Around me, I saw only crops I couldn’t identify, interspersed with patches of verdant forest.
No houses or people.
When I did eventually stop, it was because I was getting a spinal adjustment from the potholed and bumpy road and needed to stretchout my back. Unclipping my seat belt, I pushed open the door to get out. The air felt cooler than it had by the shop, all that green cutting down on the heat.
A small and scuffed-up blue truck loaded with what looked to be freshly cut taro—a root vegetable to which Diya had introduced me—rumbled over from the other direction while I was stretching, and stopped right beside me. The man who leaned out was Fijian, somewhere in his twenties, his hair tight curls buzzed close to his skull, his skin bronzed, and his T-shirt a faded gray.
“You break down, brother?” he asked. “Gonna be dark soon. I’ll give you a lift home.”
“No, car’s fine. My back just needed a rest from the road.”
His laugh was huge and warm. “You should drive this truck, man—thing is twenty years old. It’s all bump, bump, bump.” But from his grin, he didn’t much care. “You American?”
“Accent that obvious?”
Another grin. “Where you going?” he asked with a bluntness that would never fly in a city but was likely expected in a place this small and rural.
“The Prasad place,” I said, using the same verbiage as the man in the shop.
The truck driver frowned for a minute. “Ah, right, big place by the water. Nice, man, nice.” Lifting his hand, he said, “Got to get these ready for the morning market.”
Big place by the water.
It could’ve described the home that had gone up in flames. The Prasads re-creating the home they hadn’t been able to let go of even after so many years in another country? Because of Ani? Was she buried here?
I frowned. No, that couldn’t be it. The family preferred cremation. I knew that because Diya and I had found it morbid that it wasin the boilerplate wills we’d signed, each of us having to put down what we’d prefer when the time came.
“We don’t bury our dead,” Diya had said, her gaze pensive. “The idea of being buried underground in a small box…” She’d shuddered. “I’d far rather burn up and be done with it.”
The comment haunted me.
Jumping back into the car, I continued on.
Thirty minutes later, right when I thought I must’ve passed it already, I saw the top of a large house just emerging from the thick green foliage in which it nestled. I spotted banana palms, along with flowering vines and a tree with huge glossy green leaves, among many others.
The foliage was so dense that all I could see of the house was the tip of the roof even as I came closer and closer…and that was when I realized why the shop owner hadn’t told me to turn off at a certain point. Diya’s family home was right at the end of the road, only the ocean beyond it on the far side.
I felt cobblestones under me as I brought the vehicle to a stop in a front yard draped in the thick shadows of early evening, and when I stepped out, I saw that the grass had been kept under control.
By that caretaker? The cousin-brother something?
The two-story house, while free of the encroachment of what felt like a forest now that I stood inside it, was shuttered and silent and in urgent need of maintenance. Large flakes of paint had come off the frontage, while mold grew on the upper level.
The tropical environment might’ve done even more damage over the years if the building hadn’t been formed of concrete—I’d seen acouple of similar structures on my drive, houses far more stable than the dwellings of rickety wood and corrugated iron that dominated the rural landscape.
This was a rich person’s house.
The entire property was also a haven of cool, the tropical heat ameliorated by both the plantings and the breeze coming off what I knew to be a secluded beach behind the house. Not visible from ground level as with the Lake Tarawera property, but only a short walk through the foliage.
Despite its beauty, however, this place felt desolate, a ruin in the making.
“Hello!”
Heart kicking at the sudden interruption, I looked over to my right—to see a skinny Indo-Fijian man with hair so flawlessly deep brown that it had to be dyed, and a matching pencil mustache. He’d come from somewhere beyond the banana palms to the left and wore a short-sleeved tan shirt with what might’ve been Fijian tapa prints on it, jeans, and flip-flops.
His thinness accentuated his wrinkles, but he wasn’t that old. Forty-five maybe.
And unlike me, he seemed perfectly comfortable in jeans.
