Tokoriki

A myna bird waiting for breakfast and a song at Tokoriki. Photo by David Lansing.

I think Penioni has decided to adopt me. Perhaps because I seem to be the only one at the resort by myself. This morning I pulled myself out of the ocean (I love going for a swim just as the sun comes up), wrapped a towel around my waist, and plopped down in one of the wicker chairs around the pool for breakfast. Before I could ask Niumaia for a pot of coffee and some fresh fruit, Penioni had pulled up a chair across from me. As if we’d arranged to meet for breakfast this morning. Which I’m pretty sure we didn’t.

It was odd. He didn’t say anything. Just sat down and folded his hands in his lap, staring down a myna bird, an island interloper from India, sitting atop a chair and waiting for someone to ignore their piece of toast long enough for him to make off with it. The bird, not Penioni. Penioni made a small hissing sound and the myna cocked his head in interest but refused to budge.

A couple of the boys in the water sports shack down below us on the beach, hosing down snorkel gear and pulling kayaks on to the beach, started singing. Penioni, locked in a blinking contest with the myna, joined right in. He sang carefully and with emotion. As if the two of us were in some sort of Fijian version of South Pacific and Rodgers & Hammerstein were directing him from the wings.

It was fantastic and upsetting for some reason, having a stranger sitting at my table, warbling like Rossano Brazzi, while I drank my coffee.

When the song was over and the boys went back to hanging up the wet suits to dry, I didn’t know what to do or say. I felt sort of embarrassed but I didn’t know if it was for Penioni or myself. Because the sudden silence was making me uncomfortable, I said, “Penioni, do you sing often?” What a stupid question.

But Penioni didn’t seem insulted. He shrugged. “All Fijians sing,” he said. “It’s what we do.” And then he got up and without saying so much as See you later, went and sat at one of the other tables around the pool, this one occupied by a young couple showing all the signs of being honeymooners (holding hands, glowing, guffawing when a myna bird stole their brioche). I felt certain that if Penioni broke out in song midway through their breakfast, they’d find it enchanting. And something they’d tell their children fifty years from now on the occasion of their Golden Anniversary. “We were on a little island in the South Pacific called Tokoriki where this little man who managed the resort—What was his name, Dolly?—would sit down with you at breakfast and just start singing like a song bird. Damnest thing we’d ever seen.”

And it was.

Is reading in a hammock suspended between coconut trees a wise thing? Photo by David Lansing.

Penioni, a heavy-set, balding manager at Tokoriki Island Resort, claps his hands and a young woman in a fuchsia pink sulu brings me a tall glass of island punch made from a blend of pineapple, papaya, and mango juice with a dash of grenadine. I pull out an airline-sized plastic bottle of lemon vodka from my camera bag and add it to the fruit juice. After several hours of transport aboard first a catamaran and then a speedboat, I have arrived at this, the only resort on Tokoriki, just in time for dinner.

Penioni directs me to a table near the edge of the infinity pool beneath—I swear to god—swaying coconut trees. So here I am, looking out at the fantastically blue water, wondering how often a coconut actually drops down on one of the dining tables by the pool. Just to make small talk, which I’m not very good at, I ask Penioni, who seems a little bit bored, what I should do tomorrow. He brings his hands up under his chin like a professor waiting for an unruly class to settle down, and says, wistfully, “There’s nothing to do here.” And then he shrugs the way Italians do when there’s simply nothing to be done about the situation. I don’t believe him, of course, but even if it turns out he is right, that would be just fine with me. A little bit of nothing sounds fairly enchanting at the moment.