The Book of Secrets (26 page)

He had the industry of a spider. He hardly ever left the shop, until closing, when he would go to mosque. In a world in which he had neither family nor prestige, he found a niche, and that’s where he built. Business came to him. Whole grain, from the farmers, which he would send to the mills for flour that he would then sell; copra, from which he would extract oil to sell; cashews roasted and raw; old newspapers; even screws and nuts, bolts and nails. For everything there was a buyer. And if sometimes a stolen bangle came his way, or a chain, or a forged hundred-rupee note, what matter? — he did not go searching for them. He even bought old German coins, now useless and despised, because he thought one day the price of metal would go up and they could be melted down.

In the evenings after supper his wife would help him count the day’s takings — the coins would be rolled up and the notes gathered in bundles, and the money was put safely away. After a time they had a daughter. Yet there was nothing more compelling in the house than the Englishman’s diary. It lay inside Pipa’s black metal trunk by the bedside. It was memento, it was absolution. It harboured the spirit of Mariamu. By giving it to him — as he believed she had — by taking it for him when he did not have the
courage to do so himself, she had chosen him over that other, had finally given herself to him. He should feel complete, and in a manner he did. But he felt possessed. If the book contained the spirit of Mariamu, she had not died. If through it she had chosen him, he could not cast it aside.

He knew, also, that it contained the answer to the one question that still haunted him, the answer he thought he almost knew for certain. What Mariamu had never discussed, never acknowledged, never denied. One day he would release the spirit in the book, and it would tell him. He wasn’t sure how. In the single room behind the store, which was a bedroom at night, a living room during the day, the trunk with its sacred content was a charged presence that made him glow, tremble with excitement every time he allowed himself to think of it. That it had value to its previous owner he had no doubt — someone who had meticulously written in the book time and again, whose comfort he had sought like a woman, was bound to it by his memories, would come looking for it if he knew where it was.

But this did not happen and Pipa had put it out of his mind until one day, years later, while in the process of tearing up an old copy of the
Herald
for his packets, he found himself looking straight at the face of Alfred Corbin. Pipa couldn’t believe his eyes, he stared and stared — but there he was, unmistakably Bwana Corbin, in the local newspaper.

He looked around desperately, then in great agitation ran outside with the paper to ask someone to read it for him. A civil servant visiting a neighbouring shop finally obliged him. By this time a bunch of curious shopkeepers had gathered.

— Aré that was the District Commissioner, Mr. Corbin — didn’t Pipa ever see him? Eh bhai, didn’t he come around this area ordering cleanups and the beggars to be picked up?

— 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.

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?