The Book of Secrets (29 page)

As the forties arrived, Dar es Salaam was a booming town and a capital surpassing Zanzibar. Here fortunes were made that would last a few decades, and more; family dynasties began that would replace the once glorious but now declined houses of Tharia Topan, Sewa Haji, Allidina Visram, who had gone penniless from Cutch to Zanzibar in the previous century and set up private empires while servicing foreign ones. The no-man’s-land that was Mnazi Moja, a wasteland left undeveloped to act as firebreak and sanitary buffer between the African and the European sections, with the Asians living on either side of it, became a boundary between the town-wallahs and the Kariakoo-wallahs and a muggers’ haunt in the dark. A mosque was erected in the Indian quarter, near the vegetable garden and the town well, a two-storey stone structure with a tile-roofed clock tower that dominated the shops at its base, tolling the hours and half-hours. Gradually mud and wattle and corrugated iron gave way to brick and concrete. There were motorcars, buses, and bicycles on the roads, several cinema houses in operation. India sent magazines, storybooks, missionaries, pandits, fortune-tellers, mullahs, new immigrants, and movies. England sent newspapers (which came second hand through civil servants and often as wrapping paper), textbooks, movies, teachers, administrators and governors, the
BBC
, and the law. America sent movies and Coca-Cola. English meant power, prestige, and wealth, while German was a quaint reminder of a bygone era. The pioneer days were over; the Indian communities took their ancient rivalries to the cricket pitch for “friendly” games that only occasionally turned bitter and became memorable. They had their schools now, and dispensaries; welfare organizations, community councils, sports clubs, youth
organizations; proud Boy Scouts carried their banners at festivals, swore loyalty to God and King, learned survival in the jungle. Festivals lasted weeks, mournings forty days. Festivals opened with dramas — or “dyloks” — the most popular for several decades was
Hassan bin Sabbah
; but Indian musicals supplied endless plots and songs. The Empire Cinema entertained with Madhuri, “The Baghdadi Bul-bul,”
Beau Geste, All Quiet on the Western Front, Her Private Life
(also called
The Fallen Goddess
), and much more. New products tantalized the new consumers. Cadbury’s, cod-liver oil, Pagdiwala Coffee, Stephenson’s pens, Aden-white salt, Odeon “talking boxes” with records in English, Swahili, Gujarati, Urdu, and Arabic. Star Printing Works was born, and with it a community newspaper with national and international news: the Boy Scouts of Dodoma were arriving; Prince Aly Khan opened a school in Kathiawad, India; a religion teacher required in Nairobi; a widower in Masindi Port seeking a companion or he would marry his African maid, for the sake of the “comm” (the community) would a widow or older unmarried lady of experience please come forward. In these hard times, one Lalji Ramji exhorted the community, you could make a few extra shillings by selling him your old postage stamps, also those old German hellers and Maria Theresa dollars; a mosque gone up in Iringa; M. S. Meghji would have your lights fixed; Bharat Cinema pleaded for its customers to support it, its new seats were comfortable, a gallery was set aside for the ladies; we have spent a lot of money, announced the Empire Cinema, on equipment for talking movies, please support.

In short, a world that begins to look familiar emerges from the waters of the past, integrated.

From the personal notebook of Pius Fernandes
May 1988, Dar es Salaam

Rita and I see each other every day when she comes into town. There are not so many people she knows here now, and the relations that she does have become free from their shops only in the evenings. We discuss among other things the diary — the slim book that has enmeshed so many lives. She’s curious about what I know, of course, but surprisingly she has been quite forthcoming with what she knows.

“You see,” she says of Ali, “the son did return to the father. Just as Mariamu said he would. At least for a few days.”

“And then?”

“They talked, had the talk they never had before, and then he went away — returned —”

“Went to his father in England?”

She gives an annoyed look.

Later, talking of her father-in-law, Pipa, as if arguing his moral
right to the book, she says, “How much he put himself through just to preserve that book, to keep alive that memory, that name: Mariamu.”

“A latter-day Orpheus —”

“A little different, surely — a humble shopkeeper.”

She stops, looks at me impatiently, then smiles, surprised at herself.

“I’m sorry,” I say, as she sips her coffee.

She has me now, as she’s had me ever since I laid eyes on her again, after so many years, when I went to greet her at the hotel.

Still the Enchantress.

We sit in a café on Somora Avenue. It used to be Independence Avenue; before that, Acacia Avenue. It reminds us that much has changed (for one thing there are hardly any trees left), but life goes on; if anything there is more life now, in this teeming street, in this city whose population has more than quadrupled since she left.

Every day, for several days now, we have sat in the same place, the same cushioned corner seat, starting at ten in the morning: some idle chitchat, some reminiscences, and for me, in little bits, she gives the story of Pipa the father, Ali the son. And she, Rita, I think as I watch her, certainly no spirit across the table.

There is some grey in the hair, above the ear; the face is long, still smooth, with a dab of peach bloom on the cheek, a little tiredness around the eyes. She has a flower-patterned dress on, the brightest thing anywhere in this room (no one wears a khanga here), and sits straight but not stiffly; no longer a pupil but a rich woman of the world.

“And you have told me all this,” I say. “All this openness about the family’s past. Why? Is it the book you want?”

“Well, I have only told
you
, haven’t I.… We go back a long way, don’t we? I enjoy talking with you — perhaps all I’ve done is to repay you for your company. Haven’t
you
felt the need to talk, after a long time?”

She stops, eyes me. For a moment, and only a moment, she looks vulnerable. “Your curiosity is irresistible, in any case. You already know so much. And — since you ask why I tell you all this — there’s a price I’ll want to exact from
you.
” She smiles.

“I’ll pay the price.” So says the historian quickly disarmed.

“Any price?” Her smile widens.

“Any price that’s mine to give.”

“I wonder.”

This new familiarity, I say to myself, watching her, is exciting. I never knew her like that. The mature, grown-up Rita, the full person.

I smile in return, as I must: “The story is all that matters. I can’t stop now. I’ll take it to its end.”

Who owns the diary? Feroz and Rita stand poised, each with claims to it. Feroz with the finder’s privilege. It is he who gave it to me, on trust; to him I should return it. Rita on the other hand represents the heir. That claim assumes that the diary was Pipa’s. But it wasn’t, it was stolen. A claim could be made for Corbin’s heirs. But what guarantee do we have that it would have gone to them, or that they would have disposed of it in a manner he would approve of, or that he himself would not have ultimately destroyed it? The private diary of a public servant. Who are his heirs — his kin? The people he served among, whose lives he influenced? The government he served?

“How do you two know each other?” I ask Feroz light-heartedly.

In her absence, he’s talked of her knowledgeably and familiarly, and now, watching them together, it seems to me that they go back quite some way. He is embarrassed by the question. She
answers it: “I am his aunt, aren’t I, Feroz?” She explains: “He is a son of one of my cousins. I remember him as a boy often when I left Dar.… He was a quiet boy and such a help around the shop.” She turns to Zaynab, his wife, and asks almost impertinently: “Is he a good boy now?”

This is at lunch at Feroz’s. We are on the second floor of a Msimbazi building constructed in the heyday of the sixties when such a building represented wealth, a move up. Since then, like others, it has been taken over, nationalized; and money has found other means, other havens. But in spite of the wealth amassed by Feroz (some in Canadian and British banks), in spite of the hot water and
VCR
and toaster, this house — everything from its oilcloth on the table to the linoleum on the cement floor, the wooden pantry and scullery next to the dark kitchen, the sofas, the beds made up with mosquito nets rolled down and tucked in at the sides — belongs so much to the times Rita left behind.

“Hasn’t changed a bit,” she says. “Exactly like the house I grew up in. Don’t tell me —” she tiptoes excitedly into the sitting room, with its television, sofa, and — she turns to looks at us triumphantly — the master bed. “Brilliant,” she says, clapping her hands delightedly.

By this time the host and hostess are thoroughly deflated, shown up, reduced to the Kariakoo-wallahs that they are (foreign bank accounts notwithstanding, educated kids in the wings notwithstanding). There is a pained look on Zaynab’s face. Her daughter brings Cokes on a tray. The room is air-conditioned, cold; curtains on iron-screened windows keep away all knowledge of the glaring melting heat (except for a stark bright triangle on the linoleum, broken by the diamond pattern of the screen). The guest shivers, the hair on her arms bristles. She has on a sleeveless dress, arrogantly white, with green borders; the shoes are green and white, the purse is green. She exudes freshness.

Lunch brings more awkwardness. The couple can only show off their children (of whom only the beautiful though unaffecting
Razia is with us) and the food they can buy here. Of the old school, Zaynab is taken to force-feeding, and guests cannot leave until they are practically bursting. Politeness will not do; at some point you have to look her in the eye and say, “No. I will not have any more.” There is meat, of course. And rich biriyani, buttered lapsi. Kababs. Bhajias, potato fritters. “We do not believe in all this diet modern stuff,” Zaynab informs us, excusing the abundance. Feroz concurs. “Eat, I say. There is plenty of food in this country. We have enough.… I understand there is much poverty in U.K.” This last remark is for Rita, who doesn’t seem to hear it.

After the meal, Rita brings out photos of her family. The first one is the daughter, a young woman of stunning beauty. Did Dar spawn this? I ask myself. But of course a lot of wealth and special schools have gone into that look — that face, that tall shapely body, that Princess Diana manner. Her name is Rehana.

“She is married to a European, isn’t she?” Zaynab asks.

“Her father wanted her to marry the Kuwaiti ambassador’s son — you know, to keep Eastern contact. But the girl was adamant. They are Scottish, her in-laws. They own resorts in Europe …” The second photo is of a boy and girl, eight and six years old. Rehana’s children. “David and Leila … her in-laws were adamant about the boy’s name …”

The third photo goes around — Hadi, her son. He’s lost out to his sister in looks, is stocky with crew-cut hair and a smile that is thin and cruel. “He went off on his own — for some years,” says his mother. “But he’s now a director in his father’s company.”