The loud choruses of the crickets and frogs had begun in the tsunami-created marshes and swamps behind our guest-house, the power had been switched off and we were all sitting in the dark. We knew it was past 11:00 PM. Nao wanted to retire. I extracted a promise from him to visit us the next day, at his convenience, but with the Andamanese version and not the Hindi one. He said he had forgotten it all. When I insisted that he could remember at night while going to bed, he agreed to try but was sure that his attempt would fail. “Chaaliis saal se sunaa nahiin, kaun bolega?” (It has been 40 years since I have heard it; how can I narrate it?) He was sure he would disappoint me.

Then came the next day. I was making some grammar notes sitting on the wooden bed the next afternoon. I saw Nao standing at my door with an expectant look on his face. The moment I looked up, he said in Hindi, “kuch kuch yaad aataa hai” (I can remember a little). I invited him and then we sat around the bed turned makeshift table. He started narrating the same story in short Great Andamanese phrases, not very fluently but code-mixed with Hindi.

Narayan assisted me in recording and transcribing the story. This is how our long journey of Great Andamanese narration started, a journey into the past. I would interrupt him to get Hindi equivalents and he could, with a 90% success rate, render them. It took us several days, to get the full version of the narration of Phertajido and the subsequent word-for-word translation. Sometimes we would have our sessions in the afternoon and sometimes after 9:00 PM, as he was always busy fishing by the jetty after sunset. This was a great story and I could see he loved narrating it. Now it is a history as the entire story with interlinear gloss with English translation is printed in the grammar of the language. Grammar of the Great Andamanese language. An Ethnic Space. 2013. Anvita Abbi. Brill, Leiden.

The story has now been published by the National Book Trust of India, in English, Hindi, Bangla, Odiya, Tamil and Telugu, the major Indian languages, thus has reached a large children population.

The translated version of this story had some gaps, which I realized only after coming back to Delhi. I decided to go through the entire process again during the next trip. I was lucky enough as Nao obliged me during my next trip to Port Blair in December 2006, almost 11 months after our previous visit.

On reaching Port Blair in December 2006, I realized that Nao was on Strait Island and not in Port Blair as I was informed by a tribal friend on the phone before I left Delhi. The AAJVS officials not only failed to honour the already sanctioned permit to visit Strait Island, but were also on the lookout to catch and arrest me if I pursued my research. There was no way of informing Nao of my arrival in Port Blair. Unfortunately, Strait Island had no phone connections. The only wireless communication that island had, was in the hands of the government officials. I had no option but to visit the Port Blair jetty and take a chance and see if I could run into any of my tribal friends on the ship. Ships for Strait Island leave very early in the morning at about 5:45 AM. It was 19 December 2006, I reached the jetty much before the stipulated time. A crew member from one of the ships recognized me. By 2006, many local officials, especially those who worked on ships and boats, had started recognizing me as a friend of the Great Andamanese tribes. As soon as this man, a ticket checker at the departure gate saw me, he indicated the next ship moored in the distance and said “Go and see Reya. She is going to Strait Island.” This was a girl from the Great Andamanese tribe whom I knew very well and who had married a Bengali. I ran towards her, lest I lose her. She immediately recognized me and greeted me with a namaste. She introduced me to her husband. She asked me in Hindi, “kab aayaa (when did you come?).” Reya is one of those Great Andamanese tribal girls who loves to amalgamate herself into our society and is happy to forget her heritage language. I told her that I desperately wanted to see Nao. She informed me that Nao was on Strait Island and had no plans of visiting Port Blair. My world was falling to pieces.

I knew requesting the administration to transport Nao Jr to Port Blair would not help. It is really a shame that the members of these tribes are kept as captives in their own land and are restricted from meeting other Indian citizens. Had it not been for the initiative of the Great Andamanese themselves, they would have never befriended locals and visitors like us. I immediately fished out a piece of paper from my purse, wrote a note in Hindi in bold letters and gave it to Reya to pass on to Nao. I told her to ask him to have it read to him by one of the school-going children. I also told her that the sole purpose of my trip to the Andaman was to meet Nao and my other tribal friends, but Nao in particular. She promised to deliver the message.

It was not until 21 December 2006 that I got an opportunity to meet Nao Jr, who did respond to my request and made the journey to Port Blair just for me. He came to the Circuit House where I was staying and told me that he had received my letter. He needed some money desperately and I obliged. He looked frail, weak and sad. When I commented on his health, he immediately complained of loneliness and desolateness. I took him to my room and we talked of days gone by, his solitary life on Strait Island and the irritating officials.

Every time Nao would leave for home, I would remind him to think of his parents before sleeping, how they hunted together in the sea and how his mother or grandmother must have narrated stories to him as a little child. My zeal for getting more and more infected him. One early morning, I had not even had my morning cup of tea when he knocked on my door. His eyes were red and he looked disturbed. When I opened the door, he said, “Madam, I could not sleep the whole night as I remembered this story and you have to listen to me.” What more could I have asked for?

I invited him in and made him comfortable by offering him a cup of tea. Over tea, he told me that he was trying to remember the story of Maya Lephai, which was narrated to him by his Abba (the father) when he was about seven years old. He told me that he liked the story very much even then, but had somehow forgotten all about it. His bloodshot eyes told me how he must have waited for dawn to break to come and narrate the tale of Maya Lephai to me. He first narrated it in Andamanese Hindi so that I could understand it easily. He then gave it to me phrase by phrase in Great Andamanese, followed by the Hindi translation. I was amazed at the organized way in which he gave the information. He was better than many of us in the educated world. Whenever I got stuck, he would repeat and explain. The story has many dialogues and Nao obliged me by delivering each and every one of them with the proper intonation. Not only this, he would put the ear phones in his ears and ask me to rewind the tape so that he could listen to his own voice. Sometimes, he used to hear his own rendering to remember the next episode or sequence in the story. All this was very educative for me. He had learnt to use the tape recorder and was assisting me unknowingly to achieve the near-perfect version.

I was collecting the names of various endemic birds from Nao when I suddenly asked him, “Don’t you remember any story about birds?” He said he had heard one story in which all the Andamanese people became birds but informed me that he would have to think about it overnight to narrate it to me. I appreciated his willingness to help and we fixed a time to meet in the Circuit House on 4 January 2007 to record the story. Thus was recorded the story of Jiro Mithe, one of my favourites. He was very happy that day as he could remember the story very well. He told me that he had been thinking of it all through the night. This was an unusual story as the names of the various Andamanese birds are taken from the names of the Andamanese people, contrary to the general phenomenon where the reverse is true. Not only could he recollect what he had heard in his childhood, but he could also remember words from his heritage language, which went a long way in helping me enrich the dictionary of Great Andamanse. He would switch back and forth between Andamanese Hindi and the Great Andamanese language, like a perfect bilingual. In some ways, I felt very proud of myself for having been able to help him revive the lost language. It is very unfortunate that Nao Jr is no more with us. Not a single day passes when I don’t miss him. He was my friend and my guru who taught me not only the language but also the ancient culture, beliefs and indigenous knowledge of flora and fauna.