SEASON’S GREETINGS: HOW GREEN IS MY VILLAGE
NADI , AS A PLACE, THRILLS ME MORE THAN ANY OTHER. I LIKE THE NAME -- IN HINDI IT IS A RIVER. I’d left my birthplace in my teens. And whenever I return, my heart and spirit fills with special affections for the place, the people, many no more, and for my
Satendra Nandan is Fiji’s leading writer. His new book Gandhianjali will be published on 15 May, 2018.
Suddenly last month I received an invitation from London to attend the CIVICUS conference being held in Fiji at University of the South Pacific (USP).
The invitation had come from the Commonwealth Foundation to celebrate a few Commonwealth writers from the 52 countries associated with that august body.
I was delighted for several reasons: visiting Fiji is always a joy, not as a tourist but a member of both a family and a national-multicultural community.
Besides, Commonwealth Literature, which I studied at Leeds, has enriched my life immeasurably.
Both Fiji, the place of my birth, and USP, a dynamic symbol of higher education, and literary encounters, have been at the heart of my being and becoming -- to be born in the islands and to discover the larger South Pacific through an institution has been my enduring education for almost fifty years.
Reading and writing, of course, become the blood and breath of a creative life of words.
In between one has known both a country’s agonies and ecstasies--its sense of alienation and redemptive restoration and resilience after many a storm of many forces of nature and human fate.
But the human spirit heals in subtle ways with small memories and mercies. And you begin to hear the still sad music of humanity in the landscapes of your innocence and ignorance.
So I accepted the invitation to come to Fiji to read one of my poems selected to be published in an anthology from London University and give a talk.
Jyoti and I packed our bags and arrived in Nadi on December 1.
I spent three days in Nadi before moving to Suva for a working week with around 700 delegates from over 100 countries for the CIVICUS meeting--my first such encounter with activists involved in a variety of civic concerns, climate change being most urgent for the region.
Fiji, of course, has championed the cause of climatic awareness with determination and vision: a small country with the mighty heart of the ocean around it.
Needless to say Nadi , as a place, thrills me more than any other. I like the name -- in Hindi it is a river.
Even the word ‘Indian’ derives its origins from a river’s name--and I’ve always felt how much we’re like rivers, streams and rivulets--forever flowing towards that infinitely vast, indivisible ocean.
There’s only one sea, one sky and one earth--they constitute our common home. They shape our uncommon and unfinished humanity.
I’m not one for identity of rooted trees in a single landscape. Human beings have feet--they move. Movement is in our DNA.
It’s on bare feet that my grandparents had moved from their land-locked villages lost in the medieval mists of time on to a little road that brought them to the South Sea islands.
Yes, indeed the longest journeys begin with your first step on your naked feet. Always and everywhere for everyone. That alone should be our deepest bondage of a shared and endless destiny.
So we landed at Nadi airport at noon-the flight left Sydney at 7am. From Sydney to Nadi is one of the most turbulence-free flights. The service on Fiji Airways is exemplary both in courtesy and generosity.
I spent two nights on the dwelling place I was born in, now past the biblical span. Jyoti had made that journey exactly 50 years ago from New Delhi. I’ve made many an exciting, exhilarating and, at times, an exhausting journey but the memories of my childhood days, spent in two villages, one by the river and one across it, remain with a pristine beauty and freshness.
I’d left my birthplace in my teens. And whenever I return, my heart and spirit fills with special affections for the place, the people, many no more, and for my extended family, remnants of which remain in the landscapes of my childhood, much to my delight. But more than anything, it’s the luminescent green of the fields that touch my mind--the green grass keeps singing as the blue waves keep dancing and breaking on the shores of Nadi Bay.
Above the greenery of sugarcane fields, the palm trees sway in the raintrees; and a little beyond in the blue haze the forests over black rocks , silver streams streak over jagged mountain slopes after the rains on the Sabeto mountains.
And the lapidary Sleeping Giant is ever in its slumber blissfully.
It had rained heavily the day before. But on the day of our arrival the sun shone brilliantly giving the green a luminosity of growth, of life humming.
It is this that I experienced in Nadi for three days.
Things were growing. Houses were being built. Where my father had his fragile, flammable bures and corrugated lean-tos was now a concrete building with air-conditioners.
My late brother’s son was helping his son to build a house bigger than any I had seen in the vicinity of the village. It made me feel happy to know that the new generation had enough faith to build not only bigger houses but a better, fairer Fiji.
With their stubborn resistance, they have neutralised the gossipy negativity of racists and communalists. The visit gave me a good feeling. There was peace in the landscape and the people I met and shared a meal or two all seemed full of a new hope for Fiji.
I was glad I’d accepted the invitation to the rather large and varied conference of civic bodies that do so much to alleviate suffering and bring renewed hope in the hearts of many who deserve a better life.
At my second secondary school, my English teacher from New Zealand had given me a poem to read titled ‘Tintern Abbey’. It’s by William Wordsworth, 1770-1850.
No -one who has read it can ever see a landscape without the prism of this most haunting of poems.
The poet returns to the banks of River Wye in the Lake District and revisits a dilapidated abbey.
What once to him was merely a landscape now becomes a most meaningful, healing power after all the suffering he has experienced in his own life and witnessed it as a human being growing in a very revolutionary world.
I doubt if a more beautiful and sadder poem has ever been written in the English language after the French Revolution.
The poet describes several stages in the growth of his sensibility and the landscape is suffused with the human stains of his personal and political sorrows.
Young Wordsworth was caught in the brutality of the French Revolution: a love, and a separation from his beloved. At the time of the Revolution, he’d written: ‘Bliss was in that dawn to be alive but to be young was heaven.’
But soon disillusionment, dejection and despair set in and he began to understand what man had done to man.
The French Revolution had broken faith and become brutal where Liberty, Equality and Fraternity came under the steely blades of the guillotine.
It’s in Nature that the poet seeks the powers that heal his hurt heart.
The green fields I beheld across the Nadi river brought back memories of my childhood and youth. Much is gone forever, as it must.
Such is Life.
But for all the loss and nostalgia … nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward , springs -Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings. Lines I remembered from another of my teacher’s favourite poem titled ‘God’s Grandeur’.
In 1987, on Christmas Eve, I had left Nadi in Air Pacific with a kind of death on my mind.
This Christmas Eve I felt a renewed sense of life as I boarded the flight in Fiji Airways.
And began scribbling the last poem for my book Gandhianjali, titled ‘Prashant-Shantih’: Pacific Peace.