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Authors: M.G. Vassanji

The Book of Secrets

BOOK: The Book of Secrets
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INTERNATIONAL ACCLAIM FOR
THE BOOK OF SECRETS

“Vassanji masterfully weaves an extraordinarily colorful and richly complicated carpet.… A big book in every sense.”


Toronto Star

“A testament to the almost mystical power of written words, Pius Fernandes’s search for the truth is also a celebration of storytelling.”


New York Times Book Review

“As I read this book about exiled people squeezed by war and circumstance, I thought of other novels that seem its cousins: Timothy Findley’s
Famous Last Words
, Michael Ondaatje’s
The English Patient
, Graham Greene’s
The Heart of the Matter.

— Lawrence Scanlan,
Globe and Mail

“A poignant, questioning work that confirms Vassanji as one of our most thoughtful, as well as one of our more able, writers.”


Financial Post

“A work of art.… Highly recommended.”


Library Journal

“A mesmerizing and rewarding literary experience.”


Winnipeg Free Press

“From its opening page it is clear that
The Book of Secrets
is a story about the importance of language and writing in shaping history.… Vassanji’s prose is simple and evocative, with a light touch he recreates places and times, deploying flashes of colour with a careful attention to detail.”


Financial Times
(U.K.)

“The book is lush with evocations of East African physical, cultural, and historical landscapes.…”


Publishers Weekly

“A glorious novel.…”


Law Times

“Fact and fiction are melded into a compelling narrative which transcends reality and nourishes both mind and spirit.… [Vassanji] captures both the minute ripples of individual human motivations and the broad sweep of that grim machine we call history.”


Ottawa Citizen

Copyright © 1994 by M.G. Vassanji

First published in trade paperback with flaps 1994
Trade paperback edition first published 1997

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher — or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency — is an infringement of the copyright law.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Vassanji, M.G.
The book of secrets / M.G. Vassanji.

eISBN: 978-1-55199-710-0

I. Title.

PS8593.A87B66 2003      C813′.54      C2003-903225-6
PR9199.3.V388B66 2003

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

Four lines from “The Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam” translated by Peter Avery and John Heath-Stubbs (Allen Lane, 1979). Copyright © Peter Avery and John Heath-Stubbs, 1979. Reprinted by permission.

Seven lines from W. H. Auden on
this page
are from “You,” from
Collected Poems of W. H. Auden
by W. H. Auden. Copyright © 1959, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965 by W. H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.

SERIES EDITOR: ELLEN SELIGMAN

EMBLEM EDITIONS
McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
75 Sherbourne Street,
Toronto, Ontario
M
5
A
2
P
9
www.mcclelland.com/emblem

v3.1

for Kabir
who wouldn’t wait

Contents

I passed by a potter the day before last,

He was ceaselessly plying his skill with the clay,

And, what the blind do not see, I could—

My father’s clay in every potter’s hand.


The Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam

Prologue

7 July, 1988

They called it the book of our secrets, kitabu cha siri zetu. Of its writer they said: He steals our souls and locks them away; it is a magic bottle, this book, full of captured spirits; see how he keeps his eyes skinned, this mzungu, observing everything we do; look how meticulously this magician with the hat writes in it, attending to it more regularly than he does to nature, with more passion than he expends on a woman. He takes it with him into forest and on mountain, in war and in peace, hunting a lion or sitting in judgement, and when he sleeps he places one eye upon it, shuts the other. Yes, we should steal this book, if we could, take back our souls, our secrets from him. But the punishment for stealing such a book is harsh — ai! — we have seen it.

They were only partly right, after all, those wazees — the ancients — who voiced wonder-filled suspicion and mistrust at the book and its writer, the all-powerful European whiteman administrator who had appeared in their midst to govern. They could
not know that this mzungu first and foremost captured himself in his bottle-book; and long after it left his side — taking part of him with it — it continued to capture other souls and their secrets, and to dictate its will upon them. Even now it makes protagonists of those who would decide its fate.

Because it has no end, this book, it ingests us and carries us with it, and so it grows.

But it began simply, the story of this book, an unusual discovery put into the hands of an out-of-work schoolteacher, who at last found his calling and began to work with an industry and enthusiasm he had not mustered since his apprentice days.

I am that former schoolteacher. In my time I taught a generation or more of schoolboys. I have watched this place grow from a small colonial town into the bustling city that it is now. Many of my students have left, gone abroad to different corners of the world. Professors, businessmen, and engineers now, who left during the trying times that gripped us in the last decade, or even earlier. They’ve gone beyond me, so many of them, but I carry no regrets. They are proof of my success. Wistfully sometimes I wish I had been born later than my time, so as to be able to make the leap from this periphery into that centre, where all the important and exciting things seem to happen. But as I am, I have never desired to leave.

When I complain — and who doesn’t? we’ve lived through trying times as I said — Feroz laughs at me. When I mention how I miss my old Morris to transport me around, he says with his shopkeeper’s logic, “Sir, if you had left, with your talent and experience you would own ten cars!”

They still call me Sir, or Mr. Fernandes.

Three years ago, officialdom caught up with me and discovered that I had passed retirement age. I was given no option. Spending idle days since then was not easy, in this city where I had no family or close friends and was after all an immigrant. A few
months ago in the beginning of March, I had found myself treading along the footpaths of Dar es Salaam’s back alleys when by accident I met Feroz. It was not the first time that a former student had come to my aid. He is not what I would count as one of my successes, and he knows it (I mention too frequently and indiscreetly my prize achievements). His once muscular body now distends, and the loose mouth gives him a friendly look that I suspect hides bad teeth and a nervousness about what he says. Financially he has not done so badly. Mixed with that Eastern respect for the guru, there is in him, I know, also some of the shopkeeper’s contempt for the low-paid teacher and self-styled thinker who ultimately does not seem to amount to much. But he came to my aid. I must confess, so straitened was my circumstance that I had been reduced to searching for a pair of shoes at the open-air mnada in Congo Street. It was as I emerged from the madness of the mnada, pushing my way through the solid throng of shoppers, raucous vendors, and jostling thieves, clutching my parcel and hastening away surreptitiously into Uhuru Street, that I bumped into him. He had, it appeared, stopped his car to give me a lift, and then got out and watched my sorry little sojourn into discount shopping.

When he heard my story, Feroz’s sense of propriety was offended. He was outraged. The very next day he took me on a round to see some people of means and influence in the city. He even telephoned a few people upcountry, he lent me money. And, failing finally to find me the kind of job he. believed I deserved, he offered me a flat to live in, here at the corner of Uhuru and Viongozi streets.

What is it like to step back into a tomb? The name on this building where I’ve been put up is Amin Mansion 1951. Downstairs, outside the corner shop, the partly obliterated sign “Pipa Store,” at the intersection nicknamed Pipa Corner, brings to mind the one possible image when I think of the name Pipa: a plump
wheezing man in singlet and loincloth inside a produce shop, perched atop a tire-seat in the middle of all his wares, his fingers constantly at work folding and refolding squares of paper into packets of spices, dropping them in one fluid motion into a basket at his side, measuring time as it were with grains of turmeric, coriander, chillies.… A man with a reputation for stinginess, dirtiness of his store and person, the shadiness of some of his dealings. The store now belongs to Feroz, who uses it as a secondary business place, selling shoes, radios, and watches, his primary sphere of action being the bustle of Msimbazi, just beyond Congo Street where he found me.

BOOK: The Book of Secrets
11.09Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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