Childhood can put a shine on a place, send it orbiting around one's memory with planetary brightness.
In Fiji, during the course of three happy pre-pubescent years, I attended the Suva Boys Grammar School, learned the ukelele, joined the Sea Scouts, did some firewalking, had my heart broken by hazel-eyed Miranda Sims, 11, and witnessed two spectacular hurricanes.Then I was exiled, under duress, to continue my education in Australia.
The past, though, is a fragile part of one's personal ecology and I often wondered about the wisdom of going back; what swung it, finally, was a call from a Fiji Indian friend just returned from visiting his family. He said they were selling up and preparing to leave. "If you want to see it again in a recognizable form, you'd better get a move on."
So last month, at London's Heathrow, I embarked on a 26-hour flight that ended among coconut palms down across the International Date Line.
Suva, the sprawly, swaybacked capital, still retained its pretty Edwardian buildings and, from green mountains across the harbor, batteries of rainbows still routinely swept the sky. It looked unchanged but wasn't; I no longer knew a soul there.
Then, setting off down Victoria Parade, a stranger in a familiar town, I was hailed by a handsome, smiling Fijian woman who spoke in an educated way; I took her for a teacher and, delighted by her spontaneity, even summoned up a few stumbling words in Fijian. She waited patiently for me to finish, then propositioned me.
Incredulous, I talked to her, learned she was destitute and gave her money.
When two bald Americans approached and said "Hi!" I backed off, growling, but they simply needed directions to Disraeli Road, which, after half a lifetime, I was able to supply.
Heading for Albert Park I pondered the imperial nomenclature still, puzzlingly, retained in this tiny, troubled South Seas republic. The park was overlooked by Suva's triumphalist government buildings, erected on a swamp by a British colonial administration wholly indifferent to the chronic unsuitability of the site.
Probably the random choice of some governor's lady, it was developed by engineers who specialized in raising epic monuments to Empire; here they had to sink three miles of concrete pilings before they could even lay the foundation stone.
Noting their marble-crowned chiming tower clock had stopped, I crossed the park where, on Saturday afternoons, barefoot Fijians had played rugby with a ferocity that conjured up the days of inter-tribal warfare. Now three Indian kids were knocking a soccer ball about.
"What country?" they cried.
I told them.
One said: "You know Cambridge? My brother is there."
"Really?" I said, interested. "Which college?"
He frowned. "No college. He cook in a curry place."
The Grand Pacific Hotel, once the finest between Sydney and Honolulu, faced the park, too. An elegant Palladian structure built by a shipping company to vaguely maritime specifications (deck-like balconies, foaming saltwater baths), it stood boarded up and abandoned. A Fijian sword-seller wandered by and said it was owned by an island community which hadn't the money for its restoration.
"So what will happen?" I asked.
He shrugged. "It will tumble."
I headed on to the Desai Bookshop, which had stocked Penguins and been a haunt of Suva's pre-teen literati; now it sold stationery and junk best-sellers. After an ice cream at Morris Hedstrom's I checked out the Regal Cinema and the King's Wharf on Jellicoe Road where, each month, we had mustered to watch the Home Boat arrive from Tilbury. It brought frozen Welsh lamb, new English cars (mostly Vauxhalls and Ford Prefects, they all fell to bits in this climate), Scotch whisky, Passing Cloud cigarettes, Callard & Bowser's nougat, new books from the Reader's Union, all the treats that kept expats from dwelling on the dismal fact that Home was 10,000 nautical miles away.
The City Library, once a palace of delights, had grown dim and musty, but the Civic Baths, water rendered purple by a lowering palatinate sky, remained alluring as ever. Yet nothing, that afternoon, registered even a single click on my sentient Geiger counter.
That only happened when, watching the sunset by the sea wall, a sword-seller told me we were standing in Cruikshank Park. Cruikshank Park? Old Dr. Cruikshank, stern and high-minded, drove a shiny Humber Snipe and one night, I recalled, had accepted an invitation to dinner. My mother was serving him vegetable soup from her willow-pattern tureen when a sock came up in the ladle. As the silence twanged and echoed, I stifled a whinnying laugh and knew the cook had used it to strain the vegetables - probably pureed earlier with a flailing shoe.
In my hotel bar, a nuggety little Sydney businessman told me he was traveling to combat a mid-life crisis and talked, pessimistically, about Fiji. "Currency's been devalued by 30 percent, unemployment's chronic and the 40,000 brightest Indians - who were turning Fiji's economy into a real success - sloped off within a month of the coup. Now it's all going down the drain." He finished his beer. "Fancy another? Quick sneakie?"
"No thanks." I was growing dejected. Indians, originally shipped in to work the cane fields, today represent 46.2 percent of Fiji's 785,000 population. Down the years they had saved and sacrificed, started businesses, put their kids through college, become powerful, focused and affluent. And everyone got on; Fiji boasted a multi-racial society as tightly meshed and integrated as a jigsaw.
But Indians dominated the coalition that won the 1987 general election and, an hour into their first parliamentary session, Lt. Col. Sitiveni "Fiji for the Fijians" Rabuka arrested the prime minister and Cabinet and announced he was in charge. Worldwide outrage obliged him to hold a new election which, since most of the opposition had exiled themselves, he won.
Like every industry, tourism suffered dreadfully. Yet a few centers of excellence proved robust enough to ride the storm and I headed for one now, Toberua, a four-acre island set off the Rewa Delta a mile out to sea.
On its tiny quay I met the owner Michael Dennis barefoot in a sulu, and a pretty Fijian woman named Titilia who showed me to my thatched bure.
The island has 14, cool and spacious with lofty ceilings displaying the intricate magimagi weaving usually reserved for the dwellings of chiefs. For an hour I sat and listened to a fitful southerly trade wind leafing through palm fronds, the occasional whump of a falling coconut.
I was born on a tropical island not much larger than this, and knew again the pleasing sense of being parked in one of the world's lay-bys. We have lassitude bred into our very bones and now, no longer required to fight it, felt the old waypoints - sunrise and sunset, the times of the tides - quietly reimpose themselves. Then the afternoon grew dim and heavy rain began purring on my palm thatch roof, invoking such contentment I drifted off to sleep.
On tiny islands you can be woken by silence. This one indicated the tide was fully out and ready for a fish-drive. Instead, I set off through slanting evening sun to see Toberua's nine-hole reef golf course, playable with sand wedges, its hazards including variable geometry-clawed crabs that can eviscerate your ball.
Later I came upon a black-and-white banded dadakulaci, or sea snake, dragging itself across a path. Titilia, passing, said: "She has been eating small moray eels and came ashore to digest her meal. They can't hurt you and we like them. But Australian guests go crazy when they see a snake and we tell them, `Please don't beat the dadakulacis to death."
Early one morning a dozen frigate birds took up station over Toberua, hanging motionless but for a slight axial spin. Titilia warned: "They bring big winds, storm coming."
I left as it arrived, the launch breaching the swell in warm, blinding rain, the boatman steering by instinct. I was headed for Suva then the Yasawas, a place I had a particular reason for wishing to visit. Indeed, the prospect of finally getting there had, in truth, much to do with my return to Fiji.
"I STILL LOVE YOU Sanjay Bali" read the message, painted on a roadside cliff face somewhere south of Nadi. Three stories high, the cliff possessed a slick buttery glaze indicating the author had risked her - or, perhaps, his - neck to publish that proclamation.
My minibus driver, a muscular young Indian with sweeping, buffalo-horn moustaches, said some rural tomboy had done it. We chatted, and he told me both his brothers had fled. "One was headmaster, the other very talented senior detective. Now they are in Australia."
"Why don't you join them?"
"Because my dream house was requiring every penny of my capital; we moved in three days before coup." He smiled grimly. "So me and my good lady are stuck. But our children will go; uncles will raise them."
Near Sigatoka, a dense little shower drummed on the roof, split an adjacent rainbow like a wishbone then, crossing a jungly acre irradiated by sunbeams, became vaporized steam.
The interior of Fiji's main island, Viti Levu, is an erratic eggbox arrangement of impassable mountains and plunging ravines that keeps the main highway hugging the coast. Now, as clearing skies revealed sparkling seas and hazy blue islands, I found myself thinking about Capt. Trevor Withers, an eccentric from the old days.
A bony New Zealander, he had come to Fiji to establish a fishing business. Soon after his arrival, the coconut wireless reported big schools of yellowfin and skipjack tuna around the Yasawa islands, west of Lautoka. Custom and practice dictated that he pay his respects to the chiefs before surveying their waters, and he came back bewitched. Something about the Yasawas had affected his mind. He forgot about fish and announced he would operate tourist cruises there instead.
Tourist cruises? That caused incredulity around Suva. Fiji had no tourists. Accommodation, where you could find it, was primitive, travel difficult. Viti Levu's ravaged roads were perilously served by hurtling wooden mammy-wagons, the outer islands - one containing a flourishing leper colony (its contagion allegedly wind-borne and virulent 20 miles out to sea) - by rodent-infested schooners reeking of boiled yams and copra.
And echoes remained of a troubled past; not that many years ago, cannibals eating an Englishman named Baker even attempted to swallow his shoes.
So Withers' search for backers, support, a suitable boat, yielded nothing. He grew despondent and, I'm pretty sure, was seeing my father, a Suva doctor, about anxiety and depression.
Then, quite unexpectedly, Jean Simmons turned up. Britain's most ravishing movie star had signed for a desert island love story called "Blue Lagoon" to be shot in the Yasawas; Withers found himself roped in as a consultant and, goodness, did she put a spring in his step. (Mine, too; one morning my father, summoned to inspect her throat, introduced us. She said, "Hullo, young man," and, seconds later, I walked exultantly into a door).
They got along famously, beauty and the beast, the clerky Withers sweeping her off to their idyllic location and finding himself, amazingly, the object of widespread sexual envy. He returned blazing with confidence, renamed his company Blue Lagoon Cruises, located an ex-Royal New Zealand Air Force crash boat and even a rich American customer.
(That first Yasawa cruise was not without incident, Wither's millionaire becoming gummed to a freshly-painted lavatory seat; though they had to return him to Lautoka for medical treatment, he gamely elected to carry on).
The trip was judged a success, Withers expanded - he even bought the governor's 56-foot motor yacht - and eventually sold up to go beachcombing in his cherished Yasawas. And there, in 1981, he died.
In London, before leaving for Fiji, I saw "Blue Lagoon Cruises" featured in a brochure and made inquiries. Was this Capt. Trevor Wither's old firm? Indeed it was.
And the tale has a footnote. One rainy Sunday afternoon I finally got to see the movie, my expectations so high I persuaded my wife to watch, too. Her murmurs of derision started shortly after the titles rolled and continued until she walked out midway through. Jean Simmons, playing a castaway island waif, was heart-stoppingly beautiful but the film, sadly, turned out to be a load of absolute cobblers.
A compact little twin-decker, the 362-ton Marieanda boasted a spacious public area and a couple of dozen tiny, functional cabins housing, today, passengers from Australia, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland and Britain. She headed north to Bligh Water, where the Yasawas began streaming by - old volcanoes operatically articulated against the afternoon sky.
The only occupant of the wheel house was a plump Fijian who sat cross-legged on a high wooden stool, singing to himself. A ukelele lay on the floor, finger cymbals and a tambourine on a shelf by his big wooden clippership wheel. He nodded affably. "Your name, please?" I told him.
He said, "Bula, Alex. I am Capt. Tom," and talked about the weather. "Big winds up north. We have a ship there, at Yasawa-I-Rara, now she hurrying back. Tonight we stop at Nacula."
"Good anchorage?"
"Prime anchorage."
The sun set as we arrived, vanishing behind banners of blood orange cirrus. Midway through dinner, men began mustering in the shadows. Joe, the Fijian purser, introduced us to his all-Fijian crew. "Capt. Tom! Chief Officer Pau! Chief Engineer David! Bosun Isoa! Deckhand Sai! Motorman Kini! Head Cook Siva! Assistant Steward Mosese! Barman Zak!"
They came filing around, gravely shaking hands, then Chief Officer Pau picked up a guitar, went aft and began playing island melodies. Fish jumped in the darkness, somewhere inland a dog barked as I listened, spellbound, to the songs of my childhood.
At 7 a.m. I found three sea snakes coiled in the ship's tender and a double rainbow parked only yards from the stern, its reflection plunging as deep as the cables of a cofferdam bridge. We only sailed a mile or two that morning. Continuing high winds in the north made passage there inadvisable, so everyone went ashore for a day on the beach.
As their passengers lazed and swam the crew gossiped in a pandanus grove. I chatted with Zak the barman, handsome and personable, whose brother was at Sandhurst and who wanted to be a ship's master. "You need a Grade 4 certificate. But the Marieanda is small and there is no quiet place to study."
Capt. Tom, flat on his back with his eyes closed, spoke drowsily. "Only perseverance, Zak, will get you my job."
This was his first command. Previously third officer on a German liner, he had come home after completing a round-the-world cruise. Now, suddenly sitting up, he surveyed his passengers. One, a Swedish woman asleep on the sand, was coloring like a lobster. He woke her and conducted her into the shade.
"Sunburn is the big problem," he said, returning. "I have a medical kit and have done a course, but prevention is better than cure."
"Can you give injections?" I asked.
"Well, I know how. They teach you with bananas."
"His bananas all died," said Zak.
Joe, an ebullient ex-Department of Agriculture employee built like a cruiser-weight fighter, recalled a shark attacking a Yasawan fishing boat one night. "It jumped in and bit the head off a sleeping man. Then it thrashed around until the crew got to a village and borrowed axes to kill it."
I listened to the drowsy murmur of their voices, watched Mosese, the earnest teenage assistant steward (who also dreamed of being a ship's master) collect firewood, then coax a thread of smoke into a blaze. They cooked lamb stew and, when the passengers had finished, a dozen islanders appeared through the trees to join the crew, a resonance of talk and laughter emerging from the shadows where they ate.
That was how the days passed, each spent on a different beach or atoll - once, coming close inshore, the ship tied up to a coconut tree - while Joe organized reef walks, trips in the glass-bottomed boat, a hike to a village to observe a yaqona ceremony.
Centuries old and central to Fijian life, it involved the preparation and drinking of a grayish liquid made from the pulverized root of the Piper methysticum plant. Though non-alcoholic, yaqona induces euphoria and, drunk to excess, temporary paralysis. But the mind remains clear so that, even lying there poleaxed, one may contribute to the gaiety of the occasion.
On our final afternoon I chatted to Chief Officer Pau as he supervised the digging of a trench at Nanuya Lailai, an abandoned copra plantation. When I mentioned Trevor Withers, he looked blank.
"The man who founded this company," I prompted then wondered, startled, whether Withers had been obscured by the mighty shadow of Capt. Bligh. Chased through the Yasawas by sleek war canoes, Bligh somehow managed, in his cumbersome, overcrowded boat, to evade them; more than two centuries on he continued to dwarf the handful of foreigners featured in the Yasawans' ancestral memory.
That night they held a big beach feast, roasted a pig in the trench. Back aboard, most passengers headed for the bar while Pau and Bosun Isoa, seating themselves at a distance, produced guitars and began to sing. Motorman Kini joined in with a ukelele, Capt. Tom and the chief engineer pulled up chairs.
When Mosese brought a yaqona bowl and began formal preparations, I knew the singing was not for us.
At 11 p.m. they began passing the coconut shell around, clapping twice as each man drank. By midnight most of the crew was assembled, a dozen grave Fijians seated beneath a starry sky, all getting lightly stoned and listening intently as their lovely island songs drifted out across the dark water.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)