A unique day in the travels of Lardo – a special lunch invite from an Indo-Fijian Family (June 12, 2012)

We took a three hour bus trip to Labasa to pick up our friend Loren Harrison at the Labasa airport. While traveling on the bus, we had a very interesting encounter with an Indo-Fijian man named Rakesh who spoke very little English.  Rakesh was very curious about us, the only white Americans on the bus.  He was quite friendly and before long, he was on our cell phone calling his wife.  He asked her to cook a big meal for his new American friends.  We were quite thrilled to be invited to this Hindi speaking man’s 13 acre sugar cane and rice plantation.

A long outstanding tradition in the South Pacific is to take care of ‘kaivalagi’s’ (foreigners).  Rakesh definitely took special responsibility for us by escorting us through town to help Dennis find special parts for the boat.  During a tropical downpour, we must have walked two miles throughout town stopping at many hardware stores to search for parts.  We actually found most of what Dennis needed before Loren’s flight arrived. 

Once we had completed our errands and picked up Loren, Rakesh made sure that we hooked up with his uncle “Bobby”, a taxi driver, who took us on a thirty minute drive out to Rakesh’s plantation for a special lunch cooked by his wife.  Rakesh family spoke mostly Hindi, except for Uncle Bobby who spoke pretty good English.  We learned a great deal of local history from Uncle Bobby who had indicated that Rakesh and Bobby’s family settled in Labasa ‘four father’s ago’ when the family came over as indenture servants; they were finally freed of their indenture obligation in the 1979 military coup.  The family now maintains a thirty year lease which is passed down to each generation; thus it is very critical to have children to pass down the lease rights to future family members.  All around Rakesh’ plantation, were other family members – siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins – taking care of their leased land too. The farmer’s children attend a nearby elementary school funded by the government with classes conducted in Hindi.

Rakesh’s wife cooked us a very lovely vegetarian Indian meal in her very modest two room home with a wood burning stove/oven.  Although sparsely furnished, the walls were decorated with festive colorful Indian paintings.  Her meal consisted of homemade roti (similar to a Mexican tortilla), rice harvested from their field, tamarind chutney using tamarind from their tree, taro/kassavo curry dish along with several other Indian dishes.  For dessert we had fresh watermelon served with tea made from tea leaves grown on their property and spiced with milk from their cow, sugar and ginger.

When we sat down to eat this meal we discovered that Rakesh’ family did not use utensils.  We were all a little sheepish at first to eat with our fingers but once we saw Rakesh and Uncle Bobby dig in with their fingers, we joined them and easily scarfed this very tasty Indian meal.  This was the best part of the meal, eating it with our fingers!  While feasting, Rakesh’s mother dressed in traditional sari clothing, stood in the background and his wife who labored so hard cooking and cleaning on such short notice did not join us for the meal. 

Our bus trip back to Savusavu was also unique.  When we boarded the bus we found it to be packed with passengers and school children.  We couldn’t believe that the driver allowed so many people on the bus.  The school kids crammed into the aisle as there were no empty seats.  We took pity on the little ones – it was about 5:00 p.m. when the young first graders boarded the bus after a long day at school. Their poor little faces looked pretty wearied.  So Dennis asked Thomas, a first grader, if he would like to sit on his lap…without any hesitation, Thomas jumped up on Dennis lap and promptly fell asleep.   It finally dawned on us that little Thomas might miss his stop so we asked the older teenage girls around us if any of them were watching after Thomas – they said ‘senga na lenga’( Fiji for ‘no worries’)that they would make sure that Thomas got off at his stop.  And like magic, one of the kids poked Thomas and nodded to us that Thomas’ stop was coming up.  He had to shake the sleep off, but he did get off at the right stop!  About another hour later, Lardo’s wearied travelers finally arrived in Savusavu.