Reclamation in Great Nicobar

Ladakh and the Andaman Islands

(All photos and/or videos to be added at a later date once stronger internet connection is obtained.)

Since 2013, I’ve been fortunate enough to have worked in and/or visited several places; twelve, to be exact. Of all these wonderful places in India, two have stood out with auras of emotional flamboyance – Ladakh and the Andaman Islands. Lately I’ve been wondering what it is about two places so completely different in their position, biodiversity and climate, that captured my attention so adhesively, and have come to realize they have more in common than what meets the eye.

ONE: Getting there can be challenging, yet beautiful.
Three things can come in the way of traveling to both Ladakh and the Andamans. (1) Weather – snow or rain, (2) prices – being spontaneous burns a deep, deep hole in your pocket, and (3) their exotic reputation – a sense of it being an unusual place to simply go to. But once you get there, good lord, it tugs at your breath better than Rowling’s dementors. Whether it’s the vast expanses of the Himalayas that throw the skies and land open as far as the eye can see, or the dense forests of the islands that filter sunlight and rain several-fold before they reach you, they’ll force you to stop and absorb them.

TWO: It’s expensive to get there, but cheap to live there.
Which is why I’ve devoted large amounts of my thinking time to figuring out ways in which to get there and never leave. Renting a small flat in Ladakh is a fourth of the price (if not lower) than that of an equivalent space in Mumbai. In the Andamans, it’s about a third. Either way, it makes up for the cost of getting there, and in return you get the serenity of nature with enough amenities to get you by over long periods of time. It’s perfect.

THREE: Developed, but not entirely.
Both places have a central, developed town/city which has restaurants and some hotels for tourists, small food shacks which are frequented by the locals and a bunch of general stores. Ladakh has its quintessential marketplace in Leh where anyone can buy woolens and household items, eat at a handful of restaurants or buy souvenirs from handicraft emporiums. The markets in the Andamans that compare are in and around Port Blair, but they are certainly more city-like than the quaint shops that line the streets of Leh. Sanitation, electricity and internet are available across both areas, though they are never entirely reliable. As Calvin’s Dad would say, these kinks in the global definition of ‘development’ build character and add to one’s learning of the places’ cultures and strife. I’ve learned more about life and work from my time in these places than I have living in Mumbai, and I’ve come to treasure those bits of me.

FOUR: Land-locked, sea-locked, remote and isolate.
The Himalayas that fall in Ladakh rise tall around the modest strip of runway at the Leh airport. Flying into Leh is gorgeousness, for it feels like gliding over a giant raster of geographic elevation, occasionally obstructed by blindingly-white clouds. The skies are always a limpid blue and the mountains are continuous and unrelenting. Layer after layer of peaks make you wonder where you’d ever land and about all the animals you’re flying over. When the little buildings and fields emerge from the landmass, they seem desolate and, in personification, content. Flying to the Andamans gives you the same feeling of gaping vastness and detachment from familiarity. The ocean is the same bright blue of the Ladakh sky and the coastlines gleam with their slivers of sand. Every island is a cluster of bright green vegetation – something I hope will hold true even years into the future. Both places are distant – in time if not in kilometres.

FIVE: Un-capturable landscapes.
You cannot photograph the Himalayas or the Andaman seas and forests without losing their overwhelming presence. No photo can capture the way these landscapes envelope you and stretch far out to the horizon. A photograph is 2D, but what you see with the naked eye is beyond 3-dimensional. It’s several added dimensions of wonder, intimidation, smells and sounds, which are completely lost once your shutter goes off. That being said, one can never take a bad photo of the mountains or sea. It’s a limbo of oomph, but a compromised oomph.

SIX: Tourists, people, and their animals.
Both these places are tourist hotspots and function seasonally, given their unfavourable summers and monsoons. If you go to Ladakh between December and June or the Andamans between September and March, you’re bound to meet a range of tourists – from loud joint families to solitary observers. The descendence of these tourists have come to dictate the lives of the locals, and now, their livelihoods rotate around these months. You'll find a clear distinction between the locals and anyone else who attempts to integrate. The people of the land are a humble, helpful and self-assured kind, dotted with colourful and unforgettable personalities. From caring for up to fifty domestic animals per household to dealing with feral dogs and animals, being a local comes with its share of challenges. I refrain from calling the people from these places simple, for that’s an unfair label to give them. Even though they don’t live in metropolitan cities or drive swanky cars, they lead complicated lives which are often harder than we realize. Visiting and living with them have taught me a great deal, and I’ve come to criticize and value various aspects of my life ever since.

SEVEN: The elusiveness of their wildlife.
The Himalayas are known for their large mammals, however, the snow leopard isn’t its only ‘ghost of the mountains’. It’s a landscape full of camouflaged wildlife that isn’t easy to track or spot. The Andamans house far fewer mammals, but is teeming with bird life which isn’t the easiest to find amidst its dense trees and vines. In both places, the wildlife teases you, with calls and signs, poop and tracks, but rarely graces you with its presence. If one of these wonderful creatures does show itself, live the moment. Don’t fumble for cameras or tripods or lenses, for that moment won’t last. Simply absorb it, etch it in your mind, make it a memory that you’ll hold onto forever.

EIGHT: No matter where you are, a picturesque landscape is never more than 15 minutes away.
This is a virtue of point THREE above. Perhaps this will change with time, as the Border Road Organization hacks away at the mountains or as deforestation progresses in the islands. But until those sad times befall us, these landscapes are always nearby, waiting to be gawked at.

NINE: There’s more to be known about them than is known already.
Ladakh and the islands are rich in ecological and social history. There are traditions and biodiversity that are yet to be explored and scrutinized. As time passes, more and more researchers seem to be showing interest in these scientifically uncharted fields, and rightfully so. Both places pique my curiosity more than places like the Western Ghats simply because there’s so much we’re yet to learn about them.

TEN: Disconnection from the rest of the world.
Finally, these places give you the option of unplugging every electronic device and living in the present. Disconnection from the world isn’t necessarily a direct result of poor internet or telephone towers. These places tend to make you cherish the option of switching off and using your phone and email only for the essential few communications. You can rely on newspapers for news and wave goodbye to social networking. And the best part is that you don’t miss it. Even slightly (disclaimer: this could be only my perspective). I maintain that the less my friends and family hear from me, the fewer pictures I have and the more notebooks I fill, the more fun I’m having.

I hope fervently that things stay this way even in the years to come, however romantic or idealistic that hope may be.

In the Andamans - with 2% internet

04/06/17

It’s five in the evening and it’s pouring. I’m seated in a dimly lit cottage inside ANET (Andaman and Nicobar Environmental Team) with three dogs curled up under the table and the smell of wet mud and wood filling the air. The sounds around me are a cocktail of raindrops falling on broad leaves, pond water, slushy mud and tin roofing. The trees are vibrant, as though tweaked for maximum contrast, with their dark, damp barks glistening against a palette of greens. It is mucky, icky, noisy beauty.

When I first came to the Andamans two months ago, my stomach was tingling with pure, unhindered excitement. I had no expectations, I simply knew I’d love whatever I found once we landed. I was right – I was met by more raw nature than I’ve been exposed to in the past. I realized that wilderness isn’t defined by the animals that one finds or how densely forested a place is. It’s defined by how unhabituated to people and civilization, how removed from familiarity, and how untouched a place and its biodiversity is. The Andamans is that place. A place that’s been changing and interacting with humanity for years, yet a place that maintains a tinge of feral within it. I went away feeling like the land tamed the people there, rather than the other way around, despite its growing villages and towns.

Today, I set off for ANET once more, but this time, my stomach was in knots. Knots of twisted excitement. This time, I had expectations, and worries about whether they’d be met. I embarked on this trip as a reconnaissance survey, to pursue a couple of research ideas for my Masters’ thesis. Now, I have to learn how to focus on a research question and on how to answer it in addition to gawking at the place I’m in. Seated in my plane, the glistening blue waters that shone at me didn’t help my gastric symphony of buzzing bees. After two months of craving, ideation and dreaming, I was going back again – hoping to find enough potential and purpose to keep going back.

The trip from the airport to ANET was familiar and greener than when I last remembered. More fields seemed waterlogged now that the monsoons had arrived, despite the patchy rain over the last few days. I was taking turns in my head before we made them, and was pleased to know I still knew my whereabouts from the last visit. When the car pulled up outside ANET, my knots untied and I immediately relaxed. There’s something about the calm of this place that prohibits worry. Crusoe, Tweemo and Tweepa – the dogs of ANET – greeted me heartily, and in that moment, I knew I had only good things to look forward to.

I’ll close now and watch the light fade.

Untouched, or, less touched.

The Andaman Islands house trees that could squash me like an ant if only they could lay a corner of their ginormous buttresses on me. Each tree is history. Walking through wooded areas reminded me of how puny, insignificant, trivial, inconsequential I am. Of how people are unimpressive in every way. Of how my (literal) footprint could never be as deep set as the valleys in the mud created by a single, archaic tree.

I use the large, overshadowing tree as a metaphor for the islands themselves. Despite the tar roads that weave through villages and the occasional electric line overhead, passing through them is reminiscent of another time. There’s an overwhelming anachronistic nature to the place that swoops in, swallowing all my preconceived notions of beauty and replacing them with itself. The Andamans – over land and underwater – has me seized by the collar, endearingly, and its grip is far too strong to ignore. 

More to come.

What is a woman?

I say ‘what’ and not ‘who’ because objectification is the path we’ve taken as a society to build gender stereotypes. This afternoon, I asked a friend, jokingly, about whether I qualified as a woman, given the fact that I’m rarely ‘feminine’. Then, I stopped. I realized that unknowingly, I let myself lapse into the norm of femininity. Being one who criticizes the way sexes are put in boxes, I found that I too was a victim of what can only be termed as brainwashing since I was a child.

Asking anyone to state the differences between a man and a woman (setting aside the obvious anatomical separations that one would most likely see) yields painfully predictable adjectives. Understanding, intuitive, gentle, caring, strong, dominant, protective, athletic, analytical. I can confidently leave those there and leave you, the reader, to put them into their typical categories – whether you personally agree with them or not. This is the bread and butter we’ve been brought up with – the girls having been taught how to butter the bread while the boys to eat it.

This isn’t an article about feminism. It’s but one of speculation and unfortunate observation.

Impassioned online activists would be appalled by my passivity, but I stem from a staunch disagreement with most of the sex-related aggression flying around. The fact that women are classified the way they are isn’t wrong. Sure, we are gentle creatures, however, the definition is incomplete - dangling from its poor architecture. With Women’s Day coming up, so are the various empowerment posts and articles – not to mention the angry ones about how there isn’t a Men’s Day for want of equality. The fact that these articles need writing or that there are battles in need of settling lend hand to how far our world is from fundamental equality.

The human race, for all its intelligence, virulence and dominance, is wonderfully diverse. We’ve spent eons putting ourselves on pedestals that balance tactfully on the point of every food pyramid. Why, then, can’t we offer ourselves enough credit to share our adjectives between genders and truly appreciate the multitude of combinations that are born from them to produce billions of inimitable individuals?

I leave here an old poem I once wrote about homosexuality, which, I now sadly find, holds true even in light of this post.

We put people into boxes and pack them away

Label them with thick, black markers

And stow them under strong tape.

Until being boxed up eats at their muscles

Causing their minds to atrophy

And their limbs to ache from cries for freedom.

Until their tired fists pound hard enough

Against the feeble cardboard,

Bogged down by insults and spite

Bogged down by hatred and judgement

By the weight of fear.

Until those pounding fists meet fresh air

Contaminating it with the beating blood

Of someone hungry for love.

Wodehousian guilt

Books that hold letters of popular personalities, both personal and professional, are often published posthumously in an attempt to immortalize them. I enjoy reading letters and think they give me an insight into what a person truly was like - especially if they were writers or actors who portrayed only a part or none of their real selves in the public realm. It’s an intimate way of getting to know and, maybe, fall in love with those personalities even more than I did through the work I know them for.

Two months ago, I found 'Life in Letters', a book that put together all of P. G. Wodehouse's letters chronologically. Needless to say, I bounded with the kind of antiquarian joy that cannot be contained in a quiet bookstore, so I wielded my puny cash and clasped the goodness to my beating heart.

While reading the introduction to ‘Life in Letters’, I found it mentions that compiling this volume of letters comprehensively took a long time to achieve, and that this is the first time his life has been put in any kind of biographical order. PGW was a private man, hated intrusions into his life, and, even in his character sketches and writings, refrained from drawing parallels from his own life. He claimed that biographical evidence was irrelevant to understanding a work of art, and didn’t think his private life influenced his work in any way.
Despite the fact that this is a man of historical significance to the field of literature and that there are thousands of people eager to know what he actually was like, is it fair to abuse what he preserved all through his life simply because he’s long gone? By being famous and popular, does one automatically sign an unwritten contract to be stripped down bare and investigated? I'm worried about how unethical this is.

I feel Wodehouse frowning down on me for prying into his life and personal letters - letters that he probably wrote in the privacy of his home, that he was certain would find the eyes he intended them for alone. The cover of this book sports him smiling broadly, but I doubt that’s how he feels. I’m still wildly excited to know more about his life, to know what made him come up with the characters I’ve grown up reading, what drove the stories he created, how the brain of this genius of wit functioned. I want to put myself in the shoes of every recipient and fantasize about how it feels to hear from that beautiful mind - but this goes against his wishes. PGW, being someone I have respected, looked up to and loved for years, is haunting my conscience, and I'm convinced that I'm committing sacrilege.

You missed a comma.

There's a little bit of my grandfather in people all around me. In the vegetable seller outside my hostel, the night watchman, or even Dr. George Schaller.

Perhaps it's only when you lose someone dear to you that you realize how well you had memorized every bit of them - their mannerisms, their eccentricities, the way they held a pen, the way their eyes crinkled around the edges, or how they meticulously handled groceries. There's a lot more to a person than their interests, careers and legacies. A lot more than the objects they leave behind or the stories people share about them. We build our lives around goals and careers, and hold those ultimate targets higher up in our minds and hearts than our true everyday lives. But it's the little things that make us who we are, who made them who they were. The language, the gestures, the slow blinks of reassurance and unwarranted criticisms.  And, although this seems clear today, it's only in retrospect.

It's the reason why I watch an elderly biologist giving a lecture, know he reminds me of my Thatha keenly, but still have no idea why. It's a constant feeling of I-know-you-but-I-can't-put-my-finger-on-how feeling, where flashes of familiarity draw my attention and leave me perplexed as I wonder about what I'm missing so ardently. I find that I miss the presence and nuances more than the whole. The emptiness comes from a space of lacking interaction rather than physical vacuum. Little can replace a stray fit of laughter from a well-placed bad joke or the silent introspection from receiving a lengthy sermon.

With time, it's the laughter I remember more than the tears.
How can it not be so?

The Ladakhi Way

The first homestay I went to was in Saspotchey - small and warm and cold. The Tongspan Himalayan Homestay. Looking at the old man who owned the house instantly took me back to my primary school days when I first read Tintin in Tibet. He looked just like the Sherpas that Hergé used to illustrate, with his dusty, worn-out jacket, woollen cap covering the top of his head exclusively, his slouched but sure walk, and his homely smile that brought out a hundred new wrinkles across his face. The familiarity was welcoming, and I felt certain of having met him before, at least in a dream far away.

I’m back in Ladakh, ‘The Desert in the Skies’. I’ve been craving more of this rugged, barren gorgeousness year after year since I came here to work with Snow Leopard Conservancy (SLC-IT) in 2013. Finally, this winter, I found the opportunity to fling myself into the Himalayas once more and I grabbed it in a heartbeat. I’ve been working on a project here that’s trying to understand the interactions between wolves and snow leopards, and field work has added to my mental stash of mind-blowing experiences by the truckload. I’ll elaborate once I’ve let those moments sink in and once the temperature allows me to write and type with more ease.

For now, I leave you my general wonderings.

Over the past two weeks, I have lived in five different homes and experienced first-hand what running a home in this frigidity means for its members. Last time I was here, living alone meant being left to my own devices, and I came up with my own logical ways of dealing with household tasks and daily routines. This time, I’m learning to do it the real way. One of my primary insights after having shared living space with so many hospitable, embracing families is that economic status and/or availability of disposable income has no bearing on the lifestyle that comes by virtue of living in Ladakh. No amount of monetary stability can battle facts like (1) water doesn’t flow through pipes in the winter, (2) no matter what material your home is made of, it will get cold if not kept heated, (3) availability of vegetables is limited and expensive, (4) food is tedious to prepare and is inadvertently simple in nature, (5) there are no functional bathrooms anywhere, and traditional dry compost holes-in-the-ground are far and few, or (6) the slightest gust of wind is enough to remind you that all your layers of clothing are futile attempts for warmth. Homes have heaters of several kinds that use firewood, oil, kerosene or gas cylinders, but every home uses them for the same purpose. They all have a vessel full of water placed over it, heating up for the smallest of requirements. A plastic drum full of water covered with a lid is placed someplace convenient, like the sink or the stove, and a mug is kept over it. This water is used to refill the vessel on the furnace every time water is taken from it, like an endless and intuitive cycle for the whole family.

For someone who’s lived most of her life in Mumbai, where it’s either summer or summer-with-rain, the concept of one’s whole way of life changing with the seasons is fascinating. Here, with the onset of winter, homes shift into the single room with the heater (generally the kitchen), thick rugs are hung from every doorway, windows are insulated with paper or polythene, the carpets are brought out and made to cover every inch of flooring, dung is dried for burning and firewood is collected diligently. Every morning begins with a glass of hot water followed by a cup of hot tea. One needs that kind of warmth from within to provide the motivation needed to go outside in the cold and brush up for the day. Solja, or tea, is made and served constantly. Butter tea is drunk in boredom and of habit. Their elegant ceramic bowls are refilled immediately even after drinking a single sip, attempting to keep the salty, pink fluid warm. All gaps in conversation are filled with observations about the weather and comparisons between the days and years. Between all the tea and gossip, it’s a wonder they get so much hard work done.

I’m currently living with one of SLC-IT’s members - a smart woman whose brain I’ve enjoyed picking over the last couple of weeks. I asked her once about why people are as nice as they are in Ladakh. What makes them different from the rest of this big bad world? What is right (or wrong) with them? Her opinion is that the extreme hospitability of every Ladakhi household came about as a survival strategy, and that if people didn’t help one another, life would be much harder than it already was in this hostile environment.

Ladakh was a land of simple folk, where the barter system existed up until less than a hundred years ago. Today, tourists from India and around the world are reshaping some of these traditional households and lifestyles, bringing money and stereotypical economic development to the locals. There are pros and cons to this, and perhaps they deserve a post of their own, but I hope with all my heart that this town of Leh and all the villages in Ladakh never lose sight of how intrinsically rich in culture and beauty they are.

One of the many villagers who insisted we come in for tea during an interview survey.
"kschyot le!"

A wood furnace with some soup 'naam tuk' boiling in the vessel over it.

The amale from a homestay in Saspochey.

Hergé's Sherpa trying to spot a golden eagle with our binoculars.

This old nun lives alone in the only house near Rhisdung monastery with her many ferocious dogs.

Our goofy shadow as we interviewed the people of Tarutsey.

The skull of a wild ungulate, as seen hanging from several homes.

An interviewee of Tarutsey.

Traditional garb. Avec sunglasses.

Old, married women sport two plaits and all the beads they have come to own.

Lady of the house from our homestay in Tarutsey, and her visiting feline.