The Book of Secrets (38 page)

“No, sir — Pius — this is the price I’m going to ask — which you’ve known all along, and I hold you to it. Let it lie, this past. The diary and the stories that surround it are now mine, to bury.”

After lunch at his home, Feroz and I return to his shoestore, at the former Pipa Store, on Uhuru Street. He offers me tea from a thermos he’s brought along. With Rita at the game parks now, Feroz and I seem to be where we were those days in March when he’d just placed the diary in my care.

I tell him that I must give the diary to Rita. He nods, giving me an indulgent look. He has known, ever since Rita came and began her long tête-à-têtes with me, that he has lost control of the diary.

“It has no value to me,” he affirms. “And it’s for family reasons she wants it, no, sir?”

“Yes,” I say, not wishing to elaborate. It occurs to me that Rita has perhaps also had a chat with him, explaining and cajoling so he wouldn’t make an issue out of the matter. And, he has a son in England, to whom she could be nice.

“That’s that then, sir. It’s as if it was never found in the first place —” He eyes me craftily, knowing that what he’s just said can’t
be true. But I refuse to take the bait; I ask him about something that’s bothered me from the first day he showed me the diary.

“You never told me, Feroz, how and where you found the book.”

He looks at me for a moment and says, “I’ll tell you. I’ll show you — come to the storeroom …”

I follow him to the room at the back, Pipa’s infamous dark room, now brilliantly lighted, its walls lined with shoeboxes.

“Anything unusual — you notice anything unusual in the room?” Feroz asks with a sweep of one hand, as if preparing to perform a trick.

“No,” I say dutifully, “I see nothing unusual — what is it?”

“Saidi,” he calls a servant.

With some effort Saidi and a helper drag an entire section of shelves, with shoeboxes, out and sideways. The bare yellow wall thus revealed looks at first ordinary — but no, I draw a sharp breath, one of the servants gasps more audibly and mutters a prayer. Down low, six inches up from the floor, is an old, torn plywood door, two-by-one feet — the size of four large bricks. It is held in place somehow, but a gap where it’s broken in one corner hints at the dark recess behind, where the book presumably was found.

“…  buried and sealed behind the wall … all along … buried and sealed …” Feroz is going on in triumph beside me.

I turn to look at him. The two servants have moved back and out of the way, ready to leave the room but only if told. Feroz explains.

“One day — several years after this shop came my way — when we were installing these new shelves, I noticed a small hole in the wall — a piece of cement had fallen away. It looked like a nail hole. I put my little finger in it, and more cement fell. And more. And there, behind all the cement that could come off was this little cupboard. Finally, I thought, the old miser’s fortune which no
one could ever find — but there was only this book, wrapped in newspaper.”

“Buried in the wall all these years …”

The wonder of it all. Someone else might have found it; it could have met an altogether different fate, perhaps never been found …

“Do you know the story of Anarkali, sir?”

I look at him: “Go on, you tell me.”

“Well, sir. In Mughal times in India, the great Emperor Akber had a son called Salim, who fell passionately in love with a servant girl named Anarkali. Such a love, between the prince of a great dynasty and a servant, could not be allowed. It was forbidden by the emperor, and Salim was sent to war. But the lovers continued to meet in secret. Finally, sir, as punishment for disobeying the emperor’s order, Anarkali was sentenced to be sealed up in a cave. But many years before, Akber had offered Anarkali’s mother anything she wished in exchange for her services to him. Now, as the cave was being sealed up, Anarkali’s mother came to claim mercy for her daughter. So Akber, who is famed for his justice, instructed that the cave be left open, at the back, and Anarkali was free — but she had to go away. She went singing, ‘The world belongs to those who love …’ ”

I recall a pack of audacious schoolgirls singing this very song to me in class. Mocking. Rita and her friends, in the prime of youth and happiness almost forty years ago.

“ ‘The world belongs to those who love.’ ” Forbidden love.

Perhaps all love is forbidden which is true, and it is true because the pain it causes makes us live.

Appendices

(1) In March 1964, von Lettow Vorbeck, commander of German East African forces during the Great War, died in West Germany. Upon his death, the Bundestag voted to pay off his askaris, and a Hamburg banker was dispatched to Dar es Salaam to make the payments. To identify the former askaris, he gave each claimant a broom and put him through the manual of arms. No askari, it was claimed, ever forgot the German commands.

(2) American actress Rita Hayworth (born Margarita Cansino) was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and placed in the custody of her daughter Yasmin (through Aly Khan) in 1981. The actress died in New York in May 1987. The prince had died in Europe in a car accident in 1958.

In the early 1960s, the first years of independence in the country, the breezy self-confidence of the new ruling class came mixed with a nervous insecurity. Loyalty — especially from those who had served the old order — had to be loud and unequivocal. Some countries allow dual citizenship, but not the new republics hungry for recognition and greatness, suspicious of new colonialisms, anxious for a clean break from past humiliations. You were asked to renounce your former citizenship, say goodbye to a prized British subjecthood for a brave new world. Not everybody acquiesced, and some gracefully left, including the country’s first finance minister, who was an Englishman. We were not surprised. One was not used to seeing Englishmen renouncing England; though the world has changed since then. And so when Gregory gave up his British passport, I was rather astonished.

“I’ve lived here most of my life, now,” he said. “This is home.” Then he looked at me pointedly: “Besides, if something were to happen to me and I got kicked out, England, that bitch, would always accept me — but not you, Pius. Wrong colour.”

Thus spoke the perfect ironist, who could not take the world at its word, or himself at his own, and continued to live in it as best he could, without committing himself to anything. There lay his tragedy, I thought even then: a man who was vulnerable on all sides, who had not saved himself a position to back into. And, indeed, it would not have been hard for someone such as Gregory to be kicked out — our leaders had no room for ironical ambiguities or other literary niceties, especially from those who had ruled over them. The
Herald
’s satirist, mocking a query in Parliament regarding mermaids, had been a recent persona non grata and had left for Australia.

For several years after we met at Boyschool, we called each other Mr. Gregory and Fernandes. He was much older than I, and perhaps even reminded me of my own teachers. There seemed a chasm between us, not wide, but deep. At some point, without much ado on Gregory’s part, I became Pius for him, for me he was still a Mr., and only a little later was it Gregory, and finally Greg, but only to his face and with the British-hating Desouza not around.

The three of us continued, in these times, to teach at Shamsi Boys’, or Boyschool, which was reaching even greater successes in the achievements of its students. We had, soon enough, among our new colleagues some of the students we had ourselves brought up. But Boyschool, in these its glory days, fell victim to the politics raging around us.

The early years of independence were years of political euphoria and self-confidence in the new nation. With both the eastern and western blocs wooing Tanzania, the country could play a game of radical and cocky nonalignment. But alignment proved inevitable; it fell eastwards, and there came towards the end of the decade an era dominated by an earnest socialism. Changes came at breakneck speed, dismantling old structures, racing us towards the egalitarian Utopia that most surely — we were told — awaited us.

One of these changes was the government’s takeover of Boyschool. We had objected to this, of course: not to the control of the syllabus — which was understandable in the highly sensitive political climate — but to the takeover of the school which had been put up with such devotion, was a monument to the labour and ambition of a community. For a few years we had Mr. Green, an Irishman, as headmaster, then Mr. Peters, an African writer from Moshi. It was, however, with Mr. Joseph that we hit bottom; a Party cadre who came simply to occupy a post — which he did armed with his government newspaper
Mwafrika
— and not to administer a school renowned for its standards and facilities. What surprise, then, that a storage shed was put up over the cricket pitch, the tennis courts became overgrown, window panes went unreplaced, the school bell disappeared, a plaque commemorating a heroic sacrifice of life by one of Desouza’s boys was removed, the boards containing the list of all the former graduates of Boyschool were taken down — in the cause less of egalitarianism than of erasing an irksome past. We lived in cynical times then, when the Party youth wing, the Green Guards, in the manner of Mao’s Red Guards, bullied people in the streets and sought control over their lives.

I go into these details because they come back to haunt, were so wantonly destructive. They are, to me, the markers of a period — a short one — in which so much changed. Nothing was the same again. Friends and colleagues began to leave, never to be heard from again; and Gregory fell.

At that time every school was provided with a plot of land to cultivate vegetables in the service of the school’s coffers as well as the students’ characters. Every plot was divided into smaller plots, one for each class. And twice a week came the dreaded shamba period at Boyschool when these urban boys, who had never seen a spade except perhaps in their fathers’ shops, marched in the sweltering heat for three quarters of an hour, up a hill past the new bungalows and to the slopes behind the Jangwani Girls’ School.
What I remember of that short-lived experiment is the diminutive Mr. Kabir the math teacher, bent over almost double under the weight of two spades; Gregory holding a machete as if in pursuit of a robber or beast; grey, bearded Desouza with a hoe for a staff, eyes on the hill ahead, a latter-day Moses; and boys digging, persistently digging, but with no maize, no yams, no okra, no crops to show for it.

It was during one of these shamba periods, as Gregory was overseeing a pack of boys digging the red earth (“I’m no farmer, Pius, but surely you don’t have to dig this deep to plant maize …”), that he fell into one of these contentious three-foot-deep ditches, suffering sunstroke, narrowly missing the sharp end of a hoe.

He was half carried, half dragged out, what little water was at hand was poured on his head, and I dispatched two boys to the Jangwani school to fetch a teacher. The East German math teacher came, in his car, and Gregory was taken to the Aga Khan Hospital, which was near his house.

Gregory was released from hospital the following day, looking rather weak and somewhat sheepish. Thereafter he was readmitted several times with dizzy spells. He was not recovering properly. All at once he seemed frail and aged. He began to wheeze and had become thinner so that his immense shorts, which once were the joke of the town, were now drawn in by a belt, portending decay and worse. He was excused from his duties in school, and gradually it came to be understood that he would not return.

It was 1971. Around this time a new batch of teachers from England had arrived at Boyschool, one of whom, Fletcher, had taken over the dramatic society. I cannot say whether it was the calibre of the students or the talents of Fletcher, but drama took off as it had never done before under Gregory or me. For the first time in many years, the school won first prize in the Youth Drama Festival with a production of an adaptation of
Pygmalion
written by Fletcher using an idea of Gregory’s.