Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [95]
The village was in a deep gully below the road. It seemed like an awful location for a village, a place where breezes did not reach and mosquitoes festered. But it was freehold land, and that for the Indo-Fijians was what mattered most.
Saresh dropped me off at a small beach near the Namale Spa & Sanctuary. “It is very dear,” he said as we passed the resort’s entrance. That was Victorian English for “expensive.” I had read that it was owned by Anthony Robbins, the toothy motivational speaker, and that it was frequently booked solid with conventioneers motivated to spend upwards of $2,000 a night. He’s good, that Tony Robbins. My taxi fare, so far, had come to about $4, and as I swam I wondered if I would have enjoyed my swim more if I’d paid an additional $1,996. I’d probably enjoy it less, I thought, particularly as it was by then overcast. Foolishly, I failed to put on sunscreen, and when Saresh picked me up exactly one hour later, it was with some exasperation that I realized I was burned. Thank goodness, I thought, that at least I hadn’t paid $2,000 for the privilege of getting a sunburn on an overcast day.
I asked Saresh what it had been like on Vanua Levu during the coup.
“During the coup, it was very bad. They attacked all the Indian houses here. They take the cattle and the goats and the chickens. They take the women. They even took the Air Fiji pilots hostage. It was not so bad in Savusavu, but here,” he said, gesturing toward the hills and the Indian farms, “it was very bad. And in Lambasa, it was also very bad.”
Lambasa was a town in the north of Vanua Levu. It was largely an Indian town, and since the coup, many of its inhabitants had drifted to Suva looking for work. This had been a region for growing sugarcane, a precarious industry in the best of times. Since the coup, however, many Fijian landowners had declined to renew the leases of Indo-Fijian sugarcane farmers. Expelled from the land their families had farmed for generations, the farmers found themselves in an unenviable situation.
“For me it is too late,” Saresh said. “I will die in Fiji. But for my children, I tell them to study. They must study, get degrees, and then they can emigrate.”
Why couldn’t we all just get along? I thought. Perhaps we could just blame the British for Fiji’s predicament. After all, it was they who had brought the Indians—coolies is what they called them—to Fiji. The British had needed Fiji to pay for itself, and rather than disrupt traditional Fijian society, they had decided to import workers from abroad to till the soil. Fijian and Indian cultures are disparate, to say the least. And yet, Fiji had been an independent country for more than thirty years. That these two peoples could not reconcile themselves to each other was a failure of their leaders.
A SHORT WHILE LATER, I found myself at the Captain’s Café in Savusavu, admiring a framed note hanging on the wall. It was from Brooke Shields, who had apparently enjoyed her meal there. Some of Fiji’s higher-end resorts were on Vanua Levu. Would Brooke Shields stay in a resort? I wondered. No, I figured. She probably visited Savusavu on a yacht. Such were the depths of my thoughts when a Fijian man joined me at my table overlooking the harbor.
“Bula,” he said. “I am Bill.”
He wore a formal sulu, the sort typically worn by Fijian men on their way to the Methodist church on Sundays.
“These are the end days,” he informed me.
“Ah…,” I said. “Could be, could be.” I didn’t have any information suggesting otherwise, so I thought it best to remain neutral.
“I was hit on the head,” he said, rubbing the back of his head.
“I see.”
“By a truck.”
“Ah…”
“I was in the army. But I didn’t receive anything. No money. Nothing.”
Clearly, Bill was not one for small talk. I wasn’t quite sure what to say to him, and so I spent a moment nodding thoughtfully, a little nonverbal gesture that I hoped conveyed a sense that I too found this world lamentable.
“So, Bill,” I said. “Savusavu