The Emigrants

Seona Smiles

“So, they’ve invited us to their lovely new home in Beachcliff for dinner.  Is that Fiji dinner, or Australian dinner?  Yes, there is a difference.  Australian dinner is lunch.  Then they have tea.  But tea is not tea, it is meat with two veg, icecream fruit salad.  How you don’t know these things?  Because you never go in kitchen, that’s why.  Other people’s husbands in Australia go in kitchen sometimes. 

Okay, so its dinner dinner.  What door they say to knock:  the upstairs, the downstairs or the garage? Of course it makes difference.  Upstairs is polite family, Europeans, visitors from Fiji, and maybe the mother-in-law;  downstairs is old friends and maybe the daughters and sisters-in-law;  garage is what Australians call blokes – the grog gang who drink kava all night. 

Mmmhm, so they didn’t say – means we have to go in the upstairs,  All right for you, after you be polite for a while then the husband’s going to say “pssst, Babu, I got the Black Label downstairs,” and you’ll sidestep.  Me?  I’ll be left with the ladies, making nice.  Then we’ll go on a tour of the house.  Aree, they have such big, big houses, and every room I’m seeing. 

This is the family room, this is the study, this is the linen cupboard,  this is the number one daughter’s room, this is the small daughter’s room….and this is her walk-in closet….and this is her en suite bathroom…. and this is where the pussycat sleeps.  En suite for the pussycat, too – called the litter box. 

I’m trying not to repeat the same things I am saying about everyone’s house:  “my goodness, all bedrooms en suite, fancy.  And such pretty bedcovers.  You get them new?  Mmmhm, yes, all matching matching purple.  Oh, sorry, mauve.  Your other daughter’s room purple.  Because modern girls don’t do baby pink any more.  Oookay.  But son’s room blue. Gihahn, oh yes. 

Nice things you got, so well kept.  Still in their plastic cover.  Mmm, dust in Australia like that, especially on fluffy toy animals.  And ornaments, yes.  Fighting eagles hard to clean, man. Ooh, souvenir wall hanging of Alice Springs?  You been there then?  Uhuh, got it at the second hand.  Its good, the second hand, eh? 

I got a good electric frypan there, first class, hardly used.  Well yes, some people wouldn’t buy cooking pots second hand because don’t know what’s been cooked in them, eh?  But this lady told me she didn’t cook any beef or pork at all, not at all.  She kept this one frypan for roasting rabbit. 

What’s the matter?  Oh, sorry, didn’t know your mother-in-law so sensitive. It like that with some vegetarians.

The number one house tour goes on and on, and finally we get to the kitchen.  The wife and all the female relatives are there, and we all have to make like we helping.  You men just go out to dinner and eat, we making it, same as home.  But too many ladies, not enough garlic to peel, so they all talking. 

This is the really scary part.  First you hear about everybody’s children who, trust me, are all child genius.  They all going to finish university before other people’s children finish primary.  Then they going to be on TV because they so good at dancing or singing or doing tricks with small furry animals.  Then the boys going to be playing soccer with Ronaldinho because the talent scout going to spot them at the Beachcliff Wombats Junior League Saturday afternoon game.  That probably why the son wearing his hair like that, so people can mistake him for Ronaldinho. 

Then, Bagwhan, my God, they start on the diseases.  Sometimes I wonder how come there is any of them left on this earth, after what they suffer.  The knee, the head, the back – well, arthritis I can deal with.  But then they get to the internals.  Gory stories about cutting here and cutting there, tumours as big as fists…bigger, bigger…like the curry pot almost.  Kitchen like autopsy room, I’m telling you.  Then they get on to the babies.  Any poor pregnant woman in that room going to throw herself off the top of the china cupboard, quick smart.  Water not breaking, weeks in labour, doctors flummoxed.  More cutting, cutting, and how many stitches you don’t want to know.  God forbid they start to show their operation scars. 
Finally its eating time, and what have they cooked us?  Lovely chicken curry, because we might be missing it.  How?  What chance missing it?  Everywhere we go, oh, you must be missing home food, have some nice curry. 

The ladies eat and then we sit, nicely, waiting for the Babus to finish their Black Label and their ‘one last bilo’, the final bowl of kava, and then their nice curry, and we dying here.  The wife trying not to go to sleep on thesofa, the mother-in-law more boring than Parliament, and the terribly clever daughters watching complete crap on TV.
At last we are leaving, and I hear you saying to someone ‘yes, how kind, we’d love to come to your place tomorrow and meet your wife and children, and maybe get some nice home-cooked curry.”  Another lovely evening, just like back home, eh?

So, tell me…..why you want to emigrate, eh?  Why the hell you want to emigrate?

Seona Smiles is a well known columnist and activist from Fiji. She has published a collection of her short pieces which she often performs to great acclaim at reading nights.