The Shark God by Charles Montgomery Page B

the ritual by the earliest Presbyterian missionaries, who noted that the Tannese followed each gulp of the drink with an invocation of a spirit or a prayer meant to activate the power of a magic stone. The missionaries did not like that at all. They banned kava consumption for several decades before John Frum came to challenge them.
    No women were permitted in the nakamal . I watched the men whittling away at clumps of kava. They halfheartedly scraped off the dirt and woodiest skin from the root, which looked like ginger, only fatter. Then they cut it up into bite-sized portions and handed them to teenage boys, who waited like dogs for table scraps. The boys chewed and the men fed them more bits of root,until their cheeks ballooned like singing frogs. Then one of the boys spat the contents of his mouth onto what looked like a hankie (which seemed appropriate, given the way he cleared his nose and horked once his chewing was done). The blob of masticated root looked like a cow pie. Isag Wan held the cloth and chewed root over a coconut-shell bowl. Someone poured water over the fibrous mass, then the chief wrapped the cloth around it and squeezed until the juice dripped into the bowl. They kept pouring and squeezing until the bowl was full of mud-gray slurry.
    The chief drank his shell in three quick gulps. Then he turned and spat a great bouquet of spray toward the forest. As he was spitting, he made a sound somewhere between a groan and a yawn.
    â€œThe chief is saying his tamavha: he is praying,” whispered a young man who had settled in next to me. His name was Stanley. A single knot of dreadlocks sprang from the back of Stanley’s head. He wore a T-shirt with a cartoon mouse on it. The mouse was drinking tequila.
    â€œAnd now it is your turn,” Stanley said, smiling encouragingly.
    Everyone in the nakamal turned to watch me. I rose and was approached by a lad with red paint smeared across his face. He looked like one of the castaways from The Lord of the Flies . Snot oozed from his nostrils in vibrant shades of green and yellow. He cleared his nose and swallowed, then he handed me what I considered to be an unfairly large coconut shell that was close to overflowing with the muddy brew.
    â€œJust like the chief did,” said Stanley. “All in one go, and then you say your tamavha. ”
    The kava looked like dirty dishwater, tasted of mud and cloves, and acted like anaesthetic. My tongue went numb even as I chugged my shell. I spat into the forest, barked “God help me,” then peered into the shadows. After two more shells, the numbness spread to my stomach and my head. All was well. The worldhummed quietly, and I tried to place the source of this newfound feeling of transcendence.
    Scientists have been researching the pharmacology of the Piper methysticum shrub for more than a hundred years. Researchers in the 1980s found that the pepper’s root contains compounds with anticonvulsant, muscle relaxant, and local anaesthetic effects. There may also be psychoactive constituents, but nobody seems to agree on whether or not kava contains enough to get drinkers good and high, in the clinical sense.
    Kava is consumed in pockets right across the South Pacific. But nowhere is the drink said to be as powerful as on Tanna. That could be because Tanna is the only place where the root is prepared by chewing, rather than pounding or grating. Researchers have suggested that the root’s active ingredients, whatever they are, have low rates of water solubility. Saliva might act as an emulsifying agent. In other words, all that chewing by all those snot-nosed virgins might actually release the kava’s true power.
    The night air was wrapping itself around me like strands of gauze. I sat on my grass mat and proclaimed the goodness of it all to Stanley. It dawned on me that he was a dear, dear friend of mine. “Everything is purple. Life is purple, really,” I told him. “Don’t you