Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [36]
The impression we took away was that Vanuatu’s paramilitary police force were not the sort of people one wanted showing up at your home at five o’clock in the morning. The publisher was taken to the airport, deposited on an early morning flight to Australia, and soon found himself in Brisbane, where, no doubt, he could be heard muttering, “What just happened?” The government declared that The Trading Post had been publishing “state secrets” that were “detrimental to investors’ confidence in Vanuatu.” Most egregiously, the publisher had not respected Vanuatu’s culture, and for this he was deported.
Fortunately for one and all, the deportation was deemed illegal by the country’s chief justice, and the publisher returned to Vanuatu just in time for The Trading Post to announce that Mr. Ghosh had very kindly donated a giant ruby to the good people of Vanuatu. It was, he said, worth $175 million. Prime Minister Sope was delighted, and he announced that, using the ruby as collateral, the government of Vanuatu planned to issue $300 million in bonds. The recipient would be Amarendra Nath Ghosh, who promised—he may have even crossed his heart—to use some of the money to finance a paved road around Efate. Soon Ghosh was also given mineral, fishing, and forest concessions in Vanuatu, and even the right to issue currency in Vanuatu’s name.
Well, this must be some ruby, everyone thought, and we were looking forward to seeing it. Alas, no one was ever allowed to see the enormous gem. It was hidden, for the common good, in a secret location somewhere in Port Vila. Fortunately, a picture of the ruby was soon released. It looked remarkably like a rock. Indeed, it was a rock, said a gem expert quoted by the newspaper. Nonsense, said the government. Ghosh had smuggled the gem out of Burma himself. Well, even if it was a gem, wasn’t stealing it from Burma illegal? A trifling detail, replied the Sope administration.
What a curious state of affairs, we thought. I wondered how a nation could endure it. Of course, on the outer islands, where the vast majority of Vanuatu’s population live, there was little inkling that anything was amiss. Still, I was curious as to what those in Port Vila, who did have access to the newspaper, thought about Barak Sope and the giant ruby. In the name of research, I decided to spend a little more time at the nakamals.
“Barak Sope is a great leader. All the world respects him,” said one dapperly dressed man at Ronnie’s nakamal. The others nodded encouragingly.
“But don’t you think he’s being just a tad reckless, giving Ghosh $300 million in exchange for a ruby that no one is allowed to see?”
“But you see,” said my companion, a government official, “Barak knows everything there is to be known about money. Barak is a very smart man.” Pause. “He is my uncle.”
It occurred to me that I was in the wrong nakamal.
At the neighborhood nakamal, however, the mood was decidedly different. The kava drinkers were upset, angry even, that once again the Ifira Mafia—for that is how they viewed Port Vila’s landowners—was robbing the country blind. For a brief moment, I wondered if Vanuatu might finally go the way of the rest of Melanesia: mayhem and anarchy in Papua New Guinea, civil war in the Solomon Islands, a coup in Fiji.
“Yu wanem wan shell kava?” asked my benchmate.
“Tank yu tumas,” I said as we found our moments of poetry, and as I joined the kava drinkers on the bench for a quiet, relaxing, stress-free reverie, it occurred to me that no, nothing will happen in Vanuatu, not while we listened to the kava.
NOW AND THEN, I LIKE TO THINK