t to the shoreline. “We started floating coconuts over to them. To our surprise some of the Sentinelese came into the water to collect the coconuts.”
In the two to three hours that followed, Sentinelese men waded from the beach into the water repeatedly to collect the coconuts—a novel product that does not grow on their island—while women and children watched from a distance. Yet the threat of an attack on the anthropologist outsiders remained present, Chattopadhyay recalls. “A young man aged about 19 or 20 stood along with a woman on the beach. He suddenly raised his bow. I called out to them to come and collect the coconuts using tribal words I had picked up while working with the other tribes in the region. The woman gave the boy a nudge and his arrow fell to the water. At the woman’s urging, he too came into the water and started picking coconuts,” she says. “Later some of the tribesmen came and touched the boat. The gesture, we felt, indicated that they were not scared of u
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