Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [93]
Suddenly, two dogs bounded out of the trees. Well, fuck, I thought, my heart pounding. Ever since we’d lived in Kiribati, I had become utterly terrified of island dogs. They are either wild animals, left to their own devices to find sustenance, or they have been trained as guard dogs. Neither type amused me. I stopped moving and dropped my backpack, poised to throw my rock. The dogs were about thirty feet away. They too stopped. I stomped my feet. “Skat! Get out of here!” I hissed. Off they ran. Apparently, they had learned to fear people. Thank goodness for that, I thought.
The hotel lobby was open to the elements. I was pleased to see a light on.
“Bula,” said the sleepy guard, using the Fijian word for “hello.”
“Bula,” I said. “Do you have any water bottles here?”
They did not. A few moments later, I found myself in my hotel room, drinking from a flow of rusty tap water.
SAVUSAVU. It pleases me just to say the word. Savusavu. For a while, I had considered going to Taveuni, the garden isle of Fiji. There was a boat going there too. I had been to Taveuni before, when we traveled through Fiji on our return home from Kiribati to the U.S., and I had liked it very much. The main town on Taveuni is Somosomo. It was a close call, but Somosomo wasn’t quite as evocative as Savusavu.
There was another reason for going to Savusavu. Many of the Fijians on Vanua Levu had supported the coup, and I wanted to ask them, you know, what was up with that. It was difficult to get a sense of what had driven the coup in Suva. Fijians and Indians lived separate lives in the capital, but they lived these separate lives together, harmoniously ignoring each other, more or less. The Fijians played rugby, the Indians cricket. The Fijians worked in government. The Indians were the shopkeepers. The Fijians celebrated the queen’s birthday. The Indians lit candles for Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights. Even though they had been sharing the islands for more than a hundred years in roughly equal numbers, intermarriage between Fijians and Indians was a striking rarity. In a way, Suva reminded me of Washington, where blacks and whites occupied the same geography, walked the same streets, shopped at the same stores, then went home to lives that had nothing to do with each other. In our Suva neighborhood, in the evenings, the Indians who lived below us gathered around a small set of drums and sang Hindu chants. The Fijians who lived above us settled around the kava bowl. And in the mornings, we all wished each other a good day.
Sylvia and I often went for early-morning walks along the seawall in Suva. It was the only place in town where one could have some confidence of walking without being assaulted by dogs. Some mornings we ran into Sitiveni Rabuka on his morning constitution, bedecked in a shimmering track suit. He had led Fiji for a decade following the first coup, after he overthrew the first predominantly Indian elected government. A little farther on, we often encountered Mahendra Chaudhry, the Indian prime minister of Fiji until George Speight and his followers attacked the parliament. That they could share the same seawall for their morning ambulation, I thought, was rather extraordinary and spoke well of Suva. Indeed, most Fijians in Suva voted for the Labor Party, Chaudhry’s Indian-led party. On the western coast of Viti Levu, the sunny side, and up into the Mamanuca and Yasawa islands, there was little support for the coup among indigenous Fijians. So how could it happen? How could a democratically elected government be overthrown on an island where support for the coup was negligible?
It was a chiefly dispute, people said in Suva. In Fiji, a chief, or ratu, as we had learned, had considerable power. The vast majority of land in Fiji is Fijian owned, and rents, whether from an international resort or an