Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [79]
“Come this way,” Ahanda said. We followed him around the balcony until we reached the front of the hotel. From our perch, we found it remarkable how very English Suva appeared. Directly beside us was a lawn-bowling club. I had never before actually seen a lawn-bowling club and was pleased to find that the lawn bowlers met my expectations of what lawn bowlers ought to look like. Even in Fiji, the English dress code was enforced on the bowling green. Dressed in starched whites, the bowlers looked like male nurses assigned to a mental ward. Across the road stood the Fiji Museum and Thurston Gardens, a typically English park with a clock tower and a bandstand. It was overgrown with weeds, and as I had discovered during my week alone, it was the only place in the South Pacific that I knew of where one could reliably smell cannabis. Next to the gardens were manicured lawns that rose up a hillside toward Government House, the former residence of the colonial governor-general and, since independence, the home of the president of Fiji. The entrance was a tumble of barbed wire and tire spikes guarded by camouflaged Fijian soldiers carrying M-16s. Elsewhere we could see the old parliament building, a gray stone edifice that looked like a mausoleum and would not have been out of place in Manchester. Farther down Victoria Parade, where it became Queen Elizabeth Drive, were clapboard bungalows, like seaside English cottages, including one completely ensnared by vines, above which slept a thousand flying foxes, a stinking mass of bats dangling from tree limbs.
Directly across from the hotel, in the wide expanses of Albert Park, scores of Fijian men were busy pounding each other senseless.
“Do you play rugby?” Ahanda asked me.
I stared at the men. So this was rugby. I knew, of course, that rugby was not a game for sissies. In the U.S., however, one tends to think of it as a game played by men named Biff or Scooter, men deemed just a little too effete, a little too fey, for football. I had come to regard the game through the prism of class, envisioning players prancing about in bob haircuts and designer jerseys, lingering for perhaps a moment too long in the group embrace known as a scrum, hoping that, on the sidelines, Buffy wouldn’t notice. Fijian rugby, however, was something different entirely. This was gleeful mayhem, with large, barefoot men colliding into each other like trucks at a demolition derby.
“No,” I said. “I’m afraid I don’t play rugby.” I was a hockey man back in the day. “But it looks like the Fijians know how to play.”
“Fiji is no good this year,” Ahanda said. “The boys are lazy.”
Ahanda was referring to the Fijian national team that played rugby sevens, an offshoot of the standard rugby game that features fifteen players per side. In rugby sevens, two teams of seven play each other for fourteen minutes rather than the standard eighty. It is typically played in tournament form, with teams playing through round-robins and on into quarter- and semifinals before the two top teams meet each other for a twenty-minute final. Each tournament lasts one day, so by the end, the two top teams have played roughly a half-dozen games. I, of course, didn’t know anything at all about rugby, much less its more esoteric deviations. It wasn’t until some days later that, through the open windows of our new house, we suddenly heard 350,000 people collectively gasp and hoot.
Our house, which we’d rented from an Indo-Fijian businessman, was on a hillside overlooking Laucala Bay. Below us, on the steep slopes, were Indo-Fijian land squatters living in tin shanties. Just above us lived a mixed-race family that owned Fiji’s largest shipping company. Across the street was the enormous, rambling home of an Indo-Fijian man who owned one of the country’s bus companies. Next to him lived a colonel in the Fijian army; his house was painted purple with black tiger stripes, like an animated dinosaur in camouflage. This was an astonishingly diverse neighborhood, but be they rich