Transience

Ross Island, December 2025

The ferry from Port Blair takes just twelve minutes, but stepping onto Ross Island feels like crossing into another century entirely.

The sun shines softly with a warm, gold tone, with indifference in December; the kind of light that has no memory. Underneath it the crumbling ruins fall silently: a church roofless and suffocated by fig roots, the floors of ballrooms taken over by moss, and a swimming pool where there is only silence swims

Built in 1858 as the administrative hub for British colonizers after the Sepoy Mutiny, Ross Island was once the Paris of the East – housing nearly 800 officers and their families, humming with administrative certainty and confidence in dinner party conversations. It felt like it would last forever, as all power does.

Then, in 1941, a devastating earthquake shook Ross Island’s foundation. The Japanese occupied the island during WWII. After the war, the British, surveying the post war wreckage, simply did not return. By 1947, the jungle had begun to reclaim Ross Island.

Currently, the only permanent residents on the island are spotted deer- gentle, unhurried and totally unbothered by history. They roam undisturbed through the abandoned ballrooms and verandas consumed by vines, as if they knew the empires that had existed before were merely a short pause in their grazing.

After being renamed for Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose in 2018, and currently under the administration of the Indian Navy, Ross Island provides tourists something far rarer than beauty: a view point. The Andaman Sea sparkles outside, unchanged, timeless.