Ross Island (Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose Dweep)

For eight decades Ross Island was the seat of British power in the Andamans, laid out with tennis courts, a bakery, a printing press, a swimming pool and a Presbyterian church whose stained glass was shipped out from Europe, while the convicts who built it all served their sentences across the water at the Cellular Jail. Officials called it the Paris of the East, largely to convince themselves that a fever-ridden 0.3 square kilometre outcrop was worth the effort. The earthquake of June 1941 cracked the settlement open, the administration shifted to Port Blair, and the Japanese occupied the island from 1942 to 1945, leaving squat concrete bunkers among the ruins.

Since then the forest has done the rest. Banyan and strangler fig roots pour over the church arches and through the ballroom windows like slow water, and the graveyard headstones tilt into the undergrowth. Spotted deer, peacocks and rabbits, all introduced, graze the lawns with no fear of visitors, and the Indian Navy keeps the paths cleared.

Renamed Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose Dweep in 2018, the island takes two unhurried hours: walk the loop past the commissioner's bungalow, the bakery and the old water treatment tanks, then sit on the sea wall with Port Blair's ridge in view and the ferries crossing back and forth.