Reece's Place 2

Robyn and I continued along the street towards the main market. Many Indian shops looked old and shabby, with prominently displayed ‘close-out’ signs, for the purpose of emigration rather than expansion. We stopped in at the Sunflower Airlines office, to book our flight to Kandavu for the next morning. The Airline with a Heart. The market was in Technicolor, with yellow bananas and lemons and breadfruit and jackfruit, mauve eggplant and big pink yams, red chilies, green mangos and watermelon and cabbages, ash-grey manioc, tall tied pink and green taro, and bright orange pineapples. Large Fijian women with frizzled black hair, in their garish Mother Hubbard dresses, sat on plastic tarps around the outside of the stalls. There was the smell of flowers and fish and dust and frying oil. We walked under a sign, reassured. Poisonous fish prohibited for sale. The stringy earth color we were seeking, was sold only by Indians, for consumption only by Fijians. We needed it for our arrival in Kandavu. In one of the most interior stalls, we found trays of the long curled roots of Piper methysticum, the ‘intoxicating pepper’ of the Southern Sea.

“You are wanting Yaqona?” asked the stall proprietor, pointing to his collection of kava. “Very powerful.” We had been told to buy powerful, so this was the guy. He told us the price. I flinched.

“Gratitude is expensive.” He said, not appearing like he had much to be thankful for himself. The cost of four year-old roots had apparently doubled in the previous three years. I paid him.

Down the southern road was the blue and pink and lime pastel Sri Siva Subramaniya temple, aspiring to emulate the Dravidian skyscrapers of Southern India. But the concrete contract had obviously gone to the lowest bidder, and the tropical mildew was making inroads, like it had with Paul Theroux’s namba, in the same Fijian humidity. The situation is dormant.

Back at the market, we boarded a bus to Lautoka, for the evening firewalking. Just north of Nadi, we passed Raymond Burr’s Garden of the Sleeping Giant, four thousand acres that he and his paramour, Robert Benevides, bought in 1965, to house his orchid collection from Sea God Nurseries. I remembered his emergence from the closet, and the scandal created at the time for a Canadian actor, playing the role of a brilliant legal mind with impeccable integrity, to have so deceived his fan base. When you pick someone to lie to Mrs. Granger, never choose your doctor or lawyer. In both cases they can be fatal...In any country but this, they would have let him in.

We made the 24 kilometers to Sugar City in record Indian bus driver time. Lautoka had the largest crushing mill in the Southern hemisphere, but the sugar produced, like its girmitya producers, was brown, not white. Bligh had charted the coast while making his epic lifeboat voyage to Timor after the mutiny, in 1789. Not much had changed, except for the Japanese honeymooners that had also arrived for the firewalking ceremony. Robyn and I recognized the Australian salad bowl seekers from Jack’s. The social anthropologists who pretended to understand the purpose of these types of activities define a notion of collective effervescence, in which a common arousal results in a feeling of togetherness and assimilation. They quote data that purportedly demonstrates the synchronization of heart rates of the firewalkers and nonperforming spectators. This is presumed to be the physiological basis for an alignment of an aroused emotional state, which strengthens group dynamics and forges a common identity. I looked around at the social dynamics between the Indian owners, the Fijian dancers, and the tourists, and rather than finding any evidence of collective effervescence, I saw a bunch of tourists that seemed anxious to see some feet burnt. The dancers were Sawaus from the island of Beqa, and would be walking on stones that were white hot, from the bonfire that had been lit hours earlier. In the old days, the participants had to abstain from women and coconuts for two weeks before the ceremony, or the gods that had given them the gift to walk unharmed on these stones, would withdraw their protection. The guy with the girl on his arm, slurping his green coconut water through a straw, seemed blithely unaware of the injunction. Just after sunset, he defiantly pounded his way across the rocks, and emerged unscathed. I knew this was a phenomenon of simple thermodynamics. The ‘mind over matter’ was ‘matter over matter,’ quickly. The amount of time the foot is in contact with the ground was not enough to induce a burn, and the stones were not good conductors of heat. The square root of the product of thermal conductivity, density, and specific heat capacity is called thermal effusivity, and explains how much heat energy the body absorbs or releases in a certain amount of time per unit area, when its surface is at a certain temperature. It was the Leidenfrost effect from the insulating vapor barrier under the dancer’s wet feet that protected him, not his deal with the gods.

But you have to keep moving, or the thermal conductivity will catch up with you. The twenty managers of the Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets in Australia, who confidently jumped into the firewalking team-building exercise three years after they were buying salad bowls in Fiji, were treated somewhat differently, for severe burns.

The collective effervescence also didn’t bubble up the fact that Iron Age Indians had been firewalking on coals since 1200 BC, when the current Fijians were still living an aboriginal existence on Taiwan. We all left the party after the situation was dormant, burning with togetherness and assimilation.