Sorry, you are too Andamani for me - The Sequel

Andaman is like mini India. We have people from all over India living here. Everyone knows someone who comes from another religion or state. There are locals, like my family, who moved to Andaman from mainland India long ago (pre-1942) and then there are settlers.

Tonight my family was invited for a dinner in a non-Andamani house, in a very Andamani street. When I say Andamani street, I mean you can smell the cow dung and the ocean all at the same time.  I have already described a typical Andamani house but this house is different. This is a house with sculptures of beautiful women and what looked like a cupid. The house was built on the graveyard of money, for crying out loud there was a waterfall in the living room! This beautiful piece of architecture was built by a local, now rented by settlers, both parties happen to be our family friends.

Just after few minutes of entering the house, men deserted us to meet their lady of the night – alcohol. And we females had to make our piece with fruit juice, sausages and salami (sausages and salami is not very Andamani but we were in navy house, that means unlimited supply of imported goods).  I’m pretty sure all the ladies in the house have had a few drinks in their life but tonight we were good Indian women who can only watch men getting drunk and loose and then moan about it. The thing that annoyed me the most was that we were not even given an option of an alcoholic drink, not even an elegant glass of wine? It was either mixed fruit juice, lychee juice or orange juice.

There were 4 kids running around creating mayhem which saved us from a lot of awkward silence hovering in the air. Food obviously was the reason we all were there. Let me tell you, this is an unspoken law of Andaman, or maybe even the whole of India, when it comes to food the host must be persistent and the guest must be resistant. We all obeyed the law.  As a guest, if you had one serving of food, you win but if the host has managed to feed you three servings then you lose. Two servings is a tie I guess.

At the dinner table our hostess told us stories of her home in mainland India. She told us how women were only responsible for kitchen and men controlled everything else. She mentioned that she was taken aback when she learned how liberal my family was. And then she said something that I thought was very contradicting; she said she believed that men and women must be equal and everything must be 50-50 between them.

Here I am, sitting with the woman who believes in equality between men and women and yet there is nothing that is happening in the dinner party that seemed to follow the same notion of gender equality. All I saw was the typical men drinking at some corner and women making small talk and watching over the kids. These are the so called ‘modern’ people, young settlers who can save Andaman from its monotonous life.  I expected everyone to sit together and have a mature conversation but of course I am shooting for the stars here.

I guess there are some things that will never happen in Andaman, like I will never be able to have a cigarette outside my room because good girls don’t smoke, they probably don’t even know what it is…is it the white thing hanging from their fathers mouth?

Or maybe I am being pessimistic; it takes a while to grow into another lifestyle.  Maybe being modern (the term itself is very controversial in India, but that’ll take another post to explain) in Andaman is like buying a fancy car, it looks pretty…but you can’t drive it in the rocky roads of Andaman. 

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