I cross the street to a taxi stand where eight or nine Indian men—Fiji is about half Indo-Fijian, the legacy of a British indentured labour policy—are gathered around a badly dented Toyota Corolla listening to a Shania Twain song. I have heard several Shania Twain songs on the radio since I arrived in Suva late yesterday afternoon, and, unable for the moment to recall having heard anything else on the radio, I begin to suspect that the nation pursues an all-Shania programming policy. It is something about Shania’s voice. Enormous, unprecedented change is possible, she says, improvements to your life, improvements you have been dreaming about but haven’t allowed yourself to mention. They are almost within reach.
The taxi driver has no idea what I am talking about when I mention the name Sujit Kumar, nor do the words “chicken man,” a moniker that is sounding increasingly lurid, ring a familiar note. He was locked up with chickens, I explain, in a chicken coop. In a chicken coop, he says. Schoolchildren wander along the roadside in unnaturally bright uniforms—canary yellow, orchid pink, lobster red. As we approach the address, a three-storey warehouse at the end of a badly potholed road of almost identical looking warehouses, the taxi driver mentions that he remembers something about a child in a chicken coop, but he’s not certain. He nods vaguely, repeating the word “chicken” with solemn emphasis, as if an image of the bird were gradually taking shape in a dusty back corner of his mind. “You came here from Canada for this chicken man?” he asks.
Elizabeth Clayton is described in most newspaper and television reports on Sujit Kumar as a behavioural scientist, but it was not behavioural science that brought her from Australia to Fiji in the mid-1980s. It was the prospect of building chesterfields for the international furniture retailer ikea. She heard about the Fiji timber industry and low labour costs while working as a business consultant in 1986. A few weeks later, she had an epiphany. She wanted to be “more productive in life,” to manufacture things, to escape the “parasitism” and giddy, free-floating capital of business consultation. She redefined herself overnight as a furniture manufacturer, rehearsing the phrase “I am a furniture manufacturer from Fiji” before taking ikea by storm. The behavioural scientist title apparently refers to her post-graduate career, when she taught psychology at an Australian college. She is the kind of woman who can say, “I am a furniture manufacturer from Fiji” or “I am a behavioural scientist” and, through the mystical power of declaration, convert herself into a furniture manufacturer or a behavioural scientist.
Clayton still lives in the sprawling five-room apartment she built on top of her old furniture factory, which is peopled these days by young, daintily uniformed schoolchildren and their evangelist educators. Halfway up the circular staircase to her apartment, overlooking the schoolroom, I notice a chalkboard drawing of a smiling child’s face beneath a rainbow-coloured message: Jesus loves you. The face is delicately rendered in pale oranges and pinks. Then, in cut-out paper letters on a fleshtone bulletin board: Feel His Love.
The long central room of Clayton’s apartment extends breathlessly from a compact, ikea-style kitchen across a roller-rinkish wooden floor to a spacious, ikea-style living room. It is “open concept” and it is mainly white. The room is the domestic expression of Elizabeth Clayton: brisk, austere, resolute. It is almost noon, Sujit’s lunchtime, and hectic last-minute preparations for his arrival are in full swing. In a few minutes, I am told, he will be returning from his morning program, a series of activities that run from stacking plastic blocks to practising his walking and climbing—the daily adventure of learning to be human. Linda, a chipper New Zealander who is producing what I take to be, from her fervent synopsis, an inspirational Christian documentary on Sujit, hops around the kitchen collecting bananas, mangoes, and scraps of bread. She passes the food, baton-style, to Anna, Clayton’s Fijian housekeeper, who scans the shelves for hiding places. Sujit, Clayton informs me, is an ardent and untamed diner: he will lunge for bananas; he will pounce on sausages. An arm, tucked innocuously into his chest in its “chicken” posture, might flutter and reappear with an egg, a piece of cheese, a mango. It happens fast, I am warned. Faster than you would imagine. I am reminded of early nineteenth-century reports of Victor the Wild Boy, the “natural” child who was “always looking for something to eat.” Astounded by Victor’s appetite for potatoes, one of the wild boy’s early observers concluded that “his mind is in his stomach; it is his life center.”
Sujit seems to appear out of nowhere. The hall door opens, there is a shuffling sound, and he is in the kitchen, inching forward with stiff, measured steps, herded around the room by Mohammed, a young Indo-Fijian man with baggy jeans and a nervous smile. Sujit’s full lips, slightly darker than the rest of his face, are pressed tightly together and pushed upward in a way that suggests both acute physical strain and flaccidity. This conjunction of agitation and inertia pervades his body: his stiff legs, his restless eyes, and his gnarled, fidgeting hands. His hands and feet, but particularly his feet, are extraordinarily small—the feet of a ten- or twelve-year-old boy. He is just over five feet tall, wearing knee-length blue shorts, blue plastic sandals, and a white T-shirt with the words “Bugle Boy” on it. For a moment I think that he might not look out of place in a sports arena or a shopping mall, but the illusion does not survive his next few tottering steps into the kitchen. His style of walking is fiercely purposeful and exploratory, as if his limbs might at any point adopt a new, hostile agenda. There is a disarming fragility about Sujit, as though the people clustered around him, guiding him, keeping him on track, were anxiously tuning a vast network of overhead wires and levers that hold his body together.
Unlike most nondescriptly sporty thirty-year-olds, Sujit seems strangely unaware both of himself and his surroundings, like an open-eyed, worried sleepwalker. There is a pervasive neutrality about him. His eyes look everywhere and nowhere, dashing from object to object and person to person as if to ensure that things aren’t closing in on him. He looks at people in much the same way that he looks at chairs or lamps; his eyes glide over faces or pause briefly, but rarely make contact. The contorted fingers of his right hand are cupped in his left hand and clasped tightly against his chest in what is frequently described as a “wing” or “chicken” position.
According to workers at the Old People’s Home, he has always held his arms in this position and he is clearly agitated when Clayton takes hold of his hands and lowers them to his sides. “Good boy, Sujit,” she says. “That is how you hold your arms.” His eyes, which have been circling the room in jittery rolling sweeps, drop down to his arms, then settle on Clayton’s face. It is the first time he has made eye contact since entering the room. “Good boy, Sujit,” Clayton says, tapping her finger against his lips and making a rumbling “brmmm . . . broommm” sound. “That is how you hold your arms, Sujit.” But Sujit doesn’t look convinced. He has the wearily accommodating look of a trained bear, teetering on his back paws, waiting for the stunt to end. He expels a rushed breath through his nose and resumes his shuffling approach to the kitchen counter.
Then he pulls an unexpected move, throwing himself sideways and grabbing a stray banana. The kitchen erupts into chaos as Elizabeth, Mohammed, Linda, and Anna each struggle to separate a fiery and intransigent Sujit from his prize. At the centre of the tempest, Sujit is grimly defiant, his wild eyes trained on the banana he is clutching against his chest. He is clicking his tongue furiously against the inside of his mouth, making the staccato sound that is typically employed in the feeding of birds. He makes this clicking noise, I am told, when he is anticipating food. It seems to point, along with his tucked arms, his now-broken habit of sleeping in a squat, “perching” position, and his impulses to “roost” and to “peck” at his food, at his long-term confinement in a chicken yard.
Elizabeth proposes a compromise: Sujit may keep the banana if he eats it in an orderly, civilized manner, allowing Anna to first peel the fruit, then cut it into pieces. Only a few months ago, Elizabeth explains, Sujit would eat bananas whole and unpeeled, cramming them into his mouth as though rivals, hungry and ruthless, were waiting to pounce. The institutions of cutting and cutlery are still new to Sujit, who ate at the Old People’s Home by tipping his plate onto the floor or mattress, lowering his head, and either “pecking” at his food or hectically filling his mouth with his hands. When he takes his seat at Elizabeth’s counter, a very different routine unfolds, one that nudges the dining experience from the laws of nature to those of culture.
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