The Book of Secrets (24 page)

In the years of his childhood that he would actually remember, the war was already the stuff of legend. He had been taken to Moshi by then. He recalled men sitting outside mosques or
houses there, discussing positions, movements, and tactics, using twigs and stones on the ground, pondering outcomes as if over a game of chess. He played guns and armoured cars and planes in the streets. For many months there were the wounded without arms or legs or eyes, one Indian reputedly with a single testicle; another, a man with the top part of his head sliced off orange-fashion, as it was described. There were the boots and khakis and binoculars and mess tins and bullet casings and rifle parts and tires and belts and buckles and tiffin boxes and betel-nut crackers and shaving brushes and razors and tinned food that appeared on sale in all conditions. For many months in Moshi a favourite game of the street loafers would be to call out “Halt! Achtung!” in the market and watch the men who had worked as soldiers for the Germans stiffen reflexively, still showing that renowned discipline in spite of which they had lost the war.

He was a wonder child in Kikono, and later in Moshi. People pointed him out. Young girls in mosque, eyes dreamy with thoughts of marriage, would come to see him for themselves: the grey-eyed boy with fair skin, pointed chin, high cheekbones. The ideal-looking child they would wish for themselves. “Please don’t let his eyes change colour, Mama Khanoum, please don’t,” the maidens would plead, as if his guardian, Khanoum, the mukhi’s wife, had power over the boy’s looks. Finally, before some evil could befall — before some djinn took it in his heart to possess him, or someone cast devil’s eyes or put a jealous spell on him — she took Aku to a maalim for protection. The maalim tied a tawith around the boy’s right arm, a little cylinder case containing papers inscribed with Quranic ayats for protection; the mukhi his great-uncle tied a thread with prayers round his neck. And his eyes received thick smudges of kohl from Khanoum just in case.

Of Khanoum, who swore she would hold him close to her bosom even if God’s earth were to split apart under her feet, Aku would always remember a short black woman, who barely reached her husband’s shoulders. She would stand at a distance to
cast her eyes on him, and flash a smile. He would remember, too, the long arms and that engulfing hug that promised so much. Oddly, he also could never forget one story she told: how in her village two young men fought over a woman and one devoured the other’s ear. He laughed and laughed. Even when he was much older and as far from that town with the mbuyu tree as one could ever be, he would smile at the memory.

Of his mother, as a boy in Moshi he only knew what Khanoum had told him: she was her little sister who had died. His father he knew to have gone away and left him. Khanoum and Jamali were his auntie-mother and uncle-father, who over the months became simply Mama na Baba, Mother and Father, as they were for the other three children in the house.

How does a small town like Kikono die?

Even as the armies of General Smuts were trampling past on their way to victory over German East, Chagpar the dispenser, one of the original settlers of the town — as if forecasting the future — had offered his services to a medical corps and departed. Pipa, having buried his young wife, left his son with Jamali and Khanoum and took off, in the same direction, to Moshi to begin afresh.

Suddenly, with the armies gone, it seemed that not only the rest of the war but everything of import was happening somewhere else. Within months, Dar es Salaam had been shelled from the sea and was taken, and soon the war was over. In the times that followed, small Kikono, situated with such great promise between two railway lines, was forgotten. No new
ADC
came to administer its affairs and those of the neighbouring area. Newspapers from Nairobi and Mombasa were slow to arrive, rumours came faster; speculation grew — concerning booming business in the large centres, cheap properties to hold on to in Tanga and Moshi and Dar as the Germans and their allies lost all.

The mukhi, Jamali, desperately held on to his people, for a
time. It will soon get better, he promised. Remember, in the past we almost got township status. With strength of numbers we can petition for an
ADC
, call for new immigrants. Nothing has changed, he said; but all had changed. Over the months, family after family came to bid farewell.

There was a bitter row over custody of the boy Aku when Jamali’s sister, Kulsa, Aku’s grandmother, came to say her goodbyes. But the mukhi had status still as well as a letter from the boy’s father, who had left Kikono after the war and had remarried and gone on to Dar. Jamali had prevailed. As long as that railway coolie Rashid hung around his sister, he would never give her the boy, he said to her, creating a schism between them that would never be repaired. Aku’s grandmother and her husband, Rashid, slunk off Mombasa way.

The mukhi, who had been the first of the Indians to arrive in Kikono at the twisted mbuyu tree, who had seen his congregation grow from the twosome of himself and his wife, now saw it dwindle to himself and his family. Finally they too left for nearby Moshi, three years after the armies had gone that way.

They had taken to the Taveta road with two donkeys and a goat, a hand-pulled cart which could carry a few of them at a time, and a few porters. The twisted mbuyu raised a final protesting hand behind them, in the distance were the forest and the Mission hill, in front rose the mighty Kilimanjaro. The road, a dirt highway, was deserted. The war had left numerous scars on the land: rusting machine parts, piles of refuse reduced by the elements and scavengers, charred campsites.

At one point some Masai emerged from the roadside and stood watching them — tall and erect at the side of the road, with spears and shields in their hands — giving them quite a scare. As they approached, the Masai started chattering and motioning. The head porter of the party went over to them. “They want us to see something — or meet somebody — don’t know what, over there.” They went, scrambling onto the grass, two servants
remaining to guard their possessions. The Masai, bounding ahead of them, stopped at the bank of a dried water hole and pointed — a human skeleton. It was lying on its back, projecting outwards from the trunk of a young tree. It had the oddest look of having been dismantled, then put back together — the joints were not complete, the bones loose; and the head was placed upright against the base of the tree. This was a strange, eerie sight they never forgot. Who had taken the trouble of collecting the bones? How had the animals been kept away? What did it mean? And why had the Masai boys brought them here? The Masai were laughing now — perhaps the sight had become a joke for them which they had wanted to share. At another place they saw an abandoned vehicle in a dry riverbed, monkeys playing on it, having managed to bend a whole tree branch almost completely over it. They saw no bones about. They stood staring in silence at the wreckage for some time, then continued on their way. Of that journey, they would remember many things. The grunting of lions, the constant presence of hyenas spoiled on the remains of human warfare. The servants who accompanied them were armed with machetes and spears, Khanoum carried a club; the mukhi — lanky as a Masai, though a bit wobbly — walked with a spear and supplied comic relief. An impala gave them the run-around and they couldn’t kill it; they wouldn’t touch a dead giraffe. Finally one of the donkeys which was on its last legs was slaughtered. Their goat ran away, to its doom — if only it had known better.

Aku had been four years old then.

Aku remembered a holiday, a festival, when practically the whole town of Moshi went to the railway station to welcome the new District Commissioner. There were flags, banners pledging allegiance, and two bands; Europeans — the men in white suits and
sun-hats, the women in dresses and wide frilly hats — stood in front with the police; Africans in all manner of attire, kanzus, tattered trousers, buibui, khanga cloth, stood behind on one side; Indians in turbans and fezzes, suits, dhoties, and frock-pachedis, stood on another. Aku stood with the mukhi amongst the Indians as the train arrived and a stool was produced and a white man descended from the train and then assisted a white woman, a rare delicate creature, to do the same. The bands played, there was applause, and the
DC
and his wife waved. Then the
DC
inspected a police guard of honour, after which he and his wife made their way to the awaiting motorcar. As the
DC
approached where Jamali and Aku stood, the mukhi tugged at the boy’s hand and pulled him away.

The new District Commissioner was Alfred Corbin.

A year after that festival, the earth under Khanoum’s feet split open and her world tumbled. The mukhi, with whom she had presided over a town, who had taken her down the slopes of the Mission hill to his world at the mbuyu and made her mother to his people, died, a king in exile. In Moshi he had not had quite the same prestige, but there were enough who knew him. Jaffer Bhai was one of them, though also reduced in stature, having retired as the mukhi of Moshi. With what he could bring with him, Jamali had opened a general store with dreams of regaining his past glory. He might have done just that, carried his family through a generation of respectability. Instead, with his death his family turned overnight into paupers. The store was not the kind of venture a woman, and an African one at that, would be allowed to enjoy credit on; it collapsed, its original promise coming to nothing. Without her husband, or material means, Khanoum was ignored by the community that she had embraced so wholeheartedly. The status she had held was forgotten. And so she turned away from them, bitter and sad, but not defeated. She had an Indian boy in her keep and three half-Indian children of her own; she was their Mama. The fact that Aku was so much fairer than the others did
not seem to concern him, in the camaraderie of the streets where the sun tanned him and the dust covered everybody.

A poor widow sold what she could; Khanoum had her cooking, which she sold from her house. Her older son had left home, the other son brought in a meagre pay, and the third child, a daughter approaching marriageable age, helped her mother.

By the time he was six, a year after the mukhi’s death, Aku was picking balls at the Sports Club for the mzungus when they played tennis, and receiving tips. And he was offered work as garden “toto” at the large house of a European. He would go at nine o’clock every morning to a house behind the closed cemetery where there were many large trees. The memsahib would be sitting on the front steps, resting after her morning’s exertion in the garden — her face flushed, her pith helmet dropped beside her. The steps descended to a walkway that ran under a shady bower. There were many flowers and shrubs in the garden, of which the only ones he knew by name were the roses and sunflowers.

At first the boy did not understand the attention lavished upon a mere piece of ground covered with vegetation. Later he let his eyes roam discerningly over the garden and saw the clusters of golden yellow, the spears of white, red, and blue at the ends of long stalks, the pink and white ground cover, the thick large leaves like curtains and the numerous tiny leaves like lace, the difficult-to-maintain plants and the easy ones. He saw design in their timing and arrangement, and he felt a respect and affection for the garden’s creator, this ruddy woman with golden curls, a smile on her lips, who was prone to chatting to herself.

He went around with a watering can, swept clean the path, arranged the flagstones, chalked them after rains. He always got a glass of lemonade after work. Once, he and the woman had killed a snake together.

One Sunday there was a party at the Club. He helped arrange chairs and tables on the lawn, and laid tablecloths and carried
flowers. He ran in and out of the house conveying this and that, anything the panicky memsahibs demanded. The guests came in cars or on foot. Indians had been invited and came in two large groups, one of men, another of women, and they stood apart uncomfortably, huddled in their groups, watching the Europeans. The Europeans wore whites, looked pink and clean, their chatter crisp and starched. They sat down on the chairs. On the front tables silver trophies had been placed, polished that very afternoon, and so blinding in the evening light that some of the guests had to move their chairs. A man got up and made a speech, and the presentations began. The servants and the Indians at the back gawked. When the ceremony ended, sandwiches were served, and drinks. The Indians were concerned about ham and beef, and one of the mzungus came and talked with them. A little later a fresh tray was brought for them. “Cucumbers, bread, no harm here,” the men said, and ate, but the women were shy and soon left. A little later the men followed, also shy, and apologetic, it seemed, but once the men were outside the gates Aku and the other totos saw them positively trotting away and laughed.

It was dusk, grey and breezy, and kerosene lamps were brought out. The trees rustled, emitting large expansive sounds, and the mzungus were ready to go inside.