Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [80]
“What do you think is going on?” Sylvia asked.
“I have absolutely no idea. Maybe Saki knows.”
Saki was the night watchman. The landlord had insisted that he stay. We had agreed, since the last thing we wanted to do in postcoup Fiji was to take someone’s job away, and also because Suva had become a dangerous town after dark. As usual, Saki was nattily attired. This was because it is my mother’s mission to have me dressed like a country club golfer, and every year to that end I receive a package from her containing pleated trousers and collared polo shirts, which I dutifully pass on to anyone who will have them. Saki, I was fairly certain, was the only night watchman in Fiji wearing Ralph Lauren.
“Saki, what is everyone shouting about?” I asked.
“The rugby game,” he said, resplendent in his yellow golf shirt. “It is the finals. Fiji against New Zealand.”
He cocked his head, straining to hear the commentary from a thousand distant television sets. We too had a television, and in a moment of indulgence, we had signed up for the deluxe cable option, which allowed us to receive three channels: the Fijian national station, a channel that played old Bollywood movies around the clock, and a sports channel that seemed to specialize in Korean ping-pong and Malaysian high school basketball. I turned on the game.
“Do you want to come in and watch?” I asked Saki.
“No, no. I’ll stay outside.”
I turned the TV so that he could watch the action from the open doorway. To my great surprise, I found the game riveting. Several of the Fijian players had tourniquets around their head. They were stained crimson. I didn’t think I had ever seen such a fluid game before, with the action moving seamlessly from defense to offense. This was the finals of the Hong Kong Sevens, one of a dozen stops the annual tournament played throughout the year. Even Sylvia, in a first for her, found herself rooting for a sports team on television. “This is so much better than football,” she said. I wasn’t ready to go that far. I had invested many a Sunday afternoon in watching football, and I wasn’t prepared to admit that perhaps there had been better things I could have done with my time.
“He’s a farmer from Tailevu,” Saki noted after a Fijian player scored a try. There were other farmers on the team, as well as prison guards. A small island nation fielding a team of farmers and prison guards is a hard one to root against, especially when the New Zealand All Blacks were professionals. Fiji, alas, to the collective groan of a nation, lost the game.
“The boys are no good this year,” Saki said, shaking his head.
What did he mean? I wondered. Even I knew that the New Zealand All Blacks were perennial world champions in rugby. Simply reaching the tournament finals, I thought, was a mighty fine showing for Fiji.
“Last year, Fiji was the world champion,” Saki noted sadly.
“Really.”
This would become the common refrain over the rugby season, a national sigh of disappointment as Fiji proved unable to overtake New Zealand and South Africa in the world rankings. But that was the remarkable thing about Fijian rugby. Though the game was played solely by Fijians, who by and large tend to make all other nationalities appear scrawny and meek, the country as a whole—Indo-Fijians, Chinese, Europeans—rooted for its team as one. Now, call me sentimental, but given that the country had recently been torn asunder by a coup led by Fijian nationalists toppling an Indian-led government, I thought this was a rather hopeful sign. Peace and understanding through violent sport.
Determined to do our share in promoting harmony among the peoples of the world, we invited a number of new friends—Fijians, Indo-Fijians, other Pacific Islanders, Australians, and Brits—to our house to watch the American Super Bowl, which was being broadcast on the cable sports station just