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 theTaxisign 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,beautifulplace,” 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 remindedme 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.
