by M G Vassanji
In short, a world that begins to look familiar emerges from the waters of the past, integrated.
Miscellany (iii)
From the personal notebook of Pius Fernandes
May 1988, Dar es Salaam
Rita and I see each other every day when she comes into town. There are not so many people she knows here now, and the relations that she does have become free from their shops only in the evenings. We discuss among other things the diary — the slim book that has enmeshed so many lives. She’s curious about what I know, of course, but surprisingly she has been quite forthcoming with what she knows.
“You see,” she says of Ali, “the son did return to the father. Just as Mariamu said he would. At least for a few days.”
“And then?”
“They talked, had the talk they never had before, and then he went away — returned —”
“Went to his father in England?”
She gives an annoyed look.
Later, talking of her father-in-law, Pipa, as if arguing his moral right to the book, she says, “How much he put himself through just to preserve that book, to keep alive that memory, that name: Mariamu.”
“A latter-day Orpheus —”
“A little different, surely — a humble shopkeeper.”
She stops, looks at me impatiently, then smiles, surprised at herself.
“I’m sorry,” I say, as she sips her coffee.
She has me now, as she’s had me ever since I laid eyes on her again, after so many years, when I went to greet her at the hotel.
Still the Enchantress.
We sit in a café on Somora Avenue. It used to be Independence Avenue; before that, Acacia Avenue. It reminds us that much has changed (for one thing there are hardly any trees left), but life goes on; if anything there is more life now, in this teeming street, in this city whose population has more than quadrupled since she left.
Every day, for several days now, we have sat in the same place, the same cushioned corner seat, starting at ten in the morning: some idle chitchat, some reminiscences, and for me, in little bits, she gives the story of Pipa the father, Ali the son. And she, Rita, I think as I watch her, certainly no spirit across the table.
There is some grey in the hair, above the ear; the face is long, still smooth, with a dab of peach bloom on the cheek, a little tiredness around the eyes. She has a flower-patterned dress on, the brightest thing anywhere in this room (no one wears a khanga here), and sits straight but not stiffly; no longer a pupil but a rich woman of the world.
“And you have told me all this,” I say. “All this openness about the family’s past. Why? Is it the book you want?”
“Well, I have only told you, haven’t I.… We go back a long way, don’t we? I enjoy talking with you — perhaps all I’ve done is to repay you for your company. Haven’t you felt the need to talk, after a long time?”
She stops, eyes me. For a moment, and only a moment, she looks vulnerable. “Your curiosity is irresistible, in any case. You already know so much. And — since you ask why I tell you all this — there’s a price I’ll want to exact from you.” She smiles.
“I’ll pay the price.” So says the historian quickly disarmed.
“Any price?” Her smile widens.
“Any price that’s mine to give.”
“I wonder.”
This new familiarity, I say to myself, watching her, is exciting. I never knew her like that. The mature, grown-up Rita, the full person.
I smile in return, as I must: “The story is all that matters. I can’t stop now. I’ll take it to its end.”
Who owns the diary? Feroz and Rita stand poised, each with claims to it. Feroz with the finder’s privilege. It is he who gave it to me, on trust; to him I should return it. Rita on the other hand represents the heir. That claim assumes that the diary was Pipa’s. But it wasn’t, it was stolen. A claim could be made for Corbin’s heirs. But what guarantee do we have that it would have gone to them, or that they would have disposed of it in a manner he would approve of, or that he himself would not have ultimately destroyed it? The private diary of a public servant. Who are his heirs — his kin? The people he served among, whose lives he influenced? The government he served?
“How do you two know each other?” I ask Feroz light-heartedly.
In her absence, he’s talked of her knowledgeably and familiarly, and now, watching them together, it seems to me that they go back quite some way. He is embarrassed by the question. She answers it: “I am his aunt, aren’t I, Feroz?” She explains: “He is a son of one of my cousins. I remember him as a boy often when I left Dar.… He was a quiet boy and such a help around the shop.” She turns to Zaynab, his wife, and asks almost impertinently: “Is he a good boy now?”
This is at lunch at Feroz’s. We are on the second floor of a Msimbazi building constructed in the heyday of the sixties when such a building represented wealth, a move up. Since then, like others, it has been taken over, nationalized; and money has found other means, other havens. But in spite of the wealth amassed by Feroz (some in Canadian and British banks), in spite of the hot water and VCR and toaster, this house — everything from its oilcloth on the table to the linoleum on the cement floor, the wooden pantry and scullery next to the dark kitchen, the sofas, the beds made up with mosquito nets rolled down and tucked in at the sides — belongs so much to the times Rita left behind.
“Hasn’t changed a bit,” she says. “Exactly like the house I grew up in. Don’t tell me —” she tiptoes excitedly into the sitting room, with its television, sofa, and — she turns to looks at us triumphantly — the master bed. “Brilliant,” she says, clapping her hands delightedly.
By this time the host and hostess are thoroughly deflated, shown up, reduced to the Kariakoo-wallahs that they are (foreign bank accounts notwithstanding, educated kids in the wings notwithstanding). There is a pained look on Zaynab’s face. Her daughter brings Cokes on a tray. The room is air-conditioned, cold; curtains on iron-screened windows keep away all knowledge of the glaring melting heat (except for a stark bright triangle on the linoleum, broken by the diamond pattern of the screen). The guest shivers, the hair on her arms bristles. She has on a sleeveless dress, arrogantly white, with green borders; the shoes are green and white, the purse is green. She exudes freshness.
Lunch brings more awkwardness. The couple can only show off their children (of whom only the beautiful though unaffecting Razia is with us) and the food they can buy here. Of the old school, Zaynab is taken to force-feeding, and guests cannot leave until they are practically bursting. Politeness will not do; at some point you have to look her in the eye and say, “No. I will not have any more.” There is meat, of course. And rich biriyani, buttered lapsi. Kababs. Bhajias, potato fritters. “We do not believe in all this diet modern stuff,” Zaynab informs us, excusing the abundance. Feroz concurs. “Eat, I say. There is plenty of food in this country. We have enough.… I understand there is much poverty in U.K.” This last remark is for Rita, who doesn’t seem to hear it.
After the meal, Rita brings out photos of her family. The first one is the daughter, a young woman of stunning beauty. Did Dar spawn this? I ask myself. But of course a lot of wealth and special schools have gone into that look — that face, that tall shapely body, that Princess Diana manner. Her name is Rehana.
“She is married to a European, isn’t she?” Zaynab asks.
“Her father wanted her to marry the Kuwaiti ambassador’s son — you know, to keep Eastern contact. But the girl was adamant. They are Scottish, her in-laws. They own resorts in Europe …” The second photo is of a boy and girl, eight and six years old. Rehana’s children. “David and Leila … her in-laws were adamant about the boy’s name …”
The third photo goes around — Hadi, her son. He’s lost out to his sister in looks, is stocky with crew-cut hair and a smile that is thin and cruel. “He went off on his own — for some years,” says his mother. “But he’s now a director in his father’s company.”
<
br /> And then the fourth photo, which Rita hands out with an anxious look. Ali.
It’s a garden scene, in front of a house: a driveway, a portico. He stands alone, looking at the camera. He is not very tall, he has on a collared blue sweater and white trousers. He has a kindly face, well kept. There’s no past in that photo, nothing that I recognize. For that there’s Rita, the link.
“It’s taken at Beech Grove,” she says.
“That’s your house, isn’t it?” Feroz says. “In England they don’t have house numbers,” he tells his wife, “just give the name, and the post office knows —”
“Well, not in all cases,” Rita laughs.
“I remember,” he says, “we used to hear Ali lived in a palace which had gold taps and —”
“Wouldn’t it wear off?” murmurs Zaynab.
“Where does he live now?” Feroz asks.
There is a pause and she returns his look. “In Knightsbridge,” she tells him. “Near Harrods.”
“But he took good care of you?” Feroz says. Suddenly he is protective.
“He was generous,” she says. “We could have fought. But it, the divorce — we are divorced now — was all amicable. We meet often. Rosita is my friend, actually. We often do our shopping together.”
There is a photo of Rosita, the new wife, beside a horse. She is younger than Rita, but not by much. I look at Rita.
“He was always the playboy,” she smiles, taking the photo from me, putting it away.
“It’s as if he has two wives,” she continues, wants to explain. “I am his Indian connection — that’s why I am here. The community approaches him through me. For donations and so on, you know.”
She looks around, then picks up the shopping bag she’s had at her feet all along and brings out the presents. For Feroz, a smart pen. A dress for Zaynab, who says, “Hai hai, you shouldn’t have troubled yourself.” “No trouble at all,” Rita says, and gives Razia hers: a suit. The girl beams, is almost in tears.
“And for you, Mr. Fernandes — sir —” Rita says.
I open the wrapping — from the weight, size, shape, I know what it is: a book. There’s also a pen, like Feroz’s. But the book …
Havin’ a Piece: Collected Poems 1930-1967, by Richard Gregory.
“My, my.” I am flustered. “Don’t tell me — Dar, brought to the world through the poems of an expatriate teacher.”
The name, the pun in the title, the photograph on the back, all bring back strong, vivid memories … of a long friendship that I could never quite explain.… The volume is posthumous, and recently published.
First Rita, then Gregory, they have entered my narrative, unasked, so to speak. I began a history, with an objective eye on the diary of Alfred Corbin, ADC, DC, one of the architects of Indirect Rule, later Governor — and so on. I saw myself as a mere observer, properly distanced by time and relationship, solving a puzzle. Now, strangely, I see myself drawn in, by a gravitational force, pulled into the story.
“Show me.” Feroz takes the book from me.
“Haven of Peace, Dar es Salaam,” Rita explains the pun to Feroz and Zaynab.
“You remember him?” I ask her.
She smiles. “We’ve turned thoughtful, haven’t we,” she says. And then: “Oh yes, I remember.”
II
Ali and Rita
Now they all know what I am …
— Gilda (starring Rita Hayworth
and Glenn Ford)
18
No, you will not forget. You were our Rita, queen of the stars, queen of Dar, queen of the night. You shimmered and radiated, waved at the crowd, at us. Full of life, promise. Your sparkling star-strewn carriage driving you away to the music of drum and trumpet, still waving. In hindsight, a childish, girlish phase all this, replete with colonial innocence. Yet unforgettable. And hindsight is dead sight after all, jealous of memory that breathes.
How did I, a Christian Goan, Pius Fernandes, come to be in the midst of this Shamsi Muslim procession of floats, pining for its queen?
That was in 1950, November.
Three years before, in Goa, I had passed my BA in history and literature, upper second, University of London (external), and the world lay at my feet. So I was told by my principal. But that world lay stunned after another catastrophic war. The Empire was winding down. And those of us who had identified a little more with our colonial masters knew not where we belonged in the new order being fashioned out of the India that was breaking up all around us. Economically we were on no surer ground; hundreds applied for even the meanest clerical position — licking revenue stamps, as we called it then.
An advertisement from the colonial office had appeared in the Goan Times, inviting applications for teachers in Kenya Colony, Uganda Protectorate, and Tanganyika Territory. We Goans are a travelling people. There have been many Goans — Goanese as they were called — in Africa from earliest times. The prospect did not seem daunting. I remember how, during the subsequent interview in Bombay, we joked as we waited nervously. Aré, who wants to be Kenya colonized? And U-gand-a? It is T.T. for us — Tanga-nyika Terri-terri. We could not know of course that the differences among the three countries, their futures, were indeed as great as we pretended in our humour and would determine our futures in unique ways. I was selected for T.T., with two others, Steve Desouza and Kuldip Singh, and we walked out of the interview together and headed straight for the nearest teashop to speculate about our futures. Desouza was the scientist, Kuldip the mathematician, and I the humanist, which is how we called ourselves somewhat immodestly.
We had been told that all three of us had been posted to the government school in the historic town of Tabora, in the interior of the country. We did not know what to expect, none of us having taught school, let alone in a part of the world about which we had only the faintest notion — and a lot of fantasies culled from the likes of Rider Haggard, Tarzan, and Sanders of Africa. The brochures we were given with our appointments were less than useful — we already wore the kind of clothes we were broadly advised to take, we knew how to protect ourselves from malaria. Tigers, we were told, did not exist in Africa. The African servant, like the Indian, we learned, did not have a sense of “mine” and “yours.” We were to wear shoes.
We dug up a teacher, a Scotsman, who had spent twenty years in East Africa. “My boys,” he said. “Take books — Voltaire, Wilde, de Sade! And,” he paused to eye us over his glasses, “above all, the books in your particular specialties.”
Three strapping young men facing into a head wind, on our second-class paid passage aboard the SS Amra. We had boarded ship at Bombay, and throughout the journey our spirits never dipped for a moment. The world seemed small and we were conscious that we were crossing it. We were sailing to freedom: freedom from an old country with ancient ways, from the tentacles of clinging families with numerous wants and myriad conventions; freedom even from ourselves grounded in those ancient ways. Desouza, big and dark in safari suit and hat, very much the magazine picture of an adventurer; Kuldip and I, ordinary Indians in light bush shirts and loose trousers.
We trampled through the market in Aden. We walked up and down the decks looking for interesting people to talk to. There were those returning to Africa — and these you could tell by their interest in the ship’s amenities (mostly the bar) and nothing else — and others like us going for the first time, ready to romanticize any sight, eager for any piece of information. The third-class deck was a floating Indian slum, to which we were drawn by the attraction of the newly married brides, who in these crowded quarters had lost their colour and also much of their shyness. When we crossed the equator we joined the upper decks at the ball. None of us had qualms about taking drinks, and all of us took turns at dancing with an elderly returning headmistress of a girls’ school. And finally Mombasa, when we knew we had come to Africa, where most of the Europeans disembarked on their way to Nairobi. Then Zanzibar, and, with beating hearts, Dar es Salaam. In Dar we slept the night in a hotel nea
r the harbour and spent the following morning roaming the streets before departing on the afternoon train to Tabora.