The Book of Secrets (25 page)

As Aku was scurrying off with a liquor bottle a voice behind him said sharply, “Simama!” Stop!

The boy stopped, cringing, afraid of a scolding, even a cuff, and turned to look back. It was the European who had arrived on the train, the
DC.
He was the man who was the guest of honour, who had given out the trophies earlier. He had a thick moustache, kindly twinkling eyes. He was not very tall, carried his white helmet in his hand; his thin hair was combed flat. Beside him was the boy’s memsahib and a tall young man. The woman spoke to the
DC
, who listened while staring at the boy. Then he came forward towards Aku.

“Kuja,” come, the
DC
said in his English way, then stopped, and hesitantly the boy walked towards him.

“Jina lako nani?” What is your name? The man had bent down to speak, to look at the boy.

“Akber.”

The man looked long and hard at him, into his eyes, until they hurt and he brushed them with the back of his hand.

“Baba yako nani?” Who is your father?

“Mukhi Jamali,” the boy said.

“Yuko wapi?” Where is he?

“Amefariki.” Dead.

And so Aku told him about the mukhi his uncle-father, and his auntie-mother, Khanoum.

The next morning Khanoum received a chit from the
DC
, brought by a messenger on a bicycle. At two o’clock, therefore, after lunch and rest, she went to see the
DC
at the government district office. Compared to what Bwana Corbin had been used to in Kikono, this was a palace: a large white building with an askari on guard outside. Another askari stood in the long corridor outside the
DC
’s office. Inside, the
DC
sat behind a large desk, behind him a window with a grille. On a wall was the photograph of King and Queen.

As she entered he looked up from the papers on his desk, put down his pen, and stood up. She stopped in her tracks, bewildered, intimidated at the change — in circumstances, in him. He looked cleaner, heavier, and imposing.

“How are you, Mama Khanoum? Sit down … please.”

She sat across from him, silent.

“It’s been a long time …” he said.

“Ai. Much has passed.”

“Yes. How is the family? … I heard Bwana Mukhi —”

“Passed away. It is as God wishes, isn’t it?”

“I am sorry to hear that. Polé sana.”

“And you, bwana?”

He told her he had been in Mombasa, then he had gone with the victorious army up to Wilhelmstahl, and stayed there for some work; then he was
DC
in Tanga. Later he had gone on leave and got married in England to a girl he had met in Nairobi (he nodded towards the framed photograph on his desk). He had returned to Tanga, then was posted to Moshi.

She accepted some water. How things had changed. He had been a shy guest in her home, once. He had been lonely. He had sometimes come to their home on a pretext and chatted with her husband. And the mosque had always fascinated him, he would peep longingly inside when on his evening rounds. Then there had been the incidents. First with the maalim, then the wedding. Mariamu had made him happy working in his house — that was her husband’s idea, a stroke of genius he thought until it became a curse of the devil. All that, had been. Now they were in a big town. He was its ruler, with a beautiful young queen. And she, Khanoum, was a woman without a husband. She threw a glance at the photograph of his wife, a bright-looking girl with fair hair. The pose was stylish, the woman arching herself back and leaning sideways.

“I heard about you from the boy —” he said.

She nodded. “He told me. I didn’t know it was your house he worked in.”

“Mama Khanoum …” he began cautiously, searching for words. “I am deeply sorry to bring this up, but … I learned from government reports that Mariamu had been killed in Kikono. Please accept my sympathies …”

“Thank you.”

“Who killed her — did the family have any suspicions …”

“No,” she said. “There were many strangers about. But the matter is finished now.”

“And the boy —”

“He is hers. Akber — we call him Aku.”

He waited, then asked, “And Pipa — what of him?”

“In Dar es Salaam. He married again and gave the child to us.”

She was staring at him and he became uncomfortable.

“If I can be of assistance, Mama … perhaps to help send the boy to school …” he said tentatively.

Proud woman that she was, she declined. “I have been remiss,” she said. “Only, I have other children too. But I shall send the boy to school.”

When she returned from the government headquarters, she told Aku not to take up odd jobs. And she herself found work in a European home, assisting its mistress with housework. She never met the
DC
again. Soon he went away, to Dar es Salaam, she heard, and another one took his place.

When she made inquiries at the Indian school, the elders of the Shamsis came to see her. Would she like to give up the boy? they asked. There were one or two Indian families who would oblige. The boy was good-looking and hard-working.

No, she told them, the earth under my feet has split open, but I shall not take charity and I’ll not let the boy go. I am the wife of a mukhi, who left Aku in my care in the absence of the child’s parents. I, too, have been leader of the community, looked after its welfare, helped run its mosque, buried its dead, welcomed new arrivals, nursed and fed the sick, cooked for its festivals, and danced and wept with the rest. So why do you come to harass me now that this husband is dead? Does this black self lessen in value now that its brown partner is gone? Has my soul lost anything, or my honour? Eti, have my abilities as woman and mother been diminished?

All arguments, she knew, were in vain. It was only a matter of time before her heart would be wrenched.

One day two Indian women came to see her. They were local women — Khanoum had seen them both before — middle aged and with the bearing that comes of status. They spoke clearly.
After the greetings, and refusing refreshments, one of them said, “We’ve come to see Pipa’s son. The father pines for him and wants news of him.” To explain this request, she added, “We have a letter from him … if you want to see it …”

Khanoum declined, and called the boy to meet the guests.

For two days they took him out on walks, talked to him. They bought him things, fed him. They told him about his father from whom he’d been separated and from whom he was now being kept away, no doubt due to the bad intentions of those who wanted to use his labour. “Look at you,” they said, “just like a European. You have a great future, your father is rich.”

One of these two “aunts” was on her way to Dar and would take him to meet his father.

Eight-year-old Aku was excited by the prospect of a rich father in Dar es Salaam. But he loved his Mama Khanoum too.

“Go,” she told him. “Go and be with your father. You have a future with him. But don’t think you’ll be rid of me, you! Mama Khanoum will come to be with you …”

A few days later he climbed into the train with one of the women and went away. He would never see Mama Khanoum again.

For Pipa, the closing of the war brought a tragedy that marked the end of one life and the beginning of a new one in a world that had changed.

The day after he discovered his wife dead, Pipa and the community buried her in the little graveyard in Kikono. There was no civil government in town to investigate her murder; no witnesses were sought, no rewards offered, no evidence gathered. The Shamsis assumed that a marauding soldier had violated and killed the young wife, and — too conveniently in the eyes of the bereaved husband — had dropped the matter. They were a peace-loving people not in the habit of seeking vengeance. They could take comfort in the thought that Mariamu had moved on to a better life in the hereafter.

In a subtle, and to them compassionate, way they had so involved the bereaved husband in the rites and ceremonies of burial, that it was only afterwards that he could be alone with his grief. He had grown to love his wife. He felt cheated, felt her memory somehow violated by the quick resolution in the matter
of her murder. But his elders had ruled; and there was no other authority — save the military, which he feared — to which he could turn. The town of Kikono now held for him the bitter reminder of a happy beginning cut short. Within days, as soon as the British armies had finally broken through into German East Africa, Pipa set off for his home town of Moshi. He left his young son, Aku, in the care of the mukhi and his wife, Khanoum, until such day when he could take care of him.

When Pipa arrived in Moshi on the heels of the victorious British forces, he was immediately offered a bride by his old patron Jaffer Bhai. The girl was none other than Jaffer Bhai’s youngest, Remti, whom Pipa had watched growing up in her petticoats. Remti, contrary to the meaning of her name, “mercy,” declared what most girls of her day would have agreed with, and something which she was most certainly coached to utter: I don’t want the child of “that woman” in my home.

Children of a previous marriage polluted the new one. In most cases, however, some conscientious family member did the pious duty, for to adopt orphans is a great virtue. The mother or father would then take care to stay away, in another town. The price exacted by the new marriage, the abandonment of one’s children for the sake of a new wife or husband and another brood, was seen as a necessary evil. Faced with this condition to his marriage, Pipa wrote a long letter to Jamali and Khanoum, asking them to keep the child.

Pipa was home now, yet lived in fear. He was a marked man, known both to the agents of Maynard and to the allies of the Germans; any of them could come to call on him as they had done in Kikono. He lived near the place where he had once run his shop, where Hamisi had come to buy English tobacco. In a way it was that tall, handsome Arab who had got him involved with Fisi; he thought of how the evil Englishman had betrayed Hamisi, who had been hanged by the Germans. Pipa was not the one who had
passed on the betraying message, but in the eyes of Hamisi’s followers his association with Fisi made him guilty. He saw Hamisi’s children in the street sometimes, and once, through Jaffer Bhai, sent a gift of money to the widow. It was promptly returned. A young man in a white suit and with a stern face had asked for him at the door and peremptorily placed the envelope of money in his hands, without saying a word. He had worn the long green fez with the insignia of the Sufi order.

Pipa had come to town bearing another burden: a white man’s intimate thoughts, memories, pains, committed to words in a diary, though he did not have the key to this illicit treasure, could not decipher it, did not have the language. He had hidden the book well, wrapped in canvas, inside an old trunk. The pen which had come with the book he kept with him.

He desperately wanted to get away, to Dar, to make a new beginning in that bustling city in which he had seen so much promise once. All kinds of opportunities would be opening up there. Even as preparations for his wedding were taking place, news came of the city’s capture from the sea by the British.

Pipa was given a traditional wedding, regular in all respects. As Jaffer Bhai told him, “You have nothing to fear, she’s my own daughter.” It was as if his old patron was offering him his own daughter as replacement for damaged goods. But the memory of silent, beautiful Mariamu lingered, a cloud over the exciting event that was the wedding, casting a shadow that would only deepen.

Remti was a small figure of a girl, with thick wavy hair, full of mischief and vitality. She could cast seductive looks, as Pipa found, but she was practical and calculating. He had found a good match. In a larger town her prospects would have been brighter, but trapped in Moshi by the war, her choices were close to nil, until Pipa arrived. All this was no doubt reflected in the tears of her mother during the final ceremony of the wedding: the
farewell after the feast on the day following the flawless wedding night.

Soon after the wedding Pipa took his new bride to the capital.

Dar es Salaam, 1916. A few decades before, the Sultan of Zanzibar, on an acquisitive whim, had paid a visit to the site. It was then a village beside a perfect, peaceful harbour. Highly impressed and feeling ambitious, he returned shortly with carpenters and planners to build up a town, and called it Haven of Peace. The Germans came and wrenched it from Arab hands; they built it up further, with beautiful white houses, roads, and monuments. It became now, for the British, the main military base for the remainder of the war. Gone were the rickshaws and handcarts, to be replaced by fleets of lorries, motorcars, motorcycles, roaring through the streets spewing black acrid fumes into the hot humid air. Villages of tents covered large, previously open spaces; restaurants and hotels overflowed with soldiers; fields and parks housed thousands of mules and horses. And everywhere the stench of dung, petrol, animal carcasses.

The Germans never surrendered their prize colony. Instead they kept getting pushed farther and farther south, and under their redoubtable leader von Lettow they kept fighting all the way into Portuguese East Africa. They had to be told that the war in Europe was over before they would emerge from the jungle.

And then finally one day came the end of military authority. The tents and uniforms, the animals and vehicles, the thousands of soldiers had gone; the town was cleaned up. And the residents of Dar took stock of what had happened.

There were those who had come from the interior wiped out, to unload their woes on family and community. And there were the others, whose fortunes had risen in the same war, who had bought out the Germans, foreclosed on loans, received outlandish collaterals, smuggled, hoarded, supplied the armies. Property was scarce in Dar. But the man who had been an unwilling agent
of both the protagonists of the war had been paid well. He rented a house with shopfront; Pipa Store began anew.

His customers, as for the rest of his life, were the poorer Africans and Asians, those who could not stock their larders for more than a day — buying a little of this and a little of that. But bit by bit, as Pipa would say, the ocean gets filled. Haba haba hujaza kibaba. There are those who sit in their shops twitching their legs or picking their noses, saying their rosaries or singing hymns; I have my packets. A little bit of turmeric, chili, coriander, inside a flat cone of paper — fold, fold, fold, and a packet in the basket that would fetch an anna. It became a meditation for him, folding packets, an unconscious act during which he could think, come to himself, watch the world.