Uhuru Street (19 page)

We discovered Almeida together, Fahndo and I one day, dying and helpless. A student coming for extra help got no reply at the door several days running and, knowing how sick the teacher had been, assumed the worst. He came to Fahndo: ‘Sir, I think Mr Almeida is dead.’

Fahndo in his brusque arrogant way with students – how well I remember it – dismissed the observation (it couldn’t happen without his permission). The two had taught together for a couple of decades. He took me along to Teachers’ Quarters to Almeida’s flat. We knocked on the door, and listened. Then holding our breath we inserted the spare key and threw the door open. And there he was, the maths teacher, lying shivering in bed. He had turned a feverish, harried face to look at us. After being jilted in love once many years ago, Almeida had taken to a beard and grey clothes and a suffering mien that had been enhanced, it seemed, by the food shortages several years ago. And since he was the kindest teacher in school he came to be regarded by students as a mysterious, saintly and suffering figure.

Fahndo and I found no food in his flat except stale bread and sugar. But on the kitchen shelves in neatly arrayed ancient boxes and tins of English crackers and toffees and chocolates we found
banknotes, some thousands of shillings’ worth. For a maths teacher not to trust banks … but then these are uncertain times. Almeida was worried silly that the recently announced devaluation and change of currency would certainly lose him all his life’s savings. But Fahndo has connections. It was his patron Nizar who ultimately got the money changed, and perhaps saved Almeida’s life, because malaria pills were temporarily unavailable.

One day some weeks later Almeida came to say goodbye to Fahndo. His mother was dying, he said. He should see her. And, perhaps with the money he had saved … So he returned to Goa. And found out that he had been tricked: his mother was hale and hearty, his brother wanted to open a bar. Almeida, without an Indian teaching certificate, found a job only with difficulty and according to Fahndo’s report cycles twelve miles a day each way to a village school where he teaches.

‘So he went home,’ I said.

We were in Fahndo’s sitting room, two former students come to visit a teacher. Fahndo was extremely flattered, especially by Lateef’s visit. He had given us tea brought in by a maid.

‘Yes. But what is home?’ he said.

Fahndo and Almeida, like many of our other Indian teachers, came to East Africa as young men, unlike most of us, their students, who were second and third generation Africans.

‘The whole world is our home. It’s a global village,’ grinned Lateef.

‘This was more his home, I’d say,’ Fahndo said reflectively. ‘He desperately wants to come back, but who’ll let him?’

We went on to discuss other students, friends, classmates. Fahndo takes a great pride in their achievements: professors, scientists, engineers ‘out there’. He himself has refused to follow them out … and has stoically borne the brunt of the hardships that have swept over the country.

Finally, as we left, Fahndo wrote something on a piece of paper and gave it to Lateef.

‘Here – I want you to do something for me.’

Lateef looked at it, his face lit up and his teeth became visible in a delighted grin.

‘Wow. Panjim, Goa.’

‘I still have family there.’

‘Wow! When were you last there?’

‘Long time ago,’ said Fahndo with a stern look from his best schoolmaster days. ‘Anyway, I’d like to ask you a favour – if you could send some money to my mother.’

‘No problem! I might even take it myself!’

As we emerged he asked me if Fahndo was that poor. I told him he couldn’t get the foreign exchange without using underhand means, which he wouldn’t do.

Again that amused look on Lateef’s genial face, as if to say, ‘What to do with deluded fools.’

‘I see you intend to settle down here properly,’ he said, and I simply gave a shrug.

‘Take care of her; she deserves the best,’ he said at length. He was referring to Farida.

I met her at the mosque one day. I am not religious. That innocent magic, that faith that led you to believe that you had control somehow over your destiny – or at least had a say, a vote, a hand in it – has been buffetted and tattered, like the naive hopes we had of founding a great society … But in this city when two hours after sunset the grip of a silent darkness throttles the life out of the day, the mosque is one place that tries to prolong the hum; not with the uproar of previous years; and not at the landmarks that are the town mosque or Upanga mosque but at this once humble one behind the fire station to which we wondered who would ever go.

The mosque has a little library. A room – shed really – its walls
impressively lined with books in a bid to provide education where it is at a premium. The atmosphere is appropriately grave, the lighting soft and sparse so that shadows are ominously large, and in the silence the flick of a page can echo sharply as if spurring one to greater concentration. But in fact the books are mostly paperback romance and crime novels that the youth consume in large quantities.

This time as I wandered in there was a boy engrossed among the thrillers, the same boy as on several previous occasions. Several girls walked out huddled over a heap of romances. A librarian absorbed in her own book looked up as I came in, did my quick frustrated hopeless tour and was on the way out. She smiled at me.

I said, ‘Don’t you have any more books … than these? …’ it was impossible not to give a dismissive wave of the hand. I even threw a look at the book she was reading.

An attractively plain girl with wavy black hair down to her shoulders tied at the back; a striking, long face – white, high-cheekboned, with an oriental quality I had often associated with some Jewish features.

‘There are lots of books to read here,’ she spoke primly.

Obviously I am not unknown here, it’s impossible to be. So she was throwing a challenge.

‘But these books are not educational,’ I spluttered out an observation she could not possibly argue with.

‘Boys and girls need entertainment. We don’t have TV here.’

Another barb there.

‘And where do they go for serious entertainment?’

‘They listen to sermons,’ she smiled.

By this time the boy who had been engrossed in the thriller section had come and stood beside her.

‘This is my son Karim,’ she said, throwing a glance at his acquisitions and a challenging look at me.

We wound up over the course of several days making up a list of ‘serious’ literature, and we sent it off to friends overseas.

And so on themes of educating children and running a library, we came closer together. The July festival caught up with our shy self-conscious bewildered overtures. We danced the dandia together, that delightful communal stick dance that also allows you to have partners, and between rounds we would sit, drink sherbet, or talk earnestly of our pasts: our failed marriages, our single child each; our aspirations for the future, for her the future of her boy. We allowed ourselves to touch each other.

She is the youngest daughter of Rahim Master, the stern teacher of religion whom at least two generations of ‘former boys’ remember fondly whenever a verse of a hymn escapes their lips. She was as a girl a serene-looking person, a face of innocence, dressed plainly, walking erectly, two long pigtails falling down to her hips, when other girls were busy with VO5 and beehive hairdos.

Why she was languishing here was the result of a bad marriage that had robbed her of a chance even to go to college: Rahim Master’s way of disposing of a daughter with the first decent-looking proposal, at a time when the youth were taking to jeans and western-style dancing. She was living with a brother and his family now, and we were allowed to go out together and given occasional use of the only car. There are not that many men and women of our age here, and such a stage of a relationship implies a successful courtship, a permanence.

That she would impress the grinning, unctuous and rich Lateef was obvious.

I realise that our relationship started out by her humouring my stumbling self-conscious efforts, in the same way we once humoured the good intentions of European teachers. We came quite some way from that beginning. There is a sensitivity in that plainness that penetrates, cuts right through the tangle of convoluted
justifications to the bare longing that lies underneath. Yes, when it comes down to it, there is only a plain longing for a home, a permanence. That is what she taught me. And permanence and home are what I began to hope for and finally looked forward to from her.

It was at the library that Lateef would give his pep-talks to the boys and girls while Farida and I sat at the table waiting for her son to come out inspired. Lateef saw us together and was taken aback; then, face beaming beatifically, he came and shook hands with her.

The ghost of Almeida lies rather strangely over us. I suppose it is because we all knew him and he has only recently left. It’s hard not to evoke him cycling with much effort along a country road somewhere.

‘Sir,’ said Lateef one day, ‘tell us what happened to Almeida … why did he become –’ he waved a hand, ‘this Jesus Christ figure …?’

‘He was jilted in love.’

‘But why?’

‘Why … He was about to be engaged to a real angel of a girl, a secretary at D T Dobie. He went on home leave to Goa and the girl was to follow with her mother, so the families could meet and so on.’

‘Well?’

‘She never went. When he returned, she’d got engaged to somebody else. Rich and influential family.’

Lateef sat back with a grin.

‘What are you looking so satisfied for?’ I said sharply. My tone caught us all by surprise; I felt angry at myself, and I avoided meeting Fahndo’s watchful eye.

This was during Lateef’s last visit and I had ample reason for being peevish that day. For one thing, he had been a special hit
with the boys and girls. They loved to hear him talk about the Middle East and he thrilled them with stories of how the Arabs lived, about their wealth, arrogance, influence. He had demonstrated the Arab dress to them in the mosque compound, showing off with long strides the white flowing robes and head dress in a circle of enthusiastic onlookers. I took credit for having brought him to them in the first place. Only this time he had come of his own accord, and it was from Fahndo that I found out he was here.