Over the years, during my travels, I have repeatedly felt that every place has a unique vibration associated with it and that those vibratory waves interact with the consciousness of each traveller in a unique way. It is because of such unique alchemy between a place and a traveller that at some places the traveller, because of no explainable reason, finds a remarkable sense of peace, calm, harmony and equanimity, whereas at some other place, he gets a sense of gloom, restlessness and an unfathomable feeling of unease.
For most of the ‘outside’ world, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands are exotic lands of pristine white beaches and blue skies—an ideal vacation hotspot. But as the protagonist of the book travels through these islands for his research project and meets and converses with diverse people, the myriad unique stories of these islands start taking shape—the forgotten stories of the ‘original’ indigenous tribes, of the colonial British as well as other European powers, of the Indian freedom fighters incarcerated here, the stories of Japanese ‘occupation’ during the Second World War, the stories of the so-called ‘Local Borns’, the waves upon waves of migration, the stories of the Nicobarese Bishop and the Gujarati business family, of the local ‘Rani’ and finally the nightmarishly tragic story of the Tsunami of 2004.
Andamanush Nicobarese is a travelogue and novel rolled into one, where the lines between reality and imagination no longer matter.
