Just call Ma

Seymour Drive is the other SPCA house. No one has been living there since the last vet left so Deb and I were given the keys to check the place out, see if we might want to move in there. With Deb away on a vet clinic I set out alone one Sunday morning to case the joint.

The bure family (caretakers who live in an attached house) waved as I walked up the drive and greeted me like an old friend. They invited me in for a cup of tea and five hours later I was still there, talking. That’s what happens when you sit on a straw mat in Fiji.

Ma made boiled egg and potato curry while her husband Manu, a policeman, told me all the stories of his life. Ma’s cousins dropped by with fresh bread and invited Deb and me to feast with their family one Sunday. Ma told me to call her whenever I didn’t feel like cooking. “Just call me and say, ‘Ma, I’m coming for dinner,’” she said. “And then you come. Even if we only have tea that day, we will drink it with you.”