Chapter 25
Half of me was convinced Ackerson had put me on a no-fly list, but I got through customs and security in New Zealand without a hitch, then onto the flight. But it wasn’t until after the plane was in the air that I relaxed.
A bare three hours later and we were on the runway in Nadi, Fiji’s largest airport.
The humid heat of the tropical country hit me like a damp wall when I stepped off the plane. The air was as thick as molasses and somehow slower, the scent of the earth different in a way I couldn’t explain. As if all that lush tropical vegetation had permanently altered its chemical composition.
No one rushed ahead of me, most of the male passengers in shorts, and shirts featuring hibiscus blooms or palm trees. Many of the women wore strappy sundresses and had pulled out sun hats in readiness for hitting the outside world.
Tourists.
Hardly any locals on this midweek flight, to my eyes, though I did spot a couple of little old Indian ladies in light saris, and a small group of native Fijians in black shorts and white tees bearing the name of a local rugby sevens club.
The latter was a game with which I had little familiarity, but that Rajesh Prasad had followed with near-religious fervor.
My jeans weren’t going to cut it in this heat, but they’d have to do.
An airport staff member in uniform, a red hibiscus bloom over her ear, pointed the passengers toward the immigration line. Unlike when I landed at LAX, no one was impatient, and a number of people chatted to each other as if they were in no rush to be anywhere.
I shifted from foot to foot.
And heard Diya’s laughter in my mind as she teased me about my need for constant forward motion. “Island time will drive you crazy,” she’d said one night, after we’d been talking about her childhood home. “But resistance is futile—things will happen when they happen, so just relax and enjoy life.”
As it was, the line moved along quickly enough even with no one in a hurry. When the officer, with his dark skin and tight curls, first saw me, he said, “Bula. Coming home?”
Funny, how I’d never thought I’d be asked that question on island soil at the far end of the Pacific. Hadn’t ever thought about visiting Fiji at all; my grandparents had immigrated from India, my only knowledge of this land due to seeing its name splashed across my mother’s favorite bottled water.
“First-timer,” I said. “My wife’s from here.”
“You’ll be back,” he predicted before returning my passport and waving over the next person.
I had no luggage to pick up, nothing to declare, and was soon exiting into the arrivals area, where people waited for their relatives.
A little girl in a pretty pink dress was jumping up and down as she peered at the stream of arriving passengers, her hair pinned to the sides of her head with barrettes.
Dressed up to fetch someone important to her.
Her father stood next to her, smiling indulgently.
Skirting past the others milling around, I found the sign pointing out the direction for the domestic terminal, from where I was to fly to the more rural of Fiji’s two big islands. The walk took me a minute, if that, the international and domestic terminals side by side.
I barely noticed the palm trees or the cabs lined up at the stand.
The ninety-minute wait for my flight almost drove me insane, but the journey on the small commuter plane was mercifully short—and the descent into Labasa Airport a breathtaking glide over endless sugarcane plantations.
The tall gray-green leaves waved in the breeze, the airport nowhere in sight until we were suddenly landing on the tarmac.
Even from this lower vantage point, all I saw were the sugarcane stalks in every direction, as if we’d been dropped from the sky into the middle of the fields.
Unlike in Nadi, there was no skybridge when the plane taxied to a stop.
Instead, staff wheeled over stairs, and we were directed to disembark directly onto the tarmac.
I was braced for the tropical warmth this time, but it was worse when my feet hit the tarmac, the sticky black of it reflecting the heat back at me.
“Bula!” A smiling member of airport staff standing on the tarmac directed me along the safe pathway to an entrance. His skin was as dark as cocoa beans, his smile beaming white; the lack of any sweat stains whatsoever on his clothing shouted local louder than even his Fijian greeting.
Meanwhile, I was pretty sure I was melting.
This was the smallest airport I’d ever been in, but it moved fast because of that.
When I stepped out on the other side, I found my face brushed by a breeze that felt like a silent welcome to this place that lived in my wife’s heart. The sugarcane in the distance rustled, creating a hush-hush sound that was just a touch rough.
“I love fresh sugarcane,” Diya had told me when talking about her birthplace. “Have you ever had it?”
When I’d shaken my head, she’d said, “You strip off the hard outer shell, then just chew on the white flesh inside. It’s thready, so after you chew out all the juice, you spit the husk out and take another bite.
It’s not the same as having sugarcane juice—half the fun is in the chewing and holding the cane in your hand. ”
A delighted grin, no hint of the shadows that had swirled around her only a week earlier. “Watch out for the leaves, though—they’re tough, can cut your palm if you’re not careful.”
Pain settled again in my heart, stung at my eyes as the sugarcane rustled on.
“Taxi?” A question asked by an Indo-Fijian man in a pressed shirt and trousers who was leaning up against his vehicle not far from me. His body partially blocked the Taxi sign emblazoned in faded black lettering on the door.
“No, thanks.” The rental car I’d booked from New Zealand was meant to be waiting for me outside, but I saw no sign of anything but other cabs or locals doing a pickup run.
Taking my no with good grace, the cabdriver turned to speak to another driver, the two of them flowing between languages so easily that it took me several minutes to realize that one was speaking Fijian, the other Hindi, both also throwing random English words in the mix.
Neither seemed to have any trouble understanding the other.
Five minutes later, and the original cabdriver had customers in his vehicle and was away, while I was still standing there.
A tic beginning in my jaw, I dug out my phone and called the rental car company. Sweat dripped down my neck, the breeze not enough to counter the heaviness of my jeans or the weight of the humidity.
Los Angeles heat was as dry as the Mojave, my body unprepared for the water in the air here.
“Sorry, sorry,” the owner said, his voice languid. “Car’s on the way. Only ten minutes. Island time, eh.”
Grinding my teeth, I confirmed the registration number and description of the vehicle so I could spot it as it pulled in, and was thankful that at least they’d given me the four-wheel drive I’d asked for when I’d booked over the phone from Auckland Airport.
When the rental did finally arrive—a good twenty minutes later—it proved to be far less shiny and new than implied, and the air-conditioning was broken, but it drove well enough, which was all I needed.
In the interim, I’d managed to grab a sandwich, a banana, and an ice-cold Coke, as well as a paper map; now I threw everything but the Coke onto the passenger seat after placing my duffel on the passenger floorboard.
Then, my drink secured in the cup holder, I headed out.
I still had a three-hour drive ahead of me.
The distance to travel itself wasn’t far, but Diya had described gravel roads and dirt tracks when she’d shown me a map of where her family had lived before they moved to Nadi so her parents could work in the hospital there, some years prior to their shift to New Zealand.
“Beautiful, beautiful place,” she’d said, “but getting there is a nightmare, especially if it’s been raining.”
That map had gone up in flames, but I remembered enough to get myself pointed in the right direction out of the airport.
Once I reached the general vicinity, I’d have to ask the locals and hope.
The heavens opened up right then, blurring the sugarcane fields interspersed with tin-roofed houses, many with bougainvillea running riot in brilliant splashes of pink and purple.
The rain was gentle rather than torrential, but it did cool down the world to a bearable temperature.
Coconut palms waved in the breeze, papaya trees with their unripe green fruit tucked close to the top stood sentinel beside homes, and I could see hibiscus blooms growing wild, all of it against a backdrop of mountains everywhere I looked, the landscape an undulating beauty of lush green broken up by bursts of wild color.
It was paradise.
My jaw ached from how hard I was clenching it.
An hour into it—along a smooth sealed road—and after the rain had passed as if it had never come, I pulled over in front of a decrepit-looking shop with a faded Fanta sign in the window, and a front path bordered by what might’ve been zinnias.
Against the sun-bleached shop, all its signage long faded, the zinnias were bursts of intense pigment that made me glad I was wearing sunglasses.
But I slid them off the second I entered the cool semidarkness of the shop. The proprietor had covered over the windows with signage that faced outward, blocking the sun. No AC, but a ceiling fan spun lazily overhead.
The combination worked surprisingly well, the inside of the shop cool enough to be comfortable even for me.
The owner was seated behind a screen of iron bars, the cigarettes and the cash register behind him.
Despite the bars, which reminded me of certain parts of LA, he shot me a friendly smile.
Around my age, he was Indo-Fijian, his skin dark and his short-sleeved shirt a pale blue.
When he opened his mouth and spoke, I recognized the words but couldn’t respond to them.
“Sorry,” I said. “English?”
“Yes, I speak English.” His expression remained cheerful. “Grow up overseas?”
“Yes,” I said, because it was simpler to allow him to believe that than to explain that I had no connection to this nation or its people beyond my love for Diya.
The shopkeeper nodded. “What do you need?”
“Directions,” I said, and expected to be told to buy something in return, but the man was happy to help me out.
“The Prasad place?” he said at one point, after I indicated the general area of Diya’s family home.
I stared at him.
He laughed. “My cousin-brother’s uncle Ravi is the caretaker there. It’s easy to find. Just follow this way.”
Taking out a piece of paper, he sketched a map on it that had such landmarks as “the coconut tree that split in two in the big cyclone” and “Ali’s old house before he built his new one in town—it has grass growing through the windows” and “the river bridge with blue arches.”
“How long from here?” I asked. “I was told about three hours from the airport.”
He made a face while looking in the direction of the rectangle of light that was the open front door. “With the rain before…the tracks might be muddy. So, yes, I would say two more hours.”
Two more hours until I might have some semblance of an answer as to why Diya had gasped out her dead sibling’s name in what might well have been her last conscious moments on this earth.