Glorious Boy. Aimee Liu

her. The older children dispense ridicule with much pulling of the nose and sounds of disgust, but none of it fazes Artam. What seems to have made the greatest difference is her insistence on accompanying others—including me!—when we relieve ourselves. Then she follows suit. A signal less of culture, I suspect, than of Artam’s highly sociable nature. She endears herself to all around her and seems to view us all as immediate family. Her trust of me, so genuine and pure, along with Kuli’s welcome and Leyo’s support, makes me feel at home with the Biya (all except the grim widow Obeyo) in a way I have not felt anywhere since I was a young child.

      —As for the spirit language, the men appear to be the keepers of this code. It is the language that connects them to nature and, through the wisdom of their great god Biliku, to success in hunting, fishing, stalking, and survival—and also, I think, to intimacy. When Artam’s father, Sempe, takes her into his arms he rarely speaks, but he’ll raise his face to study the currents of wind in the treetops, and she’ll follow his gaze. Or he’ll give her a little shake to stop her babbling, and together they’ll listen to a sound I can’t hear, and then they’ll leave camp as if sworn to silence and return not four minutes later with a large rat on the end of an arrow, Artam as gleeful as if she’d shot it herself. The evident strengthening of the bond between father and daughter that occurs during these wordless excursions reinforces my sense that the silent language has evolved out of necessity to link survival with love. It is not easily taught to outsiders, however, and despite the ease with which most of the Biya accept me, this cornerstone of their culture continues to elude me.

      —When I asked Sempe if he will actually teach his daughter to shoot, he shook his head as if this were unthinkable, but Leyo says that the tribe is shrinking so quickly that everyone, male and female, must be taught to hunt and defend themselves. I wonder how quickly such a role shift can happen. Young Ekko, around Naila’s age, is plenty old enough to learn to shoot, but no one appears inclined to teach her, perhaps due to her temperament. This girl is as vain as any of my Connecticut schoolmates, grooming her hair and nails extensively, and she preens in the compact mirror I gave her on my first visit, while jealously guarding it from the others. If the tribe depended on Ekko to hunt, I fear they would starve.

      —Artam is growing bow-legged and pot-bellied, with an almost perfectly spherical head, and short, compressed neck. Now in her third year, she produces full-throated, open vowels, and growls. She clicks her way through the Biya consonants with ease and expresses herself in complete statements. No adult will ever stop to correct her pronunciation, yet she gawks as they talk and sometimes mimics them as a parrot might. She seems instinctively verbal, especially when greeting her mother after the slightest separation. I’m most impressed by Artam’s fluid ability to shift from silence when hunting with her father to garrulousness with everyone else.

       [For comparison, I note that my own son Ty, just ten months younger than Artam, is already nearly half a foot taller than she, but still speechless. He will grunt and occasionally hum, and his fits of rage remain frequent and loud, but he displays none of Artam’s vocal sociability. Where she has a magnetic and nonstop attraction to the people around her, Ty seems immune to humanity’s charms—with the single exception of Naila, his preferred companion. With Naila, and only with Naila, Ty communicates effortlessly. Their silent fluency bears an uncanny similarity to the Biya spirit language. Leyo suggests that Biliku has conferred this gift on them as a kind of birthright. Both Naila and Ty, after all, were born in the Andamans under Biliku’s protective gaze. But then, so was Artam, and she converses readily in spoken as well as silent language with both her parents, while Ty resorts to tantrums to communicate with Shep and me.]

       December 20, 1940

       Merry Christmas, Dear Mum and Dad!

      I picture you curled up with your books by the fire or sweeping snow off the front steps . . . and my mind boggles. Here we look onto a sea of diamonds, wear sunhats and shorts out to hunt for our shabby sprig of Christmas evergreen—a local shrub called casuarina—and pretend our Pimm’s cups are mulled wine.

      But I’ve so much to catch you up on! I made a week-long field trip last month. Little Artam, the Biya girl I’ve written so much about, is a gregarious imp going on four now. What a study in contrasts with our Ty! Where he’s deliberate to the point of exasperation, she’s impulsive. Where he’s silent, she’s a chatterbox. Where he’s stubborn, she’s like quicksilver. In a flash Artam will disappear high up a tree, fearless, or chase lizards along the stream. She loves to dance and jump and freely offers effusive hugs, but she can’t sit still for anything like a lesson.

      Ty, on the other hand, is a born problem solver. He loves to work with Som’s tools to fix the benches in the garden, and with Som and Jina’s daughter, Naila, to help pot and categorize Shep’s medicinal orchids. He’s already solving remarkably complex number and letter puzzles, and he adores music, can hum virtually any melody he’s ever heard, with the auditory equivalent of photographic memory.

      The one thing Ty and Artam have in common is a love of dogs. Artam affectionately torments the pye-dogs that the Biya keep for hunting, and Ty has turned the Commissioner’s Dutch shepherd into such a pal that he actually rides the poor beast’s back.

      As you can see, we are all healthy and busy. In addition to his routine medical duties—and helping Jina and Naila tend to Ty whenever I’m out in the field—Shep has made tremendous headway in the lab. He’s developed an extract of Pleated Leaf for the treatment of sepsis, an infusion of Yellow Finger Orchid roots for headache and diarrhea, and even successfully cured several cases of amoebic dysentery and reversed glaucoma using his decoctions.

      The real trick is to document every step and scrupulously preserve his samples. Everything Shep accomplishes here will have to be replicated back in “civilization,” before the grand Poo-Bahs of medical science will even think of taking him seriously. He says he’ll need at least another year in the Andamans before he can begin to face them. And I feel the same about my research.

      Dad, I could tell from your last letter how worried you are. The news we get of the war in Europe is truly alarming, and I’m sure you get boatloads more. I wish we could just wave a magic wand and come to you, but we’ve been hearing absolute horror stories about the voyage around the Cape—months, it can take, and every day the threat of bombers overhead and torpedoes below. The attempts to fly are even worse, hopfrogging across Africa, landing in blacked out backwaters with no idea when the next plane will take off, much less who will be allowed on it.

      Dearly as I’d love to come home, we really are safe and sound here. We both have our work, and I think it’s best we stay. Maybe it’s not the phony war we all thought, but it can’t go on much longer. And soon as it’s over we’ll hightail it back, with bells on.

       D’ekrose moer (That’s xox, in Biya!)

       Claire

       III

      June 1941

      The orchid garden was deserted. Shep had come over to ask Som to cut him some Rhynchostylis pseudobulb samples, but now he stood in the sopping heat, unsure of his next move. Som tended these plants as if they were his children. He’d webbed vines and bark on which to suspend the epiphytic varieties, fashioned a shade roof out of rattan, devised elaborate staking and clipping mechanisms to support the heavy columnar blooms. The orchids rewarded this care with lavish new growth and spectacular color and scent, but if Shep tried to cut his own samples, he’d insult Som and probably mutilate the plants. Despite the delight he took in his botanical research, or maybe because of it, Shep was terrified of harming these exotic species.

      Where was Som?

      Naila’s reed-like voice floated from the veranda. Aah, bi, cee, dee, ee, hef, ghee . . . Claire used to sing Ty this alphabet song, but now, between the Vanilla stalks that screened him from the house, Shep could see only the girl with