The Book of Secrets (2 page)

It is good to have as guardian a former student, if one allows to slip by the occasional glimmers of contempt that show themselves in the gracelessness of a joke, the rudeness of unexpected familiarity, and gives due recognition to the genuine kindness and respect that are also there. The ambiguity of this breed of shopkeeper was brought home to me in the most startling fashion by Feroz one day, over tea in the shop.

“What is history, sir?” he asked.

Carefully, I pressed cup to saucer to stabilize them, and looked up and stared at him. The expression on the face of this former D-student: a smile composed equally of embarrassment and pure mischief.

“You taught history, sir. Can you write it?”

“You mean …” I began, groping in vain for some loose change in thought with which I could extricate myself as he pinned me with that look, apologetic, embarrassed, cunning.

“Let me show you something, sir. Come, sir.”

I followed him, into that famous backroom of Pipa’s day, thought then to harbour in its darkness all kinds of mysteries and evidence of shady dealings which the police could never lay their hands on. Now it was a bright fluorescent-lighted room, shelves of shoeboxes covering the walls, the sharp smell of vinyl and rubber and fresh packing filling the air. There was a table in the
middle, covered with a freshly wiped, gleaming plastic sheet of a white-and-red checkered design. On it was an object, distinctly foreign to the scene, and the purpose, I sensed by the expectant stillness of my companion beside me, of our entry into this former hideaway. It was an old brown leather case, the kind used to protect passports in former days.

“Take a look at it, sir.” He took a step forward, leaned over and flipped it open, and stepped aside for me. I went to look at the book that was now exposed.

A faint odour exuded from it with the turning of the pages. It had seen some very dirty places — and what place more fittingly dirty than Pipa’s dark backroom.

“I found it in the store, sir,” said Feroz behind me.

What value could the old miser Pipa have attached to this book, I wondered. Did it come with the junk he gathered patiently over the years and sold in his crowded shop? Had this single item simply, by accident, been left over, missed the fate of the numerous pieces of paper that wrapped spices or started wood fires? Or had it been deliberately saved?

I turned to look at Feroz.

“Is it important, sir?” he said anxiously, goading the historian in me.

“It could be,” I answered.

In the last decade and a half, many relics saw the rubbish piles of this city, as people in a frantic rush to seek a new life abroad thought little of throwing reminders of the old one away. Passports, driver’s licences, books of every kind, magazines, letters, handwritten manuscripts — all rotted among unpicked garbage or met the flames or were auctioned off as scrap. Later there were fervent but mostly futile attempts to salvage these pieces of jettisoned lives.

“Tell me, where — how — did you find it?” I said to Feroz.

But at this point a servant came to call him. A consignment of shoes had arrived in the store, the Zanzibari blackmarketeer was
waiting to be paid. Feroz turned to go, saying to me, “Later.” I hurried out with him, taking the book. Seeing it clutched under my arm, he stopped. “I have to look at it carefully,” I explained. I promised to guard it with my life. There was no time to argue. The anxiety on Feroz’s face as he extracted the solemn oath from me was a thing to ponder.

It was a diary. A 1913 edition, published by Letts, and of the “Explorer” variety, which could be used for the following year, presumably by those confined to those regions of the globe with limited access to amenities. Five by eight inches, it allowed for three days a page. The cover was soft board, beige with black type, except for “Explorer” flourished diagonally in large red italics. The endpapers were covered with advertisements of the day — Indo-European Telegraph Company Ltd.; Royal Insurance Company; Eno’s Fruit Salt — “A Pleasant Way to Health Before Breakfast, The Natural Way.” There followed two pages with the sunrise and sunset times for 1913 in Capetown, Bloemfontein, Bulawayo, Pretoria; postal rates to South Africa; cable rates; and 1913 customs tariffs to South Africa.

After this information came a clear page, inscribed with the owner’s name and address in the centre:

and the first part of a Latin inscription: “at nos hinc …” the rest was stained and illegible.

Inside were brittle, yellowed pages, encrusted with open, dry capsules of cockroach eggs; insect remains, thin like fossils, releasing the pungent dust of their own decay. Several pages were torn off, many were stained; there were sections which had been neatly burrowed through by silverfish.

The ink was faded, the writing often unreadable. Much of it
consisted of typical diary entries against dates — scrawled, cryptic, the obligatory reminders or notes (for example, the entry for 27 February, 1913: “Crossed the equator. Parades, dinner, ball; weather wonderful so far …”). And then, intermittently, there were neater long journal entries written in sloping hand. I gathered that Corbin must have been quite a letter-writer, and probably shared his observations with correspondents.

Sir Alfred Corbin was, of course, Governor of Uganda in the late 1940s, after which he retired from the Colonial Service, though he was called upon later to advise the British government on the independence of that and other African colonies. He had served a long time in the British administration in the area, and even worked on the policy that went under the name of Indirect Rule. The diary in my hands was a record of an early posting, one forgotten fragment of an addendum to a well-documented history. And as such, of what interest to me, these personal outpourings, the scribblings of a young colonial officer, drafts of letters to mother or father, or perhaps notes for his eventual memoir?

This is how I have come to picture him: seventy-five years ago, in 1913, the only white man in an African village, sits at a rough, crooked wooden table in his rough wooden house. Above him, from a beam, hangs a pressure lamp. Outside, pitch darkness interspersed by the light of a few lamps and candles. The man at the table puts down the glass he’s sipped from, picks up his fountain pen, and writes in his diary. By this writing he begins to weave the thread that will connect to me.

Even before I began to pore over Corbin’s entries which would subsequently so grip me, I could not help but feel that in some mysterious manner the book touched our lives; was
our
book. There was, I felt, much more there than the contents of its pages; there was the story of the book itself. Written here amongst us, later perhaps hidden, and now found among us, it
must have left a long and secretive trail, a trail that if followed would reveal much about the lives and times it witnessed, and tell us why the diary finally surfaced where it did.

I remember my moment of decision exactly — this book, this burden before me. It had, as I sat contemplating it, the aspect of a portal. Should I enter, give to it my retired days? … I wrote a letter, to a very dear former student from whom I had received a postcard a few months before, and proceeded to meet a librarian and coax him to open a certain locked cupboard at the Dar es Salaam Library. I entered headlong into an engagement with the book.

I would — I told myself — recreate the world of that book. I would breathe life into the many spirits captured in its pages so long ago and tell their stories; and I would revive the spirit of the book itself, tell
its
own story. And so I would construct a history, a living tapestry to join the past to the present, to defy the blistering shimmering dusty bustle of city life outside which makes transients of us all.

In the weeks that followed I discovered the dark, passionate secret of a simple man whose life became painfully and inextricably linked with that of an English colonial officer. I saw that the ephemeral tie between them — the tragic young woman Mariamu — would become the most tenacious bond of all. I saw an old uncertain world give birth to a new, no less fragile one, and I followed the trail of this book, from the pen of a lonely man to the obsession of another, from ancient lives caught up in imperial enterprise and a world war to these, our times: and finally to myself, and the hidden longings of my past. At the end of it all, I too lie exposed to my own inquiry, also captive to the book.

“We seem to have sighted Mombasa at last,” wrote Alfred Corbin in his diary on 1 March, 1913, aboard the German vessel
Prinzregent.
He concluded his brief entry with a reminder to himself to order more pipe tobacco the next time he wrote home. After that he strolled out on deck. Passengers had crowded on the starboard side to gather in the new vista which presented itself to eyes long weary of the sea and the ghostly distant shapes of land.

How fitting, he thought then of this sight of Africa, that it should greet you so gently; how melodramatic and unaffecting if it were to show you straight away its power and wildness, its strong colours, the pulling force. It was in order to be impressed, to confirm his schoolboy expectations fed on tales of famous adventurers and explorers, that he had strained his eyes seaward ever since they’d left Marseilles with a fresh load of passengers from the British Isles. He himself had boarded the
Prinzregent
at Hamburg. It was the sixteenth day at sea, the ship had turned southwestwards to round the island town and bring into view the town’s full glory in the sun. A sight that even then he knew he
would never forget. The coast of Africa, the harbour of Mombasa. Its modesty, the composed exoticism of its orientalness, stayed with you like the strong lines of a deceptively simple masterwork. White houses shimmered on a hill rendered lush green with vegetation. A fringe of palm trees decorated the shoreline, a white road came up to the beach where a restless waving crowd awaited. The waters were dark blue but choppy, the sky spotless that day. Even before they entered the southern harbour, dhows and bagalas hailed them, smaller craft hustled cheerfully alongside with expectations of business.

On the ship, his fellow passengers would have noticed a man of medium build and average height; he had fair hair and a thick moustache, droopy eyes. He would have been observed as being somewhat shy.

Alfred Corbin had spent his childhood days with governesses and in schools in Stockholm and Prague and Hamburg, speaking more of the languages of these foreign lands — at least in his youth — than he did his mother tongue. His father, Charles, after a stint at cattle farming in Argentina, had settled on a career in the Consular Service. The family had a house in Devon, and the only claim to distinction it could make was through relation to Sir George Corbin-Brown of the Punjab, and through a vague connection on his mother’s Scottish side to William Pitt’s war minister, Dundas. Of his two brothers, Robert was an officer in the Indian army and Kenneth was an Area Commissioner in Nyasaland. To start off his youngest son in a different direction, Charles Corbin found for Alfred a post at the Hamburg agents of the Union Mail Shipping Lines. This job was not without interest for Alfred — it was in Hamburg harbour that he first laid eyes upon natives of Africa, ship hands conscripted from the west coast of the continent — but Alfred was soon eyeing other opportunities. A chance came when he was returning from London to Hamburg via Paris.

Years later, in his published memoirs, he would describe how he was conscripted into the Colonial Service. In Paris he’d been told the undersecretary for the colonies, Mr. Winston Churchill, was resting in a local hotel, having returned from a trip to East Africa. On an impulse he went and presented his card at the hotel, noting his relation to Sir George. “If he is related to Kenneth Corbin, send him up,” came the reply. Mr. Churchill, it seemed, had met his brother in British East Africa (as Kenya was then called). In a room strewn with paper and filled with cigarette smoke, the undersecretary, in the midst of a late breakfast, accepted Alfred Corbin’s application for a job, which would require from him, as he put it, “his whole life and soul.”

Even though it would be a few years later that he took up the offer (having become involved with a woman in the meantime), Alfred Corbin would always consider it propitious to have been initiated into the Colonial Service with these credentials, whose value would grow with the years. And he never left the Service until he retired.

2 March, 1913

We were taken into dugout boats, called “ngalawas,” and were rowed to the shore by boisterous boatmen who sang in clear voices to each other. As soon as we stepped on solid ground we were completely taken over by a surge of porters wearing that white Swahili cotton smock so popular here and called “kanzu.” Cranstone the surveyor, who had been chattering so tiresomely since Port Said about Mombasa, the eye in a socket, the leafy hiding place where Sinbad must surely have wandered through and perhaps seen the roc’s egg, began muttering now about the den of forty thieves, saying “apana-apana, enda-enda” and more. Two Indian policemen in enormous beards and red turbans watched the scene calmly; a group of scantily dressed Indian men searched nervously among their arriving compatriots whom we had picked up in Aden. Many of the Europeans on the boat were met
or knew their way about. It was unbearably hot and noisy, the clamour contagious and unsettling. As I looked around me uncertainly, the focus of a cacophony of solicitations, an Indian man pushed through the throng and introduced himself with a restrained smile.

“Sir, please allow me,” he said in a soft voice.

Gratefully I relinquished my holdall to this short dark man who was wrapped in a black tunic with a shawl around his neck. He said his name was Thomas and would I follow him. He had a rather musical voice and the curious habit of moving his head from side to side as he spoke. He turned around and I followed, keeping my eye fixed on the back of his glistening black head. It took me the rest of the day to realize that the man was perhaps attempting to muffle his cold with the silly-looking woolly shawl, for there was a faint whiff of camphor in the air …