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aroma was rich and deep, not harsh like factory-made cigarettes, but redolent of molasses and dry wood.
I was given a small coil and watched as a man nearby cut it with a rusted razor blade and packed it into a hand-rolled suki, his eyes gleaming like someone about to revisit an old friend. The first puff curled around his head in a fragrant plume. He coughed once, laughed, and patted the ground next to him. I joined him. We shared tobacco and swapped stories, he of his uncle’ s taro farm up near Lautoka, me of a failed enduro ride through the forests of Fiji where the bike, as I put it, failed to traverse a steep incline, much to the amusement of my riding partners.
Language didn’ t matter so much. Laughter was the main currency.
There was music, too. Not pipedin radio, but live, raw, improvised. Two boys played ukulele by the entrance. A woman clapped rhythm on a plastic crate, and a market porter sang a soulful melody in Fijian as he wheeled a barrow stacked with watermelons.
It wasn’ t a performance. It was just life. Unvarnished and generous.
Children played hopscotch drawn in chalk between muddy puddles. Elderly women sat on woven mats gossiping in rapid-fire Fijian Hindi. A stray dog dozed beneath a table of coconuts, its ears flicking at flies but otherwise unbothered by the world.
I spent nearly four hours in the market, though it felt like a dream that had lasted both a second and an eternity. When I finally made my way back to my dwellings a kilometre or so down the road with a bag of
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