Andaman Revisited

As a matter of fact it isn’t unusual for me to be in such a situation- of being bodily present at one place and mentally elsewhere. It happens to me all the time not that I am in the Government. I’m in the office at Suryapet and the mind is at home in Hyderabad. I’m at home in Hyderabad and the mind is in some bookstore. I’m sitting before the laptop writing this in Suryapet and the mind is in Iowa wondering if the writing workshops have begun. But from May to July every year for the past four years since 2006 while physically I am in Hyderabad and hereabouts, mentally I’m in the Andamans. After my three months (87 days to be exact) stay in the Andamans nothing occupies my mind as much as the memories of my travels there. I had thought that as the time goes by I would gradually forget, bit by bit, whatever I saw or experienced there but curiously, the memories haven’t dimmed one bit, maybe because I have done something about them.

There’s a sort of journal I maintained while I was at Port Blair in 2006 from May to July end. This I take out religiously on the last day of April, the day I got on the plane to Port Blair. After I begin reading the journal I go back and relive each day, if not each moment, that I spent at Port Blair, Wandoor, Rangat, Mayabunder, Diglipur, Kalipur, Havelock, Neil Island and other places I can’t ever seem to forget. And of course, there are the numerous pictures I took that instantly refresh my memory whenever I look at them. They bring back the way the sand at the beach at Karmatang felt between the toes, the way the wind tore through the trees at Kalipur, and the magical feeling one gets when watching the sunrise over the sea.

There are some moments, some places and some people I can never forget. I can never forget the two lonely nights I spent at the resort at Kalipur listening to the wind howling outside and make a racquet rustling the leaves of the tall trees. I can not also forget the feeling of being lost in time standing on the desolate beach at Neil Island. I cannot also forget my room mates Rahul and Shamik and of course, all the people at the NGO where I was a ‘media fellow’ for three months. There were also fearful moments like the ten minutes or so that I spent waltzing with a huge, ferocious Doberman and expecting to die any moment. This experience I have managed to put in my novel, of course, in a different setting.

Everywhere I went, every place I saw made me resolve to come back, this time with the family. Alas, four years have passed and I am yet to make definite plans to go back to all the places in the Andamans. Maybe when my novel finds a publisher I will find the time (and also the money) to make the trip.