The Book of Secrets

by M G Vassanji

  She will go to the game parks in Arusha for a few days, then she’ll return and leave almost immediately for London.

  There are questions still unanswered … about this girl who has made such a place for herself among us — Mariamu — who stole the Englishman’s diary and like that book refused to lie buried. Who murdered her in such a terrible fashion, exacting a man’s toll from her? What was her relationship to Corbin? And, most important surely for Rita, who was Ali’s father?

  Rita looks at me over her raised cup.

  “The coffee here has such a raw taste to it — you can buy Tanzanian coffee at Selfridges, you know, but it’s not the same.”

  The buyers here get the last choice from the local crop, I want to tell her, but desist. The long eyebrows, they captivate me, and the sparkling eyes — were they really always so brown, those eyes?

  This is perhaps the last time I’ll see her like this, admire her openly, at this age, in a way I had not dared to before. Only days ago, months it seems, she extracted jokingly a pledge from me to pay a price for these tête-à-têtes, her information. That price I have long guessed: silence, an injunction on these proceedings. She’s going to name it here today, but how?

  “Do you think Pipa ever learned the answer to the one question that obsessed him all his life?” I ask her.

  She draws a quick breath, then: “I don’t know.”

  “I would like to believe that Mariamu finally told him, relieved him of his misery before he died … through some sign perhaps …”

  “We’ll never know, will we?” she says, a little too quickly, I think.

  She becomes quiet, sips at her coffee. She has something — several things — on her mind, I can tell, and she’ll let me fumble through to them.

  “What else?” she says at length.

  “It’s all so maddeningly incomplete, so unsatisfactory, isn’t it? Half-formed pictures, suspicions —”

  “You can’t know everything about the past, can you?”

  “It’s not that at all. But there are certain things.… For instance, the girl Mariamu, violated, murdered, have you wondered — ?”

  “A stray soldier, perhaps … that’s most likely, isn’t it? The family didn’t come up with anything else at the time.”

  “I wonder. Perhaps they should have.”

  “Yes? Why do you say that?”

  “Maybe I carry Corbin’s bias too far …” I pause to warn her: “You may not like me for saying this, Rita —”

  “Go on, now,” she attempts to scold, smiles, then adds: “Tell me first and let me decide.” And she sits back attentively in a mock gesture, waiting for me to expound.

  “All right. It’s about the stepfather, Rashid. I never liked him. Even now he lurks in the shadows. Following the girl about so possessively, claiming to speak with the spirit who haunted her — making her do terrible things — surely not out of fatherly love.”

  “Ali told me about his reputation in the family. He was strange — but would he have killed her? And why?”

  “In a fit of jealousy?”

  “I thought you’d say that. And that the family suspected but kept quiet about it. Yes, possibly. But how can you be sure?”

  Outside the window, the curio-seller has now crossed the street to stand beside his wares. But he’s watching, ready to come over and pounce on this lady tourist as soon as we emerge.

  “Did Ali ever …”

  “Yes?” she prompts.

  “I’ve always wanted to ask this. Did Ali ever try to contact Corbin after Pipa’s confession — in England, I mean, after he returned home in the fifties? Or was it too embarrassing?”

  “We met Sir Alfred in London in the sixties, once, at an annual independence-day function. All la-di-da and formal. There were no other meetings — as far as I know. His wife was there — a rather batty old woman.”

  “And? The conversation? What was talked about?”

  “Well, just the usual things — about the old country — nothing personal. It was a short encounter, and he knew so many people from the colonies who were clamouring to say hello and to shake his hand …”

  “Amazing. And Ali — what did he feel about this afterwards … at having seen Alfred Corbin?”

  “You’ve got to understand Ali. He’s not one to dwell on the past. It was never mentioned in our home. I was not interested, either. We had a family and our future to think of, we were out in the big world, we had made something of ourselves in it.”

  And if not for the re-emergence of the diary, I’m thinking, you would not have had to deal with that past, would you, Rita?

  Her hands in front of her on the table between us, the fingers interlocked. Nails not overly long, painted.

  She is the object of much attention, and not only mine. A few tables away, a man and woman sit, publishers, lamenting the death of their industry. They are both known to me, have eyed Rita rather suspiciously. A beggar woman in rags dives into the restaurant and heads straight for my well-dressed companion but is shooed off by a waitress and angry customers. The waitress brings two meat pies. I pick one up. Outside the window the curioseller is back, holds up a gigantic, grotesque Makonde figure.

  “Oh dear, I suppose I shall have to buy something from him after all, but not that.”

  And she is looking at me, smiling.

  The same mischievous, enchanting smile of ages past. She switches it off. We’re back to ourselves, wait in silence. Could we ever have come close? Is it possible to re-live that time and determine what could or could not have happened? She’s speaking.

  “You’ve never asked me … about us — you and me. I wonder why you’ve not asked.”

  “Afraid of the answer,” I mutter. Then: “If it had been me would you have —”

  “You’ll never know,” she says.

  “Is it something only I will never know — or something even you don’t know?”

  She does not answer, says nothing for a while, and then: “Let me ask you this — would you have run away to London with a girl, risking all, as Ali did?”

  There’s nothing to say. I didn’t, did I? Why this torment now — but I asked for it.… Would she have?

  “And there was Gregory, of course.” She smiles mischievously.

  “What about Gregory?”

  “Well, your friendship with him was rather peculiar to us girls. Gregory was a homosexual, as you know. Gay, he would be called today.”

  “Are you implying …” I am astounded, to be the subject of this inference … but then what made me think I was free of this kind of speculation.… “I’ve had my share of women, if you have to know —”

  “What was between you and Gregory … only you know that. If you do.”

  Her eyes all aglow, passionate, like the girl she once was, Rita leans forward. But this time so confident, her experiences so much more deep, varied, felt. I have lived, she seems to say.

  “And if you don’t know these things about yourself …”

  And so comes the injunction.

  If you cannot know these things about yourself, she tells me, what arrogance, Fernandes, to presume to peep into other lives — to lay them out bare and join them like so many dots to form a picture. There are questions that have no answer; we can never know the innermost secrets of any heart. Each dot is infinity, Pius, your history is surface.

  And how unfair, these speculations, to those who’ve lived a little more intensely than their neighbours, and so revealed a little more of themselves. What of respect for their secrets, their humanity? Of course the past matters, that’s why we need to bury it sometimes. We have to forget to be able to start again.

  Yes, why make public our pasts, belittle ourselves, when we’ve come so far. So what if he isn’t a chief’s son in exile, what if he was a Kariakoo boy covered with turmeric … a ball boy for Europeans … a garden toto … once you’ve arrived no one wants to know. Look at the Americans. And not only them. All the nobility, the dukes and barons, even the
kings — who knows from where they came, who cares? So why should my Rehana lose face, why should Hadi’s future be compromised …

  “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.

  III

  Gregory

  Really, must you,

  Over-familiar

  Dense companion,

  Be there always?

  The bond between us

  Is chimerical surely:

  Yet I cannot break it.

  — W. H. Auden

  23

  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.