The Night I Slept Under the Milky Way on an Uninhabited Indian Island
The phone stopped working somewhere between Agatti and Bangaram.
Not in the dramatic, "signal-fading" way you see in movies. One moment I had two bars of BSNL, and then — nothing. The boat captain, a weathered man named Rashid who'd been ferrying tourists between these atolls for twenty years, didn't even glance at my phone when I held it up with a questioning look.
"No tower on Bangaram," he said, as if explaining that water is wet. "No tower, no phone, no WhatsApp. You rest now."
I didn't know it then, but those words — you rest now — would become the thesis statement of the next four days.
Arrival in a Different World
The 1.5-hour boat ride from Agatti was bumpy enough to rearrange my breakfast. But when Bangaram appeared on the horizon — a teardrop of white against impossible blue — my stomach didn't matter anymore.
The island is small. You can walk its entire perimeter in thirty minutes. There's one resort, built low and discreet against the tree line, with maybe twenty rooms. That's it. No village, no shops, no roads. The only footprints in the sand are yours and the hermit crabs'.
I dropped my bag in a room that was clean and simple — white walls, ceiling fan, mosquito net, and a view of the lagoon that would sell for $2,000 a night anywhere in Maldives. Here, it cost 12,000 INR (~$145).
The Water
I've snorkeled in the Red Sea, the Great Barrier Reef, and half a dozen spots in Southeast Asia. For a similar house-reef experience closer to home, Koh Lipe comes close.
Bangaram's water is different.
Visibility stretches 20-30 meters on a good day. You swim off the beach — no boat needed, no guide required — and within minutes you're hovering over a reef that's been growing undisturbed for centuries. Parrotfish the size of small dogs. Butterflyfish darting in synchronized patterns. And then, casually cruising along the reef edge, a blacktip reef shark.
My first thought: panic. My second thought, after watching it glide past me with complete indifference: this is its living room, and I'm just visiting.
I saw three more that afternoon. And two green sea turtles. Just... hanging out. Like neighbors.
Digital Detox — The Forced Kind
By the second day without my phone, something strange happened. I stopped reaching for my pocket. The phantom buzzing in my thigh — you know the one — went quiet.
I read an entire book. Not on a Kindle. An actual paperback from the resort's small shelf of forgotten novels. I ate lunch without photographing it. I watched a sunset without trying to capture it for Instagram.
The resort staff — a rotating crew of about fifteen people from Agatti and Kavaratti — were friendly in a way that felt genuinely unperformative. No customer service scripts. Just human beings being nice to other human beings because they live on a tiny island and that's how it works.
The Night Sky
And then came the night.
I'd been to dark-sky preserves before. I'd seen stars in rural Iceland and the Sahara. But Bangaram sits in the middle of the Arabian Sea, hundreds of kilometers from any significant light source. The nearest city, Kochi, is a dot on the distant mainland.
The Milky Way didn't just appear. It imposed itself. A thick, cloudy river of light arcing from horizon to horizon, so dense and bright that it cast faint shadows on the white sand.
I lay on a beach chair outside my room, a rum and Coke sweating in my hand (Bangaram is the only island in Lakshadweep where alcohol is served — the rest of the territory is dry), and I stared up for what felt like hours.
A shooting star. Then another. Then a satellite crawling silently across the sky, the only evidence that the hyperconnected world I'd left behind still existed.
Day Three: The Sandbar and the Kayak
Bangaram's shape creates a sandbar at its western tip that shifts with the seasons. During my visit in November, it extended maybe 200 meters into the lagoon — a tongue of white sand licked by shin-deep water on both sides.
I kayaked around the entire island. Four kilometers, roughly. The water changed color every hundred meters — pale turquoise, then cyan, then a deep sapphire where the reef dropped off into the open ocean.
At the southern point, I stopped paddling and drifted. A sea turtle surfaced ten meters away, took a breath, locked eyes with me for a second that stretched longer than it should have, and dove.
I sat there for twenty minutes, doing nothing, thinking nothing, being nothing. It was the most productive I'd felt in years.
The Return
On the boat back to Agatti, my phone caught a signal and erupted. Forty-seven WhatsApp messages, twelve emails, three missed calls. The usual debris of modern life.
Rashid, at the helm again, watched me scroll with a bemused expression.
"Everything still there?" he asked.
"Yeah. Everything's still there."
"Good." He turned back to the sea. "It always is."
I put the phone down and watched the atolls shrink behind us. The turquoise faded to navy, then to the grey-blue of open water. In 1.5 hours, I'd be at Agatti airport. In 3 hours, I'd be in Kochi. In 6 hours, I'd be back in a city where the Milky Way doesn't exist.
But for four days, I'd lived in a place where the world's distractions couldn't reach me. Not because I chose to disconnect — I didn't have that kind of willpower — but because the infrastructure simply didn't allow for connection.
And that forced silence, that involuntary stillness, turned out to be exactly what I needed.
