by M G Vassanji
— That he was Corbin, two onlookers concurred.
— But I didn’t see him, Pipa said, wondering at his good luck, letting out his breath at last. Has he gone, then?
— Yes, to Uganda. Look, he’s saying goodbye. And that piece with him is the missis.
— What, Pipa Bhai, did you know Mr. Corbin from upcountry? What would he want from you?
— It’s all right … I knew him up in British East Africa. He’s gone now anyway — where and when will I see him again …
— No telling, said the civil servant. You know the sahibs, they come and go as they please. Don’t they rule the world.
A discussion on the nefariousness of the Angrez followed, before the shopkeepers realized that business was meanwhile suffering and they dispersed.
Alfred Corbin had been District Commissioner in Dar es Salaam for eighteen months. He had then been briefly appointed Assistant Secretary for Native Affairs. He was a firm believer in, and made strong recommendations for, indirect rule of the former German colony, now a trust territory under the League of Nations. From Dar es Salaam, in 1923, Alfred Corbin was posted to Uganda, where he would spend a further twelve years.
Pipa found it difficult to get over the knowledge that Corbin had actually been in Dar, had walked the same streets he had, and possibly even stopped outside his shop. Had perhaps known of his presence in Dar. Suppose, he thought — just suppose — that Bwana Corbin had walked into his shop while supervising a cleanup of the street outside and had seen him, Pipa, sporting his fancy fountain pen. What then? A search of the house would have immediately revealed the diary in which the pen was found. Or suppose he had met Bwana Corbin in the street: how would he have greeted him? And he would have had this same fancy pen in his shirt pocket.
It was a miracle. He had been close to a calamity, but had been saved. This thought strengthened his feeling that the book was truly meant for him, and was under the protection of Mariamu’s spirit.
And then news began arriving from Moshi, news about a boy, an angel of a boy, mistreated and used as a servant by an African woman. Was it the same boy? Pipa had no doubt. He had heard of Jamali’s death the year before in Moshi, had sent a letter of condolence to Khanoum and had inquired in it about Aku. She had replied, thanking him and saying the boy was well.
Pipa then sent a letter to his father-in-law, Jaffer. The reply came: “The boy is yours, dear Pipa, living with the late Kikono mukhi’s wife. She has left our community now that her husband is dead. The boy is dirty, wears no shoes, works as a servant and does not go to school. It is our urgent duty to take him back …”
Pipa guessed, correctly, that it was due to Khanoum’s dire circumstance and outcast status that the boy’s condition in her care was seen in this light. Yet something had to be done. It was as a result of his wife, Remti’s, insistence that he had given the boy away. But seven years later Aku was no longer a threat to her; he could even be an asset. Besides, Pipa owed it to Mariamu’s memory not to turn away from their son.
Find out, Pipa and Remti wrote back, if the boy would like to come to Dar to his father, if he will be happy away from Khanoum. The boy must be willing to come; Khanoum, who has been a mother to him and is his aunt, should not be coerced. If necessary, we will come to Moshi to discuss the situation with her.
The folks in Moshi acted upon this letter and took custody of the boy and sent him to Dar.
17
You shall not worship idols, say the scriptures.
“This is not right,” said Remti. “It is sinful, this puja, this shrine. We are not Hindus —”
“I have to do this,” he said. “Or there will be no peace.”
Over the seven years since her death, she often came to haunt his imagination. At first, during his early days in Dar, she would appear as the helpless murdered figure he had discovered on the floor of their shop in Kikono: her head lolling to one side, a pained, surprised look on her face; strands of hair stuck together, a red stain on the throat, her dress soaked at the chest. The pachedi was somewhere on the floor. This bloody apparition would get up to claw at him in anger, and he would recoil with horror and surprise, saying, “This is not you, Mariamu, this anger,” and she would become her normal gentle self and chide, “Surely we agreed to be together.”
She is only jealous of Remti, Pipa would tell himself; she’ll soon get used to my new life.
After a time, to his relief, the blood-stained figure disappeared altogether, and she came to him only as the gentle woman he knew so well. She would be sitting on a chair facing him, legs crossed in front of her, quite alluring in the green pachedi and the sparkling nose stud, her bare feet dyed with henna in bridal designs.
“Why this bhupko,” he’d ask her, “this show, after all this?”
“Isn’t this how you liked me?” she’d say with a smile.
Everyone he talked to, those who knew, told him with certitude that a jiv, a soul, whose body meets a sudden end must remain on earth for the specified period, until the time ordained for death. There were rituals to benefit the jiv: on the morning of Eid, when the choicest cooking is taken to mosque in the name of the dead (food for the body transformed into prayers for the soul); and on Layl-tul-qadr, when angels descend upon the earth to bestow blessings.
When Aku came to live with him, she said, “You’ve made me very happy. He’s now with us, as before.”
“I would so much like a corner to myself,” she told him one day. “Nothing much. Just a humble corner of my own.”
There was a small, square storeroom adjoining the shop, its warped wooden slab of a door facing the till. To its left was the doorway opening into the street; to its right was the entrance to the inner, living room.
He would make a home for her in this empty storeroom, he decided.
He had the room swept and cleaned. And then he went and brought the trunk, which had for so long sheltered the book, and placed it against the wall facing the door. There the book lay, inside the trunk, for some time. The room became hers.
One morning, on a Sunday, when the shop was closed, he went into the room, fetched the book from the trunk, sat on the floor. He flipped the pages, examined closely the sloping hand, the dates, the printed advertisements on the endpapers; he noted the change from ink to lead pencil and back, and the varying length of entries: all these signified, said something, he could not know what. Tenderly he closed the book.
He went and brought a white sheet, covered the trunk with it, and with reverence placed the book on it. This room, its door visible at the far end from the till, thenceforth he kept locked, for entry to no one but him.
Thus began his long period of private idolatry.
To Aku, his father appeared as a dour, silent, and strange character, though not an uncaring one. The boy went to the community school in the morning, and in the afternoons sat in the shop with his father, at his allocated place on the outside doorstep, looking out at the street but ready to help when called. In the evenings he went out to play. His stepmother he found attentive, though in a distant way; she had her own two daughters to look after, with whom he sometimes played. For many months he missed Khanoum’s long arms with which she embraced him, and her carefree home that he had left.
Aku’s introduction to his father’s strangeness was the mysterious locked room into which no one but his father was allowed. It began with a peculiar incident, a Hindu ceremony to which his father took him one night.
They were in a large and bright room filled with thick incense fumes and the tinkle and jangle of bells and tambourines and the chanting of people. A thin, dark brown man sat at the edge of a stage, his legs dangling over the side, facing a throng of worshippers who sat on the floor. He wore a cloth round his waist, the rest of him was bare and hairless. A lightbulb hung not far above his head, creating an aura around him. The worshippers, men and women, chanted as they struggled to keep their eyes on the man, who went into a paroxysm of shaking and shivering, so that waves seemed to
move up from his legs to his belly and neck. His eyes had become large and wide as if with fright, his mouth was a deep red, and there were white lines on his forehead. Suddenly there was a hush. “Look,” people said: the man on the stage, his body taut, eyes wide, mouth puckered in a whistle, and hands on his knees, seemed to be changing colour, taking on hues from dark purple to grey to ashen white then yellow, orange, and red. And then with controlled undulations a wave went up from his vibrating stomach to the torso, and from the back of his throat there slowly appeared first a dim light, then a glowing object which so grotesquely filled his mouth it could not possibly be ejected, and the man, his lips stretched to the utmost, pulled it out, tearing his lip in the process so that it became bloody. The object seemed to be a sphere fused to one end of a cylinder. The man fainted into the arms of his attendants who had rushed to him.
Aku watched this spectacle terrified as he held on to his father’s hand.
The next morning the man came to the shop, in dhoti and cap, grinning very broadly, with extremely white teeth. The boy was not frightened this time. His father served the Indian some tea, then showed him a piece of paper, and after that took him to the storeroom. A smell of incense began to come from inside, and the sound of chanting. The Indian came two more times, each time bringing unfamiliar pasty sweets for the children, who swallowed them painfully. On the last day he drew coloured chalk patterns outside the storeroom, on the floor at the threshold.
Thus was Pipa’s shrine to Mariamu consecrated. If the room had been forbidden before, it became forbidding now. To Aku and his sisters it symbolized the mysterious, unspoken side of their brooding father. If they talked about it at all, it was to say that the room was their father’s own private prayer room, and it had resident in it a holy presence.
To Pipa, the boy brought a comfort. He felt a tenderness welling up inside him, a need to reach out to the little fellow; but six years’ separation had left gaps too large, they had not developed between them the codes and language of familiarity and affection. There was also that doubt, the question that stood between himself and Aku: Was he his son?
Mariamu spoke to him, but she did not say much. She had never been one for lengthy conversations; and now, as before, on certain matters she was completely silent.
So whenever he heard of the presence of maalims and joshis or others of whatever faith who had acquired local renown for their knowledge of the world of spirits, he went to consult them. To each he showed a half page from the book. Of each he asked the same questions. Where is she? What is she? Who killed her? What is in the book? Tell me about the jiv, the soul.
None of them could give him the exact answers. But they all concurred: the fact that she had returned to him, made her home with him again, so to speak, was proof that she had left something undone, had something yet to take from or give to the mortal world.
But what? — Pipa thought. Why doesn’t she tell me what it is?
“Sometimes, my friend,” one maalim, going further than most, told him, “all that these returned souls want from us is forgiveness in order to be released …”
Having heard this, Pipa went home trembling with the thought that he would release Mariamu. Why not? — she was dead, let her rest in peace. He would keep the book she had given him; and he had her son. He went to her shrine, sat in front of the book, and said, “I forgive you, Mariamu, if you sinned. Go now and rest in peace.”
But that night Mariamu came to him, turning the maalim’s reasoning on its head: “I thought you forgave me already … back in Kikono … why then send me away now? And how do you expect me to leave my son?”
“Isn’t he my son too?” Pipa said angrily.
He had been clever there, he thought. But Mariamu said nothing and made him angrier still.
And so Mariamu remained, as did Pipa’s questions to which she would give no answer.
Pipa learned the English alphabet from his son, who was eleven years old now, tracing over the letters like a child as the two sat in the shop in the afternoons. At other times Aku read to him from his school readers. This is a dog. A farmer went trotting upon his grey mare: bumpety, bumpety, bump. Rule Britannia. It is the duty of all subjects to be loyal to their king. The boy was not sure when his father’s limit was reached, at what point his mind simply refused to take in any more. But he read, and helped his father say words with him.
Several times Aku saw Pipa at the shrine, through the crack where the door was hinged, bent over something, poring over it — trying to read. He would come out quiet, at peace. Once, he emerged from the storeroom and said to the boy, “Can you write ‘Mariamu’?” The boy wrote on his slate. Pipa looked around for a piece of blank paper. He couldn’t find one. He became frantic. Finally, he took one of the last pages of a ledger and found a pencil stub. The boy scrawled Mariamu. Pipa took the piece of paper to the storeroom, studying it in his hand as he walked, and emerged a half hour later, rubbing his eyes and pleased with himself. He had read the book: one word in it.
The boy had felt his heart beating fast when he heard that word, Mariamu, his mother’s name, on his father’s lips. It brought them a little closer together. Until now he had been told nothing more than that his mother was dead. Now he knew: all his father’s devotions at the shrine were to his mother. But he was afraid to ask his father about her yet.
Then a strange episode occurred that made him even more aware of her.
He was eleven years old. For a few days there had been much veiled discussion between Pipa and Remti, about some “they” who would be coming to visit. Pipa had fumed and raged. “After ten years they show their faces — for what? Now that he is almost grown, do they think they’ll take him from me — or turn him against me? …”
The boy began wondering: Were “they” his other relations? Would they take him from Pipa and Remti as he’d been taken once from Khanoum?
The day they were to arrive there was much anticipation. The children were given new clothes to wear and instructed not to go outside. The rooms were swept more than once. At last, in the afternoon, the visitors came: a thin sickly woman, a robust bigbosomed lady who was older, two girls, and a man who was their local host. The adults all sat on the floor and the guests were given water. The children were presented and were admired before they, too, took their places on the floor. When Aku’s turn came to be shown off, the happy scene broke down. The older lady began: “What a beautiful child! And the girls like angels! Such prosperity in the home!” And then, before anyone could respond: “Oh my poor darling if she had only lived to see all this …” With open palms she beat her white bosom, once, twice, and the women started wailing and the two men, at first taken by surprise, looked down and had tears in their eyes. The younger children giggled a bit before the older girls shushed them. Remti offered vague words of comfort.
As suddenly as it had started, the wailing stopped. The big woman, wide-eyed, looked around. “But this is not good,” she declared. The younger sickly woman, her daughter Kulsa, who was Mariamu’s mother, blew her nose and said, “What’s happened is done with.”
This was the long-delayed sog ceremony after the death.
“She was a good soul,” Mariamu’s grandmother announced. She was the type called Zanzibari, one given to dramatic exhibitions of emotion.
The mood relaxed, tea was drunk, with biscuits, and they all talked matter-of-factly about “She,” who apparently had been a great soul. When “She” died, there had been a peaceful smile on her face; a star had fallen from the sky during the funeral ceremonies.
Before the visitors left, Aku was brought before them once more. With tears and hugs he was given a present and told to visit his grandmother in Mombasa.
After they had gone, Mariamu, his mother, became real for the boy. She had had a mother and a grandmother of her own; what else? He began to feel that he belonged to more than just his father. But the world of adult machinations, appearances and disappearances, bewildered him still. Khanoum he remembere
d somewhat vaguely now. She had said she would come to him, but she never did.
Remti was a patient woman, bringing up a growing brood of girls, longing always for a boy. She did not resent the girls, the older ones helped with the younger, and about the house; they sang together while oiling hair, or cleaning rice and grain; and of course there were numerous squabbles. With the boy, Remti was less close — both remembered the circumstances of his arrival. But she was not unkind. With a pang of regret at not having her own son, she saw him grow older; soon he would be another man in the house. Her daughters would eventually be married away, and he would remain, its master when her husband was old or dead; unless she had a son of her own. Also, she knew that it was a son who preserved a woman in her old age.
She had her way around her husband, his moods, his obsession, which she treated as if it was a disease. She had known him a long time, longer than he had known his first wife. She could remember the day he first came to her home, with his mother, shy and gruff, and how her father had taken to teasing him as though he were a younger brother. He had set eyes on one of her sisters first but had been discouraged by the ambitions of her parents.
She was a good-looking woman of high spirits, astutely keeping out of her moody husband’s way most of the time. But on festive Thursdays, cleverly and with determination she worked her charms on the man, coming to be beside him in the shop, solicitous, intimate, and good-humoured; he somehow expected that and responded. On those afternoons the rooms filled with the cloying sweetness of halud vapour, and she would bathe, and oil her hair and scent it with jasmine. She would have his clothes cleaned and pressed and together they would walk to the mosque with the children. They would return in high familial spirits and eat the evening meal in a festive atmosphere, her every move long and slow and voluptuous in the colourful frock and pachedi she generously filled. Still sweet-talking him, she would guide him to bed, in the corner away from the children, while the oldest girl turned down the lamps.