The Book of Secrets (34 page)

Then one day God died — for many of my pupils and their families — and for them the world changed in irrevocable ways.

I remember the day, but I don’t recall how the sky looked, though there are many who remember it. They say it suddenly turned grey. In the distance you saw rain showers, thunder and lightning. For a few moments, seconds, everybody, everything, was still; not a whisper in the air. Even much later the trees remained motionless; animals would not utter a sound; flags drooped; the clock at the town mosque stopped, and stayed that way for forty days. Many said that a photo of their leader had fallen from a wall, and they picked it up, much concerned. The next day many incidents were reported: tomatoes, eggs, cucumbers discovered with the sign Ali — or Allah — written across them in Arabic script. The
Herald
carried a photo of one such miracle on its front page.

That fateful afternoon I had been teaching literature to a Standard
XII
class. After a long apprenticeship I was allowed this, though to everybody’s embarrassment my students took extra lessons with Gregory. It wasn’t that there were complaints about me, just that they wanted insurance against their anonymous external examiners in Cambridge, and who better to provide it than an Englishman, that old pro Gregory. Anyway, today it was
David Copperfield.
Halfway through the lesson, a messenger came from
the headmaster with a note: “All classes let the boys go home at once.” Moments later there followed another note: “Staff meeting in fifteen minutes.” These sounded like war measures.

In the staff room we were given the news by Rahim Master, the religion teacher. Beside him was the headmaster, Mr. Shaw. The school had two governments, religious and secular, and they were independent. Rahim was a dictator, and none of us dared interfere with his administration of religious discipline. Of course he left us alone. But the students had to answer to two authorities. Rahim told us gravely that the leader of the Shamsis, Suleiman Pir, had passed from this world.

If a whole community were able to cry in unison, it could be said it did. For forty days the warren-like streets in the town — Kichwele to Ingles, Ring to Acacia — hummed with a chant, a prayer sung with one voice, occasionally reverberating with a wail for the person who had advised them on everything, from what was a good thing to eat for breakfast to the hazards of too much tea-drinking, from throwing away the burkha-veil to adopting English in schools, and then to more arcane matters such as the ascendancy after the Prophet.

Suleiman Pir had been around so long that to my pupils he was immortal. As Gregory said, “After this they’ll graduate to Nietzsche.” He was right, in his cynical way, and perhaps he even knew why he was, would be, right. Because Suleiman Pir was succeeded by Yahya Pir, a history graduate from Cambridge and Harvard, an academic. A Boston paper quipped: “Assistant Prof. tenured as God.” But for the boys, the studious ones, for whom Standard
XII
and the Cambridge O level was only the beginning, a phase set in. They wanted to go to Harvard, become academics. That several of them did, coming full circle in studying their own phenomenon, is something to ponder over. (I have, of course, one particular student, my correspondent Sona, in mind.) I wonder if Gregory would have a ready response to that.

At long last the school that the Precious Jubilee had made possible was ready. A school so beautiful it took the breath away. There was nothing like it in the country. Only Nairobi’s exclusive white schools came close. Community members came on excursions to see it, this monument they’d built, walking for miles, having their picnics, and walking all the way back to their shop-homes. It came with cricket and football grounds, running track. Its motto, appropriately Latin, was
Labor Omnia Vincit
, its symbol Promethean fire. The Shamsis had learned the colonial game well. They played by the rules but they played to win. The sacrifices they would count later — or their poets would, those who passed through our hands at the school.

As for my own life in those days, I remember 1959 as the year when my homeland, which I’d left more than ten years earlier, now loosened its emotional grip on me, gave me away. I had not had much inclination towards marriage, much to the despair of my mother in Goa, keeping myself absorbed in preparing year after year fresh students for their final exams and the world. That year, however, I became engaged to a Goan girl who lived in Kichwele — in fact, diagonally opposite Pipa Store. I saw the engagement as a consolation for my mother, who, seeing me “happily” settled and taken care of by a woman, could put her maternal anxieties at rest. Though it did not last.

It was during this brief courtship that I would see Pipa counting out his minutes with his spice packets, as I imagined it. He looked old and sickly, walking slowly — on the rare occasions when I saw him on foot — supported by his son Amin or his chauffeur.

As the decade drew to a close, it seemed that an old innocence had slowly faded, or been sloughed off, and a new consciousness by inches emerged. World news was as action-packed as the
movies — and somehow more relevant. The cold war was intense, and the atomic threat hung over our heads too. Sputnik had launched us into a new world of science fiction. Closer to home, negotiations for the country’s independence were on, and we felt conscious of the eyes of the world upon us. The Christopher Cup in cricket was avidly competed for by the schools, the Sunlight and Gossage cups in football thrilled the entire country. And the youth drama competition took up a good portion of our year at school. One of the plays was even reviewed in a provincial newspaper in England.

I associated with Desouza and Gregory, but never the two together, because of Desouza’s dislike of the Englishman. I found myself liking Gregory for precisely the reason he roused Desouza’s special ire: Gregory was a challenge, an iconoclast, always the devil’s advocate, with brutally honest observations — and yet with an underside as raw and delicate as the skin on his chest in the tropical sun. He was a rather lonely person, quite incapable of attracting any sympathy for himself, a modicum of humanity or understanding even from his compatriots. There was a certain secretiveness in him, a reserve; there remained sides unrevealed, a trait I attribute to national character. But why not? Gregory always had one or two favourite students — bright boys, of course, but what else in a boys’ school? There was always some talk about that, whose truth I never tried to ascertain. I took him with a bit of humour but also with respect and understanding. He took quite readily to me. I found myself going to the Little Theatre with him, and, during the erratic existence of the Film Society, we saw a number of angst-ridden Swedish films together, wondering afterwards over a depressing drink why we had gone.

He had hired an excellent cook and was generous in his ways. He lived in a small bungalow on Seaview, an area then almost exclusively white. But he gave all his private tutorials in town and Kariakoo, where his pupils lived. He could be dragged to class picnics, to which he was quite unsuited, turning very red very
soon; and he would participate in the annual staff-versus-students cricket match, bowling decent spinners until Solanki or Abuali or Bhamji or Visram began hitting them to the boundary.

Around this time, poor Desouza was hit by a disastrous string of events from which he never recovered. He became engaged to a nice Goan girl, a bank teller, who unfortunately jilted him for a bank officer. This wounded him so deeply he never talked of marrying after that, and even turned somewhat ascetic. A few months after he was jilted, he one day savagely caned a boy for a minor misdemeanour. This was the event that would complete his transformation. He came to the staff room weeping. He went to the boy’s home and apologized, was slapped by the boy’s father and chased back into the street. After that even Desouza’s appearance changed. He wore dull greys or browns and grew a beard. He became softspoken, almost gentle, but was also distant and never seemed happy.

To add to Desouza’s torments, for the past four or five years in succession a boy in his Standard
XI
class had died in an accident. There was already a belief in town that every year the ocean claimed one young soul for its own. In two of these successive years, the boy who died was Desouza’s. One of these was a boy who, early one morning by the shore, had heard two women crying out for help some distance away in the water. He went in to rescue them, but was himself carried away by the current. The women were saved by a boat.

Then there was the time that a boy, while chasing or being chased during school recess, hit his head against a corner of an open window. The year after, on the first day of school, Desouza warned his students: “I don’t want any of you doing silly things, getting into accidents — dying on me.” They laughed. In November, four weeks before the end of classes, two of them were hit by a lorry while on a bicycle and died.

With all the changes taking place, and new syllabuses and new inspectors of education, and observers from overseas, I found myself for the first time in many years not quite qualified. By the book, that is. I had, of course, a
BA
(upper second), but I was told I should go for my diploma in education. This, by a shopkeeper turned educational administrator, so my persuasive powers naturally failed me. The real reason, I believe, was that with the country’s independence almost upon us, Western countries were indulging their consciences by donating teachers with whom I had to compete. The very fact that they came from the West made them — in the eyes of shopkeepers — more qualified than I. Upon recommendation from Gregory, I was admitted to the University of London in the autumn of 1960.

Much has been made of one’s first sight of London, even by Englishmen. There are many Dick Whittington stories from the colonies with ironic twists to them. I had, of course, left Bombay for Africa, so a big city was not in itself going to overwhelm me. But a colonial city is different from the metropolis, that place to which all roads lead. To see history take substance before one’s own eyes (and I was quite taken by monuments) is deeply impressive; to know things, recognize them upon first sight, as objects familiar and near, is miraculous; to see Englishmen in their own habitat, not all teachers, administrators, or governors, not all from Oxford or Cambridge, is curiously numbing. All this, yes — but just to have got out of the rut I had been in was refreshing, was to be living again. I met other students from different parts of the world, sometimes with very similar experiences to mine — how truly delightful to hear discussions about the merits or demerits of Messrs. Nelkon and Holderness by those from Hong Kong, Penang, and Accra. How wonderful to discuss Gregory and to realize that his other incarnations reside in Lagos and Khartoum.

But levity aside — and surely there are those who will blame our problems precisely on the presence of a Gregory in Dar, Lagos, and Khartoum — just to see the world from somewhere
else,
out there
, was exciting. To be exposed to new ideas, to be made to read and understand so much, was a privilege. In my mind I thanked the shopkeeper-administrator many times over for having given me leave.

Many of my former students — and when not my own, those who had seen me in school and said “Good morning, sir” to me countless times — were in London, and I met them. I was invited, smuggled, to one of their functions once, in the second month of my stay. They held mosque in a residential street in Kensington. The scene was remarkable: from the tube station, and the bus-stop on Kensington High Street, young Asians converged upon a handsome town house with black door and brass knocker. Inside, the mosque was quite dingy, but that was London. There were two large rooms downstairs on either side of the hallway designated for prayers. The prayer rooms were packed that Friday, mostly with young men and women all seated in rows on the floor. After the ceremonies, when all got up, there was a tremendous crush and one moved with extreme difficulty. Finally, there was a spillover into the street — which was the only place some of these young people who lived and worked miles apart could meet. At this point the neighbours complained to the police and the bobbies showed up. It was all very polite and, I was told, quite regular. About an hour later, with the mats removed, there was dancing, and, since not everybody stayed, there was room to breathe.

After prayers, and with a jolt, I saw Rita. But briefly and only at a distance. It had been nearly ten years since she’d left Dar. She looked older, which she was, and she had a young child with her, holding him in front to keep him from getting crushed. She hadn’t seen me yet, and I quickly looked away, in a gesture that was immature and perhaps even cowardly. But I had made it a point not to be obtrusive during this visit to London, and not seek her out in her new life with her husband. I desired very much to preserve what I had come to think of as my growing equanimity.
I had heard, though, that she and her husband had run a café near the campus, frequented by foreign students, but that they had moved on. It was now run by a Greek couple, and I of course knew the place.