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By Root 850 0

wasn’t going to test the proposition, and this time I thought it prudent to wait a while before imbibing another shell. I took my place on a bench outside and chatted in the halting manner of someone unsure of whether he was making any sense. The other patrons, who were in various states of kava-induced bliss, were all from Tanna, an island known for cargo cults, kastom people, and for possessing the world’s most accessible live volcano. In Port Vila, fairly or unfairly, the people of Tanna had acquired a reputation as troublemakers. Indeed, just a few weeks prior, one of the regulars at the Office Pub, an Australian banker, had been brutally killed as he left the bar. The murderers were from Tanna. Much more typical, however, were break-ins, which is why a good many of the Westerners in Vila had turned their homes into fortresses.

“Yu likem kava?” asked one of my companions on the bench. He appeared to be a little younger than I was and wore a beard and a T-shirt emblazoned with a rapturous Bob Marley.

“Me likem kava blong Tanna,” I said. This was clearly a very satisfactory answer, and the others nodded agreeably.

“Yu likem Vanuatu?” I was asked.

“Me likem Ni-Vanuatu tumas. Me ting Vanuatu bugger-up.”

My companions nodded sagely. I was, apparently, entirely of their way of thinking. The people were very good, they agreed. The country, however, was bugger-up.

“Yu wanem wan shell kava?” I asked, suddenly feeling very expansive. Evidently, we were all on the same wavelength here, and as evening gave way to darkness and the only lights to be seen came from a kerosene lantern hanging in the kava shed and from those of my own house, I began to hear the kava. These are my people, I thought. True, we may be of different races. And our cultures might be wildly at odds with each other. And my shirt might not be as riddled with holes as theirs. But we are brothers.

“Yu blong wea?” I was asked.

Say what?

“Yu stap wea?”

Seeing my bafflement, he made as if to sleep. “Wea?” Where?

“Ah…mi blong…” I couldn’t find the words, and so I pointed at my house. “Mi blong there.”

This was duly noted.

“Yu gat woman?”

Indeed I did, which reminded me that I had promised to return home while I still possessed my dignity and, ideally, my mobility.

“And?” Sylvia asked, as I stumbled in, immediately dimming the lights.

“I’m as sober as a judge,” I assured her, and then I spent the next hour admiring the faint play of moonlight dancing on a palm frond.

Sylvia didn’t much care for kava. She found the taste repellent, which it inarguably was, and after we had been in Vila long enough, she had come to recognize the kavaheads and the fact that there were an awful lot of them, including a good proportion of Vila’s expatriate men. Kava acts as an appetite suppressant. Ideally, for kava to do its wonders, one shouldn’t eat for three or four hours prior to imbibing. After a kava session, there is no desire for food, except, possibly, for a slice of papaya or a banana. Heavy kava users are invariably rail thin. Indeed, the Frenchwomen in Vila were known to use kava as a diet drug. Now and then, because social life in Vila revolves around the nakamals, Sylvia would join me for a shell at Ronnie’s, and having recently come from America, where a goodly percentage of citizens tend toward the rotund, it was rather remarkable to see such a gathering of skinny Westerners. But that was the extent of her forays. “I feel like the designated driver,” she said. I, however, was discovering that I was immensely fond of kava, and two or three times a week I’d find myself eagerly awaiting the lighting of the red lanterns.

At the neighbor’s nakamal, I’d have languorous discussions with the other patrons about the issues of the day. They were necessarily languorous, of course, because as the evening wore on it became increasingly challenging to attach words to ideas. Nevertheless, I came to greatly enjoy these conversations. I felt my presence at the neighborhood nakamal was what allowed us to live in an unsecured house, lacking gates or bars on the windows, without