Getting Stoned with Savages (19 page)

“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 concluded.

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.

The other thing that I, at least, had come to expect of towns in the South Pacific was that they were possessed of a calm languorousness, a sleepy essence suggesting that whatever it is that needed to be done now could always be done tomorrow. Suva, however,
bustled.
It was the Midtown of the South Pacific. There were Fijians and Indo-Fijians, of course, but also Polynesians, Micronesians, and other Melanesians from the Solomons, Papua New Guinea, and Vanuatu. There were so many Westerners from Australia, New Zealand, North America, and Europe living there that it remained possible, hypothetically, for them to have affairs without the entire expatriate population knowing about it the following morning. There were Chinese farmers ferrying in produce to the covered market, and a large swath of Victoria Parade, the main road in Suva, had been transformed into a strip of Chinese restaurants and nightclubs catering to the hundreds of Asian fishermen who found themselves in town each day as their catch was weighed in port. The United Nations was represented by approximately 130 separate agencies, doing whatever it is that U.N. agencies do. The Indo-Fijian businessmen had their headquarters in Suva, and many firms from Australia and New Zealand maintained offices in town. The government, of course, had its offices in Suva, and its officials could be seen conducting business wearing
sulus,
the gabardine skirts that only Fijian men can wear with aplomb. The main campus of the University of the South Pacific too was located in Suva—a disappointment, no doubt, to the three or four American students who enrolled there each year, thinking they’d signed on for four years of surfing bliss, and discovered too late that the nearest beach was nearly an hour’s drive away.

Standing at the bus station, surrounded by dozens of windowless buses belching thick black clouds of smoke, I found myself feeling bewildered and confused. The bus trip had been exciting as the driver careened around blind corners at one hundred miles per hour, tipping us onto two wheels, only to suddenly swerve to miss a cow idling on the road or screech to a halt in front of one of the half-dozen police checkpoints that had been set up on the Queen’s Road. Minibus drivers in Fiji tended to be ex-convicts, not the most risk-averse segment of the population. There was hardly any traffic on the road, and what there was of it, the minibus driver did his best to hit. The closer we got to Suva, the more lush the landscape became. On the western side of Viti Levu, the dry side of the island, fields of sugarcane swayed with the breeze over undulating hills. It was a near-treeless expanse, populated by small Indian bungalows, the homes of the farmers who leased the land from Fijian landowners. On the eastern coast, however, a verdant jungle toppled over steep, cascading hills, a primordial wilderness that rolled on to the edge of Suva.

The capital of Fiji is not the sort of city that goes out of its way to make a good first impression.
WELCOME TO SUVA
said the sign beside an enormous mountain of garbage, a heaving mound of trash that emptied into Suva Harbor. This would be the town dump. Well, it can only get better from here, you think. A moment later we slowed for a road-improvement project that passed through a flooded cemetery. Construction crews were busy widening the road. I suppose the plan was to just pretend that there weren’t any dead bodies. A road grader would smooth dirt until a grave got in the way. Then the road would be graded again from the other side. A moment later, the bus brought us alongside what seemed like a caricature of the grimmest prison you could imagine. Think of where the pasha of Yemen in the thirteenth century would throw those who displeased him, and you might be able to envision Suva Prison, a foreboding, ancient, thick-walled edifice from which you could almost hear the howls of prisoners chained to the walls.

Suva, clearly, was not the South Pacific found in brochures. I made my way to the Peninsula Hotel and was surprised to find that I had checked into what appeared to be, in almost every detail, my college dorm room in Boston. It had the same institutional white cinder-block walls, the same neutral furniture bolted into the floor, and I half-expected to find a keg hidden in the shower. Darkness had descended, and I started down the hill toward town, hoping to find the Hare Krishna Restaurant I had patronized on my visit three years earlier. Walking, I discovered that Fijian towns all seemed to have one thing in common. Typically, on islands in the South Pacific, women tended to give me a curious glance, as they might a straying goat, and then return to their activities. In Suva, however, as in Nadi, I couldn’t walk five yards without a woman offering a
pssst
here and a
pssst
there, all promising something carnal and illicit. Walking past a bus stop where a dozen Fijian girls idled, I felt like a rock star. Girls threw their bodies at me. Possibly they thought I was immensely good looking. Or possibly not. I did discover, however, that if you want to make prostitutes laugh, just mention that you’re declining their very generous offer on the grounds that you’re married.

After satisfying a hankering for Samosas, I strolled along Victoria Parade. Here at last were a goodly number of bars. Fiji, alas, did not have nakamals. Choosing at random, I walked into a bar calling itself Signals. It was loud and dark, and I stumbled toward the bar, sensing people around me but not really seeing them. It was only after a bottle of Fiji Bitter had been set down before me that my eyes began to grow accustomed to the lack of light. I looked at the booths, scanned the dance floor, glanced at the other patrons loitering at the bar, and came to the inescapable conclusion that I was presently in a Chinese brothel.

“WHERE YOU FROM?” asked an Asian woman, yelling above the throbbing music as she settled onto the stool next to mine.

“VANUATU,” I said, to be difficult.

“WHERE?”

“VANUATU.”

“WHERE’S THAT?”

“NEXT TO FIJI.”

I strummed my fingers on the bar. All the women in the bar were Asian, as were most of the men. I guessed they were Chinese fishermen. They had an air of hard living about them.

“YOU WANT TO DANCE?”

A potbellied Westerner was on the dance floor, flailing about, surrounded by a half-dozen Chinese girls oozing boredom. It would take many, many beers before I’d even consider joining them.