Fiji’s capital, Suva, is the most developed and cosmopolitan of the capitals in the South Pacific. To the Indian eye, used as it is to multitudes, Suva is a small, charming, sparsely populated city of quiet avenues lined with grand colonial buildings, back gardens dotted with papaya and mango trees, and old establishments like Charman’s All-Races Gym and Ahmed’s Spice Shop. Fiji is made up of 300 islands and over 500 islets; many are uninhabited. Suva is the political capital, while Nadi (pronounced Nandi) is the tourist hub. Most tourists fly in to the international airport there and are whisked away in a catamaran or seaplane to their luxury island resorts. There are few tourists in Suva as it is a three-hour drive (on a coastal road fringed by tropical forests) or a 45-minute flight away (often on a small plane where passengers are weighed along with the luggage) from Nadi. A few cruise ships, however, dock here. Their arrival is announced in local papers so that downtown vendors can be ready for day-trippers.
I whimsically decide to christen the wi fruit as the dinosaur fruit. This is because I found out that wi, one of the first flowering trees on earth, existed at the time of dinosaurs. It is a great pleasure to sink my teeth into what might (unscientifically) be called a living fossil and experience its soothing taste of not-too-sweet, not-too-sour. It also makes for a superb chutney, delicious with roasted papad. In Fiji, avocados and papayas are of the same size. Which is to say that the avocados are enormous and papayas tiny, strictly one per person. Fijians have a range of roots—taro, cassava and sweet potato—and they call it, quite simply, ‘starch’. Breadfruit counts as ‘starch’ in a meal too. Ora is a delicate mountain fern with curling tendrils that, doused in coconut milk, makes for a cooling salad. Then there are the delights from the ocean—seaweed cooked with coconut milk and formed into ‘pats’; and sea grapes mixed into a salad of onions, tomatoes and tuna flakes. Suva’s markets overflow with tropical fruits, Indian spices, kava root powder (mix with water for an intoxicating drink) and bird-of-paradise flowers.
Indian culture is everywhere. The British brought Indians as indentured labour to work the sugarcane plantations from the 1870s onwards (Sugar is important business here—there is a dedicated ministry of sugar). Their descendants are a prominent part of the Fijian population today, with a culture that has evolved into a unique amalgam of various Indian cultures. It has given rise to a language called Fijian Hindi, spoken by all Indo-Fijians and difficult to understand for an Indian from India. It is a rich dialect in its own right. Indo-Fijian radio, however, is another matter—the Hindi spoken on-air is much like the Hindi one might hear on the radio in India.
Where there are Indians, can Bollywood be far behind? The two main English newspapers, The Sun and The Fiji Times, have special sections that amply cater to the hunger for all things Bollywood. These remind me of the teen magazines of the ’80s, complete with song lyrics and pull-out posters replete with curves and six-packs. Even taxi rides are usually accompanied by Hindi film soundtracks. Indo-Fijian taxi drivers almost always ask where I am from and on finding that I am from Mumbai, display boundless enthusiasm. One even went so far as to ask me whether I knew of “any good girls” in India whom he could marry. Why not a girl from Fiji, I enquired. Apparently the ones here are not traditional enough. Try Shaadi.com, I suggested.
Fiji is a rugby-mad nation; it beats Indian cricket-mania hands down. After all, has the Indian government ever issued an 11-rupee note to commemorate our cricket team? No? Well, Fiji is the only country in the world to have a seven-dollar note, in honour of their national rugby sevens team, which won the Olympic gold medal in 2016. It is not just a commemorative note, but one that is in daily circulation.
Pacific island history is a mainstay of newspapers. They almost always have long articles on old clan chiefs and colonial sailing voyages. A wonderful titbit from March 1912 caught my eye the other day: owning tiny dogs was apparently all the rage in Paris in 1912. Where Paris goes, the fashion world doth follow; so a well-known socialite in Suva went to the downtown market and paid an enormous sum for the tiniest dog she had ever seen. But when she brought it home, it promptly ran up the curtains. When the servants retrieved it, it turned out to be a rat sewn into a dog’s skin. Not so très chic, but c’est la vie.
