Rice

 

R is for…Read

 

Remind me again where I am…many thousands of miles from India, many thousands of miles from Africa, a country and indeed a continent I have never visited. Yet in many ways this place feels like I've been here before, feels like a throwback to 1970’s Africa, the same narrow roads and low rise buildings, a small town feel, courteous drivers giving each other the right of way. Sudden stockouts in supermarkets, basic health infrastructure, low hills on the horizon everywhere one goes. Very similar if one discounts the presence of the sea. And of course, the internet (which is erratic, at least in the hotel).

 

I mentioned this in passing to my husband and he, who has not one single sentimental or nostalgic bone in his body, casually replied, “That’s how you feel about every place we go, everything is Africa.” It made me laugh out loud. Well, can I help it if Africa is so rich and beautiful that once you’ve lived there as a child, it becomes the benchmark for every other place you’ll ever experience? The prism through which you view and review every element of your life?

Low hills on the horizon...the Nausori Highlands...
visible everywhere in Nadi.

 

On reflection though, it’s true what he said – I felt the same way about Bahrain when I first moved there. The same hibiscus and bougainvillea splashed buildings, perfect strangers greeting me in public spaces, holding doors open for me without knowing me from Adam. The desert climate, the strong sunlight, the sandy soils, the mesquite trees, the less urbanised, laidback  yet tight-knit community lifestyle – all of that felt at once familiar and reassuring. I settled in without any problems. By that reckoning, Fiji should also be a breeze.

 

Except that in Bahrain hubby had travelled ahead of me, so I had gone from the airport to a functional home. I had sent on a small carton of books, so I had reading material sorted to some extent. Bahrain those days had few bookshops and availability of books was an issue – that too was a throwback to small town Africa of my childhood. I figured out that in time.  Subscriptions   to magazines and trips to Dubai, India, Europe – the holidays and home leave were major opportunities for book shopping, utilised to the hilt. By the time I left Bahrain 25 years later there was a Virgin Megastore.  And Amazon had meanwhile transformed the dynamics of the whole book distribution market worldwide.

 

Bahrain, despite having a population roughly double that of Fiji, is tiny geographically – all the bookshops were located within half an hour’s drive, as we lived in the capital. Also, Bahrain’s per capita GDP is nearly 5 times that of Fiji, that has a direct bearing on the shopping options available in any market.  So, Fiji is much larger and poorer (btw, still way richer than India’s per capita GDP.)  The capital, Suva, is a half an hour’s flight and half a day’s driving from where we are. And Suva, very logically, is where the large bookshops are. Religion seems to play a huge role in the Fijian lifestyle, more than half the population is Methodist, and the few bookshops nearby are dedicated to Christian spiritual books.

 

Narrow roads and a high level of road courtesy...this is the
Queens Road connecting Lautoka to Sigatoka.

Books do NOT make for travelling light, forgive me if I’ve bored you with this before, they gobble up the baggage allowance something crazy. This time, between the two of us, we’ve got exactly five books, three of them picked up as we travelled through the airports. I’ve already finished the ones I got. I’m not sure what I am going to do about fresh reading material.

 

But this too is reminiscent of my childhood relocations, learning to navigate places with meagre book supplies. In Maiduguri, parents got me children’s magazine subscriptions from India, they reached me by sea mail months after they came out. My father, whenever he went on work trips to the larger cities, would pick up books for me as well as himself.  In Bauchi, growing into my teens, we would make occasional trips to Jos, 80 miles away,  for some difficult-to-get item such as a sewing machine or music system, and that would be combined with bookstore visits. And of course, I borrowed the daylights out of whatever books my friends had and from the school library and from my parents’ friends, and in turn they borrowed from me.

 

I'd have to travel on this road...for nearly 200 kms
before I can get to a large bookstore...

I was a relentless book hunter and reader those days, my passion for reading burns lower and more selectively now. Nevertheless, books are a required staple just as Basmati rice is. I’ve figured the rice bit out already, no doubt I’ll be able to figure the others too with time. Maybe I can get them shipped over from Australia or NZ? At any rate, going bookstore spotting is one of my favourite things!

A-Z Challenge 2022