LITMIR.BIZ

       November 18, 1938

       Ross Island

      Dear Dr. Benedict,

      Something so extraordinary has happened, I hardly know where to begin. It’s both ghastly and wondrous, and I suppose as an ethnographer, I should keep an objective stone face, but it’s difficult when I feel simultaneously like ranting and celebrating.

      You see, thanks to my darling husband, I’ve spent an entire afternoon with two members of the Jarawa, the mysterious and reputedly hostile inland tribe. However, the circumstances surrounding this encounter were monstrous.

      We have a new and odious police commandant whose territory spans the entire archipelago and whose moral compass stops well short of his heart. This man, Denis Ward, heard that a bush policeman and a couple of hunters were killed up north last week near one of the forest outposts. The murderers most likely were Burmese poachers, who are a scourge in these islands, but Ward went up with his men to investigate and decided, in his infinite colonial wisdom, to wreak vengeance on the natives.

      I suspect his Indian deputies encouraged this scheme. There is no love lost between the imported “locals” and the indigenous people here, and because the Jarawa are reclusive and violent when approached, they’re the least trusted of all the tribes.

      The upshot is that Ward’s vigilantes ambushed some fifty Jarawa men, women, and children, opening fire on them as they were crossing the Middle Andaman strait by raft. According to Ward’s own (gleeful) report back at the club, it was wholesale slaughter, but to prove what a saint he is, he brought in for treatment an eight-year-old girl who’d been shot in the thigh, along with her mother, who refused to leave her.

      Ward insists on calling the mother Topsy-One and the girl Topsy-Two. But . . . now they’re under Shep’s medical care.

       And that’s how I wiggled into the act!

      After Shep initially treated the girl, Ward put the captives under house arrest with a Bengali sergeant and his wife. Naturally, Shep had to go check on his patient, and I tagged along as his assistant.

      Trouble was apparent as soon as the young Bengali wife opened the door. They’d been given no warning, she complained. The MPs had simply dumped these “savages” upon them, forcing her into the role of jail matron and “desecrating” her good home.

      Shep pulled rank and insisted she allow him to do his job, but the prisoners’ cell turned out to be the size of a broom closet, with bars on the window and chains on the door. It stank of human waste and wouldn’t fit the four of us, so while he examined and re-dressed the girl’s wound, I tried to calm the matron. There was no sign of her husband.

       You would have been proud of me, Dr. Benedict. I assured the woman that her prisoners were as eager to leave as she was to be rid of them. I listened to her opine that Ward should have killed all the Jarawa, instead of “just” fifty. Then I reminded her that all this mother wanted was to protect her child, and I disabused her of the persistent local myth that “these creatures eat human flesh.”

      All the while, the broom closet resounded with wails and thumps. So finally, I dropped my voice to a conspiratorial whisper. I told the good woman that I’d been studying the local tribes, and I’d found that they were really clever devils. If a door or window were left unlocked, they’d vanish back into the forest without a trace, and this ordeal would be over for everyone. Then I gave her a wink, as Shep and I traded places.

      The mother and daughter resembed the Biya, but were smaller, more wiry. They wore their tribe’s distinctive red fiber bands wound tightly around their foreheads, arms, waists, and ankles, but nothing else. And their talk sounded much faster and higher pitched than Biya, though that might have been because they were angry and frightened and wanted nothing to do with me.

      I felt so awful for them, crouched in the corner, defeated by loss, injury, and exhaustion. Their eyes stared, large and deep in their sockets, and their skin, made darker by the contrast of the girl’s white bandages, shone blue-black.

      The sun striped shadows through the barred windows, and the morning heat was climbing. A bowl of untouched rice sat just inside the door, beside an empty chamber pot. The stench of urine and feces wafted from the opposite corner, where the prisoners had also flung the hospital gowns in which they’d been transported. Mother and daughter held hands, watching my slightest move.

      I tried introducing myself: “Attiba Claire.” I had to guess at the pronunciation, but Radcliffe-Brown had given me the word for name. Then I embraced myself as the Biya do in greeting. At that I detected a flicker of attention.

      I knew they had to be ravenous. Shep said they’d refuse to eat anything they didn’t recognize, so I’d brought honeycomb, cashews, raw cane and mangoes. It was a good bet. As soon as I showed the contents of my bag, the mother lunged for it. Never moving their eyes from me, the two devoured every morsel. Then, for over an hour, I listened and took notes as they demanded their freedom in a twittering language as distinct from Biya as Gaelic is from German.

      I felt deeply privileged to meet these supposed headhunters firsthand, more privileged still as they entrusted me with their pleas and complaints, but that sense of privilege was overshadowed by dread. The girl and her mother closely resembled young Ekko and Obeyo. All share the same ancestry, and the dressing on the girl’s leg made it impossible to forget what Ward had put them through—or what he’d do to the Biya, too, if given the slightest provocation.

      The mother—Bathana, she called herself—grasped my arm as I started to leave. “Malavu bhedu.” She pointed urgently to herself, her daughter, clearly expecting the impossible.

      I had to pull away, and the look of betrayal on Bathana’s small anguished face took a slice out of my heart.

      Outside I found Shep and the sergeant’s wife perched on the stairs like old pals. Shep was regaling the woman with tales of Shanghai, buying me time. Would that I’d done more with it.

      And yet . . . when I woke next morning to the news that the Jarawa girl and her mother had escaped back into the forest, I felt redeemed.

1939–1940

       Selected 1939 field notes:

      —Sempe, Imulu, and Artam are the only whole family unit. Every other adult is widowed. Ekko is an orphan. Yet the widow Obeyo alone holds onto her grief. Or is it anger? Darkness, at any rate, over the loss of both her husband and little Jodo. She now wears Jodo’s skull, strung by a cord, on her back. Her buck teeth and shaved head accentuate the ghoulish effect, and she refuses to join the nightly chanting and dancing. However, she is the master weaver of the clan, and her surviving son Tika is friendly enough for both of them, so there seems to be an unspoken agreement to leave her be. I have tried on each visit to approach her, but as soon as I come near she straightens her arms and turns her back, refusing even to let me greet her.

      —Artam has been toilet trained—in the Biya sense—since my last visit. At that time, she was not yet walking, and her mother would simply carry her away from the clearing and hold her over the foliage in a matter-of-fact fashion, then rinse her bottom with water from a

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