Copyright © 2016 by Thomas Gangale
Denzel Tongilava, Bette Tongilava, and Roxanne Tongilava
There are few intersection street signs in Tonga, and those few are confined to the central business district of Nuku'alofa, the capital city. Also, obviously, it wouldn't be useful to assign numbers to the houses to unidentifiable streets, so there are none. I noticed this as soon as I arrived in Tonga, and when I mentioned it, I was told that the government was working on it, just one of the many apocrypha I have heard here. This might make it difficult to give directions to someone, especially the emergency services dispatcher on the telephone, were it not for all of the churches and all of the Chinese-owned shops. There are one of each on practically every block. Also, there are the funeral feasts, several a day, for which someone's house gets decked out in black and purple bunting. Then there are the neighborhood halls, not as ubiquitous as the aforementioned landmarks, but useful landmarks nevertheless. So, using the churches, Chinese shops, funeral feasts, and neighborhood halls as points of reference, navigating the streets of Tonga becomes child’s play.
The following story occurred in the Fanga district outside a house at a T-intersection of Hala Taufa'ahau and some unnamed street. Across the unnamed street was a Free Wesleyan church (I suppose there were also slave Wesleyans long ago, and I suppose they had their own places of worship, but by the time I came to Tonga all Wesleyans were free as far as I know, except for those compelled to enjoy the government's hospitality at the Hu'atolitoli Hilton. Across Hala Taufa'ahau, the main road leading south out of the capital city, were several Chinese shops which were adhering to the well-known real estate maxim, "location, location, location." After all, if you can't get good directions, you had damned well better be in the best location to begin with so you don't need to suffer through the unprofitable tedium of looking for some inferior location. About a week after the occurrence of the story which I am about to relate, there was a funeral feast at a house across the unnamed street from the neighborhood hall in Fanga. Now you know precisely where this story occurred.
It was my habit, after a long day of researching and writing my dissertation on the international law of outer space, to take my four dogs for a leisurely walk to Rodney Tui'nukuafe's liquor store, which was situated on a back street of Fanga which neither Google Maps nor Mapquest identified. The dogs and I would get a little exercise, and I would unwind while enjoying a cold can of Tafi or New Zealand Lager on warm afternoon (as though there are ever cold afternoons in Tonga), and while also enjoying the companionship of my dogs. They were the descendants of some of the ten dogs which Sione P. Tongilava is said to have kept in his home years ago. Three of my dogs were born under Sione's house on Hala Taufa'ahau, where I was then living, and for all I know, their mother was also born under the house before we moved in, so, all four dogs were named Tongilava. Marilyn named the mother Bette Davis Tongilava, because before we befriended her, she was quite feral, and she would fix us with penetrating stares as she came and went while suckling her puppies under the house; she had Bette Davis eyes. Of the first litter to which she gave birth after we moved into the house, Denzel Washington Tongilava and Jadzia Dax Tongilava were the survivors of six puppies. Roxanne Ursula Tongilava was the survivor of a litter of two born about 13 months later. So much for the genealogy, which is an important field of knowledge on an small island where everyone is related one way or another. In any case, the dogs enjoyed our walks at least as much as I did, as these were their opportunities to travel as a pack.
On this particular day, Bette decided to take a major league dump in front of the chain-link gate to the house across the unnamed street from the Free Wesleyan church. I was standing in the late afternoon sun, and the yard beyond the gate was in the shade of a large tree. Also, some bushes had grown alongside the chain-link fence. So, I was taken by surprise when a Tongan man about my age suddenly rushed out of the gloom, brandishing a rock at Bette with aggressive intent. I stooped down, picked up a larger rock, lifted up myself, and said unto him, "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone."
The spiritual irony of this being spoken in such a context across the street from a church probably was lost on the man... well, maybe not. His eyes grew wide with outrage. "Fuck you! Pick up that dog shit!"
Given that I was studying for a doctorate in law, and being particularly interested in the Tongan law regarding dogs and other animals, I was reasonably sure that there was no poop scoop law. Also, I had reasonable doubt that Bette had defecated on his property; first on the grounds that where she had done the dirt was aligned perfectly with two power poles to either side some meters away, evidence of a public easement on the unpaved side of the street, and secondly, on the grounds that as legal technicality the only landowner in the Kingdom of Tonga was the King himself, and everyone else leased from him. Furthermore, why was this guy fretting about the droppings of one leashed dog when there were hundreds of free-roaming dogs in the neighborhood pooping with impunity anywhere the pleased and as necessity dictated? Lastly, the man had a puppy chained up to a metal stake in his yard, apparently welcome to poop in it at its leisure. I was confident that my case was solid, so solid in fact that I picked up the solid that had been in Bette's bowels only moments earlier, in full compliance with the man's request. I tossed it straight up into the air in a high arc, the proverbial straight poop; it broke up in flight, and the fragments landed not very far, about a meter downrange. I felt that this action was more expedient than engaging the man in a prolonged legal discussion.
His eyes grew even wider with even more outrage. "Fuck you! I'm going to shoot you!"
Where the hell did this guy think we were, the Wild West? I was from San Francisco, where you couldn’t get much wilder or more westerly and still be in the contiguous United States. This was not the first time that I had been threatened with a gunshot from a firearm nowhere in sight, and that was in California. Here in Tonga, there was no Second Amendment right to keep and arm bears; consequently, nobody had any bears, and the few Tongans who had firearms either had permits or they were Speakers of Parliament who mistakenly thought that they could get away with not having a permit.
"Excellent, "I said. "While you're getting your gun, I'll phone the police. I'll tell them that you just threatened to shoot me, which, if you cannot produce a permit, will constitute probable cause for the police to search your premises for an illegal firearm. How does that sound to you?"
"Fuck you! Get out of here!"
"When I'm inclined to," I agreed. "Meanwhile, I am a legal resident of Tonga, and this is a public street. I have every right to be here."
In any case, shortly thereafter I turned to continue my pleasant outing with my dogs. It was then that I became aware that, given that were shouting at each other across the street from the Free Wesleyan church, we had attracted a crown of onlookers. One of them approached me as I passed, "What's going on?" I gave him a synopsis. He shook his head. "Don't talk to him. He's a drunk." It was as plausible an explanation as any. I continued to walk my dogs along the same route we took every day except on Sundays, when I couldn't rest outside of Rodney's liquor store and nurse a beer for half an hour.
Two weeks passed before the same man and I chanced to sight each other again. He approached the chain-link gate and extended his hand over it in a gesture of friendship. "I'm sorry about what happened. I want it to be in the past."
I transferred a couple of leashes from my right hand to my left one, then I took his hand. "It's in the past. I try to never miss an opportunity to make a friend." We talked about our dogs for awhile.
Another week passed, and this time I waited at the gate while he stooped over the metal stake in the ground. I saw that he now had two puppies. His back had been toward me, but he turned and saw me as he rose, and he walked to the gate with a broken dog collar in his hand. I knew the problem all too well. The underdeveloped global south is a dumping ground for substandard products that the industrialized global north can't sell within its own sphere. Our dogs had gone through a lot of flimsy collars over the years until Marilyn found some excessively sturdy ones at (where else) a Chinese shop. These dog collars were so mil-spec that we joked that the Chinese must have designed them for chows serving with the People's Liberation Army. I told my new friend where to buy the collars, but when I got home and told Marilyn, she decided to go ahead and buy a couple of them the following day. The next time I saw my friend, I told him that we had collars for his dogs, but that because they were made for large dogs, we would have to drill extra holes in them so they would fit his dogs. Since then he has passed a cold beer over the gate to me on a couple of occasions.
It was far from an auspicious beginning, but that's how one makes friends in Tonga. Having failed in their plot to kill and eat Captain James Cook, the Tongans befriended him, so he called Tonga the "Friendly Islands."
The Hawai'ians ate him instead.
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