The Book of Secrets (18 page)

“Come here,” the missionary said sternly, holding the book and the valise under one arm. “What is your name?”

“Pipa, bwana.”

“Do you know the punishment for stealing?”

Khamsa-ishrin, the young man thought with dread, twenty-five strokes of the whip, pain and humiliation — the German punishment. Is this why I returned home?

“Mercy, bwana. I will not do it again …”

A German officer, having heard the ruckus, was approaching. Perhaps he had been fetched. All eyes turned towards him.

“Leave the boy to me, bwana,” said Livingstone quickly to his boss. “He is my responsibility.”

And Livingstone, pulling Pipa by the ear, took him aside and slapped him a few times on the face, saying, “You fool, you barbarian. Of which mother were you born … do you know the German could have your hands cut off!”

The German and the missionary walked away together. And the men who had watched the spectacle said, This old Livingstone may dye his hair, but what a man of the people. Weh, Pipa, go home now, open your shop, Indian. You are a lucky man.

When Pipa returned to Moshi it was January 1913, and, looking around, he knew this was no longer home. It had been twenty-two months since he left. But now he had the experience of a world inside him. What did this place amount to beside Tanga with its Kaiserhof, or Dar with its Government House, its monuments, its teeming streets, and visitors arriving daily from the ends of the earth? Where were the likes of Sheth Samji, who with a click of the fingers could command a community, to whom even the Germans paid respect? There was money in those places, opportunities to be grabbed, status to be bought. But he was here, in Moshi, and this was where he would start. The camel had opened his eyes, and he was home. And in the process of regaining his sight, he thought somewhat ruefully, he had almost lost his two hands.

His mother shared rooms, now, in a ramshackle house. She looked older and heavier. Her hair was greying, her hands, her
feet, looked coarse. She had let herself go. The Greek doctor had left town and she now cooked for an Indian man and did some housework for him. His sister, Zaynab, had gone away with a merchant.

A sheet of torn tent canvas held up by poles was the first Pipa Store, selling cigarettes, matches, oil, tea, spices, and sugar.

There was an influential man in town called Hamisi the Arab. He had come from up north, Sudan. A tall and fair-skinned man of good looks, he always wore khaki trousers and tunic, over which he had a fine white cotton kanzu, and on his balding head would be a white Swahili kofia embroidered with light brown. He ran a noisy Quran-reading school every afternoon in his home, from where the alif-beh-teh chants of the boys rang out into the street. Three of the boys were his own. He was friendly with the commandant, Bwana Rudolfu, and it was rumoured that either he spoke German or the commandant spoke Arabic, or both. On Thursday nights the Karimiya Sufi order met in open secret — not just anybody could go — on the second floor of a prominent local building to discuss hadiths and whisper holy syllables. Hamisi would take the commandant to these meetings. There were many things whispered about the Sufis, including the wisdom of not engaging in whispers about them. The young men among them were particularly fierce — they took to the streets in their kanzus on Friday afternoons, when they wore green fezzes on their heads.

One day Hamisi stopped at Pipa’s shop and asked if the young man could get him some English pipe tobacco. He spoke in a gentle, kindly voice; his manner was unassuming. Pipa, quite taken aback at his presence, said, Yes, bwana, I will get it for you. Hamisi’s custom at Pipa’s became regular after that. He would
stop to chat after buying his tobacco or matches or sugar — a serious man yet friendly, with a distracted smile.

Pipa took pride in this friendship. It was a sign of his acceptance as a respectable even though young businessman of the town. With the benefit of this new patronage and its influence, his business increased. Every Friday Pipa sent a bag of dates to the Arab as a token of his appreciation. To demonstrate his newfound dignity he did not move into better accommodations — that would have been expensive and foolish — but instead enabled his mother to buy better clothes, to walk proudly in the streets; and he took her to the Shamsi mosque. As he had learned in Dar, you had to belong somewhere, have a people. Even Hamisi the Arab had inquired of him one day: “Who are your people?” And Pipa had had to hum and haw before saying, “The Shamsis.” After all, it was the Shamsis who had adopted him in Dar, taught him the tale of the blind camel and what could be learned from it. Hamisi had been satisfied. And so Pipa accepted, once more, this fraternity, whose network extended into towns small and large among the shopkeeper communities, each praying to the same God in the same fashion as their forefathers, scratching out an existence and future in Africa. Their chants and prayers sounded less foreign to him than to his mother, who dismissed all questions about her past, her origins, any people she might have had. They went regularly, every day, to the mosque at the edge of the Indian quarter, one half of a building owned by the local mukhi. It was a small community and it embraced them warmly. His previous reputation as a ruffian became an asset, because the mukhi in the town, Jaffer Bhai, lived in slight but real fear of assassins after the recent murder of a mukhi in a small coastal town.

Naturally, the question of the young man’s marriage arose, was quickly taken up by the community, for which he was grateful. Moshi had no eligible girls except for the two daughters of the mukhi, both young, and anyway reserved for the prestige of larger
towns. But mukhis have connections, too, and this one put his to use almost immediately.

One Friday night Jaffer Bhai detained his congregation, as he was wont to do for special announcements. All those who could moved backwards or sideways to find a wall to rest their backs against. When it came time for the mukhi’s announcements, the men would crack jokes and the women would get impatient. The mukhi was known for his impractical schemes and a tendency to lecture.

On this occasion, he stressed the great benefits for those living in the towns of Kilimanjaro to co-operate with each other. There were matters of trade, obviously, and employment of new or younger people and — he paused significantly — marriages and so on. As well, information could be exchanged regarding the methods of the governments on either side of the border. He announced a goodwill mission to Kikono, a new but growing town in the British area, whose own mukhi, Jamali, he knew to be a good man. He called for a delegation. Two men volunteered.

“How about you?” Jaffer turned to Pipa. “Would you like to explore opportunities there?”

The young man, not used to such niceties, blurted, “For how long? Is the town far?”

But, as the jolly Jaffer Bhai later explained to Pipa, “You naïve oaf! The mission’s specially for you! There’s a girl I want to show you in Kikono.” Which was what the young man was waiting to hear.

One July morning Jaffer and his three community brothers joined a group travelling to the Church Missionary Society station in Taveta. They spent the night at the border town and early the next morning set off for Kikono, arriving late in the afternoon of the following day. They were greeted like high dignitaries, escorted into town, and fed at a communal feast that had been prepared for their arrival.

The next evening, after prayers had been said, and as the congregation sat around in the mosque, the local mukhi, Jamali, gave a long welcoming speech and stressed the need for co-operation among neighbouring towns in much the same way that Jaffer had done in Moshi. Pipa looked furtively towards the women’s section. Jaffer had told him to watch out for the girl but had not described her. Pipa met one or two hostile looks and turned away, yet he thought he had caught sight of her, the girl who had been selected for him by his elders. She had a narrow face and longish nose, looked a little lost, just as he imagined he himself did. But she was pretty, he liked her, and his heart was full of excitement and hope. Then all kinds of apprehensions crossed his mind — would she approve? would her family approve? what would they demand from him? He did not even know what the custom was — and what if she did not approve of him: there were not that many girls around.… Mombasa had been hinted as a possible source; there was a Swahili girl in Moshi, daughter of one of his mother’s friends.

He yearned for the stability of a home, the embrace and warmth of a marriage bed; he hoped he would make a good father. Marriage put a successful end to youth: the religion proclaimed that, the community acknowledged that. With marriage you were finally accepted: the women came and talked to you, called you “bhai” — brother — and men treated you as one of them.

Later that night, as the women danced a garba, the Kikono mukhi, Jamali, pointed out the girl and Jaffer Bhai’s eyes lighted up in satisfaction as if he would marry her himself.

“Well? What do you say?” asked Jamali.

“Well?” Jaffer Bhai turned to Pipa.

“Well …” was all he could muster.

The older men laughed. “He’s fallen. We’ll take the proposal.”

Pipa was told that the girl’s name was Mariamu. She was
Jamali’s niece, and the proposal, to the girl’s parents, was a formality. An engagement was confirmed in Jamali’s house, where sherbet was served to the small Moshi delegation.

Pipa had, of course, not yet met the girl. Now at this ceremony his eyes met hers, briefly. There was hope in hers, an acceptance, perhaps a plea. His eyes lingered on her as she turned away. Had she found them sympathetic?

Jaffer Bhai and Pipa with their two other townsmen went home after an excursion to Mombasa, where they bought goods to take with them to sell. Items of glass and perfumes were in great demand, and khangas of the newest fashions, inscribed with a current proverb or riddle, for which women fought and clamoured in the shops. And of course they took dried fruit and halva for presents. From Mombasa they took the ship to Tanga, thence a train to Moshi. Their profits would pay for their journey and more.

“Don’t you think you should go to Kikono?” Jaffer Bhai said to Pipa.

Three months had passed since the engagement, when it had been agreed that a wedding date would be suggested by the bride’s people, but there had been as yet no word from Kikono. Instead, they had heard once through the grapevine that the girl had been unwell.

It was Friday night, the young man and his mother were guests at the mukhi’s. They sat with their host and his family outside the store, a lantern producing a dim glow around them and throwing flickering shadows on the ground. A girl sat at the open doorway.

“Have you heard from them, then?” said Pipa in response to Jaffer’s question.

“No. But you should use this occasion to go.”

The occasion was the October “happiness” to celebrate the community’s founding in India.

“Go and find out what the matter is. If the girl is sick you should know. If not, what is holding up the wedding?”

“Will you come with me?” asked Pipa.

“No,” Jaffer said. “I can’t. But be a man and go by yourself. Tell them you bring greetings and presents for the festival, and you’ve heard that the girl has been unwell. They’ll understand. And don’t come back without fixing the wedding date — remember, insist on it.”

Pipa said he would go. He exchanged a glance with his mother, who had finally looked up. Without any real status in the community, she had no say in this matter.

Hadn’t he picked a date only to be told that they, his spiritual guardians and worldly fathers, would tell him when? But Jaffer Bhai had forgotten all that. “You’d better take charge, friend. There are all sorts of young men looking for pretty wives who might beat you to it.”

“There’s a group leaving tomorrow night for Taveta,” Jaffer said. “Go with them. And Hamisi has been asking about you — he has an errand for you. I told him you are a good boy, with a bride waiting under a mbuyu tree.”

The following afternoon Hamisi the Arab came round to Pipa’s shop.

“Ah Biba, how are you?”