The immigration and customs was a breeze. And we did not have checked in luggage. So, we were out of the secured area within four minutes of getting out of the airplane. I was looking for somebody waiting for me with my name on a placard. Instead, saw somebody with a Marriott board. I went to her and introduced myself.

She immediately took me to a very nice Marriott club ten yards away. I have never seen such reception from Marriott. They had a nice area with comfortable sofa to relax in with good coffee, snacks and some drinks. This is where we waited till our driver showed up. I told him – “Give me two minutes to finish my coffee”. He immediately responded – “We are in Fiji time now. No hurry. No worries.”

“Oh! yeah! I learnt how to say that when I was trying to pick up some Fijian words – Sega Na Leqa – right?”

That impressed Aseri (our driver) a bit. “Have you been to Fiji before?”

“Nope. Our first time. I learnt 25 words while doing my research. So, I am going to run out of words quickly.”

“No problem. But your pronunciation was perfect”.

I would not have learnt how to pronounce “g” correctly in Fiji if I had relied in English only. There is no exact letter/letters in English. In Bengali, the exact letter is “ঙ”. It is like “ng” in “sing” but a shorter one.

The “q” in Leqa is even more unintuitive – it is like “ng” but a lot more stress on “g”. It actually translates to Hindi “lenga” and pronounced that way too! In fact the whole thing is pretty close to Hindi “panga na lenga” !!