The Book of Secrets (33 page)

Her name was Parviz. She was a short girl, with two pigtails down to her waist, known for her piety, which she expressed with an earnestness and plaintiveness in the Mira Bai mode. Unfortunately for Patani and Parviz, their affair was going on at the same time as Haji and his agents were on the lookout for another pair of
illicit lovers. Parviz aroused the suspicion of the zealots when she was seen once to leave the mosque in a hurry halfway through the service. She was soon exposed.

It was a night of festivities at the Shamsi mosque, another “happiness” — gaiety and food, sherbet and dancing. In the middle of the evening’s festivities — after prayers, when there was dancing and milling around — Parviz took off, hurrying away along Mosque Street. The youths followed — four of them, two on either side of the street, as they had seen in American films. When the girl went into her building, they noticed from the street that the lights in her flat did not go on. They took the stairs but could not find her. They knocked on a lot of doors, without success. Finally they dispersed, posting themselves on different floors, and waited. At eleven o’clock a door opened and Parviz emerged. She gave a gasp at seeing a youth she knew. He instantly called out to his friends.

“What are you doing here?” they demanded.

“What is it to you …” her voice petered out as Patani, shirttails untucked, emerged wearing bookish spectacles.

“I came to pick up …” she started again, but there was nothing to say.

“Come with us — or don’t you want to?”

She went.

One hears of larger terrors — yet how is one to compare? For this girl surely it was the end of the world. What must she have suffered on that walk along Mosque Street escorted by her captors? I still cannot make up my mind — the shame or the fury that awaited her, what weighed most on that beating heart? She was brought back with tears in her eyes, terrified, to be judged by a thousand people.

The “happiness” was at its zenith, the last rounds of the dandia stick-dance were being played in a crescendo towards their finale. At another end of the mandap — the tent — outside the mosque
was the traditional procession of women. Older women supported brass pots of sweet milk on the heads of younger, unmarried women and girls. They walked in a long file through the crowds, to where the mukhi and other elders, in robes and turbans, would receive them and give each girl a shilling.

At the head of the procession, this remnant, surely, of an ancient goddess ritual, they brought her, the stained one, saying:

“Ask her where she was when we found her.”

“And what she was doing.”

“And with whom.”

Her crime was compound. There was no way, no need, to disentangle the multiple strands of guilt; they reinforced each other.

“I only let her talk to him because she wanted to ask about the mystic Narsinh Mehta,” her mother wailed. “How could I know he would make her into his gopi —”

The girl was shamed in public, from which she would never recover. But the matter did not end there. The next evening the zealots knocked on Patani’s door. They went in, roughed him up so he fled, then they trashed his flat. Chairs, sofa, went over the balcony to crash on the sidewalk, three floors below. Radio, ice box, coal stove, primus.

The
Herald
carried a story about the event the next day. “Shamsi thugs vandalize,” wrote the European reporter. “Storm troopers terrorize Hindu bookkeeper.” At this criticism the youth of the community were in an uproar, even the moderate ones. How dare he say “Shamsi thugs.” We had a lively debate in my boys’ class, a liberal bunch with only one or two leaning towards the fanatic fringe. Wasn’t the behaviour thuggish? I asked. Yes, but why “Shamsi thugs,” why not say “thugs”? The behaviour was surely connected with the community, I said; they went as representatives of the community, they had the sanction of the elders — or didn’t they? No! they said. They would have accosted the girl, some of them said, brought her back from that Hindu banya’s flat — nothing wrong with that — but they would
not have gone back and vandalized the man’s flat. He surely deserved a beating, though. (“Sir, he was married! Surely he was only playing with her!”) Write an essay, I said.

They did more. They wrote a letter to the editor demanding an apology. The editor refused, went into a long tirade about freedom of speech. The boys responded by going from store to store asking people not to buy the
Herald.
The editor relented, regretted the unfortunate choice of words.

If only it had ended there.

The girl Parviz, who had apparently fallen while on a search for mysticism, regained her fervour many times over. Every day she went to mosque, early in the morning before dawn and in the evening. But this did not wash away her sin; not in the eyes of the people. Women and girls habitually made comments behind her back. She said hardly a word in mosque, and not much more at home. Her silence was her guilt, wrapped tightly around her. One day a woman said behind her, but quite audibly, “If I were she I would jump into the ocean and die.” The following morning Parviz went to mosque as usual. She drank the holy water. She stood before the takhat, the seat of God, and said a prayer. Then she went downstairs, put her shoes on, hugged her shawl around her, and left for the seashore. There she took her shoes off and threw down the shawl. Then she walked into the ocean and drowned herself.

That afternoon, Karim Langdo limped along the streets calling “Mai-yaht mé halloo” — come to the funeral — in a subdued, somewhat breaking tone, announcing the death whose unwilling agent he had become.

The incident shook up the whole city, most of all the girl’s own people. What happened, why so fast? A quick judgement, a quick death. What have we done? What happened to “Forgive and forget,” that motto of the forties that we so conveniently adopted? What happened to mercy? She will haunt us, this girl,
we will never be sure of ourselves. She has judged us. She mocks us. In that, she lives.

It was a big funeral, the biggest I had seen. My girls wept without control, my boys gave shoulder to the coffin as they recited the kalima in that haunting call which at this occasion was a wail, a cry for help: There is no God but Him.… A cry for mercy?

When Ali told Rita, a few months before at the picnic, that he would go to London, he was suggesting to her an option that no Dar girl could have failed to understand. London was escape, a haven for illicit, unapproved-of relationships.

They had only engaged in a brief flirtation of letters; they had not met in private, they had not made love. They had engaged in an exploration, in joyful play. Parviz’s exposure and suicide, linked to their affair as if by the hand of fate, suddenly brought to an end the play, the innocence of fresh love. The realization that theirs, too, was an illicit love was almost brutal. But they would not stick around for exposure and shame. They would escape.

It was not easy simply to go off to London without the whole town knowing about it well in advance, but Ali and Rita managed to slip away without event, for they departed at a time when thousands were flocking to Dar es Salaam for the Precious Jubilee of the Shamsis.

The spiritual leader of the community, Suleiman Pir, had been in office for sixty years, and it was thought fitting to celebrate this event in a jubilee — after all, Queen Victoria had had hers — that would culminate in matching the weight of the leader with a mixture of precious stones. The site chosen for the event was our beloved city, and a property was bought to hold it on.

They came to Dar in buses, trains, planes, and by boat. They came from Nairobi, Mombasa, Kisumu, Kampala, Tororo,
Mengo; from Stanleyville and Leopoldville; from Tananarive in Madagascar, Lorenco Marques in Mozambique; from Durban, Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Salisbury; from Karachi, Bombay, Poona, and Rajkot; from Rangoon and Dhaka. They slept in tents, ate in mandaps. Armies of cooks, servers, cleaners, doctors, nurses served them. Onions, potatoes by the sack were peeled and cut, cattle slaughtered by the herd. This was a far cry from the early days of the lonely traveller in the bush, fearing man and beast. They brought money now, they contributed millions. And the millions collected went into a fund for new schools and homes for every family so that East Dar is what it is today. The children born that year were special too, and they bore names to celebrate the event. In subsequent years I would teach many a Diamond, an Almas, a Jubilee Begum, a Jawahir, souvenirs of that happy time.

It was an event in the Empire which Movietone newsreels broadcast to cinema houses from Sarawak to Kamloops, Wawa to Wollongong, though London, itself pale under rations and drizzle, was understandably cynical.

In all the hubbub surrounding this jubilee, with so many strange, happy faces in town, with all the excitement of the ceremonies and keeping track of dignitaries, and the weddings and the births and deaths, Ali and Rita could quietly catch a plane to Nairobi. Before anyone knew exactly where they were, they had taken another plane, to London.

The news came to Pipa in his corner grocery store, as it did to most people in Dar, through the grapevine: Did you hear? Ali and Rita have run away together. To London.

The boy whom he had come to love in his own gruff way, who had sat quietly in the shop with him, who once with so much devotion sketched Mariamu for him, was now gone for good. Few people returned from London.

He was angry at Ali for not coming to take leave, ask permission, for such a momentous voyage. (He forgot that once he, too, had left home quite suddenly and without giving notice.) He was angrier at Mariamu. The son becomes the father, she had told him. Is this what she had meant, had known all along, that Ali would go away to the land of the
ADC
— become an Englishman? Was she telling him, now, after all these years, in such a treacherous manner, that Ali wasn’t his son after all?

As if to assuage his grief, another son was born to him, late in life now, after seven daughters. And for the next ten years this son, Amin, born of Remti, was the joy of his life.

And for those ten years, Mariamu and her book were allowed to recede into the background; or perhaps she simply allowed Pipa and Remti to lavish attention on Amin unhampered. One day, when Amin was four, Pipa removed the book from its place and hid it elsewhere; the shrine room was put to the use for which it was originally intended — to store goods.

I did not get to teach Amin, but I remember him well as a primary-school child. A much-pampered boy, and handsome, which must have pleased Remti. He was driven to school and back by a chauffeur in a shiny new Ford Taunus. The fifties were a time of emerging affluence. Even away from the town centre, the Indian shop-houses were giving way to two-storey brick buildings, each bearing the name of a favourite child or vision. Pipa’s Amin Mansion went up with Habib Mansion, Anand Nivas, Bismillah Building, and others on Kichwele Street, the Indian street that braved its way into the African section, Kariakoo. But Pipa’s store in its new building looked as it had when he first came to Dar, and thence, after the fire, as it had in the mud house that preceded Amin Mansion. The only difference was that the family now lived in the second-storey flat above.

Times were moving fast for all of us. In Kenya, the Mau-Mau war was on, and there were fears it would spill over into Tanganyika. We had a labour union now, and political parties were in the making. It was a time of considerable confusion. To the shopkeeper, the British government, the Queen at its head, was absolute ruler. How could the mighty British give way to the African, the servant? Those of us who were a little more aware of the world knew that Tanganyika was only a trust territory under the United Nations and was approaching independence. We had seen the prize colony — our India — become independent, though not
without pain. I, myself, had left it at an uncertain period, a time of considerable upheaval, and saved myself from difficult choices. Now those times, the choices, had caught up. Only recently, the fiery Indian foreign minister, Krishna Menon, had come with a
UN
committee and done us expatriates proud. The only question now was how independence would happen, and that depended partly on Kenya Colony (
KC
as we had happily called it once) and the federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, the two neighbouring domains of white settlerdom.