On January 1, 2005, I went to visit the Nirmala School Camp in Port Blair. The camp, like the school in which it is housed, is run by the Catholic Church, and it is presided over by a mild-mannered young priest by the name of Father Johnson. On the morning of my visit, Father Johnson was at the center of an angry altercation. The refugees had spent the past three days waiting anxiously in the camp, and in that time no one had asked them where they wanted to go or when; none of them had any idea of what was to become of them, and the sense of being adrift had brought them to the end of their tether. The issue was neither deprivation nor hardship — there was enough food, and they had all the clothes they needed. It was the uncertainty that was intolerable. In the absence of any other figure of authority, they had laid siege to Father Johnson: When would they be allowed to move on? Where would they be going?
Father Johnson could give them no answers, for he was, in his own way, just as helpless as they were. The officials in charge of the relief effort had told him nothing about their plans for the refugees. Now time was running out: the schools in which the camps were located were to reopen on January 3. Father Johnson had no idea how his school was to function with more than 1600 refugees camping on the grounds.
Realizing at last that Father Johnson knew no more than they did, the inmates reduced their demands to a single modest query: could they be provided with some paper and a few pens? No sooner had this request been met than another uproar broke out; those who'd been given possession of pens and paper now became the center of the siege. Crowding together, people began to push and jostle, clamoring to have their names written down. Identity was now no more than a matter of assertion, and nothing seemed to matter more than to create a trail of paper. On this depended the eventual reclamation of a life.
Standing on the edges of the crowd was a stocky thirty-year-old man by the name of Obed Tara. He was, he told me, from the island of Car Nicobar and a member of an indigenous group whose affiliations, in language and ethnicity, lie with the Malay peoples to the east. But he himself was a naik (corporal) in the Tenth Madras Regiment of the Indian Army and was fluent in Hindi. On December 10 he had set off from Calcutta, where his unit was currently stationed, to travel to Car Nicobar. Like most Nicobarese people, he was a Christian, a member of the Anglican Church of North India, and he'd been looking forward to celebrating Christmas at home. But this year there was something else to look forward to as welclass="underline" he was to be married on the first day of the New Year — the very day of our conversation.
On December 26, despite the celebrations and merrymaking of the night before, Obed Tara, like most members of his extended family, rose early in order to attend a Boxing Day service at their church. Their house was in the seafront settlement of Malacca, just a few hundred yards from the water. Their neighborhood was the commercial heart of the township, and their house was surrounded by shops and godowns. They were themselves a part of the market's bustle; they owned a Maruti Omni and operated a long-distance phone booth in their house. In other words, theirs was a family that had been swept into the middle class by the commercial opportunities of the past decade.
That morning, as the family was gathering outside the house, the earth began to heave with a violence that none of them had ever experienced before; it shook so hard that it was impossible to stand still, and they were forced to throw themselves on the ground. Then the ground cracked and fountains of mud-brown water came geysering out of these fissures. Like all the islanders, Obed Tara was accustomed to tremors in the earth, but neither he nor anyone else there had seen anything like this before. It took a while before the ground was still enough for them to regain their footing, and no sooner had he risen to his feet than he heard a wild, roaring sound. Looking seaward, he saw a wall of water advancing toward his house. Gathering his relatives, he began to run. By the time he looked back, his house, and the neighborhood in which it stood, had vanished under the waves. Two elderly members of the family were lost, and everything they possessed was gone — the car, the phone booth, the house. The family spent a couple of nights in the island's interior, and then the elders deputed Obed Tara to go to Port Blair to see what he could secure for them by way of relief and supplies.
By the time he finished telling me this story, there was a catch in his voice, and he was swallowing convulsively to keep from sobbing. I asked him, "Why don't you go to the army offices and tell them who you are? I am sure they will do what they can to help you."
He shook his head, as if to indicate that he had considered and dismissed this thought many times over. "The sea took my uniform, my ration card, my service card, my tribal papers — it took everything," he said. "I can't prove who I am. Why should they believe me?"
He led me to the far side of the camp, where another group of islanders was sitting patiently under a tent. They too had lost everything; their entire village had disappeared under the sea; saltwater had invaded their fields and taken away their orchards. They could not contemplate going back, they said; the stench of death was everywhere, and the water sources had been contaminated and would not be usable for years.
The leader of the group was a man by the name of Sylvester Solomon. A one-time serviceman in the navy, he had retired some years ago. He too had lost all his papers; he had no idea how he would claim his pension again. Worse still, the bank that had custody of his family's money had also been swept away, along with all its records.
I told him that by law the bank was obliged to return his money, and he smiled, as if at a child. I wanted to persuade him of the truth of what I'd said, but when I looked into his eyes, I knew that in his place, I too would not have the energy or the courage to take on the struggles that would be required to reclaim my life's savings from that bank.
In the same camp I encountered a Sikh woman by the name of Paramjeet Kaur. Noticing my notebook, she said, "Are you taking names too? Here, write mine down." She was a woman of determined aspect, dressed in a dun-colored salwar kameez. She had come to the islands some thirty years before, by dint of marriage. Her husband was a Sikh from Campbell Bay, a settlement on the southernmost tip of the Nicobar island chain, less than 125 miles from northern Sumatra. Like many others in the settlement, her husband belonged to a family that had been given a grant of land in recognition of service to the army (to distribute land in this way is a tradition that goes back to the British Indian Army and its efforts to engage the loyalties of Indian sepoys). But Paramjeet Kaur's in-laws came to the Nicobar Islands well after independence, in 1969, at a time when agricultural land had become scarce on the mainland. They were given 15 bighas of land and a plot to build a residence. The settlement that grew up around them was as varied as the regiments of the Indian army: there were Marathis, Malayalis, Jharkhandis, and people from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.
"There was nothing there but jungle then," said Paramjeet Kaur. "We cleared it with our own hands, and we laid out orchards of areca and coconut. With God's blessing we prospered, and built a cement house with three rooms and a veranda."