A DAY CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE
BEHIND EVERY DARK CLOUD, THERE’S A GOLDEN LINING So often happiness may depend on little things of life even if an existential crisis seems to be around us.
■ Satendra Nandan is Fiji’s top writer. His latest publication, GIRMIT: Epic Lives in Small Lines, has just been published and will be available at Tappoo Bookshops. His forthcoming meditative volume, LIFEjourneys: Love and Grief, is due for publication early next year.
Last Saturday, October 17, dawned grey and bleak in Canberra. The Spring morning was neither bright nor burnished: not a leaf stirred, and no birds sang in my small but splendid garden. The flowers too looked thoughtful without fragrance. A long-legged spider’s web hung precariously between two bare branches of a tree.
The cloud-haunted sky had its own sadness as if COVID-19 had wrapped its shroud around every living thing one saw and valued. A cold wind blew across the greening landscape of rolling hills with clusters of gums amidst transplanted trees.
Together they look ineffably beautiful and I love walking in the spacious park next to our home or on the edges of the Lake Walter Burley Griffin, named after the Chicago architect who initially designed this new capital for Federal Australia in the state of NSW, a little more than a century ago. Burley Griffin is buried in Lucknow where my wife studied in the first college created for Asian Women in India. My grandparents migrated from the vicinity of this most multicultural city, the capital of UP, the most populous state in India.
So I’ve connections of sorts and have been to Lucknow a few times. From Delhi, it’s a night’s journey by train: one of my closest writer-friends was born there in a haveli which today lies in neglected ruins.
Playing football and cricket
These are dismal, desolate times: the worst of times as Charles Dickens wrote centuries ago in his novel A Tale of Two Cities that I studied for my Senior Cambridge examination decades ago.
But my particular gloominess was not related to a revolution or a pandemic. It was more personal, even visceral. The inner sadness had nothing to do with the outside world. The fault, dear Brutus, was within myself.
It took me a while to diagnose the melancholy nature of my morning’s mourning: the reason was a game on the previous night.
My team had lost a rugby match: if they had won, there would have been a lot to celebrate in parched Canberra. Canberra Raiders had been thrashed in the first 15 minutes of the 80-minute game by Melbourne Storm with several players from the rugby-obsessed islands in our special region in both the teams.
Now rugby, of either variety League or Union, had never captivated my imagination in Fiji. I was more interested in football and played a few forgettable games for a Nadi team named Press. I also saw Nadi often defeated in the annual inter-district soccer tournament.
If held in Lautoka, Ba, or Nadi, we attended it with a religious devotion. Inevitably, Nadi lost in the final. Indeed in my youth, Nadi never won the final and we blamed the biased referees. My cousin Ram Narayan, who took us to these tournaments in his International cargo lorry bought to haul sugarcane to Lautoka mill, took us in that formidable vehicle with the Nadi flags fluttering from sticks of sugarcane. I left for Delhi in my teens: table tennis, cricket, tennis, were the games I played. Rugby was scarcely mentioned or had any coverage in the Delhi papers. Cricket dominated our playful spirit like a banyan tree under which nothing else grew.
I captained my college cricket team during my fourth year: a girl fell in love. After that I may have dropped many catches but held on to the one that changed the great game of life itself.
It was when I came to Canberra in 1988, in difficult circumstances, that I developed some genuine affections for rugby. Canberra Raiders, a team led by a gentle giant named Mel Meninga, partially with an islander-origin, got me hooked to this talented team of outstanding players.
It had happened to me once before in the early 1970s when I was studying for my first Masters at Leeds. Leeds had the most incredible football team and I watched the matches every Saturday, but mainly on television because one could see the replays, especially the genius-like dribbling of George Best for Manchester United.
Then of course the international rise of Fiji Sevens: I even wrote a Haiku when they won the Sevens world championship. It’s published in my book of poetry, The Loneliness of Islands:
The Captain of Sevens
Lifting the Champions trophy Uplifting children’s hearts to heavens.
Saturday’s morning bleakness
So Saturday morning’s bleakness had a cause. Canberra Raiders had lost and there was no hope of the Wallabies winning on Sunday against the
All Blacks, of all places in Auckland. But something more exciting and of enduring significance was happening in Auckland and Canberra: Free Elections.
Later that night we were delighted to learn that the incumbent primeminister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, had won a landslide victory. She had endeared herself as the most authentic, empathetic, inspiring, and extraordinarily sympathetic leader of our region, and perhaps the only one or one of the two in the world, worthy of imitation.
For me this was glorious news: Auckland is possibly the most ‘Fijian’ society outside Suva. I go there at every opportunity to see how safe and progressive are so many members of my migrated family and many friends. The KIWI generosity moves me deeply. There’s something so South Pacific about the city: the sea-coast, with blue-eyed surf, the mixture of people, the wind and rain, the moth-yachts in the harbour and the warmth and affections you meet walking on the streets in the faces of many cultures, features of several civilisations in their accents and casual costumes.
Sadly, I’ve never studied in New Zealand or lived there for more than a fortnight. But I do remember my Kiwi teacher who changed the direction of my life in Form VI and taught me literature and a bit of writing for publication in the school magazine.
So it’s a place of imaginative pilgrimage for me.
Jacinda Ardern has, of course, added a new dimension to my life’s pursuits in poetry and politics. She is a natural and possesses an innate beauty, which can be seen in her brightening smile and felt in the hidden sensitivity in a woman prime-minister’s soul.
In a world so dominated by so many pugnacious and petty political ‘leaders’, she is a fresh flower in a desert: a hibiscus on the dung-heap of current world politics, where brute force and brutal inequality seem to trump our common human decency in our uncommon, shared home.
The world is too much with us and Mr Donald Trump is not the only one affecting our lives in inimitable ways. Let’s hope that agony ends on November 4. The NZ prime minister’s landslide victory brought joy to my heart. If she can do something for the South Pacific region, it will be a remarkable re-awakening for more than New Zealand. New Zealand has had several outstanding prime-ministers and individual citizens: Sir Edmund Hillary and David Lange come to my mind because of a day’s meeting and a book’s acquaintance in my life. Then there’s Richard Hadlee and stories of Katherine Mansfield.
‘National interest’, the mantra of modern politics, is no longer about merely a nation. That myth has been demolished by COVID-19. From the poorest to the richest, from the most powerful to the seemingly powerless, we are entwined and vulnerable.
The ACT elections
Then came the news of the ACT elections where my wife and I cast our votes. Before long the ABC experts were informing us that Labor was returned to power in a coalition with the Greens.
The Greens had made more gains than other parties though Labor had the majority of seats. Of the 187 candidates, 25 got elected.
The Greens electoral gain is significant: the young people are increasingly aware of the climate crisis more than the debt and deficit they’ll pay for the rest of their working lives.
As a cynic remarked: What has posterity done for us? Let them pay our debts. But saving the planet together is another matter.
Canberra is the smallest national capital in the largest island continent. The planetary consciousness among the young is astounding. I can see that in my adolescent granddaughter, who is studying science and planting trees on burnt-out hills.
To my knowledge, the ACT has the most enlightened government in the world. The Labor-led government has been in power for the past two decades and soon it will exceed Mr Robert Menzies’ term in office as the longestserving prime-minister of Australia. Labor victory was a truly historic victory. It’s also the most progressive government. The Chief Minister is Andrew Barr. When others introduced their wives on election night, Mr Barr, with considerable pride, welcomed and embraced his husband to spontaneous applause in the presence of his parents.
The ACT had introduced the first legislation to make same-sex marriage legal in Australia long before it became nationally legitimate through a referendum.
So, I felt, a day that had begun so dispiritingly had turned out to be rather exhilarating.
The peaceful elections in two of my favourite places – a country, a city – was in itself to be celebrated when there’s a feeling of chaos and uncertainty all around us.
Free and fair elections are threatened even in the oldest democracy and that grace under pressure, in defeat, is slowly vanishing.
However, this realisation on our region uplifted my sagging spirit: to think the oxygen of freedom in the atmosphere can revive us on a saddening day.
There’s a sun shining behind the dark clouds in its effulgent glory giving us life and some sense of liberty. I forgot all about the rugby loss; instead went to watch my granddaughter play Frisbee. I didn’t follow the rules but her team, I’m reliably informed, won. Hannah Maya played with skill and energy to make us all happy. So often happiness may depend on little things of life even if an existential crisis seems to be around us.
Behind every dark cloud, there’s a golden lining.