Since I haven’t yet mentioned anything about my work here, I guess this is a good time to give you a taste of my nocturnal “adventures” on the beaches of Agatti..Part of my project involves regular surveys at night to track, measure and tag nesting sea turtles that come ashore to lay their eggs..Now walking on tropical beaches on moonlit nights is sure romantic as hell but there are times when I get a whole lot more than I bargained for…

One of the more memorable surveys I’ve had was one in the middle of June at the start of the southwest monsoon. I’d been surveying with both Najmudheen and Lateef and we had almost finished the isolated south side of the island and we were just nearing the resort on the western side when the wind suddenly picked up speed to about 60 km/h in less than a minute. This wasn’t surprising, given that it was monsoon so we just started walking faster but almost instantaneously, before we could prepare for it, the rains broke. I say “rain” but that is possibly the grossest understatement to describe the fury that descended on us that night. Within seconds we were drenched from head to foot. But there’s nothing extraordinary about getting wet in the rain. What really blew my mind that night was watching the downpour. It felt like we were in the front row seats of an Imax theatre screening a documentary on “Worlds Most Dramatic Storms”, only there was no giant plexiglass screen separating us from the scene itself. With no shelter in sight, we had made a dash for the nearest coconut tree on the beach. The scraggly tree offered as much protection as a doughnut but it was an excellent vantage point to view up-close the stunning visual effects of a furious monsoon shower lashing a tiny island in the middle of an incredibly violent sea. Witnessing thunder, lightning and torrents of rain hit 3 measly square kms of land was quite a sight. The wind was so strong that the trees lining the shore were practically bending at right angles. It was almost like watching a wildly primitive dance to the rhythm of 5-foot tall waves crashing on the sands nearby…While I was busy appreciating this spectacle of nature, my intrepid assistant Latheef had been busy appreciating his own restlessness and had decided to explore our options. He set off armed with one torch to find us a safe route to escape to the bike shed and he came back after a couple of minutes to report that we should make a break for it. So we did. Tumbling, tripping and scrambling over fallen bits of trees, we fled along in a mad dash to the road until we abruptly ran into a wire fence that blocked our path. Having no other choice, we started to run along it and luckily after about 50 meters we found a gap which we squeezed through and made it to the road. Getting wetter and wetter by the second, we ran as fast as we could toward the bikes, blinded by the wind and rain. I think Latheef even lost a slipper on the way. Anyway just about 10 yards before we reached the bikes, the rain suddenly stopped and the wind just died down in an instant. Just like that, it was all over. I couldn’t stand the irony. It was as if Mother Nature just turned off the machine and sat around inspecting her nails as if she’d done nothing spectacular just minutes before.. Looking back I know we didn’t see any nesting turtles on that survey…but I’ll be damned if I call that night disappointing….

Another survey that I can never forget was the one on which I tagged my first green turtle. This was also during the monsoon. Accompanied by Latheef and the very reluctant environment warden Thaha, we were just getting to the end of the airport circuit when we came across a bunch of fresh tracks that by the looks of it had been made by turtles that we had just missed. But we were lucky. As we walked further, we saw one turtle at the end which was just inching into the surf. Thaha and I saw it at the same time. We ran towards it and I must say. I have never been more surprised at the oddities of human nature than when I saw Thaha himself manhandle the turtle onto its back! Let me mention at this point that this man is 5’7” and weighs no more than 53 kilos. Such enthusiasm I could only later attribute towards his resolution on tagging a turtle at any cost that night given the effort he had spent in coming for the survey in the first place. It had been a particularly windy night but I can’t cancel surveys in the monsoon because of wind and rain (duh!) and his only problem as far as I could see was his lungi tending to fly off. But that certainly didn’t warrant the amount of cribbing I had to put up with all through the survey. Plus since I was short one field assistant I had counted on Thaha even if it meant a lot of coaxing on my part. I guess seeing that one turtle was reward enough in the end. Anyway, back to our turtle…Amidst much chaos and confusion and flipperfuls of wet sand and seawater being thrown in our general direction by the rather indignant turtle, we finally managed to get it on its back after which tagging the huge thing was almost anti-climactically, a piece of cake. Overturning turtles doesn’t really harm the turtle but it does make a ruckus trying to right itself. So after I was done, I was once again amazed and spellbound as Thaha singlehandedly overturned the turtle back onto its stomach. That man displays the fastest personality changes I’ve ever seen not to mention mysterious sources of superhuman strength. Anyway once we had managed to get its size measurements and track width, we let the turtle go and collapsed on the sands after it disappeared, laughing at our state and the craziness that we had just been a part of. We did look comical with wet sand and sea water plastered all over us. We eventually got around to collecting the various odds and ends that we had thrown about in our excitement, like the torch that we found rolling in the waves nearby but surprisingly still worked (it still does to this day), the tag record book, the applicator, all scattered in every direction. Finally, just as we were ready to leave, I realized that my jacket was open and my shirt was visibly wet inside. But it wasn’t my modesty I was worried about. I was worried that my expensive new cellphone which I’d kept in my shirt pocket, was also, inevitably wet. I got so panicky that I didn’t even notice the steady droplets of water that were starting to fall around me. The almost instantaneous downpour that followed however did catch my attention and I started to run like a hare or more precisely, like a bat outta hell, madly, wildly, and blindly towards some semblance of shelter. The rain was so thick I couldn’t see one foot away from my face and I ran in what I hoped was a straight line to the hut owned by the Bangaram Resort that was about 200 metres away. Unfortunately for me, I did not in fact keep to a straight line and found myself 3 minutes later rather unpleasantly in the middle of a carpet of Spinifex bushes, which as the name suggests, refers to a plant with viciously sharp needles. I think that alarmed me more psychologically than physically because I was still thinking of my 12-grand cell phone quietly absorbing water in my shirt pocket. Almost berserk with panic by then, I ran to a nearby building belonging to the airport instead of the aforementioned hut that now evilly stood on the other side of the Spinifex patch (ahh the cruel illusions of blind panic). Anyway I ran to this airport building and clung to its northern wall as there was no way of getting inside. I was partly protected from the rain there anyhow and removed my cellphone from my pocket. Then I realized that I hadn’t one square inch of dry surface on me to wipe away the water so I finally had to resort to rubbing my palms on the cement wall to get them dry. But my relief was only short-lived. I noticed that in my mad haste I had dropped almost everything else that I had been carrying – my rainpants, record book, hands-free and wotnot..After a while, Lateef came by and since it had stopped raining for a bit we went to look for the hands-free. I actually dint know at the time what exactly I had been carrying but the missing hands-free I distinctly remembered dropping. But it was like looking for a needle in a sand dune and we gave up soon enough. When we finally went back to the Bangaram hut we found Thaha there. And the man managed to surprise me a third time by handing me one by one all the objects I had dropped – even the rain pants! The sudden downpour had caught him and Latheef too but they hadn’t run and Thaha had even picked up after me! It was all I could do to keep from hugging the man. Needless to say, I didn’t. I am, however, not ungrateful and I now remain ever so slightly inclined to restrain myself from making fun of him when he offers me lame excuses for not coming on further surveys. I guess he needs all the time he can get to recover from ‘the excitement of tagging turtles’.
:)