QUEST FOR FIRE

I woke suddenly and looked up through pooled sweat— salt stung my eyes and for a moment I thought I was lying on the bottom of the ocean, its entire blue weight pushing me down onto the narrow bed. Shaking my head to clear my vision, the water flowed down my cheeks onto my lips and with my tongue I could taste… Naomi, a Fijian girl I’d kissed in the moonlight on the Coral Coast, 12 long years ago. Great barrels that day, hollow reef-pass rights, and as I sat alone in the lineup, I’d wave to Naomi, who stalked barefoot across the shallow inside coral, spearing octopus for supper. In the dreamy nights sitting on the soft, crushed coral sand, she would clasp my hand in hers and silently regard the contrasting dark and white skin.

So many surf trips ago. Where is the Crescent?

April 28 Port Blair

Still no sign of the boys on their yacht from Burma. I hire a driver and in a battered taxi rattle through town, winding around a snug back bay called the Hornbill’s Nest. Top-heavy inter-island ferries with blood-rust-streaked hulls and straked fishing boats lie over on their gunwales, propped up for repairs in the low-tide muck Across the Chatham Jetty to the islet of Chatham, its tall signal tower rising up through tangled tress, standing out against the hazy blue sky at the summits of a steep hill. A sleepy customs officer had told me that any boat arriving in the Andamans must register with Port Control, housed here in the lonely tower. The taxi wheezes up a vertical driveway, I climb sweating up the narrow stairs, and in a shadowy, dusty office, sitting in front of a round electric fan, a very solemn Mr. Kumar looks across the huge desk and informs me no shipload of American surfers has checked in with his office. I ask Mr. Kumar if they get many private Yachts here in Port Blair.

“Three of four a year,” he says. “Not enough to lose one in the crowd.”

“Have you ever heard of any surfers traveling through here, Mr. Kumar?” I ask. “In the years past, I mean.”

“Surfers?” he asks. Mr. Kumar has a huge fleshy cyst protruding from one side of his nose, and I try not to stare.

“ You know, surfers, here to ride the waves that break on the coral reef.”

“No. I have never heard of such a thing here,” he says.

“Never?”

“Never.”

“Is there any way somebody could get to any of the outer islands without you knowing it?”

“This is not possible. You must first register with us and then clear immigration and customs. The government is very serious about protecting the original native cultures on these islands. Some of these tribes still live in the Stone Age, you know. The Jarawa tribe in the south have not yet discovered fire. They must wait for lightning to strike a tree, and then they protect the flame throughout the year. And their dress is nudity. Most of Middle Andaman, North Sentinel Island and little Andaman, North Sentinel Island and little Andaman are off-limits to foreigners. To visit, many of the islands require a special permit. The Crescent’s master has these permits?”

“I sure hope so,” I say. Later I walk through the bazaar to the Aberdeen Jetty and swim with a half-dozen Indian boys: glistening brown frogs, leaping and then kicking across the placid surface of the bay. To be honest, I don’t think there’s any surf here. Flying in from the Indian continent the sea was like a pane of green glass— not moving at all. And that was on the Bay of Bengal side, exposed. Here in the Port Blair, on the Andaman Sea, facing Thailand and the Isthmus of Kra, I get nothing from the water. No message, no hints, no siren’s song. I feel no energy, put my foot in the sea: no pulse.

I hope that I’m wrong. But it doesn’t really matter. I’m here, my boars are with me and with or without the Crescent I’ll look around a bit. There is a man, a Mr. Magavarnan, who is said to know these waters, and who tomorrow might charter me his fishing boat from Wandoor Bay on they west side of the island.To pass the third day I put on goggles and swim across the channel to tiny Ross Island, A quarter-mile off Aberdeen jetty. This densely forested lump was once home of the British Chief Commissioner. Port Blair was settled by England and established as an offshore penal colony during India’s Sepoy Mutiny in 1857, through the royal Navy had first surveyed the chain of 321 emerald islands as far back as 1788. The infamous Cellular Jail crushed the life but not the spirit out of generations of Indian freedom fighters; it’s now a national monument and one of Port Blair’s prime attractions. Ross Island, on the other hand, has been left to rot. The consular mansions are now crumbled to ruins wrapped in a goat’s foot creepers, the mortar cracked and blasted by the prying roots of 100-foot-tall padouk hardwoods. Ghosts haunt the footpaths in the dappled light under the canopy: the sound of a waltz being played in the domed ballroom, the clink of cut crystal— gay, righteous laughter. But there was heartache, too, lots of it, so many thousands of miles away from their own cool isle. Here in the humid, dripping forest I find a hand-hewn black stone, set in brass:“Sacred to the Memory of Lawrence, the infant son of Lawrence and Jemma McCarthy, who was born her on the 16th September 1863 and died on the same date aged 22 hrs.

Sweet Babe, he lanced into our world to see a sample of our misery. Then turned away his languid eye to drop a tear or two and die”