A CONCERT OF MEMORIES

IN 1995 AN ANTHOLOGY OF WORLD WRITING IN ENGLISH, EDITED BY PROFESSOR VICTOR J RAMRAJ, WAS PUBLISHED IN CANADA. THE TITLE OF THE 500-PAGE VOLUME IS CONCERT OF VOICES. It’s only now I realize what an honour it was to be included in that volume of so many w

I■ Satendra Nandan is Fiji’s leading writer. He is currently composing his volume of poetry and prose titled Gandhianjali. The book will be published and launched in Delhi in June and at a Literary conference in Europe in July, 2018.

n 1995 an anthology of World Writing in English, edited by Professor Victor J Ramraj, was published in Canada. The title of the 500-page volume is Concert of Voices.

It includes selected pieces by four Fiji writers: Subramani, Sudesh Mishra, Alafina Vuki and Satendra Nandan. I know three writers are still writing but where’s Alafina Vuki?

It’s only now I realize what an honour it was to be included in that volume of so many writers from the English-speaking world, among them Nobel literary laureates Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott, V S Naipaul, ---in between works from Chinua Achebe to Albert Wendt.

I found the volume recently among my neglected books. It brought memories of my Canadian friends--Victor was one of them--he died a few years ago in Calgary.

We’d met in Delhi in 1977 at a conference and travelled to see the Taj Mahal at midnight in the moonlit night. We’d hired a Delhi taxi--the journey began early that morning and finished much after midnight. But we did see the Taj together, lit like a poem in marble, glowing with the beauty of a woman’s loved body.

Three months ago I lost another friend in Toronto who I knew from my Delhi University days. Indeed he was the first Fijian student I met as my ship, P&O liner Strathnaver, anchored at Bombay.

I’d boarded the luxurious liner at Sydney and arrived via Melbourne, Adelaide, Fremantle and Colombo.

CN was visiting Bombay from Delhi with a couple of medical students. They were from Fiji too. It’s astonishing how many Fijian students studied medicine in India and became well-known doctors in Fiji and Australia.

Many I was to meet later: among them the late Dr Umanand Prasad after whom UPSM is named as part of the University of Fiji.

Four members of my immediate family went through the same courses on scholarships and are doctors in Fiji and Brisbane.

Fiji’s medical history is a great story to tell and Dr Umanand Prasad was writing it when he died in a car accident in Adelaide.

Some other doctor might wish to take it up and complete what really is a remarkably proud, healing history, part of Fiji and beyond.

CN was a friend--he’d studied science at Delhi University and had completed an M Sc, a rare distinction in the early 60s for a Fiji student.

He was several years senior to me. We became friends and spent many hours together on the colourful campus of Delhi university where food was cheap and tea and coffee available in abundance.

We really then did measure our days with coffee spoons as J Alfred Prufrock says in T S Eliot’s famous poem: Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

…

I grow old… I grow old…

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

…I have heard the mermaids singing each to each.

I do not think they will sing to me… Eliot’s poetry was a rage with students of English in Delhi University and probably ruined the Indian sensibility of a generation of lesser talents.

While I was still pretending to study, CN returned to Fiji and worked as a teacher and later as a scientist in the FSC. Jyoti and I attended his marriage to Ambalika in Suva in 1966.

Then I left to study abroad, first to England and later to Australia.

When I returned, I heard he’d migrated to Canada. A few years ago he retired in Toronto; a few months ago, surrounded by his wife and children, he passed on.

Another Fiji friend sent a one-line news. He didn’t know what that line contained for someone like me. A moment can be eternity depending on what it contains.

I was saddened beyond words. In migration this is the most terrible reality-to die far away from your place of childhood home and remembered friends of your youth.

Every time he met me, for some reason he quoted two lines for me: Pucho na hame hum unke liye kia kia najarane laye hain,

Dene to mubarakbaad unhe ankho mein anshu aye hain!

Do not ask me what gifts I’ve brought for you,

In felicitations to you, tears have come into my eyes!

About a decade ago, in Canberra, I heard a knock on the door of my university office: when I opened the door CN stood looking healthy with his lovely wife and a relative. They had driven all the way from Sydney to see Canberra, me and my family.

I was delighted. After lunch, they had to return to Sydney to take a flight that evening to Toronto via Fiji.

As a parting gift,I gave him couple of my books. He valued it and read them and wrote a most moving review of my autobiography Requiem for a Rainbow: A Fijian-Indian Story, published in 2001.

He had written:

Requiem for a Rainbow is an epic journey through three different worlds - a sort of travel in a time machine through countries so unrelated and yet so real that they exist - each in its own time warp. India where you found love, tolerance and hope; Australia has provided you the present and renewed your faith in the future though exiled you might feel; and Fiji where you gained and lost it all.

It is Fiji that Requiem for a rainbow is all about. The book speaks fearlessly of the tragic dislocation of the life of a hardworking community, the denial of, and ultimately, the usurpation of their rights - such a narrative on Fiji had become long overdue.

You have mustered much courage to tell it to the perpetrators as should have been; for such people must become too callous for diplomatic talk, and, above all, calling to attention the neighbouring countries for their insensitivity and hypocrisy as evidenced by their double-talk during the tragic suffering of a people, who added so much to the Australian and the colonial wealth continuously for years, is most timely.

I’m ill-equipped to say much about your literary merits for obvious reasons, but I must say that your wit and conviction are very stirring; the diction of your passionate vehemence at the total hollowness and self-edification of the coup perpetrators shows much insight and a great strength of character.

The wit and metaphor used in relating matters to politics and Fiji and in sizing up your political ‘humsafars’, fellow travellers, is a delight to read. Interspersed between sadness and anger are accounts of joy, happy reunions, and moments of faith and hope - that good things prevail despite human conditions. The irony, the lament, the insight and the Hardyan wit, a gift of yours I had always enjoyed, comes through passionately and eloquently…

Altogether, the book is an insightful reflection of an intellectual and a writer of note. If any part of the recent regional literature in English is to endure in the Pacific the Requiem for a Rainbow should surely be in it.

Your lament about the lack of more Fijian-Indian interrelations, and not learning the Fijian language and culture are points very well taken. We couldn’t have made a greater mistake! .... After such eloquent endorsement, I began sending him my published works for his readings.

Ambalika wrote an occasional email to say he was pouring over my pieces but slowly dementia was setting in like little waves on the pebbles of memory scattered on a distant seashore. Next year I was hoping to visit him and his wife in Toronto.

Once again I’m so late for a late friend.