pn832. A Tribute of Professor Brij V Lal (1952-2021) by *Rajendra Prasad in Auckland

Brij Lal

It would perhaps be wrong to claim Professor Brij Vilash Lal as one of us because he was exceptional; a gifted writer and thinker beyond the ordinary. Such people are gifted for a purpose and he fulfilled his purpose, leaving behind a nation in disbelief and a community in shock and sorrow. 

Cruelly exiled to Australia in 2009 by the Fijian Government for being a threat to national security and peace, he spent the rest of his life struggling to understand the cruel dénouement of his right to return to the land of his birth. In his meditations, he melancholically remembered the village of Tabia in his writings where he was born and to which he was inseparably attached. The childhood memories of the rustic village and its undulating hills perhaps drew him in its arms every day during the exilic years, as he confessed the cries of his longing heart, “Home is where the heart is!” 

Rajendra Prasad

The Tabia boy had left but Tabia in the boy could never be separated. The exilic years were cruel, inhumane and undeserving. Many of us now settled abroad, live with similar sentiments. We left Fiji but Fiji in us lives but differs in intensity – some like Professor Lal, including me, the departure from Fiji became an enduring wound that time cannot heal. In the recall, there is pleasure swathed in pain. I recapture here my lamentation for my Vaqia village in Ba, as I described in my book, Tears in Paradise – Suffering and Struggles of Indians in Fiji 1879-2004 –