The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

  This was the last thing I wanted to do. The kava sapped my energy and made it a chore to paddle. But I did not wish to be offensive, so I sat for a while and asked them about it. They told me about the girls who had once chewed the root and they said that in some places the root was still chewed. But they had little conversation. This was not an activity that induced high spirits. Most men sat around the bowl mumbling. Initially a kava ceremony was an occasion to gossip, but the more people drank the less coherent they became.

  These men said they would be there most of the day. They had nothing else to do. When I asked them how much they could drink they said, “Two kilos” – they meant of the pounded root, which was gallons of the muddy liquid.

  It was a struggle to paddle onward from there, but I had no choice. I had intended to reach the far side of the bay, where a town showed on the map. The effects of the kava did not wear off until mid-afternoon, and then I made better time, reaching the settlement just before sunset. But the name on the map was misleading – as names so often were on maps of Pacific islands. It was simply a crossroads, and a small store, run by a small grizzled Indian named Munshi.

  Munshi said I could camp on his land, a little clearing just inland from the mangroves. He claimed to own it outright. He said his grandfather had bought it – his grandfather had come to Fiji to work on a sugar estate in the 1890s. Munshi had been born in the same house where his father had been born, on the other side of the island at Votua.

  He watched me pitch my tent and to make conversation I asked how he was getting on.

  “This is a bad place now,” Munshi said. “This is no place for Indians. We are suffering.”

  I found this all depressing – the undercurrent of resentment, the silliness of the tourists, the fact that no one in the world paid the slightest attention to it. It was a lost cause, the kava-drinking Methodists on the one hand and the cliquey puritanical Asians on the other. All they had in common was a love of video cassettes – a shared fondness for Rambo and Die Hard and Predator II. Apart from that, there was no sympathy, much less any intermarriage. Here and there – and sometimes in the wildest, emptiest places of Vanua Levu – was a Chinese shop, its owner looking like a Martian behind the counter, utterly indifferent to it all.

  The next day, a hot humid morning, Munshi sold me some Shell-Lite fuel for my stove and explained his predicament. I had asked him what he wanted to do.

  “I want to leave. To go anywhere.”

  “Have you ever been away from here?”

  “No,” Munshi said. “But my father went to India. He made the Haj pilgrimage. I would like to do that.”

  He was barefoot and dirty. His wife, who never spoke, swept the yard with a twig broom, shifting garbage from one side of the yard to the other. His kids squawked on the porch, and some Fijian boys sat on the steps, one holding a loaf of bread, the other a can of corned beef, listening without understanding.

  Munshi said, “Where do you come from?”

  “America.”

  “I would like to go to America.”

  Munshi handed me my fuel and replaced the bung on his oil drum.

  “This is a bad place.” He snatched off his greasy skull-cap and scratched his head. “Why you come here?”

  “Just looking around.”

  “You like?”

  “Very nice.”

  He shook his head. “No,” he said.

  The Fijian boys on the porch began to eat their breakfast. They knifed open the can of corned beef, tore the loaf of bread into hunks, and took turns scooping smears of corned beef out of the can with the bread hunks. These they stuffed into their mouths, until the can was empty. There was little fresh fish here. People ate canned fish, as they had in New Guinea and the Trobriands – pilchards, mackerel, “tuna flakes.”

  Munshi had baked the bread. He made it fresh every day, with flour that came on the ferry that he trucked to his kitchen. His shop was the only source of bread on this entire end of the island, for fifty miles or more. All the Fijians ate bread. None of the other shops – the other Indians, the Chinese man – made bread.

  I was certain that he would leave – he said his land was for sale, his shop for sale. If he couldn’t go to Canada or America he would go to New Zealand. Then there would be no bread. I imagined that his bread would be missed, even if he were not; but the Fijians would learn to do without it. They would eat crackers instead – cream crackers. There was a traditional diet in Fiji, as there was on other islands; but along with this was another kind of food, the sailors’ diet which was standard on many Pacific islands and was eaten with relish: ship’s biscuit, corned beef, Spam, tinned fish, and for sweets, jars of marmalade and canned plum duff.

  No fishing canoes were made or used in Viti Levu nor even in simpler and more traditional Vanua Levu. I never saw anyone fishing beyond the reef. Inshore, they waded up to their thighs and cast small nets. They threw dinky spears. They caught tiny fish. Off the beaten track, there were some thatched huts on Vanua Levu but mostly the roofs were corrugated tin, and the villages tended to be ramshackle – no evidence of weaving, carving, or lashing poles. It was the apotheosis of missionary effort, a great evangelical success. All the people went to church. But they had lost most of their traditional skills. Even their gardens were unimpressive – they only grew enough for themselves, and they still patronized the Indian shops. They needed Munshi more than they realized.

  When the tide was out – and it went very far out on this Bua coast – the place seemed even more remote and abandoned, a distant muddy shore. In so many words, Munshi told me he was simply going through the motions; he was waiting for his chance to leave.

  I was grateful for his letting me camp on his land. He expected nothing in return. When I offered him yanggona he just laughed at me. We were sitting on his veranda. He repeated that this was an awful place. What should he do? Where could he go?

  “I am like a prisoner,” Munshi said.

  This reminded me. “You know Salman Rushdie?”

  “I have heard of him.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Bad things.”

  “Is he a bad man?”

  “I think so, yes,” Munshi said.

  I said, “The Ayatollah wants to have him killed.”

  “Yes,” Munshi said, and smiled, and made a harsh noise as he scraped at his whiskers with his skinny fingers.

  “You want to kill him?”

  “Maybe not me. But it is better if he die.”

  I paddled back to Nabouwalu and camped up at Yoakini’s and drank grog in the kava circle. When Masi got stiff he began warning me about Alfred Hitchcock. I thought I would load my boat and drive north eighty miles to Labasa, where there was a sugar town and some offshore islands. I asked them what it was like there.

  They said, It is like this.

  I went to bed feeling as though I had just been at the dentist’s, my mouth full of novocaine.

  It was another hot day in Nabouwalu. I was in the car. My gear was packed – my tent folded, my boat collapsed. I began driving through town and out of the corner of my eye I saw that the ferry was docked at the jetty. An immense timber truck was waiting to drive on board. Another was trundling down the stony road to the pier.

  The wind lifted, and an overwhelming stink of rotting vegetation rose from the shore to the west and blew past me. It carried with it muddy beaches and buggy mangroves and decrepit tin-roofed villages. It even carried with it a glimpse of the big bushy-haired man with the wicked cutlass and the T-shirt that said Nibble Nobby’s Nuts. I looked up and saw the rutted road, and envisioned how bad it would be after fifty or sixty miles – the dust, the pot-holes, the hairpin curves above the sludgy lagoon. It is like this.

  On a sudden impulse I swerved onto the road, jounced towards the pier, and a Fijian stepped out of the way and waved me on board. Within minutes we were out of there, and then Vanua Levu was astern, just another Fiji island smothered in cloud and haze.

 
; Paddling in the cluster of reefs and islets and remote villages, off Viti Levu, in Bligh Water, I met Ken MacDonald, who was building a hotel for scuba divers on the island of Nananu-i-Ra. He suggested that camping might be misunderstood on the island and said that I could stay at his bungalow while I explored the islands in the area – and I might find an island to camp on later.

  MacDonald, who looked as Scottish as his name, surprised me by saying that he was partly Tongan and Samoan. This ancestry was unfortunate, he said. Though nothing specific was mentioned about it, he felt that it had been the reason he had been unable to marry the daughter of the Fijian nobleman Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara. He had romanced the woman for nine years. If he had been part-Fijian, or wholly Scottish or English, he thought he might not have been rejected. This was an insight into the Melanesian social system – and it was true that behind this façade of religion and tourism and sugar cane and the rather decrepit modernism of Fiji, was an inflexible and ancient infrastructure of chiefs – the ratus, and real power, where caste and blood mattered.

  I wondered what Ken might mean when he warned me that he could be moody, with sudden lapses, and odd humor, unpredictable opinions and slight tetchiness. He seemed very pleasant, if a bit quiet. It was an advantage to me that he was somewhat remote, and preoccupied with the building of his resort. I hated being anyone’s house guest. I disliked being shown around, cooked for, and patronized. It suited me that Ken was too busy for this, and I could see that his diving resort, Mokusiga (the word meant goofing off), had been designed to be as unobtrusive as possible on this pretty island. It was taking all his savings and most of his energy to see it through.

  His house was crammed with books and cassettes, and the shelves in the kitchen lined with cans of mackerel, the sort I always brought along when I was camping.

  “So you eat this stuff too,” I said.

  “That’s for the cats,” Ken said.

  But he said that there were very few people who went fishing in a serious way. Now it was all vegetables and corned beef and soft drinks; a pretty awful diet.

  “Fifteen years ago you saw outrigger canoes,” Ken said. “The men went fishing beyond the reef. Now you might see some people with nets, but not much more.”

  In the evenings after I had returned from paddling we sometimes sat in the darkness, under his trees, slapping mosquitoes and drinking beer.

  He said that it seemed to be simply a stand-off between Fijians and Indians. But it was much more complicated than that. There were all shades of political opinion – very right-wing Fijians, very nationalistic parties, like the Taukai. It was during the second coup that this party emerged significantly, the word taukai in Fijian means “landowners” – and Fijians from all classes became members.

  “The Taukai burned shops and beat up Indians,” Ken said. “And some of the Indians were militants. Arms – all sorts of guns and ammo – were found in some Indian areas. And a boat with arms for Indians tried to slip in here – through the channel. But there were soldiers watching from the hills and they intercepted it.”

  “Do you think the Indians will leave?”

  “Some have already left. The ones that stay are not persecuted. They are just left out,” Ken said. And it seemed to me that this was so. “Anyway, they never had a lot of faith in the Fijians.”

  “For Fijians the feeling is mutual,” I said. “So what if the Indians are forced to leave, as they were in Uganda? It was an economic catastrophe for Uganda. If that happens in Fiji, there will be very few shops, poor supply lines, a scarcity of goods and services, a shortage of skilled manpower – teachers and medical people, for example. Then Fiji would be in a very bad way. It will be an island of ghost towns.”

  Ken said, “Yes, that’s a possibility.”

  He was being realistic, but had no sense of urgency. He was not alone. The general feeling among Fijians and other aliens was that the Indians would stay as long as there was business to be done and money to be made – the idea of profit overrode any political consideration.

  Personally, I did not agree. It seemed to me that Fiji had an uncertain future and that there was a great deal of bitterness and resentment. Unless a democratic constitution was enacted there would be trouble – if the Indians stayed they would be bitter and angry, and if they left there would be economic collapse.

  Some neighbors of Ken were old soldiers – part-Fijian – who had served during the Second World War, in the Western Pacific. They had been in the struggle to take Bougainville Island, in the north Solomons. Every night they met Ken under the trees, and sat in the darkness, chatting amiably and drinking beer. I asked them about their role in the war.

  “You Americans had a small beach-head, about six miles wide, on Bougainville,” a man named George told me. “The rest was held by the Japs. We were trying to get them out. I am not boasting but I can say that we were well trained and we were used to the jungle. We knew better than to wear helmets and we knew how to be very quiet.”

  He was laughing, perhaps wondering whether I would be insulted by what came next.

  “I am sorry to say but your American troops weren’t used to the jungle. And there was one of these Negro battalions. All black. Very scary.”

  It seemed unusual that a Fijian soldier would say this. “You were scared by black soldiers?”

  “No. Only by soldiers who shoot at every sound they hear. An American said to me, ‘We had to chase them and put shoes on them, and then we sent them over here.’ They shot at birds. They shot at each other. They never hit anything! And every morning they did the heebie-jeebies. Heebie-jeebies! Up and down!”

  He stood up from his canvas chair, mimicked a prancing minstrel and made his friends laugh.

  Fiji: VANUA LEVU AND THE ISLETS OF BLIGH WATER

  “One American colonel saw us going into the jungle. He said, ‘These men will protect you on your way out.’

  “I said, ‘No sir! I am going the other way! I don’t want these men protecting me!’

  “We went on patrol. I was with my men, about six of us. Of course we never talked. We stopped to rest at noon and were lying there, no talking, when I heard a loud click – a helmet hitting a rock. We never wore helmets. If you see pictures of soldiers wearing helmets in the Solomons they are untrue – they are posed.

  “Hearing this click, I got up slowly and looked through the bushes. And about fifteen feet away, just on the other side of the bushes were some Jap soldiers, resting, like us.”

  George was still on his feet, showing us how he had moved in that jungle clearing, still gesturing and whispering hoarsely.

  “I signaled to my men to fan out – the right and left. Just hand signals, no talking. Then I gave the signal for – you know what enfilade fire is? Sweeping them with bullets? We did that, caught them in a crossfire, you might say. We killed six of them. We wounded more. We followed the trails of blood but those Japs escaped.”

  “How did you feel at the end of that day?” I asked.

  “Lucky. And tired,” George said. “We buried their bodies. We were not savages. We gave everyone we killed a decent burial.”

  It was said that the Fijian soldiers were so tough, and were preceded by their reputation for ferocity, that surrendering Japanese sought out American marines for fear of being used brutally by Fijians.

  There were six or eight other islands, small and large, around Nananu-i-Ra. One, Dolphin Island, was privately owned and on the market for a few million. Another private island was a coconut plantation. I was making a sixteen-mile circuit of Nananu-i-Ra, and had my tent and food with me in case the weather suddenly turned foul. Yet it brightened, the clouds dispersed, the wind dropped, and I was paddling on an incandescent mirror, watching the plopping terns and the patient herons and the kite-like motion of the frigate birds.

  Although I was well protected, wearing a shirt and a hat and sunglasses, the blinding light on the ocean drove me into the shore of a bay at noon, where I looked for a shady spot to rest, before pu
shing on in this circumnavigation of the island.

  There were two other people on the beach. I said hello. They had just gone snorkeling on the reef and they too had been driven onto the shade of the beach by the blazing sun.

  They were the Garstangs, originally from South Africa but now living in Virginia. Michael was a meteorologist, who had been one of the first people to work on the change in the world’s weather pattern and the possibility of a greenhouse effect. He had recently been teaching in New Zealand and was about to embark on a weather expedition to Borneo.

  Michael said. “People mainly think about Brazil – the rain forest – when they worry about the ozone layer. But there are three hot spots that determine the world’s weather. Brazil, Borneo and Congo-Zaire, the middle of Africa. They produce the heat and the force” – and he pushed upward with his fist – “that drive El Nino.”

  “Is it just Borneo that’s the hot spot?”

  “No. New Guinea – the whole region. You probably noticed how warm the water was there. That’s another factor.”

  “Does it bother you that everyone claims to be an expert on global warming?”

  He smiled and said, “Not really. But accurate data is very hard to obtain. You might have a calculation on warming, but if there is just the slightest amount of cloud cover your calculation can be thrown off by an enormous amount. The fact is that no one really knows the answer.”

  “Michael has been studying this for years,” Mrs Garstang said.

  Michael said, “Did you know there is an ozone surplus in the South Atlantic?”

  “I was under the impression there was ozone depletion – an ozone hole,” I said.

  “Yes. Over Antarctica. But I’m talking about the South Atlantic. This ozone surplus has just been discovered and has only recently been studied.”

  We stood knee-deep in the lagoon talking about the world’s weather, and then about the changes in Fiji – he had first seen the island many years before and said that it had deteriorated. And it struck me that the people who knew Fiji best removed themselves to be as far from Nandi and Suva as possible. The Garstangs had begun their life in America at Wood’s Hole, when Michael had worked at the Oceanographic Institute, and so we chatted about Cape Cod – places we knew and liked – and we were so engrossed on this sunny day that it was as though we were there, in a little cove, passing the time of day.