The Book of Secrets (30 page)

And then the fourth photo, which Rita hands out with an anxious look. Ali.

It’s a garden scene, in front of a house: a driveway, a portico. He stands alone, looking at the camera. He is not very tall, he has on a collared blue sweater and white trousers. He has a kindly face, well kept. There’s no past in that photo, nothing that I recognize. For that there’s Rita, the link.

“It’s taken at Beech Grove,” she says.

“That’s your house, isn’t it?” Feroz says. “In England they don’t have house numbers,” he tells his wife, “just give the name, and the post office knows —”

“Well, not in all cases,” Rita laughs.

“I remember,” he says, “we used to hear Ali lived in a palace which had gold taps and —”

“Wouldn’t it wear off?” murmurs Zaynab.

“Where does he live now?” Feroz asks.

There is a pause and she returns his look. “In Knightsbridge,” she tells him. “Near Harrods.”

“But he took good care of you?” Feroz says. Suddenly he is protective.

“He was generous,” she says. “We could have fought. But it, the divorce — we are divorced now — was all amicable. We meet often. Rosita is my friend, actually. We often do our shopping together.”

There is a photo of Rosita, the new wife, beside a horse. She is younger than Rita, but not by much. I look at Rita.

“He was always the playboy,” she smiles, taking the photo from me, putting it away.

“It’s as if he has two wives,” she continues, wants to explain. “I am his Indian connection — that’s why I am here. The community approaches him through me. For donations and so on, you know.”

She looks around, then picks up the shopping bag she’s had at her feet all along and brings out the presents. For Feroz, a smart pen. A dress for Zaynab, who says, “Hai hai, you shouldn’t have troubled yourself.” “No trouble at all,” Rita says, and gives Razia hers: a suit. The girl beams, is almost in tears.

“And for you, Mr. Fernandes — sir —” Rita says.

I open the wrapping — from the weight, size, shape, I know what it is: a book. There’s also a pen, like Feroz’s. But the book …

Havin’ a Piece: Collected Poems 1930-1967
, by Richard Gregory.

“My, my.” I am flustered. “Don’t tell me — Dar, brought to the world through the poems of an expatriate teacher.”

The name, the pun in the title, the photograph on the back, all bring back strong, vivid memories … of a long friendship that I could never quite explain.… The volume is posthumous, and recently published.

First Rita, then Gregory, they have entered my narrative, unasked, so to speak. I began a history, with an objective eye on the diary of Alfred Corbin,
ADC, DC
, one of the architects of Indirect Rule, later Governor — and so on. I saw myself as a mere observer, properly distanced by time and relationship, solving a puzzle. Now, strangely, I see myself drawn in, by a gravitational force, pulled into the story.

“Show me.” Feroz takes the book from me.

“Haven of Peace, Dar es Salaam,” Rita explains the pun to Feroz and Zaynab.

“You remember him?” I ask her.

She smiles. “We’ve turned thoughtful, haven’t we,” she says. And then: “Oh yes, I remember.”

No, you will not forget. You were our Rita, queen of the stars, queen of Dar, queen of the night. You shimmered and radiated, waved at the crowd, at us. Full of life, promise. Your sparkling star-strewn carriage driving you away to the music of drum and trumpet, still waving. In hindsight, a childish, girlish phase all this, replete with colonial innocence. Yet unforgettable. And hindsight is dead sight after all, jealous of memory that breathes.

How did I, a Christian Goan, Pius Fernandes, come to be in the midst of this Shamsi Muslim procession of floats, pining for its queen?

That was in 1950, November.

Three years before, in Goa, I had passed my
BA
in history and literature, upper second, University of London (external), and the world lay at my feet. So I was told by my principal. But that world lay stunned after another catastrophic war. The Empire was winding down. And those of us who had identified a little more with our colonial masters knew not where we belonged in the
new order being fashioned out of the India that was breaking up all around us. Economically we were on no surer ground; hundreds applied for even the meanest clerical position — licking revenue stamps, as we called it then.

An advertisement from the colonial office had appeared in the
Goan Times
, inviting applications for teachers in Kenya Colony, Uganda Protectorate, and Tanganyika Territory. We Goans are a travelling people. There have been many Goans — Goanese as they were called — in Africa from earliest times. The prospect did not seem daunting. I remember how, during the subsequent interview in Bombay, we joked as we waited nervously. Aré, who wants to be Kenya colonized? And U-
gand
-a? It is T.T. for us — Tanga-nyika Terri-terri. We could not know of course that the differences among the three countries, their futures, were indeed as great as we pretended in our humour and would determine our futures in unique ways. I was selected for T.T., with two others, Steve Desouza and Kuldip Singh, and we walked out of the interview together and headed straight for the nearest teashop to speculate about our futures. Desouza was the scientist, Kuldip the mathematician, and I the humanist, which is how we called ourselves somewhat immodestly.

We had been told that all three of us had been posted to the government school in the historic town of Tabora, in the interior of the country. We did not know what to expect, none of us having taught school, let alone in a part of the world about which we had only the faintest notion — and a lot of fantasies culled from the likes of Rider Haggard, Tarzan, and Sanders of Africa. The brochures we were given with our appointments were less than useful — we already wore the kind of clothes we were broadly advised to take, we knew how to protect ourselves from malaria. Tigers, we were told, did not exist in Africa. The African servant, like the Indian, we learned, did not have a sense of “mine” and “yours.” We were to wear shoes.

We dug up a teacher, a Scotsman, who had spent twenty years
in East Africa. “My boys,” he said. “Take books — Voltaire, Wilde, de Sade! And,” he paused to eye us over his glasses, “above all, the books in your particular specialties.”

Three strapping young men facing into a head wind, on our second-class paid passage aboard the SS
Amra.
We had boarded ship at Bombay, and throughout the journey our spirits never dipped for a moment. The world seemed small and we were conscious that we were crossing it. We were sailing to freedom: freedom from an old country with ancient ways, from the tentacles of clinging families with numerous wants and myriad conventions; freedom even from ourselves grounded in those ancient ways. Desouza, big and dark in safari suit and hat, very much the magazine picture of an adventurer; Kuldip and I, ordinary Indians in light bush shirts and loose trousers.

We trampled through the market in Aden. We walked up and down the decks looking for interesting people to talk to. There were those returning to Africa — and these you could tell by their interest in the ship’s amenities (mostly the bar) and nothing else — and others like us going for the first time, ready to romanticize any sight, eager for any piece of information. The third-class deck was a floating Indian slum, to which we were drawn by the attraction of the newly married brides, who in these crowded quarters had lost their colour and also much of their shyness. When we crossed the equator we joined the upper decks at the ball. None of us had qualms about taking drinks, and all of us took turns at dancing with an elderly returning headmistress of a girls’ school. And finally Mombasa, when we knew we had come to Africa, where most of the Europeans disembarked on their way to Nairobi. Then Zanzibar, and, with beating hearts, Dar es Salaam. In Dar we slept the night in a hotel near the harbour and spent the following morning roaming the streets before departing on the afternoon train to Tabora.

It was in Tabora that I first recall that feeling of being alone in Africa. It was a feeling that would return, though less and less
frequently; one learned gradually to guard against it. I remember vividly my first night, in my room on a ground-floor corridor. My friends were in other parts of the building. Frogs were croaking, crickets chirping, the khungu tree whispering outside in a breeze. The room was solid dark, and the night air was so depleted of substance it felt like a rarefied gas carrying just a trace of woodsmoke. No longer did I feel so sure of myself; it seemed to me as if I had come to another part of the universe, that the world I had left behind, my home town of Panjim, Goa, was as distant as the nearest star in the sky.

After two years at Tabora all of us opted to leave for Dar — Kuldip for the Government Indian Secondary School, whose cricket team and syllabus he would bring to be among the best in the country; Desouza and I for their arch-rivals, the Shamsi Boys’ School or “Boyschool.”

Boyschool was away from the downtown area, at the end of Selous Street, coming after the potters’ village and the poor Indian area known for its prostitutes. Behind the school were the teachers’ quarters where we lived. I was not allowed to teach English literature — that was in the able hands of Richard Gregory; he was many years my senior, so I did not mind. I taught English grammar, and my other specialty: history. It was a pathetic syllabus I was asked to teach: Mughal history with the deeds of Humayun the Kind, Babur the Brave, Akber the Great; and above all English history with the Tudors and the Stuarts. This was marginally better than the lower classes’ staple of Hammurabi the Lawgiver, Cheops the Pyramid Builder, and Pheidip-pides the Runner. This, after two world wars, Hiroshima, Yalta, the independence of India. Yet what to blame — the backwardness of the community or the advice of government inspectors? And blame for what?

Years later, Boyschool moved to a better location, bequeathing its old grey building to the Shamsi Girls’ School. But now the girls were kept secure, close to home, across from the mosque in
the building that remains to this day a warren of rooms. There was always a shortage of teachers at the girls’ school; the best went to Boyschool, the girls made do with the remainder. The result was that the boys dreamed of straight As in the Overseas Exams, and the girls were happy with a D pass.

Some of the Indian teachers were asked to teach at the Shamsi Girls’ School in their free time. We did not ask why. It was understood that we were Indians and appreciated the need; and we had no choice, there were many more where we came from. And so off to the girls’ school I went after recess on Saturday — down Selous, past Kisutu, on Ring, then Mosque Street. The girls were keen and lively, fifteen to eighteen years old, and would one day be homemakers in well-to-do progressive, respectable households. They were Girl Guides and junior members of the Ladies’ Committee and the Former Girls’ Association, where they took cookery classes to learn “English cooking” and did callisthenics to control their figures.

And they all wore “shortfrocks” — with hems that were a foot above the ground but already represented a revolution — and western styles and patterns and, significantly, without the head-covering or pachedi. In one fell swoop, the Shamsis decided — at least for their younger women — to do away with this remnant of purdah, with its various stylistic conventions for girls, married women, widows, women with unmarried daughters, women with married daughters. Meanwhile, in the streets, other women walked in buibuis, burkhas, saris, and pachedis; many still do.

I had then, even as a young teacher, a stern disposition with my students. Most of them had been boys. But these were girls — feminine, Oriental, and yet delightfully liberated from the traditions that would have put a physical curtain between the lot of them and me. Faced with their wiles I found myself often at a loss.

There were fifteen girls in my class. My first lesson gave a clear indication of things to come and filled me with much foreboding.

I arrived ready to teach the Mughal Empire to these Indian
girls abroad. What better introduction to the subject than the Taj Mahal?

“How many of you know about the Taj Mahal?” I began.

An eager show of hands. How genteel, I thought, how they raise their arms quietly only from the elbows, how unlike the loafers I taught at the boys’ school.

“All right, girls, I am convinced. The Taj Mahal, as we know, represents the glory of the Mughal Empire — the emperors Akber, Humayun, Babur —”

“Tell us about Salim, sir.” An innocent, almost idiotic request. And the beginning of an avalanche.

“What Salim?” I asked impatiently, turning towards the questioner.

“Prince Salim the son of shehen-shah Emperor Akber. And his lover Anarkali!” said a voice from another direction.

They were referring, of course, to the recent box-office record-breaker from Bombay about unrequited love in Mughal times.

“
Hm-hm, hm-hm
 …” someone hummed a song from the film, and the ground seemed to slip from under me.

“Now what is this? Girls! Please!”

“
Yeh zindagi usiki hai
—” she sang, the girl called Gulnar, from the back of the middle row.

Then they all sang, “
The world belongs to the one who loves, who’s lost to love and nothing but love
—”

“Now girls!” I shouted. “For God’s sake!”

They stopped, somewhat ashamed at having offended. I caught my breath, wondering whether I’d ever had a sense of humour, and what I was doing in a girls’ school.

Another time:

“Are you married, sir?” This, just as I entered the classroom, having cycled furiously all the way to get there in time, having run up the stairs. A two-minute delay could disrupt the entire school, not to say the neighbourhood.

“Sir has a girlfriend, perhaps.”

Laughter, quite animated and open — this began to look like rebellion. Then Gulnar came forward between the desks and benches, smiling, bearing a cake with one candle, and they sang, “
Happy birthday to you
 …”