Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [33]
“Do you patronize your local nakamals?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “I go to Ronnie’s.”
Subsequently, he did visit his local nakamal, where he had kava with the neighborhood chief, who arranged to have his belongings returned to him, bed included.
ONE EVENING the talk in the nakamal turned to Mir, the Russian space station, which was expected to crash on Vanuatu the following day. If it were to hit one of the islands, the government informed us, it would be like Hiroshima, a cataclysmic explosion, destroying all life on the island. Just as bad, the government confidently declared, would be a splash-down in Vanuatu’s waters. All coastal villages were told to evacuate to higher ground. Enormous tsunamis were expected. The government prudently declared a state of emergency and abolished parliament. This had nothing to do, the government announced, with the no-confidence vote it had been expected to lose the next day.
“Yu whiteman,” a fellow patron said, addressing me. “Wanem yu ting?” He wanted to know my thoughts about the impending catastrophe. There are not many subjects I am less qualified to expound upon than the scientific principles affecting a spacecraft reentering Earth’s atmosphere, particularly when compelled to do so in a language that I only dimly understood. Nevertheless, assisted by another shell of kava, which allowed me to see the big picture, I used a stick to draw the Earth, encircled it with another ring, which I called “air,” and tried to explain that when a spacecraft hit the atmosphere at high speed, it burned up, and if anything managed to survive the inferno, it was likely to be small and inconsequential. “Vanuatu olraet. No Hiroshima. No tsunami.”
What about the driver? someone asked.
“No driver.”
So who’s steering?
Well, this stumped me. Who was steering? How exactly does one guide a spaceship down? I felt fairly certain that it involved computers. But how typing a phrase or a code on a keyboard could possibly affect the course of an object hurtling through space was well beyond my understanding. It was the same with telephones. How exactly does one’s voice travel thousands of miles, more or less instantaneously, without even passing through wires or cords? My brain began to throb. These were the wrong kinds of thoughts for kava. Finally, I offered the only answer that made sense to me: “Me ting magic.”
My companions nodded thoughtfully. “Whiteman magic,” one said.
I couldn’t say. But after I had another shell of kava, I knew one thing. “Kava Vanuatu magic.”
TO SUGGEST THAT THE GOVERNMENT OF VANUATU WAS A trifle corrupt would be wrong. It was spectacularly corrupt. Indeed, I believe they even held seminars in corruption: Malfeasance 101, or How to Get Rich on a Government Wage. Whenever a new honorary consul was appointed, one knew something was afoot. The Vanuatu government was indignant, however, when Britain refused to accept its latest honorary consul, Dr. Peter Chen Hun-kee. Apparently, having served eighteen years in prison in Hong Kong for gold robbery was a disqualification for the London post.
It was the appointment, however, of Amarendra Nath Ghosh as the nation’s Consul General, Roving Ambassador, and Trade Representative to the Kingdom of Thailand, Laos, and South Australia that soon had everyone atwitter. In gracious acknowledgment of the honor, Ghosh, who claimed to be a Thai citizen, donated a garbage truck to Vanuatu, and in case anyone was unsure where this shiny new garbage truck came from, he had it emblazoned with a sign that read DONATED BY A. N. GHOSH, CONSUL GENERAL AND ROVING AMBASSADOR. Touched by the gesture, the government waived the ten-year residency requirement and granted him citizenship. Soon, Vanuatu’s latest Roving Ambassador was building a palatial home for himself on the hillside overlooking Erakor Lagoon, and he promised to build a luxurious walled compound for members of the cabinet. For good measure, he threw in