Arabian Hollows, Insh’Allah

The Pillars of  Lakshadweep

Story by Michael Kew

Photos by Alan van Gysen

SAWM
The room is moving. Trevor Gordon’s eyes are open and glazed, his pupils wide. It’s 5:04 a.m. He rubs his belly clockwise, breathes oddly, speaks flatly.

“Don’t let me pass out, man. We’ve got to stick together.”

Outside, pale moonlight glints off the warm Laccadive Sea. The 89-meter M/V Lakshadweep Sea sways from side to side, motoring east at 9 knots while Chadd Konig, also in the room, is awakened by the lanky sleepwalker.

“I really need some fresh air,” Gordon slurs.

The two step outside. Gordon’s balance is off. On the bulwark he rests his elbows. His shoulders feel sore. So much surfing lately. So many great waves. With Konig he ponders the universe and watches the sea slide by.

There, beyond the horizon, Somali pirates prowl for big boats like this. The isolation of Lakshadweep’s palmy atolls has lured the slitted eyes of East African predators who, armed with grenade launchers and Kalashnikov rifles, seek ransom for seized cargo. Can be any cargo, really. Freighters and oil tankers are preferred. Unfortunately the Lakshadweep Sea holds nothing but islanders and Indians, 260 of them, bound for the port city of Cochin. It’s a 21-hour sail.

We’ve got to stick together!

For pirates, this is no comfort zone—Lakshadweep is 1,600 miles east of Somalia. But with hijacked ships, the Somalis have widened their gaze to cover 2.5 million square nautical miles. In 2010, across the northwest Indian Ocean, they seized 1,181 hostages and gained several million ransom dollars, about 30 percent of which were sent to al Shabaab, a Somalia terrorist group linked with al Qaeda.

In 2011, Lakshadweep brushed with Somali piracy, some violent. The uninhabited of Lakshadweep’s isles may offer sanctuary to pirates, drug smugglers and Islamic terrorists. Last year, three were found on one of the atolls we surfed. Gordon and Konig are blissfully ignorant of this as dawn fills the sky.

Downstairs in a green-doored prayer room, a young Sunni Muslim man sits and ends his fajr, the first of five daily prayers included in the Five Pillars of Islam, which are: shahada (creed), salat (prayer), sawm (fasting), zakat (almsgiving), hajj (pilgrimage).

He turns his head to the right, then left. Assalamu alaikum wa rahmatullah—“Peace and blessings from Allah be upon you.”

For the past week, Allah’s blessings came from blue skies and the southwest Indian Ocean—long-period swells that tonight ease the ship to and fro. Swells that rake the clean coral reefs of Lakshadweep, 12 atolls that geographically are sewn to the Maldives and the Chagos archipelago. It’s a surfy zone, this.

Gordon’s pupils shrink. He’s awake now. The sea looks different—different from the warping blue guts of a Lakshadweep tube. Those are familiar to him. Konig concurs.

“Did that just happen?” Gordon asks, scratching his unwashed head. “Did we really get that barreled?”

SALAT
Back on the atoll, between prayers and working in his father’s sundry shop, the young Muslim man had watched the surfers leap from the pier and repeatedly disappear in and emerge from waves. In Arabic, his father called them “water tunnels.” With his friends and family and many of the passengers on this ship, the young Muslim man sat and stood on the white concrete railing, his dark face and beard catching the salt mist from big sets as they blasted through the pilings beneath him. The pier trembled.

The young Muslim man grew vexed at the government that poked this thing into the center of a surf zone. Boats can’t dock to it. And since the reefs are environmentally sensitive, locals can’t fish from it. The pier is useful only as an extension from the coconut confines of atoll life and to watch surfers, but nobody surfs in Lakshadweep. Yet. Konig left a Cossart alaia.

Today the young Muslim man feels fresh. He’s going to see his younger brother and older sister. And the fajr is his favorite ritual because it connects him to Allah at dawn, his favorite time of day.

He walks upstairs and outside. The warm wind wipes his face as he inhales deeply. He waves at Konig and Gordon, up towards the ship’s bow.

Cochin is near. It’s his big-world downtown, a noisy, stinking, crowded sprawl of high-rises, a snake pit of sweat and slow traffic. It’s his sister’s temporary home while she attends Cochin University of Science & Technology. She wants to be a marine biologist.

The young Muslim man thinks that, next month, when he returns home, if pirates don’t get to it first, he’d really like to try that alaia.

SHAHADA
Bearded/longhaired Chadd Konig styles and highlines into the tube, a picture straight from “Morning of the Earth.” Trevor Gordon, on an orange 6’7” Lovelace hull, blitzes through the third. The spit stings his back.

Swooosh.

We’re lucky. There could have been no swell—Lakshadweep is 4,000 miles from the Roaring Forties weather kitchen, with considerable swell-shadowing by Chagos and the Maldives. There could have been no real spots—on Google Earth, the atolls look bad for surfing. There could have been clouds and rain and onshore wind because, annually, May sparks the southwest monsoon. The M/V Arabian Sea, which sailed the surfers to this atoll, could have sunk or failed or been hijacked by Somalis. The ship could have never left Cochin (it almost didn’t), because the trip was booked through the government, because that’s how foreigners can visit the atolls (most are off-limits) and because the government was prone to reschedule or simply cancel, even if you have the required entry permit. To surf Lakshadweep, the odds are stacked high against you.

HAJJ
Everyone had slept well. Spirits are high despite the low surf forecast. We have no choice, really. Cochin is the jumping-off point. We’re not mainlanding. We have to jump.

The M/V Arabian Sea is a big white passenger ship owned by the Indian government. It’s the only way to reach an atoll 300 miles out. We should get there—India’s Navy, the world’s sixth largest, just opened a base in Lakshadweep to boost coastal security to stop Somali piracy and Islamic terrorist strikes, like 2008’s mass coordinated shooting and bombing attacks in Mumbai, India’s largest city.

“Insh’Allah,” a small Lakshadweep man astern says. His name is Rafiq. We discuss bin Laden’s death. We watch the boiling wake emerge from the transom and lay a wide white line atop the sea. The sun sinks into the horizon. Slowly, Cochin dissolves in the distance.

Dressed in traditional white Muslim clothes, Rafiq is a copra seller heading home from Chennai, where he visited family. Today he seems relieved. Now that bin Laden is dead, Rafiq says, clasping his hands as if in prayer—God willing—al Qaeda’s threat to India will now wane.

“India gets terror threats every day,” Rafiq says, stroking his pointy beard, squinting. “These people are very bad Muslims, you see? They make us look bad. Do you think Muslim people are bad?”

“No.”

“Okay. Well, these Muslims are very bad. They want kill everybody in India. Maybe some terrorists hide in Lakshadweep, maybe from Pakistan. Some Lakshadweep islands are uninhabited. So now we have make radar stations and Navy and Coast Guard bases in the islands. Terrorists have try to recruit people from Lakshadweep because we are Muslims. And the pirates come near now. Do you know Somalia?”

ZAKAT
Last night in Abbottabad, Pakistan, U.S. forces double-tapped Osama bin Laden with 5.56-millimeter bullets from a M4 carbine assault rifle. This killed him instantly and coated his floor red. It also exposed his brain’s left frontal lobe to the subtropical Orash Valley air.

Last night in Cochin, India, Trevor Gordon occupied a clean air-conditioned room at Hotel Bright Heritage. This morning, before checking email and Buoyweather’s seven-day chart for the Laccadive Sea, CNN sings of bin Laden’s death.
“You think this is gonna change anything?” Gordon asks me.

“Like stop terrorism?”

“Yeah.”

“Insh’Allah.”

“What?”

“God willing. It’s Arabic.”

Buoyweather’s chart looks bad: small (one meter) medium-period swell from the southwest, not the medium-to-large (two to three meters) long-period southern pulse we hope for. The wind will be offshore but….

“So,” I posit, standing above my MacBook, wishing those blue Buoyweather lines on the screen would grow. “Knee-high in Lakshadweep? Waist-high?”

Gordon smirks, pausing for effect.

“Insh’Allah.”