The Book of Secrets (39 page)

On the night of the awards, a Sunday, I went to take the news to Gregory. His bungalow on Seaview, across the road from the beach, was a small two-bedroom affair, set back from a front yard and a driveway which had two concrete gateposts but no gates. A shadowy nightwatchman sat outside on the front steps; a light was on in the front room. As I entered, two boys — one of whom opened the door — were leaving, one of them saying to me, “Sir — he’s very sick. You’ll have to call a doctor,” and the other nodding agreement with equal gravity.

I closed the door behind them, turned to face Gregory, who was sitting on the sofa, and opened the offering I had brought with me (now so inappropriate) — fish and chips from the new Wimpy’s — and gave him the good news about the prize. He grinned. I thought, then, that only his face, with that smile beaming momentarily, had any life, any presence, so frail and insignificant was the rest of him in his soiled clothes.

He sat up, tried a chip, put it down: “Bring me the scotch, will you.”

“No,” I said with friendly determination. “You, my friend, need rest. I’ll give you some warm water. Then some tea and biscuits. And then to bed with you.”

His expression turned into a most hateful leer. “Always bloody correct, aren’t you.” His voice was hoarse. “Do the right thing by me — will you — you fucking — frigid — Jesuit — who never took a bloody risk — always proper —
Mister
Gregory —
Mister
Gregory — you colonial —”

The water spilled over his shirt, and I handed him a kitchen towel, somewhat taken aback, but not willing to take his outburst at face value.

The tea went down better, and we talked about the play.
His
play, he called it. He told me that the two boys who’d left as I came in had come to say goodbye; they were going to the United States on scholarships. They were the last of his favourites, all the others had left, none had ever returned. He sat there, hunched, with a
pained look on his face as if the world had come crashing down around him and he was in the midst of the debris. I could catch a faint glimmer only of how he felt, but then I was younger and less drawn to alcohol.

“Tell me, Fernandes — Pius — if you had to do it all over again, would you? Dammit, spend a lifetime to teach, I mean … farther away than you ever imagined. Would you?”

I was dumbfounded, and for the first time the thought came to me: What exactly
had
we achieved? Some satisfaction, yes, in having brought up a generation — but what comfort that, in lonely old age?

“Why, yes — wouldn’t you? You’re being unnecessarily morbid.”

He wasn’t listening, was weeping. Then he wiped his eyes, stood up uncertain on his feet, shivered a bit. He was ready to go to bed. I helped him along, by the shoulders, and sat him on his bed, which was unmade. Hastily, I looked for his pyjamas, found them on the floor, and then, as he shivered and sweated, I helped him change. He lay down on his side and I put a blanket on him, which he kicked off, leaving only a sheet. I started to go.

“Wait here,” he said. “Please. Sit.”

I sat on the bed, watched over him. Sweat ran down his face. It was warm, I reminded myself, but not unusually so. He would shiver in spasms, then relax. I wasn’t sure how long I would sit there. “I should have called the doctor,” I said. “No,” he said, “just stay.” Without knowing why, I lay down beside him, also on my side, and held him. When at last he fell asleep, it was with a great sigh and shudder, as if he’d lost a battle.

Of that moment I remember a feeling of dislocation, a sense of empathy; a feeling of being utterly alone, with another human being in my arms. The sound of waves in the distance. An occasional car on the road outside.

It was the next morning when I left; he was still in bed, fast asleep.

I did not see much of Gregory thereafter, I don’t quite know why. All I have are incomplete thoughts, half explanations — the hateful look and the bitter taunt I could not, cannot, forget; but we had also, that night, reconciled and touched. What more was there? I felt guilty at not seeing more of him, but took comfort in the knowledge that he was under the care of some ladies associated with the Anglican church. I am surprised, now, at this callousness on my part, and have often asked myself, was it because I was afraid of what more there was, or could have been? I honestly don’t know. Gregory was a homosexual. Of his relationships with his favourite boys I never bothered to inquire; to innuendos about him I turned a deaf ear. Of all my acquaintances in Dar I found him the most easy to be with. I liked him. His quirks I treated with affection, sometimes tinged with exasperation. It was Rita who confused and tormented, who even now leaves me helpless by her charm and beauty, about whom the regrets are real and not unspoken.

Images of death come, now, and quite naturally so, with the recollection of an event that came to symbolize for so many the death … of a dream, a hope, a way of life. Nineteen seventy-two saw the ruling party’s socialist policies reach their climax in the nationalization of rental properties. Those — mostly Asians — who had erected two-storey buildings as monuments to the labours of their families, who staked thus a claim in the country they had made their home, whose one investment was in two or three flats they would rent out, saw their hopes dashed in a betrayal of the faith they had in the country. Savings of a generation, two generations, were taken away. It was now the people’s property, they were told.

Two deaths were immediately attributed to this news. One was that of Hassam Punja, probably the richest man in Dar, with
numerous buildings to his name, and mills and factories (the monument to his achievements being for many years Dar’s tallest building, the imposing yellow pyramid overlooking the Mnazi Moja grounds). The other death was that of Nurmohamed Pipa. Pipa, a cynical old man after the death of his son Amin, upon hearing that much of Amin Mansion was the people’s property now, said, “Bas? Only this? Let Him take away me too, now.” The next day he died.

The two Shamsi funerals were held together in a momentous event at town mosque. Both men had begun in poverty: Hassam Punja, as everyone knew, by selling peanuts in the streets; Pipa as a porter. They lay displayed to their people under white sheets, only their faces showing. Naked we come and naked we return, the Shamsis sang in their funereal hymn; but that teacher, Mwalimu, who became the president, didn’t have to hurry them along, they muttered under their breaths. And many would say in wonder afterwards that Pipa didn’t look so fat this time, and Hassam Punja wasn’t so short after all — how we tend to exaggerate.

Over the years, the people of the neighbourhood of Pipa Corner, looking at the yellow building in their midst, had often wondered about the miser who had built it after decades of labour in his spice shop. How much? How much did Pipa have stashed away, how much was he worth? In death now, as he had in life, Pipa eluded his questioners. After his funeral, lights in the second-storey flat stayed on late into the night, downstairs the shop was busy with all manner of sounds suggesting furniture being moved or dismantled. But Remti and her daughters and their husbands were to find no hidden treasure — no stolen jewellery, no smuggled diamonds, no German gold coins. What Pipa left for his wife and daughters was worth more than any treasure there might have been: Amin Mansion — but it was now the people’s property.

There was a third death that fateful week, but it went largely unnoticed. A few years before it would have been a local event of some magnitude and meaning; the teacher had been an institution, had taught their boys for two decades and more, they couldn’t pass English Literature without him. But, occurring now, his death was essentially an expatriate event. Mr. Gregory of Boyschool: Oh yes, didn’t he leave? No — he’s just died.

Some hundred people — expatriates in the city and senior students from Boyschool — dutifully showed up at the Anglican church for Gregory’s funeral. A eulogy was read by Fletcher, another by one of his students; two telegrams arrived from abroad. As little known to this gathering as was the dead man, I had no words to say to them, nor was I asked to contribute any.

It was a few weeks after the funeral, when I went to the grave to examine the headstone donated by a few former students and fellow teachers, that Mr. Anscombe, the minister, told me Gregory had left me a box. It contained papers and books, he said. I assumed they were the texts he had taught over the years, and the notes for students he had prepared, which we had once thought of publishing, before they had become outdated with the arrival on the syllabus of Achebe and Soyinka, and Miller and Ibsen. I didn’t pick up the box, however, didn’t examine the contents. Let them lie buried in some vault, I thought then, useless detritus from a life now, happily, for its owner, extinguished.

In the years that followed, through the seventies and part of the eighties, I continued to teach at Boyschool. In those years, under a socialist régime in the country, I saw the values that I had brought with me and inculcated with such ardour in the school become increasingly out of place. Mediocrity was the new order, and ideological correctness. The new generation of students who came were sent by a government seeking bureaucrats, not, as in the past, by a community eager to get ahead in the world. The Shamsis, who had built and run the school as the pinnacle of their ambition, now in large numbers began to pack up and leave for North America. I saw my best students come to say goodbye, never to return. And one by one, almost all of my fellow expatriate teachers left also. One of them, I heard through my former student Sona, taught math at a school in a ghetto in New York City. Another sold insurance in Canada. A few went to Zambia before retiring to India. And finally, in 1980, Desouza succumbed to the times in a typically drastic fashion.

He had moved to a private school in town and I saw less of him
then. After Gregory’s death in 1972, for a few months we did spend more time together, but we drifted apart again, though remaining friends. Too much, it seemed, had happened to us that took us into private worlds we were unable to share.

One day a student of his came and told me that Desouza had not come out of his flat for three days, and could I do something. I went with the boy to Desouza’s flat, knocked loudly on the door and called to my friend, but to no avail. Finally, with everyone else gathered there — servants and hawkers — assuring me that the teacher was definitely inside, I agreed to let the door be forced open. We found Desouza in bed, shivering, starving, and almost dead. There was no food in the house, not even tea or sugar. He was evidently suffering from malaria; and although this was a time when medication had become scarce, he was soon rehabilitated with the help of a doctor who had been a student at Boyschool. Shortly thereafter, during December holidays, Desouza went to India to stay with his sister and recuperate; he never returned. He wrote me once that he was having trouble obtaining a visa to come back. Apparently, he had never taken the trouble to become a citizen. Now, according to the visa authorities, he was too old to come back to teach.

Three years ago the headmaster of my school called me into his office and asked me if I knew I was past my retirement age of fifty-five. Yes, I said, but I had many years of teaching left in me. He smiled, reminded me that rules were rules. So I bowed to his greater authority and accepted a pension.

I have felt alone for a good many years, now; alone and lonely. The admission doesn’t come easily. I suppose I could have left after Gregory died. But where, and to what end? Only filial duty would have taken me to India, but by then both my parents were dead. And the loneliness of old age can come upon one
anywhere. This city where I first landed forty years ago has so grown on me, it is like an extension of my self. I will never shed it.

One thought, though, has been a balm in my solitary days: that I continue to live in the hundreds of students who have passed through my hands. Such were the times I served in, such the nature of the trust placed upon us teachers. Gregory would have understood this idea of fulfilment in the eventual dispersal of oneself, but he was not the type to draw upon it for comfort. “Are we thinking of the next incarnation already, Pius? A shade of Mr. Chips, perhaps …” I hear the purr of the pipe, see the twinkle in the eyes.