 "Sentinelese tribe")
Did you read about the Moroccan woman who got mad that her boyfriend of seven years had decided to leave her to marry someone else? According to the report she ‘lost her temper’, chopped him up, and cooked him into a biryani-like meal called machboos, which she served to some construction workers. It was the perfect crime…almost. L’Affaire Machboos was discovered only after several months, when the victim’s brother searched the woman’s flat and found a human tooth in her blender, after which she confessed to police.
Mitron, who amongst us has blood so sluggish that we haven’t desired to cook, or at least blanch, the annoying? Who amongst us is so above sloppiness and procrastination that we have not noticed our murder victim’s tooth in the blender and thought, ‘I’ll clean that up right after one more episode on Netflix’, and suddenly found that six months have gone by? This is a story filled with emotional relatability and clear cause and effect, and it effectively overturns the whole ‘Revenge is a dish best served cold’ thing.
(One report mentions that an Australian man also murdered and tried to cook his partner in 2014, but was “caught when the power went out and he called the electrician to his house to fix it with the body still in the pot.” This man was less bright.)
Sentinelese people have made their feelings about outsiders clear for 60,000 years with bows and arrows but John Allen Chau, an American missionary, decided against wisdom
Obviously, violence is not a good thing. (Except for in the case of people who try to turn right from the left lane—I say cook those people.) But this week, I have more sympathy for Machboos Woman than for John Allen Chau, the American missionary who decided to take Jesus to North Sentinel Island in the Andamans. Apparently, he thought that the Sentinelese people, who have made their feelings about outsiders clear for 60,000 years with bows and arrows and spears, were finally ready for him, John Allen Chau. Undaunted by the first arrows shot at him, he pressed on regardless, and was duly offed.
You have to be either brainless, to disregard the well-documented fact that the Sentinelese kill trespassers, or heartless, to disregard the well-documented fact that your alien pathogen-ridden body is likely to kill off the few remaining Sentinelese. Either way, you’re a criminal for breaking the well-documented Indian law that forbids you from visiting the island.
You can barely concentrate on this story over all its colonial, Orientalist twanging. Mr Chau grew up sneaking around the woods all painted up as a Native American. So far so harmless to anything but his own cultural wokeness. But he also seems to have thought of himself as a millennial frontiersman, Davy Crockett-cum-Mother Theresa with an Instagram feed. He was on the lookout not just for some random atheists in the neighbourhood whom he could turn toward the light, but for the most exotically remote people in the world.
I may or may not be unfairly attributing exoticism to John Chau. But I can fairly attribute to it to some of the coverage of his journey—specifically the Washington Post, which paints the islanders as hostiles, and Chau as a lovely young man on a well-intentioned adventure, glowing with love of god and for the Sentinelese, magnanimously instructing the world not to persecute the fishermen who smuggled him to the island, or the islanders in case they do him harm.
Between Machboos Woman and god-bothering millennial, I think ’tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
I don’t know if the Sentinelese eat machboos, but I hope not. It’s very germy.
Mitali Saran is a Delhi-based writer
mitali.saran@gmail.com
Mitali Saran is a Delhi-based writer
mitali.saran@gmail.com
