

_______________________________

* Sanjay is one of the ANET field staff - a brilliant cook with low tolerance for dilly-dallying, an obscure sense of humour, fantastic taste in dance music and the latest "in" hairstyle.

** Akshay is my former batch mate, dear friend and tree-ID whiz. We envisioned our master's projects in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and got to travel together and meet intermittently because of it. He's beautiful.

*** I needed to buy a scooter in Port Blair so I could put it on a ship and transport it to Great Nicobar where I'd be doing my field work.

**** All of this was in Hindi in my diary, translated here for better understand-ability. It has, in the process, lost some magic.

My Days in Nicobar

It's now been almost a year since I got back to Bangalore from Great Nicobar and I miss it as much as I did on my first day away. I was flipping through the pages of my bursting-at-its-seams field diary, feeling nostalgic and emotional, when I felt incredibly stupid. I was holding a bundle of special moments, natural history and oddities of the island's humanity, and in that moment all of it felt moot.

With the rosy idea of putting my daily jottings into a book some day, I scrap-booked and chronicled obsessively; now, I know that it will be several years (and more research) before that happens. In the meanwhile, I have decided to relive my time there by digitizing my memories here one day at a time.

Come tomorrow (and morrow and morrow and morrow), I'll have much to share.

(^She's *looking out* for upcoming posts)

Hullabaloos all around

Dear Akshay,

At the end of our master's course together, you handed me a book by Kiran Desai called 'Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard' with a characteristically-you, succinct, "Here's some sunshine for your life" note inside it. The cover intrigued me - a cartoon-y tree with the dangling legs of a person dropping into the frame from above. I didn't give it much thought when I started reading.

I began with no real expectations in mind - just the blind trust that you know me well enough to gift me a book I'd like regardless of its contents or genre. But then again, everything you do seems to stem from either purpose or reason, and I was secretly searching for either/or at the back of my mind as I progressed through the pages.

Kiran Desai's writing painted pictures of the mundane. She described sarees, food and the idle thoughts of a government employee with just the right number of adjectives and similes. She described each character in such delicious interwoven detail, that I was five chapters in with no clue about where the story was headed.

I took a break from the book for a while, shortly after Sampath, the head-in-the-clouds protagonist, let the characters of his reality into his mind for a quick peak, swiftly resulting in his routine life falling apart. This was also around the time I got sidetracked with work, travels and The Talking Ape. When I finished with that book, I got back to Sampath. Before I knew it, he was running further away from the life he had been thrown out of. He was literally running, with his dysfunctional family in close pursuit, up into a guava tree. The book's title began falling into place. While I was still skeptical about whether the bizarre events unfolding were happening in his head or in the book's real world of small-town Shahkot, I began relishing it.

I'm usually cynical when a book takes off on multiple tangential narratives as fillers for space and time, but this book did it brilliantly. It was so stuffed with characters and tales and little off-road, supporting stories, that I found it hard to stop reading once Sampath (and his paraphernalic-family) had set up shop in the guava orchard. I found it even harder to stop reading when the pages parted to make way for a notorious troop of monkeys, and irrevocably glued when the primates developed a taste for alcohol (there, I found my reasons*).

The book and its people danced in my head. You're teaching me to fall in love with good Indian writing - stories embedded deeply in intrinsically desi themes and characters. Having that added layer of relatability is exciting, and in a way, allows my imagination to create visuals with a lot more accuracy than if I were painting into place the extravagant lawns of Blandings Castle from a Wodehouse novel.

Never stop giving me your tried-and-tested book titles to read. So far, so very good.

Love always,
Ishika


*People I interviewed for my research work told me that monkeys would occasionally polish-off the left over bits of whiskey and rum in bottles from wine shops around Great Nicobar. The macaques would then either raid homes with a markedly lower sense of risk, or simply fall asleep. Upon hearing this, a certain Forest Department employee (only half jokingly) suggested we use alcohol as a mitigation measure against human-macaque conflict. Ah the colourful aspects of working with primates. 

Field-time Companionship/How I Learned To Read Again

After nearly three years of (a) taking inordinate amounts of time to finish small-ish books, (b) starting books and not finishing them, and (c) hoarding up on newer, more interesting books nonetheless, I optimistically packed four books into my rucksack. I was headed out for about seven months of seclusion on the island of Great Nicobar, and four seemed overly-ambitions with my proximate track record. Boy, was I wrong.

I ended up reading around fifteen books, not including a couple of poetry compilations that kept me going on most days (living alone allowed me to strut about reciting loudly from Sarah Kay or Walt Whitman's collections. My heart was alive, as I professed poetically while cooking every night). It turns out, long ship rides aboard the M.V. Campbell Bay, sea breeze, complete solitude at my field base and the lack of internet facilitated my every loner hobby, reading included. 

Here are some of the books that stood out the most - they're now my trusty friends who have taken ship rides and tasted sea salt with me during my islandic isolation. 

The Hungry Tide
By Amitav Ghosh

This was my reintroduction into the world of fiction after a two-year sabbatical from it, and I couldn't have asked for a better one. I spent most of my first ship ride to the island sitting in the blistering sun on deck, reading my hardbound copy of The Hungry Tide. I mention hardbound, since it proved to hold up well against the fairly-frequent sea sprays that reached it. 

This book charts the story of an NRI cetologist, Piyali, who returns to eastern India to study the Irrawaddy and Ganges river dolphins around a tiger-inhabited island of the Sundarbans. Enroute, she encounters a similarly-aged translator from New Delhi, Kanai, who's visiting his aunt - a long-time settler of the island. Their paths entwine superficially, as she finds a field assistant, Fokir, who helps her navigate the seemingly unpredictable waters nestled in the estuaries of the Bay of Bengal. Amitav Ghosh has described, in painstaking and commendable intricacy, how Piyali and Fokir face challenges from society, the Forest Department and the raging waters themselves as a consequence of their field work. Apart from a parallel narrative through the book based on Kanai's family history, I occasionally forgot that it wasn't an account of true events, a testament to how well-researched the premise was. 

I have mixed feelings about how much I liked this book. I appreciated his attention to detail and the manner in which he interwove the histories of all his characters, but could sense it falling short in terms of where it went and how it ended. It was balanced precariously on the verge of cliche, rescued and held aloft by its eloquence. Nonetheless, I'm glad I read it, perhaps exacerbated by the open ocean, my own tussles with the Forest Department and my association with Juglu - my field assistant who seemed to embody Ghosh's description of Fokir. I wonder now about the manner in which someone outside of the marine/wildlife sphere would receive this book.

Academia Obscura
By Glen Wright

I read this book off of my Kindle app, which made it the perfect bathroom read - given the fact that I had an Indian toilet that needed squatting over. It's a satirical, cynical take on the world of academics - perfect for an idealistic researcher embarking upon her scientific career. I kid.

This book has been written by someone who was so fed up with the stagnation of his own PhD research, that he began collecting and compiling the works of academicians who chose to take themselves lightly. It's replete with Ignobel prize winners, offbeat publications, unusual grant applications and caricatures of the bizarre system that is our world of research. While certain parts of the book felt like a glorified version of Glen Wright's Twitter feed, with lists of academia's most unconventional components, it also hits upon some serious notes. Through examples of those who have tried to trick or fool the system, he has highlighted how ridiculous and anal journal publishers, postgraduate programs and PhD advisors can be. I would recommend this book to someone within academia who is either frustrated with the system or loves it intimately. It will either feed their annoyance or cheese them off - both of which would be fantastic.

84 Charring Cross Road
By Helene Hanff

Since 2012, this book has been in the 'Always Reading' segment of this blog, and rightfully so. Helene Hanff is a kindred spirit. Her words jump at me from the pages of this book, grab me by the collar and shake their fist at me, angrily questioning why I wasn't alive when she was holed up in her tiny apartment, hunched over her typewriter, littering her beautiful words with cigarette ashes and lint from worn sweaters. In 84 Charring Cross Road, Helene (look at me calling her by her first name) has arranged the letters of her correspondence with the Marks and Co. antiquarian bookshop in London, situated on 84 Charring Cross. Her unfiltered American sarcasm bounced off of the polished British courtesies of her correspondents, largely a Mr. Frank Doel, makes for a page-turner. You can see their friendship blossoming into familial ties, despite never having met over decades of exchanges. This book, single-handed, reaffirms my faith in people every time it begins to wobble.


The Dutchess of Bloomsbury Street 
By Helene Hanff

In this book, Helene visits London at last. After years of wishing she could, this book is the diary she kept on the trip she finally managed to salvage. After she published 84 Charring, her publishers packed her off on a book tour to the land of her dreams, feeding all her irrational anxieties of travel. She starts writing on the flight to London and doesn't stop. She calls herself the Dutchess of Bloomsbury Street, which is the street on which her hotel was, and lets you revel in her love for (and occasional frustrations with) this place that birthed and housed her every literary God. She describes each person she meets (including Joyce Grenfell!) and you find yourself intrigued by every interaction she has. It's also rather tickling to read about a single woman traveling alone in the 1960's, especially one of independent mind and intellectual (and eccentric) tastes. If you've read her letters, this book just confirms all you thought of her (good or bad) and lets you dive deep into her curious brain and sit there, smiling like an absolute fool.

Last Chance To See
By Douglas Adams (and Mark Carwardine)

Reading a book like this one on field, after three semesters' worth of courses about wildlife conservation, can be very existential. Douglas Adams, who doesn't usually write about wildlife, tailed Mark Carwardine on his journey to seven rather remote locations, chasing the few individuals of some endangered species across the world. Quite literally, the duo undertook this series of adventures to areas like Madagascar, New Zealand and Zaire to look for species that were considered so very endangered, that it may have been their last chance to see them. Mark was an ecologist with the World Wildlife Fund, and Adams, a writer with a flair for humour, was assigned to accompany him by the BBC to help document his travels and raise awareness for these vanishing species.

Adams, being new to the trials of traveling to inaccessible regions for field work, found comedy in the logistical nightmares they faced. His narratives of the contrast between Mark's cool acceptance of the challenges of working with wild spaces, officials and scientists, and his own naivete towards them all, make for a fantastic read. Apart from the travelogue nature of this book, each chapter hits upon the ecology of each species, descriptions of the habitats they are found in and the threats they face. It's a wonderful mixture of the the seriousness of extinction, the vulnerability of certain ecosystems and the lighter side of the trials of conservation efforts. The BBC and WWF came together to choose the perfect man for the job, who could pinch your conscience and heart even through the smile he so firmly puts on your face.

Go Set A Watchman
By Harper Lee

I wrote about Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird in a post from 2014 just after having let its long-overdue read seep into my melting brain. There was something incredible about how that book wove through my neurons and sat there, staring at me from axonal corners, smiling in glee knowing that it had given me food for thought for a long time. After her book had affected me so deeply during my college days, I had kept away from this sequel of hers when it came out. I was afraid of disappointment. Then, my advisor visited me on field at a time when I was running out of books to read and left behind his copy of Go Set A Watchman with me, and it sat there taunting me for two weeks before I finally decided to read her. 

The book was not what I was expecting. Perhaps I didn't know what to expect. The book opens up to Jean Louise Finch returning to Maycomb for her annual visit from New York, where she now works and feels at home. She's grown into an intelligent, headstrong woman, firm in her ideals of the world - a contrast from the tomboyish personality of her childhood that Lee made you fall for in Mockingbird. The book winds through her current adulthood, throwing in pieces of the puzzle that comprises how her family and the people of Maycomb had transitioned between books. It made me squirm, since it shook the foundation of the characters I had laid in my mind. But as I progressed through the book, I found how it wasn't a discomfort that came from sub-standard writing, but from Lee's caution thrown to the wind. She found ways to build upon characters that were already well-established and make her readers question what they thought was morally right. You tend to misunderstand Scout (J. L. Finch) at times, because her moral dilemmas upon discovering new truths (with the reader) make her react to everyday matters drastically. Perhaps her own acceptance or understanding of the true nature of society in her home town helped me reconcile with it all. Did I like this book? I still don't know. But I certainly cannot directly compare it to Harper Lee's first.

Homo Deus
By Yuval Noah Harari

Yuval Noah Harari is the kind of historian who churns out compilations of humanity that make you reel backwards and realise you've always wondered about what's wrong with people. His first book, Sapiens, was fascinating in the history of our species that it laid out and thought-provoking in how it challenged certain ideas of religion and culture. This book, on the other hand, wasn't merely stating facts. He used our expansive anthropological journey to try and predict what our futures look like. Chapter by chapter, he discussed the various paths we may take as multiple races of the same species progressing into the rapidly-transforming unknown.

In each chapter, he is unapologetic in his commitment to the possibility of our shared future turning out a certain way. I found myself constantly being caught up in philosophical viewpoints that opposed my own and I began disliking Harari for taking that contrasting stance. But then I'd be reminded that he was simply laying out multiple well-thought out hypothetical scenarios, and that he did not advocate any of them in particular. It makes me wonder what he actually thinks will happen. It's a good book to read as long as you aren't someone who worries needlessly anyway, because if you are, this could land many sleepless nights or sudden frozen moments where you stare into space (or the sea) and simply want to mutter, "but why?".

Ghachar Ghochar
By Vivek Shanbhag

A dear friend of mine who was also working in the islands at the time came across this book (and its author) while on field, read it cover to cover, and had it couriered to me in Nicobar the moment he finished. Originally written in Kannada, it's been translated into English superbly. I was out on field looking for my monkey troop unsuccessfully, when a postwoman from a nearby village informed me that I had a parcel waiting for me at the post office. An hour later, I abandoned my search for the elusive troop and picked up the parcel, which produced this glorious book when unwrapped. I scootered home, thinking of taking an hour's break before heading out to resume field work, and took a crack at the book. It had me hooked so strongly in the first 15 pages, that I ended up sitting on my floor for four hours straight reading the entire thing.

The story is so very Indian that I related to it even though nothing like it has ever happened to me. It's a tale of a lower-middle-class family that comes into a lot of wealth due to the enterprising decisions of an uncle. Beginning with the modest life they once led, sharing tiny rooms, old furniture and floor space with persistent ants, the family moved into a larger home with disposable income and, somehow, an altered sense of purpose and entitlement. A new bride joins this family in its post-wealth period, and becomes a moral compass and reference point that unravels the many layers of every character that Shanbhag has created. The ending of the book is chilling, and I found that to be the case because I saw a little bit of my own family in his characters. Without driving a literal point home, this book had my gut by the fist.

Flight

What I love about birds is their undeniable grace. There's something beautiful about flight. I admire how they surrender their bodies to the wind and float weightlessly. It must be liberating to throw themselves into zero substratum and find that an invisible cloud of nothing catches them mid-suspension, only to carry them closer to their destination. I wonder what it feels like to be propelled by something you cannot see, or to flap in unmoving air and not plummet. I wonder what it feels like to be affected by gravity only when chosen to be.

I want to spread my arms along a sea shore and be lifted by the breeze, being thrown in every direction but my own. But I wonder if I'd handle that kind of total surrender with ease. After all these years of treading my own path and falling (mostly) consciously, I wonder if I could truly let my body go. I wonder if a hatchling that jumps to its first ever flight feels the same way a bungee jumper does before taking off. I imagine a young being, barely feathered, throwing itself into adulthood, and I'm baffled by the strength of instinct that makes them embody courage. And, after those first few awkward flaps, when the young bird takes to the sky for the first time, grace seeps into its feathers and stays there. When something as fluid and seamless as air supports them, how can their bodies be any different?


~ These are some scribbles from my bird-book, last maintained three years ago. I miss the pure, unfettered joy of birding ardently, and rediscovering these notes made me crave it again all the more. I leave these here as a thank you to Tarun, who's steadily bringing the birdsong back into my life.

Mansi - The Chirput.

Field work was full of surprises, as often happens when your subjects of interest are two incredibly intelligent primate species. Of all, the best one was discovering that I would help take care of an abandoned infant macaque - affectionately named Mansi by the local Forest Department.

I was working on field one annoyingly sunny afternoon, when my troop decided to scale two cliffs and make me work up an even heavier sweat. They were just settling down into a clump of Pandanus trees for an afternoon snack and siesta, when a family I had come to know ambled along. They were there to lop some wood in that secluded forest patch, and they brought their bumbling, black-and-white dog along to keep watch. The dog, however, promptly hurtled towards the snoozing macaques, wagging his tail eagerly in hope to play. The macaques found in him a play thing rather than a playmate, slapping his snout and then jumping just out of his reach.

While the husband and son dodged the monkeys and got down to their business, the wife hid behind me, worried that the large male near my feet would jump up and swipe her. While she hid, she asked me if I had seen the Forest Department's "new baby monkey". She wasn't the first one to mention its existence, and I was beginning to take this rumour seriously. There was an air of secret celebration, as though the fertile Department had borne an infant to the island.

Before I knew it, I was brought face-to-face with this fragile, wrinkled, scrawny thing. She looked alone and crinkled in her makeshift cage. While I held onto the still-solid portions of my melting heart, I scooter-ed off to the marketplace where I found some milk powder, overripe bananas and a mother-macaque-sized soft toy. I whizzed back to the piddly one with these items to find her clutching the cane that formed the mesh of her cage. Her wet, brown eyes looked up at me with piercing longing, melting all that was left of my cardiac muscles.

I opened the door and offered her my arm, which she took with all four of hers and held onto with resolve. I could feel the thirst for contact in her grip, which seemed only to tighten with time and trust. She swung from my clothes, body and hair - never losing hold of me. I was starting to understand directly how these infants cling onto their mothers as they leap between trees and rooftops. With fingers and wrinkles which provide arboreal certainty across media, any movement was possible, no matter how petite. I remembered the way my sister wrapped her hand around my finger as a baby, and couldn't help wonder about how unimpressive human babies are when compared to our evolutionary sisters.

She clung for three hours - initially playing and eventually falling asleep. She climbed her way up into the inside of my shirt collar and slept in the warmth of my neck. I cupped her thin body with my palm, enveloping her entirely, as I felt her chest heave against me. She hugged my neck with her delicate, long, pink fingers. Her skin felt as soft as a newborn's, but had the texture of someone much older.

I felt a fierce protectiveness towards Mansi instantly. Spending that time with her felt more profound than I thought it would be. This young macaque had lost her mother, and somehow found her way into the human realm. Not so different, albeit larger, I found how I was a plushy candidate for the role of 'mom', and wanted nothing but to give her the best care within my control. If I was there only for another few months, I was going to try to do what was best by her.

When I peeled Mansi away and returned her to the enclosure, I felt cold and bare where she had been resting. I left her that night hoping ardently that she survives to an age where a troop would accept her. In the following days, we grew increasingly fond of each other, and I watched with hope and pride as she grew more dexterous and agile. I selfishly rejoiced on the inside when she preferred my arms to others, but always felt the bitterness of having to leave her island home soon.

Now, nearly 2000 kilometers away from her, with only sporadic updates about her health, I miss her ardently. Regardless of whether I see her again, the intensity in her eyes, the softness of her fur and the smell of her pee will forever remain etched in my mind.

Mansi, you lanky bit of jet-black hair, I hope you keep hanging on.

Ek chai toh peekar jao

The island of Great Nicobar is speckled with modest settlements. People from Bengali, Tamilian, Telegu, Ranchi, Punjabi and Maharashtrian communities left their homes in Peninsular India from 1969 onwards to colonize and gradually develop the island, originally occupied by Nicobarese and Shompen societies alone. Ever since then, they’ve cut down slivers of forest along the eastern coast to build homes alongside their allotted land, surrounded by paddy fields and coconut plantations. Within 30 years of their arrival, they collectively started schools and medical centres, set up a Forest Department, an Agricultural Department and several police stations – all distributed across a long road that ran along the coast, originating at Campbell Bay and ending at Indira Point, the southernmost tip of India.

Then, in 2004, a tsunami hit, washing out decades of hard work and development, not to mention hundreds of lives and homes. Ever since, the survivors have crawled back to a semblance of what once was, aided by Government subsidies and rations. Today, the previously spread-out habitation has shifted to a clumped distribution of nine villages along a new road – running along the coast and through forested hills for 35 kilometres.

When I came to the island to study human-macaque interactions, I had planned to divide my work into behavioural observations of the monkeys, and one-on-one interviews with the local communities to better understand their take on the issue, their experiences and collective histories. For the past six months, I’ve been regaled with tales of the monkeys I’ve grown so fond of. Simultaneously, though, I’ve been caught in an endlessly looped battle of wits – that of the peoples’ plight and the macaques’ actions. Picking a side can never be part of a scenario like the one present here – my heart wishes to be parted like my methodology, lending complete sympathy to both the people and the macaques.

Despite this, a new itch has been occupying my mind off-late, one of metropolitan disgust and guilt.

Having grown up in a place like Mumbai, where trust is scarce and home exists behind two closed doors bolted tight, places like the Andaman and Nicobar Islands seem like a confusing paradox of society at first glance. Here people enjoy company, the notion of having visitors arriving unannounced, making tea for a crowd, sharing meals and lives. Here, time is a gift that’s meant to be shared, not a constraint within which life seems fleeting. People from the metros shy away from interaction; we shield ourselves behind the illusion that sparing a moment to hear someone out will eat into our minimal allotment of cosmic time. Where did this manic selfishness arise? Or rather, when? Perhaps our fear of the unknown is further exacerbated by our unwillingness to learn more about the people around us. In a society where people are more numerous than our cranial capacity to retain, and where everyone is a stranger living by an unwritten code of order amuck observable chaos, could one open their arms wide and share tea, food and time? Even the eternal optimist within me leans towards a resounding, ‘‘no’’.

I’ve been to nearly 200 homes here in Great Nicobar. Most of these homes are left ajar, often with a flimsy curtain hanging by the doorframe. The shuffle of my feet and some stirring barks from nearby dogs attract the residents’ attention. Immediately a chair is produced, chai is placed over the stove and conversation is struck – all before knowing who I am or where I’ve come from. I was worried about being an intruder, an inconvenient blotch on their routine days. This anxiety didn’t last long, though. I soon found that wondering if a family would rather I didn’t visit is an insult to their culture of hospitality. Rejecting an invite to come in, have some nimbu paani or chai, or to stay for lunch is an offence akin to outright rudeness. I began to relax, welcome the hospitality, home-cooked meals and willing company with open arms, and it transformed the way in which the locals perceived me too. I became one of them, one who held onto no pretence or inhibition, and who partook of their characteristic islandic gossip. I have the families here to thank for my own personal growth – these lessons and realizations can’t be shaken irrespective of where I go from here.

When people who have so little, who’ve lost so much, can give so voluntarily without batting an eyelid, what is it if not arrogance that makes the privileged so stingy with their time, courtesy, respect and love? Sure, I may not welcome strangers into my home without a care in the world from here on out. But I know my conscience will sting deep if I fail to extend at least a shred of the decency that has been showered upon me through my travels. 

Trust

It’s been five months since I arrived on the island of Great Nicobar. I’m here to collect data for my Master’s thesis, which is focused around the Nicobar long-tailed macaque and its interactions with people. Much like the macaques in Southeast Asia, these guys have been creating steady havoc by raiding coconut plantations and vegetable gardens all over the island, and I decided to study their behaviour and the locals’ perceptions of the issue at hand. This is one of the three Nicobar Islands housing the rotund, grey, furry monkeys that have created a reputation for being intelligent, sneaky, dangerous and annoyingly prolific. Most people still stare at me in disbelief when they learn that I travelled ‘all the way from Bangalore’ to study what seem like every day, common pests.

These monkeys have faces that seem astonishingly readable at first glance. Unlike some of the other macaque species, they have long hair on their faces, but none around their eyes. Their eyelids are several shades lighter than the rest of their skin and body, and they stand out distinctly under their thick, bushy eyebrows. Their eyes tend to be a caramel brown – piercing when directed at you. When I first began following them, I was the one being observed. It took a month of respectful distance and nonchalance on my part for the troop to relax in my presence. During this period of habituation, I began to notice personalities and tendencies of several individuals and discover their responses to my body language. I took notice of them taking notice of other passers-by, but not of me. I realized at this point that they either trusted or tolerated me, and I was keen to know which one it was.

Initially, I found that I couldn’t sit down during the day. Every time I did, I suddenly became accessible; a curio that the larger males and enthusiastic sub-adults would make a beeline for, probably hoping to raid me for some food. They’d be abruptly aware of me, as though I appeared out of nowhere, and this bothered some of the more timid and cautious individuals in the group. Just as you’d find in a social gathering of people, within the troop, some monkeys take longer to warm up to you than the others, some are ever-suspicious, some are eager and inquisitive, and some simply don’t care. Soon, I found that majority of the troop fell into the last category. Having moved from an unwanted intruder that prompted an angry chorus of alarm calls through the forest patches to one of unexciting, repetitive and uninteresting demeanour, it felt like an achievement. Never before had I been as happy to be the one not worth noticing.

This being said, I’ve come to share some tickling moments in close proximity with those whose lack of concern for me led them to attempt interaction. On one such day, I sat down in the grass, tired from having walked after them for nearly eight hours. I put my clipboard in my bag and watched the monkeys groom themselves lazily in the cloudy afternoon haze. I suddenly felt one of the monkeys grip my shoulder. It was Tripod, one of the more dominant males of the group. Having made contact with me uneventfully, three other sub-adult males, a female and another adult male made their way up to me. From their casual strides and relaxed eyebrows, I felt rather confident that they meant no harm. They seated themselves around me; a couple leaned against me and began to doze off. My heart was thumping against my chest and I could feel the pulse in my neck – I was elated. Just then, their little hands began touching my arms and legs. They lifted my shirt sleeves to inspect underneath. They began to pick ants off of my pants and pop them into their mouth. Tara, another male, used his teeth ever so gently to pull off some scabs on my arm. I was being groomed. This lasted no longer than five minutes, before a female some feet away seemed to disapprove of the gathering. She raised her eyebrows rapidly, sounding low alarm calls while shooting glances at several individuals around me. I rose and stood back slowly, and the female went back to grooming her infant, as though the whole thing never happened.

On another day, I was standing fairly close to the troop while noting down some data, when a huge fight broke out among the monkeys. Nearly every adult ran frantically to the centre of conflict and the air filled with their calls of skirmish. I was left standing amidst those who opted out, now some distance away from most of the troop. As the ruckus died down, the adults slowly sauntered back to where I was. There was palpable tension in the air that I couldn’t shake; it seemed like they couldn’t either. Several monkeys searched me with their eyes as they passed by, something that was rather unusual. A couple of them sent rapid signals to the others, and several began grunting at me. The males pulled themselves up to their full, impressive height and advanced towards me in an unamicable fashion. A couple yanked at my pants and bared their teeth. Once more, I silently backed away, and they settled down almost instantly.

I realize now that even if what they have toward me is tolerance, they trust me to understand their signals. In both the occasions I related (and some more which I didn’t), the monkeys could have easily torn me to shreds with their remarkable canines and hardy nails; they have with others in the past. They could have chased me far away from where they rested; again, they have with others in the past. Instead, they chose to provide me with a minimalistic warning and let me off easy. Maybe they were okay with having a human amidst them who hadn’t tried to harm them thus far, unlike nearly every other person they encounter each day. Whatever the reason, these events help me stay grounded and remember never to take their acceptance for granted. I have utmost awe and respect for these animals, no matter how amusing, strange and quirky they can be at times.

These fantastic, wild creatures are complicated. They have moods, personalities and emotions; and I don’t feel presumptuous for saying it anymore. Watching them day in and day out for these past few months only convinces me of this further. Perhaps the data I collect will fail to portray this, with only numbers telling tales of their behaviour, but the experiences I’ve had with them will remain more fascinating and dear to me than can be statistically discernible.