Getting Stoned with Savages

by J. Maarten Troost

  Ahanda was a security guard at the Pacific Grand Hotel. He had called out to us because he wanted to say hi. This was unusual in Fiji. Fijian men tend to be reserved, even rather regal in their bearing. They’re not unfriendly, just inclined toward the formal. The colonial English and the Fijians had a great affinity for one another, or at least they did once the Fijians stopped eating Englishmen. Kings and queens, nobles and inherited privilege—these were concepts that meshed nicely with the Fijian chiefly system. Unlike the chiefs in much of Vanuatu, who are obliged to earn their position, Fijian chiefs are born to the manor.

  There was, as far as we could tell, not much of the Pacific Grand left to guard. Built in 1914, the two-story hotel had once been the finest in Oceania, with stately colonnades and verandahs set to capture the breeze off Suva Harbor. Alas for the Pacific Grand, it was bought by Nauru, a grim flyspeck of a country that was once among the world’s richest. After squandering the wealth it had derived from its phosphate deposits, Nauru was reduced to penury and today makes its living as a prison island housing Australia’s illegal immigrants. The Pacific Grand Hotel, like most of the properties owned by Nauru throughout the Pacific, had been left to crumble.

  “Would you like a tour?” Ahanda asked, prying apart the plywood shutters that had been nailed to the entranceway, presumably to keep people out. Ahanda, clearly, had a rather unique interpretation of his role as a security guard. Sylvia squeezed through, carefully maneuvering the volleyball she had evidently swallowed.

  Inside, it was like stepping through a time warp and arriving the day after the Gilded Age had ended. The champagne flutes had been picked up, the chandeliers removed, but otherwise the lobby remained as it must have appeared to the fops and dandies of a bygone era. Well, provided, of course, that one ignored the pools of bird shit, the mounds of dust, the acres of cobwebs, and the uncomfortable feeling that, any moment now, you might fall through the floorboards.

  “Come upstairs,” Ahanda said. “I will show you something.” We followed him up. Creak, creak, the stairs said ominously as we passed a sign informing us that the morning post left at 10 A.M. Pausing for a moment to pluck the cobwebs off our faces, we emerged onto the second-floor balcony. A dozen birds scattered into the air.

  “You see?” Ahanda said. “This is where Queen Elizabeth stood. The first one. She stood like this.” Ahanda struck a regal pose, surveying his domain with outstretched hands. “It’s very beautiful.”

  It was.

  Suva looked remarkably good when you directed your gaze away from it. The city was on a peninsula, unraveling in helter-skelter fashion over urban hills, tumbling toward the ocean that encased it on three sides. It became the capital of Fiji in 1882. A few Australian farmers had settled on the peninsula, and when their cotton crops failed, they were able to persuade the English government to move the capital from Levuka, on the island of Ovalau, to Suva, which offered more room for growth. “We have rain,” the Australians told the English. “You’ll love it.” Today, some 350,000 people lived in the city, and from what I could tell, only four of them had garbage cans of their own. The remainder just dropped their trash on the sidewalks and waited for the wind to blow it to the town dump beside the WELCOME TO SUVA sign.

  The hotel overlooked Suva Harbor, one of the most appealing deepwater anchorages in the Pacific. A thin white crescent of breakers marked where the reef lay. In the near distance were the remains of several boats that had misjudged the harbor entrance, their hulks slowly whittled away by the unrelenting waves. We could see the dim outlines of Beqa, a mountainous isle whose inhabitants have a peculiar fondness for walking on fire. Directly across was a wall of green mountains and the steep, jagged eminence called Joske’s Thumb, named, naturally, after Mr. Joske’s digit. On the lawn below us, we noticed a mongoose skirting the seawall. Mongooses were everywhere in Suva. They had been imported by the English, who had unleashed the rodentlike creatures to clear the sugarcane fields of rats. They also killed most of the snakes on Viti Levu, which I understand, in principle, was a really bad thing to do, particularly as the snakes were harmless, or so it is alleged.

  “Come this way,” Ahanda said. We followed him around the balcony until we reached the front of the hotel. From our perch, we found it remarkable how very English Suva appeared. Directly beside us was a lawn-bowling club. I had never before actually seen a lawn-bowling club and was pleased to find that the lawn bowlers met my expectations of what lawn bowlers ought to look like. Even in Fiji, the English dress code was enforced on the bowling green. Dressed in starched whites, the bowlers looked like male nurses assigned to a mental ward. Across the road stood the Fiji Museum and Thurston Gardens, a typically English park with a clock tower and a bandstand. It was overgrown with weeds, and as I had discovered during my week alone, it was the only place in the South Pacific that I knew of where one could reliably smell cannabis. Next to the gardens were manicured lawns that rose up a hillside toward Government House, the former residence of the colonial governor-general and, since independence, the home of the president of Fiji. The entrance was a tumble of barbed wire and tire spikes guarded by camouflaged Fijian soldiers carrying M-16s. Elsewhere we could see the old parliament building, a gray stone edifice that looked like a mausoleum and would not have been out of place in Manchester. Farther down Victoria Parade, where it became Queen Elizabeth Drive, were clapboard bungalows, like seaside English cottages, including one completely ensnared by vines, above which slept a thousand flying foxes, a stinking mass of bats dangling from tree limbs.

  Directly across from the hotel, in the wide expanses of Albert Park, scores of Fijian men were busy pounding each other senseless.

  “Do you play rugby?” Ahanda asked me.

  I stared at the men. So this was rugby. I knew, of course, that rugby was not a game for sissies. In the U.S., however, one tends to think of it as a game played by men named Biff or Scooter, men deemed just a little too effete, a little too fey, for football. I had come to regard the game through the prism of class, envisioning players prancing about in bob haircuts and designer jerseys, lingering for perhaps a moment too long in the group embrace known as a scrum, hoping that, on the sidelines, Buffy wouldn’t notice. Fijian rugby, however, was something different entirely. This was gleeful mayhem, with large, barefoot men colliding into each other like trucks at a demolition derby.

  “No,” I said. “I’m afraid I don’t play rugby.” I was a hockey man back in the day. “But it looks like the Fijians know how to play.”

  “Fiji is no good this year,” Ahanda said. “The boys are lazy.”

  Ahanda was referring to the Fijian national team that played rugby sevens, an offshoot of the standard rugby game that features fifteen players per side. In rugby sevens, two teams of seven play each other for fourteen minutes rather than the standard eighty. It is typically played in tournament form, with teams playing through round-robins and on into quarter- and semifinals before the two top teams meet each other for a twenty-minute final. Each tournament lasts one day, so by the end, the two top teams have played roughly a half-dozen games. I, of course, didn’t know anything at all about rugby, much less its more esoteric deviations. It wasn’t until some days later that, through the open windows of our new house, we suddenly heard 350,000 people collectively gasp and hoot.

  Our house, which we’d rented from an Indo-Fijian businessman, was on a hillside overlooking Laucala Bay. Below us, on the steep slopes, were Indo-Fijian land squatters living in tin shanties. Just above us lived a mixed-race family that owned Fiji’s largest shipping company. Across the street was the enormous, rambling home of an Indo-Fijian man who owned one of the country’s bus companies. Next to him lived a colonel in the Fijian army; his house was painted purple with black tiger stripes, like an animated dinosaur in camouflage. This was an astonishingly diverse neighborhood, but be they rich or poor, Indian or Fijian, something had gotten their attention. For a long minute there was silence, a highly unusual occurrence in Suva. And t
hen we heard the groan of thousands, shortly to be followed by wild whooping.

  “What do you think is going on?” Sylvia asked.

  “I have absolutely no idea. Maybe Saki knows.”

  Saki was the night watchman. The landlord had insisted that he stay. We had agreed, since the last thing we wanted to do in postcoup Fiji was to take someone’s job away, and also because Suva had become a dangerous town after dark. As usual, Saki was nattily attired. This was because it is my mother’s mission to have me dressed like a country club golfer, and every year to that end I receive a package from her containing pleated trousers and collared polo shirts, which I dutifully pass on to anyone who will have them. Saki, I was fairly certain, was the only night watchman in Fiji wearing Ralph Lauren.

  “Saki, what is everyone shouting about?” I asked.

  “The rugby game,” he said, resplendent in his yellow golf shirt. “It is the finals. Fiji against New Zealand.”

  He cocked his head, straining to hear the commentary from a thousand distant television sets. We too had a television, and in a moment of indulgence, we had signed up for the deluxe cable option, which allowed us to receive three channels: the Fijian national station, a channel that played old Bollywood movies around the clock, and a sports channel that seemed to specialize in Korean ping-pong and Malaysian high school basketball. I turned on the game.

  “Do you want to come in and watch?” I asked Saki.

  “No, no. I’ll stay outside.”

  I turned the TV so that he could watch the action from the open doorway. To my great surprise, I found the game riveting. Several of the Fijian players had tourniquets around their head. They were stained crimson. I didn’t think I had ever seen such a fluid game before, with the action moving seamlessly from defense to offense. This was the finals of the Hong Kong Sevens, one of a dozen stops the annual tournament played throughout the year. Even Sylvia, in a first for her, found herself rooting for a sports team on television. “This is so much better than football,” she said. I wasn’t ready to go that far. I had invested many a Sunday afternoon in watching football, and I wasn’t prepared to admit that perhaps there had been better things I could have done with my time.

  “He’s a farmer from Tailevu,” Saki noted after a Fijian player scored a try. There were other farmers on the team, as well as prison guards. A small island nation fielding a team of farmers and prison guards is a hard one to root against, especially when the New Zealand All Blacks were professionals. Fiji, alas, to the collective groan of a nation, lost the game.

  “The boys are no good this year,” Saki said, shaking his head.

  What did he mean? I wondered. Even I knew that the New Zealand All Blacks were perennial world champions in rugby. Simply reaching the tournament finals, I thought, was a mighty fine showing for Fiji.

  “Last year, Fiji was the world champion,” Saki noted sadly.

  “Really.”

  This would become the common refrain over the rugby season, a national sigh of disappointment as Fiji proved unable to overtake New Zealand and South Africa in the world rankings. But that was the remarkable thing about Fijian rugby. Though the game was played solely by Fijians, who by and large tend to make all other nationalities appear scrawny and meek, the country as a whole—Indo-Fijians, Chinese, Europeans—rooted for its team as one. Now, call me sentimental, but given that the country had recently been torn asunder by a coup led by Fijian nationalists toppling an Indian-led government, I thought this was a rather hopeful sign. Peace and understanding through violent sport.

  Determined to do our share in promoting harmony among the peoples of the world, we invited a number of new friends—Fijians, Indo-Fijians, other Pacific Islanders, Australians, and Brits—to our house to watch the American Super Bowl, which was being broadcast on the cable sports station just after a junior badminton tournament in Jakarta. Sylvia couldn’t give a hoot about American football—never has and, I can safely say, never will. Still, I thought it might be fun. I’m not sure why. I couldn’t recall a single Super Bowl party I had attended as being any fun before the fourth beer.

  There was another reason I was eager to watch the Super Bowl, however. One predawn September morning in Vanuatu, we had received a phone call from Chuck, an American colleague of Sylvia’s who also lived in Vila. “Turn on your TV,” he said. “The World Trade Center’s been destroyed. The Pentagon’s been hit. America’s been attacked. It’s worse than Pearl Harbor.” Only the day before, Chuck had informed us that in his youth he had made his living as an acid dealer. I looked at the clock. It wasn’t even 4 A.M. Acid flashback, I thought irritably.

  “Who was it,” Sylvia groaned.

  “It was Chuck, reminding us to just say no to drugs.”

  “Huh?”

  “He said something about America being attacked, the World Trade Center, the Pentagon. Crazy talk.”

  And then we turned on the television.

  Though we were on a distant island, far away from the madness and tragedy, we felt connected to the events unfolding on the other side of the planet. Partly, this was because we were from Washington, D.C. In the weeks that followed, I’d find myself taking the packages of baby clothes sent to us by friends and family in Washington and opening them outside, paying careful attention to wind direction, lest I release a billowing cloud of anthrax. But the connection, of course, was deeper. While I wasn’t an American citizen—the paperwork is such a hassle—I was culturally an American. As most Americans who have lived abroad can appreciate, defending American culture can be a tedious experience. Americans, we are told, are fat, vapid, culturally illiterate, money-obsesssed, hegemonic demons. And so much more, I say. Now, with the entire world expressing their solidarity with America, here, I thought was a perfect opportunity to share a little American culture: the Super Bowl.

  The game, the announcers declared, was being viewed by a billion people around the world. I couldn’t really say whether that was true, but I was fairly confident that all fifteen people watching in Fiji were gathered in our living room. If there were a billion people watching, quite likely many of them were as agape as we were watching the pregame show. It’s funny how deranged America can appear when you’ve been out of the country for a while. Here were fighter jets screaming across the sky, merging seamlessly into the Budweiser logo. American soldiers, taking a moment from the toil of fighting a war in Afghanistan, introduced the football players as the announcers anticipated the tough battle ahead on the gridiron. The Stars and Stripes billowed in the breeze. A commercial suggested that now might be a good time to buy an SUV. Seventy thousand fans sang a stirring rendition of the national anthem. Tears welled. The cameras turned to the soldiers watching from an overseas base. A sponsor reminded us to drink lite beer. The announcers spoke of patriotism and sacrifice as dozens of enormous multimillionaires wobbled onto the field to play a game. Military helicopters buzzed overhead. A coin was tossed. The Super Bowl started. And collectively a billion people fell asleep.

  American football, I was startled to discover, is a mind-numbingly boring game to watch. I spent a few minutes trying to explain the rules. “Why do they wear helmets?” asked Savuto, a Fijian woman who worked with Sylvia. “So that they don’t get hurt,” I replied. I could see Savuto thinking: Sissy-boys.

  “Why are they just standing around?”

  “That’s called a huddle,” I said. “This is where they talk about what to do next.”

  “But they keep doing the same thing. All the fat ones fall down, and then the little one with the ball runs into them and falls down too.”

  She had a point. Perhaps I had become corrupted by the ceaseless action of rugby sevens, but football now struck me as an artless spectacle performed by obese men in tights. After the babes, bombs, and beer razzle-dazzle of the pregame show, the actual game seemed like a colossal anticlimax. Perhaps the Super Bowl wasn’t an ideal forum for promoting peace and understanding among the peoples of the world.

  “Do you ha
ve a sock?” James asked. James was a Ni-Vanuatu carpenter I had befriended over a kava bowl at the home of a mutual acquaintance.

  “A sock?”

  “For the kava.”

  “Ah…of course.”

  I had remained loyal to the kava from Vanuatu, and it wasn’t long after we arrived in Fiji that I found the stall in the covered market that sold it. James respected my sophisticated palate, and now and then we had a sock or two of kava together. Soon we were all gathered around the kava bowl, men and women of disparate cultures sitting on woven mats on a balcony overlooking the island where George Speight was imprisoned, and as the sky reddened with the sun’s descent, I knew that at least here, on a hillside in Suva, peace and harmony reigned.

  ONE OF THE GREAT ADVANTAGES OF LIVING IN FIJI, OF course, was living in Fiji. Suva, with its pervasive sense of doom and gloom, was technically in Fiji, but now and then, whenever events warranted, we had a hankering for the Other Fiji, the one George Clooney visited. Though still a rare sight in Suva, tourists had begun to return to the islands. For the visitors lounging around the resort pools, the coup was something the hotel employees whispered about as they fetched another round of daiquiris. As they admired the ocean vista from a verandah, local politics, no doubt, was the furthest thing from their minds. This was paradise, after all. And I understood. We too enjoyed the vista, even in Suva. From our house, we had a view of Nukulau Island, a picturesque islet that had once been the Suva equivalent of Central Park in New York, an outlet for urban steam. It was a picnic island, a place where the inhabitants of Suva took their families for an afternoon of swimming and frolicking. Regrettably, the island had now been transformed into a prison for George Speight and his fellow conspirators.

  Though we couldn’t escape this reminder of recent events, we appreciated the view nevertheless. Most mornings, I settled myself on the balcony with my laptop, and as my eyes passed over the slums below and the navy patrol boat ferrying supplies to the prisoners, I’d recall our lives in Kiribati. I had found a publisher for my book, which was very exciting. “See,” I had told Sylvia, “I can earn a living.” More important, I now had an answer for my offspring. We had intuited correctly: a sonogram had revealed that Sylvia was carrying a boy. Years from now, I envisioned him asking, “I know Mom was working when I was born, but what did you do?” I had been worried that I’d have nothing more to say than a mumbled “writing” as I set off for my job manning the deep fryer. I might still be destined for the deep fryer, I thought, but at least I’d have a book to show the little one, though it occurred to me, as I finished a chapter on the mating habits of dogs in Kiribati, that I might not let him read it until he turned eighteen.