The Book of Secrets (31 page)

Gulnar was the most attractive girl in class, if you count personality, which you must! Gulnar Rajani, nicknamed Rita.

Bette Davis was too thin for local tastes and too tart; there was Garbo, luscious and luxurious but a little too svelte for our smalltown roughnesses; the pin-up Betty Grable pointed a mischievous tush at you. Dilip Kumar the lover and Raj Kapoor the charming fool with so much to teach were the male idols, along with Gary Cooper, Gene Kelly, and Cary Grant; there was Nargis the heart-throb, the West-in-the-East, the dreamgirl of the intellectuals. But for a brief period the imagination of Dar was caught by the brunette American beauty Rita Hayworth. The Love Goddess, the “Put the Blame on Mame” Girl, kneeling on a bed in black lace, looking coyly at you (“Am I doing anything wrong?”) in the picture that hit Hiroshima before it blew up. And she was the gypsy girl Carmen looking so Indian. But let’s not kid ourselves, Dar fell in love with her because she married an Eastern prince — Aly Khan — with a sheikh reciting the nikaa as the Vatican looked on uncomfortably. And she did come to visit us in Africa. If she was discomfited by requirements of modesty and women bowing worshipfully and touching her hem, that was understandable. If she left in a huff, from Nairobi back to Europe then America, such were the ways of the great and famous. To have been selected by the prince gave her qualities, a bigness of soul, that perhaps even she was not aware of.

Dar had embraced her wholeheartedly, nicknamed one of its beauties after her. Our own Rita was a scaled-down version, of
course — this was Dar, not Hollywood — but a bigger heart-throb on Jamat and Mosque and Market streets. The yearnings went deeper: she was real — walked on earth, as they said — she would soon choose, marry. Who would be the lucky devil? Her friends in class reported the latest proposal of marriage that her family had received (“Sir, Rita is thinking about her future”) and which the girl was bound to turn down.

She had black wavy hair down to her shoulders, a large mouth; she was fair-skinned and, except perhaps for a little at the hips — I blush — she was slim. She had a ready smile, which is hardly surprising — aren’t those years the best of our lives? She had me in such a state that I would catch myself checking my appearance before class and seeking approval from them (her) instead of letting them (her) seek it from me, their teacher. I have never been lenient with myself and didn’t fail to chide when the need arose.

I didn’t stand a chance, of course; even the thought was a useless torment and I was determined to curb it. I was a complete outsider, without a common caste, religion, mother tongue, place of origin — I was a proper “over-comm” in every way. (Some weeks later, an incident involving a pair of unfortunates was to prove me right in my pessimism about anything developing between us.) The girls all knew of my condition. There were too many of those darting eyes and calculating brains, gauging my various fumblings, not to guess. And those asides — “Sir, she is dreaming, considering a maago (proposal)” — were surely meant to tease, and they hurt.

Rita’s father had been a bank clerk in Zanzibar, now retired. What progressiveness that background (similar to mine) signified, perhaps was cause for her boldness, was why she stood out. I know that once she was mobbed on Market Street for wearing a sleeveless dress and high heels. But she was a community girl, only flirting with danger, and the next day she was again out in the street appropriately dressed.

One afternoon after class she and her friends walked downstairs with me. The mosque yard where we arrived linked two busy streets with its two entrances. It was always crowded with people: pedestrian traffic pausing to chat; lonely men and women without a relation in the world, a penny to their names, seeking refuge and companionship on its benches; the caretaker directing servants. Someone made a loud remark about the Govo — Goan — and I longed to pedal away.

“Sir, tell us what storybooks to read,” she said, almost putting a hand on my arm. (I can still see it: my arm on the bike seat, her hand poised an inch, two inches, from it.) “
Little Women
,” I said, though
Pride and Prejudice
might have been more appropriate. And then: “Sir, which book proves God exists — the boys know but won’t tell us. Please, sir.”

She was detaining me — or was I imagining?

“Why doesn’t she — why don’t they leave me alone?” I said to Desouza later. “I don’t mind having regrets from a distance, but this flirtation across an impossible chasm —”

“Tell them you don’t want to teach the girls,” he said.

“They’ll wonder why.”

“Then ask for leave to go and get married.”

We were sitting in the staff room, on a corner sofa, drinking tea and smoking. As Desouza spoke we both looked up to see Richard Gregory arrive and stand looming over us. “Mind if we make a baraza of this tête-à-tête?” he said.

Gregory was one of those idiosyncratic Englishmen who become an institution by virtue of the sheer consistency of their oddball — some would say perverse — nature. He had a family in England, we’d been told privately, perhaps to give the lie to his carefree existence among us. In those days it was the thing to do among the educated to make fun of Englishmen behind their backs. He seemed genuine enough to me. If he had pretended
once, the role had since taken him over. He was a good deal older than Desouza and myself, a big, somewhat pudgy man with a dissolute look — dishevelled, scruffy, always in dirty khaki shorts and his shirt half hanging out, sometimes showing a part of his hairy midsection. The sun did no good to him, he would turn dreadfully red, yet he’d been in Africa for almost twenty years and had no intention of returning to England. He was a walking compilation of literary quotations, knew his Palgrave by heart, and carried the Shakespeare on the current syllabus in his head. Thus prepared in perpetuum, he would shuffle from class to class partly drunk, fumbling with a pipe that was rarely lit, trying to tuck in his shirttails, rubbing his dirty neck.

He sat down and gave a fart.

“One of the girls got your blood racing, dear boy? …” he said in his growly voice. “Sorry, couldn’t help overhearing, you do sound distraught, you know …” He began purring into his pipe.

Desouza with a look of distaste was ready to get up, but I stayed him with a look.

“Mr. Gregory, what storybook — as they call it — would you recommend to a young Asian girl?”

“A young Asian girl? And upright too, I suppose? A virgin positively?
Lady Chatterley
, of course.”

“Seriously, now. Not joking.”

“Has to be a storybook? Have you read the poems of Sappho, now? How about —”

“My sisters read Jane Austen,” Desouza said. “And Mazo de la Roche.”

“They would.” Gregory, in reply to Desouza’s distaste for him, liked to needle him. My friend was bristling. Gregory was fumbling with his pipe.

“I wonder,” he mused, “how my boys would respond to Donne. I’d have to spell it out, of course … quite the rage these days in Lon-don.”

“How about this one: What book proves the existence of God? I don’t think there is any, myself, but what would you say?”

“Saint Augustine. Bertrand Russell, of course, proves that God does not exist.” That was Desouza.

“My dear chap. Spinoza, if you ask me.” The pipe was firmly between his teeth, he was ready to go.

“How would you like to come and watch the Shamsi parade next week?” I asked him. “My girls are in a float and beg me to go.”

“Love to,” he said and shuffled off.

“Bastard,” hissed Desouza at his back. “I don’t know why you pay attention to him. You always were fascinated by Englishmen — even the one in Bombay, it was your idea to look him up.”

“That was a Scotsman.”

“All the same.”

Desouza didn’t come to watch the parade, so Gregory and I went on our own. He had a car and picked me up.

Twice every year, when the Shamsis celebrated, for days the whole town — from Acacia Avenue to Ring Street, Kichwele to Ingles — was in happy disarray.

The “happiness” began on the first day with a flag-raising ceremony at nine
A.M.
to the strains of the Shamsi anthem played by the scouts. Then came a semblance of a guard of honour formed by all of Baden-Powell’s troops — the scouts, guides, cubs, and brownies — in the manner of the
KAR
but with a few loose feet; and then the march-past throughout the Shamsi area surrounding the mosque, the band blaring “Swanee River” and strains of Sousa, followed close on its heels by boys and the town’s idlers and beggars.

Every night thereafter, after the religious ceremonies conducted with abandon over loudspeakers, there was sherbet and food. And then they danced the dandia, the garba, and the rasa to
the beat of drums and the bleat of trumpets that were heard for miles around. The mosque was covered with lights, the enclosed yard outside jammed with people, overhung with flags.

On the final day, a Sunday, there was the parade of floats, led by the young troops. It took place at four in the afternoon, at a time, I supposed, when the sun was out of the competition and smiled benignly. There came — as Gregory and I watched, having placed ourselves on Ring Street where the crowds were less congested — a larger-than-life Churchill on the back of a lorry, puffing on a huge cigar (whose smoke we were assured was nothing but incense fumes), waving at the crowds; an Arab sheikh in a decadent posture in a very Oriental setting, lying back against bolsters, drinking, smoking, surrounded by screaming, giggling houris; a snake charmer with a real cobra; a mountain with Hassan bin Sabbah and disciples plotting some nefarious but no doubt worthwhile activity; and Hollywood, complete with sparkling stars (and moon), and on each star a human starlet, waving and flashing Hollywood smiles. The topmost star, the queen of all: our own Rita.

There were volunteers serving drinks, others spraying perfumes and flinging handfuls of rice from the floats.

Walking alongside the Hollywood float, striding, beaming, waving royally to all he knew, was a handsome man in white suit, wearing a black astrakhan hat aslant on his head, a cane in his hand. He was Ali Akber Ali, Dar’s version of the prince Aly Khan.

How could names, nicknames, cast a spell over their bearers, moving them to immutable fates, combined destinies? It was all in the stars, shall we say.

All that week of the festival there would be a break in the religious ceremonies every evening between prayers: a procession would head off from the mosque, proceed at a stately pace around the neighbourhood … accompanied by the deep, lugubrious
dhoom-dhoom-dhoom
of a dhol and two trumpets bleating variations of the same ten notes in a wonderfully mellifluous refrain that echoed in the mind for days afterwards. Among dancing young men and women and elderly mothers of the community and shopkeepers turned noblemen in turbans and robes, went a lorry filled with Dar’s “Hollywood girls” waving. They went past shops decorated with flags, bunting, and strings of lights, and stopped frequently for sherbet and sweets.

Outside the shop of the “khanga king,” Ali Akber Ali, the son-in-law and prince, served the Hollywood girls, ladling the choicest sherbet into glasses with a flourish and a smart comment. At the variety show “dylok” (for dialogue, or drama), performed by the members of the Ladies’ Committee later in the week, he
helped to manage the sets and even acted a small part as a doctor performing a blood transfusion in a heartrending scene. By the time the shopkeepers went back to their businesses, satiated with celebration and sherbet and biriyani, Ali was on speaking — or bantering — terms with Rita.

To joke with a girl is to become intimate — to embrace and cuddle with words when bodies and even looks cannot but remain restrained, hidden. Joking, you can be a child, a brother, a lover. As a lover you embarrass, cause her to shift her eyes, to lose control in a peal of laughter and then stop, blushing as if kissed. Then you know you’ve got her; all that remains is to clinch it, take the first decisive step. If you’re truly romantic you send a note with a quotation in it — from a ghazal, a popular song, even a line or two from an English poem — unsigned but with a hint of its sender. This is what Ali did.

A somewhat juvenile tack for a man of his age, and married for twelve years, but he was stricken. And she, the seventeen-year-old, was impressed, but didn’t quite know who the admirer was.

He heard, saw, nothing from her in response. He went into her parents’ shop once and, in her presence, talked with her mother, joked, and recited a verse. Later he accosted her on the sidewalk, and, as she turned away shyly, he recited a sequel to the poem. He followed her to the seashore on Azania Front one Sunday, where she strolled with her friends, and in full view of them he walked along, on the other side of the road, keeping pace. In a few weeks a current of rumour, a little weak and perhaps outrageous-sounding, stirred in pockets of the community, especially among the youth.