The Book of Secrets (36 page)

There are certain events that make you a part of a place. This was one of them, for Gregory: the death of a child in a community he had served. What point in asking him, taunting him, at the Barbers’ Club: Mr. Gregory, after independence, where next — South Africa? Where but Dar?

As the van pulled away, Pipa and his male neighbours followed in the Taunus; and Remti’s screams echoed along the length of Viongozi, they said, from Gerezani all the way to the fire station, the United Nations Road, and the schools.

Ali stayed a week. He spent much of it with his father. “Tell
me,” he asked Pipa. “What is this secret? Tell me about Mariamu — my mother — who was she?”

And Pipa told him.

Ali returned to London, shaken, in some ways a changed man; and a man without cares, a man who could not be stopped. Ali told Rita what he had heard from Pipa.

And Rita has told me, but at a price as yet unnamed.

This is Rita’s story in London —

Goodness knows how, by the time Ali and I reached London there was already an air of scandal and excitement in the community. Every eye upon me in mosque; and the whispers. You can have no idea how difficult it was. So we were finally in London, now what to do? We had not married, he had not divorced. He had grounds, of course he had grounds: there had been no children by the marriage. He had written her a letter before we left, but her first response was to refuse divorce at any cost. I was staying at the Centre on Gloucester Road. There were a few girls there who had come “for higher education” — how simple we were! — but it was all shorthand-typing and hairdressing and nursing in those days. Ali stayed in a hotel near the university, and we were desperate for money. Finally she relented —
they
relented, the family — and in three months the divorce came through. He thought it was because of his threats of publicity — but it was more my family, going down on their knees to the G. R. Mooljis, the
khanga kings; signing away the deeds to some piece of property. Ali and I were married in a small ceremony at the mosque, and we rented a flat. The community in London soon forgot the scandal of our arrival and we began to lead normal lives. I heard from all my friends in Dar, but I had no contact with my parents, even my brother and sisters. My parents never forgave me. I wrote every week, I pleaded, wept over my letters. Please, I said, please, please listen. What is done is done, I cannot undo it, forgive and give me your blessings. They did not reply. That hurt a lot. A wedding is supposed to be a joyous occasion — it is a family occasion, a community occasion … it’s not only love, it can never be. There’s always some bitterness in a marriage that is not blessed. And a girl needs her family to turn to even in the best of marriages. I never got over it, it came between us, Ali and me. And now — I don’t think
I
have it in my heart to forgive
them
 … not completely … for that rejection.

There were other girls like me, in London. One had run away to marry a Hindu from South Africa; she lives in Harrow now and they own a grocery store. Another girl, from Kariakoo, ran away with a boy from the Jafferi sect — a crime much worse than mine. She is divorced and lives with her daughters in Toronto. We used to meet and talk sometimes — go for coffee after Friday mosque. All of us bred on Schoolgirls’ Picture Library comics and Enid Blyton and Indian films, with visions of Big Ben and the friendly bobby. Well, the bobbies were friendly, in the 1950s, and the postmen honest — you could post a letter with tuppence-ha’penny taped in place of a stamp, and the next day it would be delivered! There was a nice sort of innocence then. And we were still from the colonies, we were no threat. But we were coloured.

I took shorthand-typing and had work within weeks. They treated you like servants, then … but I don’t think we minded, not at first, not that much, we were too thrilled to be in London, too honoured. We worked late, were asked to clean up, had our
bottoms pinched; a girl was raped, another became pregnant. And then we learned to speak up.

But he — Ali — had it much worse … in the beginning. He worked as a waiter; the proud, handsome Ali, who had the bearing of a prince. He would leave at six in the morning — neatly dressed in suit and tie, full of high spirits, whistling — and return all dishevelled.… All the stories of London we used to hear — how many would have gone had they known the truth beforehand? And yet those who returned home kept coming back, couldn’t stay away … from the cold winters, gas-heated bedsitters, in which a few even gassed themselves … in error or deliberately, who knows? Did I have regrets? Yes. Who wouldn’t? From Dar’s favourite girl, coddled and pampered, to this — a drudge. And he? He never looked back, not once even in the most difficult times.

So this was the once-glamorous Ali and Rita in London.

But you made it eventually, didn’t you, Rita? You would always have made it, anywhere.

Ali finally had a decent offer: managing the Museum Café near Great Russell Street. It required both of us to run the place and it paid well. But it was hard work. We opened at five for the deliveries; there was the first rush at six-thirty, when the cleaners and lorry drivers arrived. Then, at eight-thirty, there were the secretaries and clerks and telephone operators; later the students. Then lunch, and tea. Oh yes, I saw everything, the grease pans, the scullery, the mop. Out in front, Ali. He was indomitable. However tired and defeated and broken down he was in the evening, the next morning, there he was, the prince — or deposed chief’s son, as some believed, he never made it clear. Oh, he could have sold them the Taj Mahal. Especially when he wore his astrakhan. That wasn’t often, of course; he was into Homburgs. He learnt the English accent, the real thing; proper. And he was learning Spanish. That almost undid me.

I had had our daughter, Rehana, by then, and I was expecting Hadi. Ali took his lessons on Fridays when I went to mosque. He was out of the community by then — more or less … it’s never complete, is one thing you learn; that was okay with me. It was over coffee after prayers when one of my friends said, “How do you know he’s learning Spanish, Ri?” “He’s learning quite a bit,” I said. In all innocence. They all looked at me as if I was out of my mind. “On Friday nights? Do you know the teacher?
What
is he learning besides?”

How I wept, made scenes. Wrote home. Her name was Alice. She came from Spain but had an American mother. At
LSE,
and a little older than me. If I had heard from my family, I would have left. But I didn’t. And he gave her up.

We ran the Museum Café for five long years. They were not all as bad as the first year. But still. My children were my inspiration then. And I went to mosque on Friday evenings — what a solace that was. Ali took courses and tried one or two business ventures on the side, which failed. We didn’t know what else to try. There was talk of going to America, or Dubai.

And then our luck changed in the most fantastic way. A few families made their fortunes in property; you know, one day grocers on Stanley Street, the next, millionaires in London — unbelievable, isn’t it? Those who came later, those younger than us, made it in hotels and nursing homes, and also in property. But our luck came knocking at our door — and it seemed that he was right, Ali was really chosen by fate. Well. There was this Jew who every Thursday was the last customer in the café, at five. Mr. Eisen. He looked old but actually he was only in his fifties; he was a big man. Sometimes he brought with him his wife and daughter. Always had a light supper — we served no dinners. He liked Ali … and me … very much … would stop him as he walked past. “Mr. Ali,” he would say. “How is the missis — tell her the soup, it was good. Thank her for keeping it for me … I know she did …” He, of course, didn’t believe for a minute that we owned the café.
“Why don’t you work for me?” he said to Ali one day. “Your missis can then stay home with the children.” Just like that.

This was shortly before
you
arrived in London. I saw you, of course — that day when you sneaked into the mosque — and I wished so much to meet you, discuss my problems with you. Ask you about home, how my parents were, give you letters to take back. Ask you to talk with them, intercede for me — did that occur to you? No, you stayed away, nursing a wound that had no right to be there in the first place.

The wound had healed, Rita. So well, only a nice memory remained, I simply didn’t want to reopen anything. You say Ali was indomitable; to me, you were so. I was afraid of what you could do to me. Perhaps I
should
have come to you. A faint heart …

Mr. Eisen — I can’t remember his first name, the relationship was so formal, though friendly — had his own finance company, the Athena. He was a refugee from Germany, leaving as a young man. He had a strong accent. We were fascinated with the history — from the films and magazines. The first time we invited them to our flat, we asked them a lot of questions about Germany; his parents and so on … and the war. As students we had read of the brave Maquis in berets and the girls in pigtails on bicycles who helped them escape through France. Anne Frank. And the films those days were all about the war, weren’t they? … But of course we soon realized it was a subject not to be discussed. There would always be that distance between us, we were too naïve. They looked poor — which they were not — and outcast, but there was so much culture, things we could only get an inkling of. They were so European. They had a son, who was an artist, who was touring in the States. He had absolutely refused to join the business. The wife and daughter helped, but I don’t believe they had a knack for it. Perhaps it was too much a man’s world. Mrs. Eisen —
Ela — was undergoing therapy. Migraine, she said, but I think it was depression. A young typist was the only outside person employed in the office. When Ali joined it he came like a breath of fresh air. The prince — even they called him that. And he took to the new business, the new life, like a duck to water. It’s what he was born for.

“What do you do — what is the business?” Ali asked Mr. Eisen when he made the offer that first day.

“Say the boss wants to sell this fine restaurant and invites you to make an offer. You don’t have the money, of course, so you come to Athena Finance Company — to me.”

“For a loan — but I could go to Lloyd’s Bank.”

“Would they give you it — give it to you … you know what I mean!”

“No.”

“Exactly.”

Should I be telling you this — a family secret? Behind many an immigrant success-story there is a guardian angel somewhere in the background. Mr. Eisen was ours. Where would we have been without his help. He was a good businessman, too, of course, and many immigrants and refugees ended up at his doorstep for loans to start again. Some of the new real-estate multimillionaires — including a few from East Africa — bought their first properties through him. He could take risks with them, he knew their mentalities. “They are not riff-raff where they come from,” he would say. “They are workers, builders … sometimes crooked, but we won’t say that aloud and we are not fools, are we?”

The night Ali’s half-brother, Amin, died, Ali was phoned from Pipa’s house. We could hear the wailing and screaming in the background — it was dreadful. And eerie, over such a long distance. And Remti blaming Ali for it — what had
he
done? We were
of course
shocked; we knew what the boy meant to his parents. Such a darling, everyone had so loved him. Having come after so
long a time, when there was money and time to lavish on him. Ali was not, after all, Remti’s son. And when she had her own son, it was a triumph, over Ali, over … Mariamu,
that
woman. He’ll be a bigger prince, Remti had boasted, he’s the real prince … and so on. Amin Mansion was built, then the signs of affluence, prestige — car, telephone, fridge (we can laugh at it all now; we
were
poor, weren’t we?) — all because of Amin.

Ali caught a plane out of London that same night we heard the news. A strange thing happened when he arrived in Dar. He had automatically put on his astrakhan and he was wearing a white suit. He took a taxi from the airport. When it got into town, driving along Independence Avenue, he realized the car had a train of young men running behind it. He was amazed, thought he was being attacked; or that he’d arrived in the midst of a revolution. But these were Indians — Shamsis mostly — who were mobbing him. Finally, when the car turned in to Uhuru Street, the young men knew their mistake: he was not the real prince Aly Khan. It rather unsettled him. This was not the Dar he knew, he couldn’t wear the astrakhan as nonchalantly as he used to.

He stayed a week, living in a hotel. In that week he became his father’s chauffeur. They had long chats. They sat at the seashore … or outside the new Upanga mosque with its beautiful garden … or in the shop, where the two had spent so much time together. Ali was genuinely touched by this closeness. The old man, coughing and sickly now, opened his heart to him. When Ali returned to London, he was changed. Before, he had seen himself as somehow chosen. Now he was driven, and quite ruthless. His face had darkened with a seriousness.

Ali asked to buy into Athena, and Mr. Eisen offered him twenty-five per cent, this being his artist-son’s share. And Ali began bringing in international business. That was his knack, he could make contacts fast, he dressed well, he spoke well, and he impressed. “Forget about real estate, and bed-and-breakfast
affairs in Victoria, and typing schools,” he would say to Mr. Eisen, “international finance is where the real money is.” Of course there was glamour in that, and travel, and the contracts were huge. The first large contract was from some Arab businessmen. A ship was chartered for East Africa … there was quite an uproar about it later — all kinds of claims, not true really, but it was turned back by the Royal Navy on its way from Aden …

The time was 1963-1964; there had been a violent revolution in Zanzibar in which the Arab monarchy was deposed, with the assistance of the Russians, the Cubans, and the East Germans. The chartered ship, the
Seyyid Said
, was suspected of carrying weapons and European mercenaries. There was a Russian submarine in the Indian Ocean, the three East African countries were nervous about coups d’etat, and the tense situation was very much the cause of the Royal Navy’s turning back of the
Seyyid.