Lost Worlds (53 page)

“So what happened to the little girl?”

He seemed surprised by the question. “She died,” he said.

“You mean there’s no happy ending?”

“Well—there are the flowers. The
tagimaucia
. She became the flowers.”

“I was hoping for a Cinderella sort of ending.”

“Cinder-who?”

“Never mind, Maika.”

I found my small hotel in the village of Waiyevo, about halfway down the western coast. Perched right on the beach, the Garden Island Resort was well within my modest budget and refreshingly devoid of scuba-diving enthusiasts at the time of my visit even though Rainbow Reef was only half a mile or so offshore.

“D’you think you’ll be doing any diving?” asked Lela Prym, owner of the hotel, as we sat by the pool sipping cocktails brimming with freshly squeezed mango juice.

“I’m not sure. I don’t know what I’m going to do—except explore and enjoy myself.”

“You sound Fijian already.” Lela had a real Julia Roberts grin that filled her face.

“And with a smile like that, you look Fijian.”

“Well, I’m not,” said Lela. “I’m American. I used to live in Washington, D.C.”

“You’ve obviously recovered from that.”

“Taveuni does that to you.”

“Let’s hope it does it to me.”

“Oh, it will,” she said, still grinning her
Pretty Woman
grin.

The days slipped by so gently. From time to time there were showers punctuated by brilliant shafts of sunlight that made the leaves and blossoms shine as if hand polished. One early morning there was a rainstorm so powerful it pounded the weaker palm fronds off the trees and flattened them into the running rivulets of gold and ocher mud. By lunchtime the rain was gone and the whole island basked under brilliant skies, smelling so richly of washed earth and moss and refreshed jungle that you could almost drink the air in great liquid gulps.

I did silly, pointless things, for no reason.

On a nearby beach, shaded by thick vine-bound jungle, I built a sand castle out of the damp white sand. Quite an impressive affair, really, with turrets and battlements and an enormous arched entrance across a moat which filled as the tide edged in and began to crumble my creation. I remembered that as a child on the beaches of Yorkshire I would cry as my castles collapsed. And even though this time I was laughing at the idiocy of this middle-aged world wanderer building sand castles after decades of abstinence, something deep down, very faint, was crying a little as it fell.

On another beach I discovered a sign proclaiming that I now stood astride the international dateline—the 180 degree median—so I bounced backward and forward from Tuesday into Wednesday and Wednesday into Tuesday and smiled at what a funny thing time is.

In fact, time became irrelevant. I discarded my watch and marked the days’ progress by the movement of the sun over the high volcanic ridges. If it became too hot I wandered off into the forest dappled with musty light and followed narrow trails up the lower slopes of the mountains. Parrots, fantailed cuckoos, and pigeons floated in and out of the trees. If it rained that silky warm island rain, I’d lie back on the ground and let it soak me with its freshness, sip its sweet taste, and listen to the land crabs clicking their claws in their earthbound burrows.

At other times I’d set off for long walks on the narrow highway that serpentined around the coves and bays and when I was tired I’d hitch a lift back with whatever was going in the right direction. Once I rode with fishermen in the rear of an ancient truck, all sitting on the bare metal floor admiring their catch of large colorful fish and identifying them for me—a butterfly fish, a damsel fish, a goatfish, a blue-striped snapper, a rabbit fish, and a rainbow-hued parrot fish. All good eating, they assured me. Particularly when washed down with fresh kava from a communal
tanoa
bowl scooped up in cups made from halved green coconut shells that are marinated for a week or two in swamp water to give them their customary color and “reek.”

One of the older fishermen told me of the “good old days” when villagers would join together for regular fish dives, or
yavayava
.

“Much kava—much, much kava! In big
tanoa
bowls, sometimes four feet across, made of the
vesi
wood—very sacred tree. We prayed to our ancestors—the Vu—everything had to be done right. Very important ceremony. We prayed for our vine ropes—the
walai
, for the nets, and we prayed to the statue of Gonedau who watched over the dive. He was in a special boat—the bigger boats, the
ladi
, were for the fishermen out by the reef. And then as we pulled in the big nets and rowed in to the beach, we would pray that the nets would not break and that we would have a good catch for everyone in the village. Oh, it was so much noise and singing…lots of fish…lots of kava!”

The other men were nodding and smiling. There hadn’t been a real fish dive in a long time and they remembered the old days with relish. I was sorry to leave them.

“
Vinaka
,” I said, thanking them for the lift. “
Vinaka
,” came the collective reply out of wide-grinning faces.

Another time I rode with a thin and rather nervous Indian, owner of an “everything shop,” in Somosomo, the main village on the west coast and home of Fiji’s high chief, Ganilau. The Indian invited me in and showed me his wares piled high in a dark warehouselike store that seemed to go on forever in a damp, jungly gloom. Lots of cheap Naugahyde furniture, mounds of bananas, ripe tropical fruit and coconuts, bottles of Fijian rum, columns of cigarette cartons, enormous aluminum cooking pots, fishing nets, cheap stereo boomboxes and even cheaper pirated cassette tapes, big black and crudely welded cooking stoves, a table of secondhand books and magazines, racks of shapeless jackets, dresses, and trousers (also maybe secondhand, it was hard to tell), some glittery T-shirts adorned with Ninja Turtles and other Western-inspired instant images, a pile of just-caught fish in a huge enamel basin by the door, and—in prominent display—a miniature forest of bundled yanggona roots for kava making.

“Well—you seem to have thought of everything,” I congratulated the storekeeper, who followed me, rubbing his long, thin fingers, as I admired his remarkable range of offerings.

“Yes. Everything, I think. We are also having TVs next week. We should be receiving our first programs soon.”

“There’s no TV in Fiji?”

“Well, not until recently. The government allowed TVs for some very important rugby matches—World Cup matches—and now the people say they want some more.”

“It was banned before?”

“Well, the government said TV was not good for family life and interfered with the children’s education, you see. So…”

“How courageous of the government!”

He looked at me curiously.

“Just joking,” I said.

“Oh, yes, joking. Of course.”

He tried a bit of a laugh, but it didn’t come naturally.

A dear friend of mine in Suva who works with the blind in Fiji and other South Pacific islands would have described this as a distinct case of “optorectitus”—“an ailment where the optical nerve gets crossed with the rectal nerve and you end up with a shitty outlook on life.” The storekeeper did not seem familiar with the Fijian enthusiasm for laughter.

In fact, most Indians in Fiji have still not learned the easygoing, easy-smiling ways of the native Fijians. They seem to be far too busy running most of the businesses, worrying about their children’s education, and wondering how to grab a little more political power over a native population reluctant to relinquish any controls to “outsiders”—even outsiders who have lived here for almost a hundred years.

Ormond Eyre, owner of the tiny Maravu Plantation Resort near the airport, sympathized with the predicament of such outsiders. Descendant of an old part-European family of plantation owners on Taveuni, he still sensed some reluctance on the part of natives to see him as one of them.

“It’s subtle—never overt. And it’s something I’ve got used to. I’ve been off-island for many years—I was a steward with Quantas for a while. Did all kinds of things. Traveled everywhere. But I always wanted to come home and run my own hotel. Something this small—we’ve only got eight cottages
—bures—
done in the traditional style with palm-frond roofs—but it’s nicer that way. I don’t need—I don’t really want—any more. I get to meet everybody and learn about their lives. You’ve got to know when to say ‘enough’ in this life. If you don’t you’ll spend most of your time doing things you don’t really want to do for reasons you can’t remember—or understand.”

I enjoyed one of my best dinners in Fiji here in Ormond’s open-air, thatch-walled and-roofed dining room—pungent garlic prawns
en croute
followed by roast chicken with tarragon, stirfried bok choy and celery, and fried plantains in a Thai-flavored peanut sauce. Flaming banana crêpes, liqueurs, and Fijian folk songs sung by a local group playing guitars, ukuleles, and tambourines, brought the meal to a delicious close as the moon eased up over the volcanoes and bathed the rolling lawns in silver light….

But I hadn’t come for too much of this, I reminded myself the next day. Time to get out and find that family I’d been invited to visit by the young man in Nandi. See what really goes on behind the pastel-painted walls of the
bure
homes in the roadside villages. Time to experience Taveuni in the raw, so to speak.

The following day I passed a village market, a casual sprawl of rickety tables and blankets spread on the ground. In addition to the rainbow-hued mounds of just-caught fish, I saw baskets brimming with shiny pawpaws, mangoes, melons, pineapples, clusters of burgundy-red grapes, and great orange moons of halved pumpkins scooped out and ready to eat. On separate tables were the muscular, bulbous staples of yams, breadfruit, taro, cassava, rich purple dalo, and small wizened potatolike morsels whose name seemed to vary, depending on whom I asked. And of course the inevitable forests of bundled yanggona wrapped in torn sheets of the Fiji
Times
and awaiting the ritual pounding for innumerable kava celebrations.

Under a shady awning of sackcloth, an old and very fat woman clad in an enormous togalike dress was cooking morsels of fish in a cast-iron caldron bubbling with palm oil. I remembered all the warnings about this particular oil but bought a handful of pieces anyway, brown and crisp on the outside and soft as whipped cream within. It needed no seasoning, although, encouraged by the cook, I tried a sprinkling of hot pepper sauce and immediately wished I hadn’t. I stood with lips burning, eyes streaming, accompanied by the grins and soft laughter of onlookers.

“It’s too hot for you!” the large cook said, trying to suppress her amusement.

I tried to say something funny, but it came out more like an inebriated squawk.

That was too much for her. She collapsed in a great explosion of giggles and fell heavily onto her stool covered with a square of ancient tapa cloth that looked as though it had been polished by her generous buttocks for years. The ancient patternings of bronze, white, and black dyes had been reduced to subtle shadowy hues, and the once-rough texture of the inner mulberry bark from which the “cloth” is beaten, looked smooth as shot silk.

Unfortunately, she fell a little too heavily. The stool gave a sad groan, buckled, and with sudden and very final snaps, two of the bamboo legs gave way and sent the giggling cook sprawling across her pandanus-leaf ground mat, whose broad dimensions defined the size of her impromptu kitchen.

There was a sudden silence—and then a hullabaloo of hilarity. My temporary discomfort with the pepper sauce was abruptly forgotten. Everybody turned to watch the poor cook struggle to pull herself upright. She rolled and struggled but couldn’t seem to raise her generous bulk from the prime position. The laughter increased. Then she reached out for the table on which the huge caldron of oil was bubbling away. God, I thought, she’s going to bring the whole damned thing down on herself. The table was starting to tip as she used it to drag herself up; no one seemed to see what was about to happen—they were far too busy guffawing at her ungainly struggles. I jumped forward and grabbed the table before it finally toppled.

Churned by the rocking table, the oil spat and leapt. A few drops splashed my arm. I could smell singed hair and seared flesh. But at least she now had the leverage she needed and slowly raised herself up, still laughing. The squashed stool lay spread-eagled on the ground under the tapa cloth. She didn’t seem to mind. Instead she took one look at my smoking arm, scooped up a fistful of something greasy and gray from an ancient coffee tin, grabbed my wrist, and proceeded to plaster the rancid-smelling whatever-it-was over the reddening oil-burn marks.