Aimee Liu's Blog: Aimee Liu's New Blog Launch! - Posts Tagged "1936"

Out take #3 is from the latest draft of my novel-in-progress...
In which Thea and Shep sail from Calcutta in 1936 to their new home: the Andaman Islands.

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The weather changed for their four-day crossing to the Andamans, and Thea spent most of her time aboard the S.S. Maharaja sick to her stomach. Not until the last morning did the skies clear and the water change from black to iridescent green. She let Shep drag her up on deck as Land Fall Island hove into view. This small pincushion of palm trees was dwarfed by the green monolith of North Andaman behind it.

Thea caught her breath and Shep took her hand, but a wave of nausea forced her to pull away from him. She clung to the rail, squinting through the flood of sunshine to the white bands of beach that divided jungle from sea. What had she imagined? Native dancers. Polynesian dugouts. Grass huts and totem poles. Tropical sunsets and wall to wall servants, had become a joke between them, but the absolutely primal state of the land before her was anything but funny. "There's no one there."

"No seeums," Shep quipped, and she punched his arm.

This first sight of her new home -- and, theoretically, her first "field" -- should have been exhilarating. Instead, despite the bright light and crystalline water, she found the forest sinister and foreboding. It warned her just how little she knew -- about anything. What did she think she could accomplish here? Did she honestly see herself trekking about in that impenetrable jungle? She’d barely been able to penetrate Radcliffe-Brown's book about this place. She was a rank amateur. And she felt awful.
But fear was unacceptable. Ruth Benedict would be ashamed of her. Her mother would be dismayed, her father alarmed. And how could she do this to Shep?

He lapsed into silence, sucking his pipe and studying her with a bemused expression. The smell of his cherry tobacco steadied her. "So this is Paris?" She gestured at the primeval forest and dared him to smile.

He smoothed the bangs back from her forehead as if to see her better, then rested his palm coolly at the nape of her neck. "It's our Paris, Thea. Even if we have to build it from the ground up."
#
Six hours later the steamer approached Port Blair -- but for a couple of isolated coastal villages, the first evidence of civilization since Calcutta. A blinking lighthouse. A regimental building spiked with antennae. A road with trucks crawling around the base of a steep hill. Thea consulted the gazetteer that Shep had left in her keeping while he finished packing below. The hill was called Mount Harriet, one of the local sights along with Aberdeen Bazaar, Viper Island, Chatham Sawmill. And the Cellular Jail.

"But first and foremost, there, Ross Island. Your new home." The elderly woman who'd been sitting beside her for the past hour pointed away from the coast to a stump of green rising from the sea off the port bow. The woman's name was Hilda Strong. For twenty of her sixty-odd years she'd lived as the wife of a coconut planter on the mainland, which meant only the mainland of South Andaman, as opposed to the Indian or Burmese mainlands. Now she was returning after a year-long visit with her daughter in Wales, and she seemed none too happy to be back. "Well, good luck to you," she said, standing abruptly. "As for me, I'm neither here nor there anymore." And with that, the primly buttoned and tucked Mrs. Strong leaned over the railing and spat at the turquoise sea.