Glorious Boy. Aimee Liu

of test. She said, “I can picture it better if you read it to me.”

      “Ah.” He stretched his long legs and leaned back against the maple’s trunk. Then he cleared his throat and began to read with the buoyant lilt of a radio announcer. “‘Viewed from the sea, the islands appear as a series of hills, nowhere of any great height, covered from sky-line to high-water mark with dense and lofty forest . . . The coast is broken by a number of magnificent harbours. The shores are fringed with extensive coral reefs—’”

      Claire scowled. “Sounds like paradise.”

      “What’s wrong with that?”

      She blurted without thinking how it might strike him, “I’m not looking for a holiday!”

      “No,” he replied quietly. “I can assure you, Claire, you needn’t worry about that.” He seemed on the verge of saying something more and different, but instead returned to the book. “‘The Andamanese belong to that branch of the human species known to anthropologists as the Negrito race. They are short of stature with black skins and frizzy hair—’”

      “Wait,” Claire stopped him. “Let me see that.” Until this moment, she’d assumed the Andaman islanders must resemble Polynesians—like Margaret Mead’s grass-skirted Samoans. The image that now formed in her head made her search for the book’s photographic plates. Though grainy and faded, they confirmed her mistake. In picture after picture, men, women, and children glared back in hostile defiance. They looked more African than Asian, and far wilder to Claire’s eye than Mead’s smiling islanders. The Andamanese wore necklaces and loincloths, and little else. Their chests and backs were threaded with patterns of scars, and their hair resembled black fleece shorn close to the skull. Some sported tattoos of clay. A couple of the men held bows and arrows longer than the hunters were tall. One girl had a skull strung to her back.

      Claire wondered whatever had possessed her to think she was qualified to communicate with these people, to make this preposterous journey. At the same time, her longing to do just that struck her dumb.

      She flipped back to read that the Andamanese were likely related to the aboriginal inhabitants of the interior of the Philippines and the Malay Peninsula. They’d been isolated on these islands off Burma for thousands of years. Even though Europeans had begun scouting the islands in the 1700s, many Andamanese tribes in Radcliffe-Brown’s time had yet to encounter a westerner, and he was the most recent ethnographer to study them.

      That was it, she thought. That was the prize. To meet these people would be like entering a time capsule. Like starting life over. Erasing everything that came before.

      “Claire?”

      She looked up with a sense of shifting lenses to find Shep studying her the way her father used to when she was little, when they went out searching for fossils or egret feathers, just the two of them. His expression curious. Hopeful. Forgiving.

      She dropped her gaze. “It says Radcliffe-Browne was the only trained anthropologist ever to study the Andamanese. Many of these tribes were already dying out, and that was thirty years ago.”

      A paper boy stopped in front of them, belting out the evening headlines: “Louie Meyer wins Indy in four! Mussolini declares Italy an Empire! Remington Rand Strike, Day Five!” It seemed to Claire he was ringing a gong. Time! Time! Time!

      Shep finally bought a paper just to get rid of the kid. Then he shook his head, as if having a silent conversation with himself. Without meeting her eyes, he retrieved the book, flipped back to the introduction, and held it for her inspection. “There’s something else you need to consider, Claire.”

      Confused by his sudden gravity, she read where he was pointing: “‘The islands, save for the clearings of the—’” She looked at him. “‘Penal Settlement’?”

      He closed the book and lowered it to his lap. “Port Blair—the town where I’ve been posted—was founded as a place to send India’s political prisoners. It’s the only modern settlement in the islands, and technically, it’s a penal colony.”

      Claire’s bewilderment must have shown. He said, “I guess you Americans would call the inmates revolutionaries. The Indian nationalists call them freedom fighters.” After the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, he explained, the British Indian government decided to distance the leaders of the insurrection from their followers. “I expect the remoteness of the Andamans was their appeal for this purpose. Back then the place had a rather sordid reputation.”

      “But that was . . .”

      “Eighty years ago.”

      “So this is ancient history.”

      “Not quite.” The concern in his voice told her this was the real test he’d been dreading. “After the convicts finished building the settlement, the British put them to work on a jail, where the violent criminals could be held while their more peaceable comrades were sent to work the island’s teak plantations and sawmills. The jail was completed around the time your Mr. Radcliffe-Brown arrived.”

      “I don’t understand. You’re making it sound like some sort of tropical gulag.”

      “Well, in a way I guess it was. Back then, anyway. But once the hardened types could be confined in the jail, the general atmosphere calmed down and the port began to flourish.”

      Now, Shep explained, the town of Port Blair was populated by Burmese and Indian convicts who’d been released for good behavior. These former prisoners had to remain in the Andamans but were otherwise free to marry or import their wives and children. They’d built settlements along the coast, started farms and businesses. Many chose to work as servants for the civilian and military administrators. “The officials live on an island that’s set up as a cantonment across the harbor from the town. That’s where the main hospital is—where I’ll be based. The British there call it the Paris of the East—though I assume that’s somewhat in jest.”

      “The Paris of the East,” Claire deadpanned. Shep seemed to expect her to recoil at the notion of moving to a penal colony, but Port Blair sounded more bizarre than off-putting. Trouble was, she didn’t yet know enough to know how to react. In Claire’s experience, the history of the British Raj, the Sepoy Mutiny, the Indian Independence Movement, even that famous little man Gandhi amounted to no more than exotic newsreel images. If she had to pick a side, Shep was correct that she’d probably line up behind the freedom fighters, but it didn’t sound as if it would come to that. Anyway, her primary destination was not this port or penal colony or whatever it was, but those “dense and lofty forests,” where she envisioned herself spending most of her time among the islands’ true and rightful inhabitants.

      Why, then, did Shep look so sheepish?

      “Am I supposed to be afraid?” she asked.

      “It’s not that.” He chewed on the inside of his cheek. “But there are bound to be tensions . . . It’s different from China, of course, yet I expect there’ll be parallels. Colonial attitudes die hard in Asia, and the Brits aren’t always as benevolent toward their ‘loyal subjects’ as they pretend to be.” He scowled, perhaps remembering his childhood in Shanghai. His freckles and ginger cowlick sometimes reminded her so much of her brother, Robin, that Claire had to look away.

      Whatever colonial tensions might await them, she sensed that they weren’t what worried Shep most. No, he was more worried about her, afraid that she might not turn out to be the go-getter he imagined, the partner he needed as he returned to a world that obviously filled him with ambivalence. And she was hardly equipped to reassure him.

      She leaned closer and placed her palm on The Andaman Islanders. “If Radcliffe-Brown could work his way around this wrinkle in paradise, then I ought to be able to, too.”

      She waited for him to meet her gaze, then reached for the bottle of cola, opened it and, ignoring the cups Shep so thoughtfully had arranged on the blanket, took a swig and passed him the bottle.

      Shep returned her gesture with a smile as a streetcar clanged on Fifth Avenue. They watched