Getting Stoned with Savages

by J. Maarten Troost

  “My nesting instinct has kicked in,” she said, rubbing her swelling belly. “I want”—she thought for a moment—“a rocking chair.”

  There was only one thing for it: We would move to Fiji a little early. It had always been the plan, and it was just a question of time until FSP International shifted its office to Suva, the capital of Fiji. What’s a little political instability, we figured, when we had the opportunity to give our child Fijian citizenship? Later, when he was snowplowing down the ski slope, representing Fiji in the Winter Olympics, he’d be so grateful.

  Before moving, Sylvia had to make one last business trip to Sydney, where she’d also receive a checkup. Prenatal care in Vanuatu pretty much stopped at the confirmation of pregnancy. Yup. You’re pregnant. Good luck. Next! In the meantime, I would be the advance team in Fiji, charged with finding a home for the little fam. Sylvia would meet me a week later in Suva.

  “You’re sure I can find Vanuatu kava in Fiji?” I asked a friend who had lived there. There was, I knew, plenty of kava in Fiji. The Fijians drank copious amounts of it—at home, at work, at ceremonies—there was hardly any situation in Fiji that did not call for kava. But it was weak kava. Once you’ve had Vanuatu kava, there’s no going back.

  “In the covered market in Suva, across from the bus station, on the second floor, there’s an Indian named Vijay Patel who sells it in powdered form. Typically, it’s from Pentecost, now and then from Tanna. His stall is the third one on the left, two rows in. Tell him I say hey.”

  “Powdered, not freshly ground?”

  “Afraid so. I tried smuggling in some fresh roots, but they were confiscated.”

  “Tragic. Better have a few shells before I go.”

  I said good-bye to Sylvia as she boarded the flight to Sydney. We’d meet next in Suva. “Be good,” she said. And then I said farewell to Vanuatu. “You are my brothers,” I told the group at the nakamal.

  Though I would miss the nakamals dearly, I was looking forward to moving to Fiji. When we’d departed the atolls of Kiribati some years earlier, Fiji had been our first stop on the journey home. It seemed huge to us then, profoundly civilized and welcoming, and we enjoyed our stay there immensely. Of course, at the time, we were easily impressed. “Look,” I had said to Sylvia in Suva. “An escalator. Do you see? It goes up. And look. That one goes down. Isn’t that amazing?” When we discovered that our hotel room on the Coral Coast had both a view of the ocean and air conditioning, we were smitten forever.

  And, I thought as I boarded an evening flight to Nadi on Air Vanuatu, there won’t be any of this pseudo-colonial nonsense in Fiji. No one will call me master in Fiji, I thought confidently. Port Vila had always felt uncomfortably odd, provoking my inner Marxist. I didn’t know I had an inner Marxist until I arrived in Vila, and I hoped to leave him behind. Marxists can be so tedious.

  It was thus with a happy optimism that I arrived in Fiji. The smell alone was redolent of the Fiji I remembered—the ocean, ripe vegetation, sweat, curry, diesel. There were dozens of taxis lined up outside the airport, and I half-expected a scrum of drivers charging at me, beckoning me with an insistent hail. The Fiji I knew was frothing with hyper-tourism, and noting the scarcity of tourists at the airport, I had prepared myself to be assailed by tour guides and cabdrivers hungry for a customer, any customer. It was with some surprise, then, that I actually had to raise my arm to catch a taxi.

  “So how is the tourist business in Fiji?” I asked the young Indian taxi driver as I settled into the front seat, feeling as pleased as pie that I could speak in English and reliably expect to be understood. The radio blared Indian pop music. On the dashboard was a sticker of a dancing blue elephant with an unnatural number of limbs. Nearly half the population of Fiji is of Indian descent.

  “Are you a tourist?” he asked.

  “Not quite,” I said.

  “Then we are still waiting for the tourists to come back.”

  Looking around, I could see why. Nadi was where the international airport was located. The airport gate was heavily guarded by Fijian soldiers carrying M-16s. Not exactly what one wants to see on a honeymoon. We slowly weaved around a series of tire traps. There were eight soldiers, and they were all business, scanning incoming cars with flashlights.

  “How is the political situation?” I asked the driver as we merged into traffic.

  “The political situation is…”

  “LOOK OUT!” I yelled. Then the realization hit me. “Heh…Sorry. I see you drive on the left side of the road here.”

  The driver gave me a cautious sidelong glance, no doubt wondering about the stability of his fare. Sensing that I probably wouldn’t bite, he continued. “The political situation is very bad,” he said animatedly. “Fiji is finished for the Indians. Everybody is trying to leave—Australia, New Zealand, Canada, America. Anywhere. There is no future here.”

  “That bad?”

  “Yes. Fiji is finished.”

  I hoped it wasn’t quite finished yet. After all, we were moving here. Indeed, we would soon have a little Fijian of our own. This would hardly alter the immigration-emigration ratio, of course. I had learned that tens of thousands of Indo-Fijians, most of the educated professional middle class, had already departed for brighter shores. I left the cabdriver to his gloom and checked into the West Motor Inn, one of the innumerable motels lining the road between the airport and Nadi. I was, it appeared, the only customer. I was given a dank room with a balcony, but I could hardly complain, as it also offered air conditioning and cost less than $15 a night. I planned to make the trip to Suva the following day. The capital was on the other side of Viti Levu, Fiji’s main island, about five hours from Nadi by bus following the Queen’s Road. I could have flown, of course; the flight was a mere half-hour. But if I didn’t have to board a Twin Otter, then I wouldn’t, particularly after I’d scanned The Fiji Times, which had a follow-up article on a recent crash involving an Air Fiji Twin Otter that had flown into a mountain. True, dozens of people died each year on the Queen’s Road, but I had survived this long without being rational and saw no reason to change my ways.

  So I had an evening to kill. With nothing to do beyond watching the geckoes scamper across the walls of my motel room, I headed out for a walk into town. The length of road between the airport and Nadi, I remembered, was quite likely the most hideous corner of Fiji, a fact I soon confirmed as I stumbled along in the darkness, inches from the whish of speeding jalopies. The sight would have been depressing had I not already known that Fiji only gets better from here. It was a long stretch of dilapidated stores, like an American strip mall that hadn’t been tended to for thirty years. Most of the businesses were shuttered behind steel bars and wire mesh, locked with chains and padlocks. From the signs, it was apparent that each was Indian owned. Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to even realize that he was presently on an island in the South Pacific and not, as the evidence seemed to indicate, in some provincial backwater in India. The cars raced by, swerving enthusiastically around everything that moved in front of them. They were driven with the casual carelessness that comes easily, I thought, to those sure in the knowledge that they will be reincarnated into perpetuity.

  It was humid, and I was beginning to sweat freely. Nadi, it was dawning on me, was much farther from the motel than I had assumed—several miles at least—but I walked on because, well, I didn’t have anything better to do. As I neared the town there was a long stretch of bush, a tangle of trees illuminated only by the passing glare of headlights. I proceeded blithely on, but soon I had a sixth sense that something was afoot. I was not, generally, particularly cautious. I rarely thought of myself as a potential victim of criminality. I tended to like people, and this, I thought, was usually enough to disarm all but your most determined mugger. And if that didn’t work, I’d scrunch up my face so it suggested that, now and then, when I’ve had to do it, I’ve killed. But something was disturbing my inner harmony, and I thought it prudent to turn around and retreat to the light
.

  Four figures suddenly ran across the road. Men? They were tall, slender, very muscular. They wore pink hot pants. Women? They wore makeup. Cross-dressers? Amazonian queens? They had, evidently, been tailing me for some time.

  “You want a blow job, honey?” asked the biggest, a tall, heavily made-up Fijian man in hot pants and heeled sandals, wearing a sleeveless Lycra shirt that emphasized his heaving pecs.

  “No. Thanks so much for asking, though.”

  He approached and locked his arm in mine, guiding me into the trees as his companions followed. “Just give me some.”

  “No, really, I’ll just be on my way.”

  He was pulling me with greater insistence into the bush. “You want to fuck?” he leered. The others were circling me.

  This is not good, I thought. Undoubtedly, I was about to be robbed. Much more troubling—and I mean incomparably more troubling—was the prospect of being sordidly abused by four hulking Fijian cross-dressers. Not my thing at all.

  “Get the fuck away from me!” I hissed, yanking my arm away.

  He continued to paw at me. “Come on, honey. Give me some.” The other three were crowding around.

  If they had just asked nicely for my wallet, I might have paused for a moment, considered the odds, and handed it over with barely a whimper, perhaps offering a gentle reminder not to spend it all in one place. They were all well above six feet tall. But there was something about the prospect of being sodomized—I had just arrived, after all—that encouraged me to flee. I dashed for the road and kept running until I reached the relative safety of a streetlamp. I turned to see if they were giving chase, prepared to keep running until my last breath if I had to. I could see them strutting and yelling, swinging their purses. Well, I thought, they’re going to have to take their heels off. Unwilling to part with their shoes, they turned and disappeared into the night.

  What a lively way to begin a stay in Fiji, I thought as I began to wander back in the direction of the motel, periodically checking behind me, wondering what else might possibly be lurking in the shadows. There was no one else walking alongside the road, and it occurred to me that that ought to tell me something. I flagged a taxi.

  “You want a girl?” asked the driver, a thin, unshaven Indo-Fijian man with a cigarette dangling from his lips. On the radio, Bollywood wailed.

  For a moment, I thought he might be inquiring about my desired preference in progeny, and I nearly answered that I had no preference, either a boy or a girl would be great, just as long as it’s healthy.

  “Only Fijian girls here,” said the taxi driver as we passed a building that announced it was a Korean restaurant and club. “Fijian girls no good.”

  “Ah…,” I said, realizing that he wasn’t talking about sons and daughters. Or at least not mine, in any case. “Thanks, no. I’m fine.”

  “You like Indian girls? Indian girls are very good. I take you to Dreamland Nightclub. There you meet Indian girls and you choose the one you want.”

  I was not in the mood for the squalid, and my evening was beginning to take on decidedly squalid overtones. What I really wanted was a beer. “No, thanks. Could you just drop me off in the center of Nadi Town?” I figured I’d walk around a bit and, with any luck, find a quiet bar where I could have a couple of pints of Fiji Bitter and read my book.

  “You buy a souvenir here,” said the taxi driver, stopping in front of Jack’s Handicrafts, “and give them my card. They give you special price.”

  This was more like the Nadi I remembered, a little outpost of the subcontinent, a place where everything is haggled down from “special price” to “final best price.” Curious, I paid the driver and entered Jack’s Handicrafts, a well-lit souvenir emporium with twelve sales assistants for every customer. I know because I was the only customer and I counted twelve sales assistants. I picked up a four-pronged “cannibal fork,” lingered over the “cannibal clubs” for a moment, and nearly bought an apron that said ISLAND COOKING above a cartoon of a Fijian man in a chef’s hat stirring a large pot with two human legs poking out. This would make an excellent Christmas present for several people I knew.

  “For you, I’ll give a special price,” said an Indian sales assistant. The entire staff was Indian. I wondered what the Fijians thought of Indians selling Chinese-made trinkets celebrating Fijian cannibalism.

  I declined to make the purchase. In Vanuatu, we had put most of our belongings in a couple of boxes and mailed them to the post office in Suva. Nevertheless, I was still traveling with just about all that I could carry, and the last thing I wanted was more stuff to move. I strolled up the main road, my eyes searching for a sign that said BAR, PUB, BEER, or some derivation promising ale. Instead, nearly every sign read PATEL, SINGH, RAMESH, or some other Indian surname followed by the nature of their wares: KUMAR CLOTHING, SARESH’S HARDWARE. The street was essentially deserted, and I walked up toward the Hindu temple, encountering only a backpacker or two, who appeared as disappointed as I at the apparent lack of bars in downtown Nadi. The town, the guidebooks had said, was the tourist hub of the South Pacific. Someone ought to tell the people of Nadi, I thought.

  I turned around, scanning the storefronts again with some peevishness in case I had missed a pub. Soon I found myself walking out of Nadi. I crossed a bridge over a burbling river. As I passed a sign pointing the way to the Sheraton resorts on Denarau Island I made a mental note to send a letter to the Fiji Visitors Bureau. If you want the tourists to come back to this coup-riddled country, I would write, a good place to start would be with a decent bar in the center of town.

  “Pssst…,” said a voice.

  Who was this? I wondered. Not another large cross-dresser, I hoped.

  “Psst…”

  The voice came from the shadows under a looming tree. An Indian girl emerged. She couldn’t have been much more than twenty. Three other Indian girls stood behind her.

  “Do you want a massage?”

  As a matter of fact, I did want a massage. A massage would have been great. I had spent much of the afternoon heaving luggage from one country to another, and I was certainly amenable to a good rubdown. And so it was with some regret that I declined the offer.

  “You want to fuck?” she then inquired.

  Well, this relationship was certainly moving at a fast clip. “No, thanks. I’ll just move along. Good night.”

  She was very pretty. There are men—lots of them, apparently—who fly thousands of miles for the opportunity to pay a few dollars to sleep with a destitute girl in a third-world country. I couldn’t quite see the romance in it, but even if I could, engaging in a commercial transaction of such a nature just wasn’t going to happen. I had a vision of standing before my wife, the vessel carrying my child: “Now, honey, don’t be like that. The reason I’m taking medication for syphilis…”

  I chortled at the thought and returned to my quest for beer. I was nearing the dark patch where I’d had my encounter with the cross-dressers. Giving up on Nadi, I hailed another taxi.

  “You want…”

  “No.”

  I returned to the motel. There was a bar there, I recalled. I settled onto a stool. There was one other patron, an elderly Englishman, who was quietly muttering to himself.

  “That’s right,” he said kindly, turning toward me. “I’ve been smoking for sixty years now. And I’m in blooming health.” He lit a cigarette.

  I took a deep breath. I had resolved to quit smoking. There was something about lulling a baby to sleep with one hand while jabbing a lit cigarette with the other that suggested that now might be a good time to quit.

  “Nothing wrong with me,” he said, dragging deeply. “I enjoy smoking. Always have.”

  The bartender stood in front of me, waiting for me to order a drink. Behind him was a display of cigarettes. Could I do it? I wondered. Could I sit here and drink beer and not smoke while a deranged Englishman rambles on—and ramble he did—about the joys of smoking? I breathed deeply. I could not, I grimly conclu
ded.

  Instead, I soon found myself sitting on the balcony outside my motel room, chewing gum, trying to lose myself in my book. The balcony was on the second story, overlooking a dimly lit side street. A car soon pulled up below me. A Fijian man emerged from the passenger side. He wore an outfit that suggested a devotion to the Jane Fonda line of early-80s aerobic-exercise workout tapes, headband included. This was matched with heels and a purse. He paced back and forth. Another car pulled up, and he hopped in. The car idled. Five minutes later he emerged. As the car sped off he looked up. Seeing me, he sashayed over to just under the balcony. “You want a date, honey?”

  No, I didn’t want a date. Frankly, I was beginning to feel a little weirded out by Fiji. It’s not every day that I’m accosted or solicited by cross-dressers and prostitutes. I had no idea what this portended, but I was looking forward to moving on to Suva. How much more sordid could the capital be?

  SUVA IS A CITY that has a way of confounding one’s expectations of what a city in the South Pacific ought to be like. Even though I had now lived in Oceania for more than three years and knew how astonishingly varied the islands could be, I could never quite get accustomed to the fact that in Suva, the beating heart of the South Pacific, the sun rarely shone. It’s true. Of all the places in the South Pacific available to the English for a regional colonial capital, they chose to place theirs in a rain shadow. I’m not sure why they did this. I had always thought that the weather in Britain, its ceaseless rain and endless gray, was what drove the pursuit of the empire to sunnier climes. And yet, once they reached the South Pacific, what did they do? They placed their administrative capital on the wettest, grayest sliver of island they could find. I don’t think the French would have made the same mistake. Looking at the weather map of Fiji, one inevitably saw happy sunshine cascading over all the islands except for that one small corner of Viti Levu occupied by Suva, where invariably rain showers were to be expected into perpetuity.