As he observes the slow but sure destruction of everything the Jarawa require for their survival, Harish is moved by a need to understand, to do something.
His unlikely friend and partner on this quest is Uncle Pame, a seventy-year-old Karen boatman whose father was brought to the islands from Burma by the British in the 1920s.
The islands also bring him to Seema, a ‘local born’ – a descendant of the convicts who were lodged in the infamous Cellular Jail of Port Blair. Seema has seen the world, but unlike most educated islanders of her generation, she has decided to return home.
Harish’s earnestness, his fascination and growing love for the islands, their shared attempt to understand the Jarawa and the loss of her own first love, all draw Seema closer to Harish. As many things seem to fall in place and parallel journeys converge, an unknown contender appears: the giant tsunami of December 2004.
The Last Wave is a story of lost loves, but also of a culture, a community, an ecology poised on the sharp edge of time and history.
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PANKAJ SEKHSARIA is an author, researcher, writer, photographer, campaigner and academic. He has travelled extensively in the Andaman & Nicobar Islands for nearly 20 years as part of his work with the environmental action group, Kalpavriksh. He graduated as an engineer from University of Pune in 1994 and did a Masters in Mass Communication from Jamia Milia Islamia, New Delhi in 1997. He is currently writing up his doctoral thesis on the Cultures of Innovation in Nanotechnology Research for Development in India’ as part of his doctoral work in Science and Technology Studies.
Hyderabad has been his home for the last six years and he lives here with his wife and four year old son. He is currently Assistant Professor at the Tata Insitute of Social Sciences (TISS) in Hyderabad.
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Reviews of the book:
a commendable debut…
Ajay Dandekar in Biblio
a poignant yet engaging tale of a group of tiny islands, which seldom find a worthy note of mention in ‘mainland India’, save for tourism and administrative purposes. Unless you are an anthropologist or an
anthropology student, you will hardly get to read a work of literature so soothingly immersed in that unusual milieu.
The Financial Express
Sekhsaria … invests The Last Wave with an imaginative spiritual core. The book draws on the wellsprings of life forces; it brings to sharp relief the mindless advance of modernity, contrasting it with a natural order of life.
Shamik Bag in The Indian Express
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