A Fiji Hindi and English podcast, gathering the stories our elders carry.
Recorded in the language they were lived in, translated so they never get lost.
The Name
Paal
Back home in Fiji, when the fertiliser, flour or sugar sacks were emptied, we cut them open and stitched them together into a mat. We called it a paal.
You laid it on the floor, and that was where the evening happened - where the tea was poured, where kava was mixed, where the old people talked, and where the stories passed from one lap to the next. Something made from what was left over became the place a whole family gathered.
Paal isn't a place you visit. It's the surface you sit on, together.
Why Now?
Every week, a whole world goes quiet.
When an elder passes, a village goes with them. A crossing, a harvest, a language of jokes no dictionary holds.
Paal exists to sit with them while they're still here.
We record in Fiji Hindi, because that's where the story lives whole - the humour, the idiom, the feeling. Then we translate it into English, so a grandchild who never learned the language can still hear their grandmother's life. The first keeps it true. The second lets it travel.
