Uhuru Street (9 page)

 … The England of 1842. Young England, of rolling hills, lush forests, and stately homes. Where character was taught in schools … honour and courage were not mere words … and don’t think sportsman’s spirit was confined to the cricket pitch (a nod toward the door), you numbskulls, who use the pitch as a market for haggling and for community vendettas. (A titter: the barb goes
home.) England, an island on the map, a beacon for the world … The summer of 1842 … from Rugby to college – perhaps Balliol, or Jesus – and then into the world to help a fresh breed of boys grow into men …

‘Where is Balliol?’ he asked suddenly. A question he would have answered himself, but for half a dozen hands in the air now, wagging fiercely. The closest hand in the second row was acknowledged, and Lalji shot up from his chair.

‘Balliol is the college of Oxford!’ All in one breath, hoarsely. ‘I mean, Sir …’

Interrupted by a jeering howl from the master and the class held its sides. It was going to be a great day.

‘Do you have to bark out your answer, man?’ Red-faced, Lalji sat down, and faced his grinning neighbour. ‘Show some grace, some poise.’ And then, with a trace of regret, perhaps, at seeing the demolished face looking back at him in a daze: ‘I know, your voice is breaking … but some grace, some poise, man … stand up first, compose yourself, and speak up, “Balliol is a college at Oxford.” ’ And then the mutter once more: pedigrees in question.

Stuart’s mission in school was to civilise. Two months before, the class had been instructed on the use of the ‘English-style’ toilets. This, after he discovered a ‘mess’ on the lavatory floor. ‘Do you think the bowl is there to wash your faces in, you numbskulls?’ And then, grinning like a mischievous dog, he revealed a happy discovery: ‘And tell your other teachers the seat is not to be mounted either!’ The ‘other teachers’ were Indians. The boys wondered how he had found out who squatted on the toilet seats and who didn’t – perhaps he went around peeping under the partitions in the staffroom lavatories?

Half way through the class Fletcher came to read an announcement. Fletcher was one of the new expatriate teachers from England, scruffy and eccentric, for whom Stuart showed a marked distaste. He was in charge of the Drama Society, which was
currently producing
A Passage to India.
The class had heard his announcement before, which he read again from a crumpled piece of paper. He was looking for Chagpar, his lighting man – and was told, as he had been several times before, that Chagpar was in Form IB. This was Form IA. He left, a little flustered. He never seemed to find Chagpar. Stuart returned to his digression.

It was one of his last classes of the year. It also turned out to be one of the last he taught in the school. The boys of Form IA prided themselves in having got rid of him.

For Stuart had a secret. There was a woman in his home. He lived in the Teachers’ Quarters. But who was this woman? If she was his mother, it was argued, she would be well into her seventies and that would explain the mystery. But if she was his wife … well, there was no knowing old Stuart the lecher … all those mentions of the Girls’ School. She could be anyone. A kept woman? That would explain the secret. Perhaps she’s an ogre, someone said, a dahkun.

It was Sumar’s idea to investigate. Sumar was bright (one of the three ‘geniuses’ in class) but awkward and gawky. He sweated from his palms and constantly sniffled. He was also serious and did not find much in Stuart’s jokes. And Stuart had developed distaste for him, which he showed with an occasional sneer but otherwise he left him alone. During the celebrated lavatory incident he picked Sumar for the demonstration. Poor Sumar had to endure all the stares and grins and back-handed remarks of his classmates as he crouched, squatted, and sat on the toilet seat at Stuart’s bidding, looking very much like an embattled owl.

Kanji and Sumar were in the lead, followed by Rajani and Solanki, then Lalji and Rafael, returning from school in the mid-morning blaze. They entered a grove thick with coconut and mango trees. The ground under them crackled with fallen leaves as they walked, and the sky was completely hidden from sight. The
path went behind the Girls’ School, which was still in session. In the Boys’ School exams were over and school had ended abruptly to allow the staff to meet.

They emerged from the grove onto a hilly path. Before them, on the hill, rose the Teachers’ Quarters: four brown concrete buildings enclosed by a tall wire fence. They started climbing up in a file of two. To their right was the ancient Shivaji Hospital, closed off by a wire fence and a densely packed hedge, from which peeped out shrubs of wild ‘European tamarind,’ so called because of its white flesh and mild taste.

‘What time do you think it is?’ asked Lalji from behind, a little anxiously.

Kanji took a peek at the sun. ‘Wait,’ he said. He did the clock trick. He picked up a stick, broke it in two, and flung the shorter part away. With the other he drew a clock face on the ground and planted it upright at the centre. The squat, twisted shadow pointed uncertainly toward the noon hour.

‘It’s eleven-thirty,’ pronounced Kanji, looking up from the ground. He was not believed, but they started walking faster. Stuart would be expected for lunch.

At the open gate sat the watchman.

‘Jambo, askari,’ they said. ‘Where does Mr Stuart live?’

‘The third building. Third floor, number six. You are his pupils?’

‘Yes, askari!’

Rafael said he would remain at the gate. Rajani stayed with him. The remaining four walked inside the gravelled compound. The buildings were well kept and looked new, each one had a bed of flowers at the side of its entrance. The walls were unmarked, the French windows painted white, and the floors and stairs polished red. There were a few people about. The boys took the stairs in single file in silence. When they reached number six, Kanji, with a glance towards the rest of them still climbing up, knocked twice on
the door. Sumar came to stand beside him and the other two stood behind.

The door opened a crack, and a black ayah peeped out.

‘Is that his wife?’ someone whispered at the back.

‘His mother,’ said Lalji, and tittered.

‘Yes?’ said the woman, her voice rising. Her face was round and fat, her eyes large and yellow. When she opened the door, the rest of her was big and wide and blocked the view in front of them. On one side of her was the kitchen door and on the other a window.

A faint sound came from behind her: a child’s voice, a spoon scraping.

‘We want to see the mama of the house,’ said Kanji, a little hesitantly, as if asking permission. The others were silent, behind him.

The ayah heaved and stepped sideways in one motion, a block partition yielding, and they saw her, the second woman, at the head of the long table slurping at her tea, playing with her spoon. She looked young and old. Her face was smooth and pink, her hands delicate and small; her hair was long and dishevelled and fell in grey and white streams around her face to the table and the cup and saucer. Her front teeth were missing.

‘Wha’ you wan’?’ she said. It was the voice of a crone. ‘Professor … he gone …’ Then she broke into a language none of them understood.

Lalji let out an involuntary grunt, like a muffled sob; then he forced a brief and nervous giggle. Kanji, in front of him, took a deep breath and stepped back, pushing them all out, and closed the door behind him.

The next morning Stuart strode into class as usual. There were no more formal lessons these last days of the year and the affairs of the school were finally winding down amidst rising excitement and impatience. The mood infected one and all. There was even a trace of levity on the usually scowling face, but the quiet that
confronted him caught him by surprise and he looked up as he went to the blackboard to place the cane on the chalk tray.

There was something taped on the blackboard which drew his notice mid-stride. It brought his head up with a jerk. It was the cover from a paperback edition of
She.
It showed in garish colours an ogre-like woman. Under it someone had scribbled in chalk: ‘
SHE WHO MUST BE LOVED
!’ Beneath that someone else had added for extra effect: ‘Frankenstein’s monster!’ in a strangely uneven hand.

Stuart turned slowly to face them: behind the sternness this time traces of his pain.

Yes, I would say for many weeks after, I have seen Satan. I have seen the face of Azazil. And at what other time than the quiet stillness of that deepest point of night, at four, when the spirits take dominion and most men sleep; only a few hardy souls venture out to seek the eternal. At that hour there are no cars on the road, no bicycles. The breeze has not started to blow and the air feels dull and spent … and the street lamps let out a glow that hangs suspended in a haze that never quite makes it to the ground. Into this quiet an occasional sound of feet would wander in and as quickly wander out.

I was eight years old then. I would sit on our second-storey windowsill looking down at the street, knees and forehead pressed against the cool iron bars, half curtain pulled aside on its slack spring, awaiting this occasional wanderer. Often only the sound of footsteps came in rapid clip-clops, with no person in sight as whoever it was walked otherwise silently among the shadows, anonymity preserved. And when I did see someone, it would be all of a sudden; my head would come up with a jerk, my eyes strained wide to check my wakefulness. The person who appeared in my sight would walk rapidly by and disappear, and the clip-clop sounds would gradually diminish to a point beyond which there was no certainty. At that hour they were autonomous and sourceless, these sounds, diffuse, coming from directions where
nothing moving was in sight: as though descended from above to announce the visitor and ascending in steps back into the heavens.

And when those sounds of footfalls on the tarmac ceased, when it seemed that the quiet would now last unpunctuated till dawn, there would come this lone mysterious cry: ‘Salaa! Salaa!’ A distant sound yet clear, rendered into the sky; not loud enough to disturb sleep yet with an acuteness that could stir one listening to the dark. A call to prayer, itself a prayer. From my perch on the window I saw no one on the main street below. But I pictured a tall, black man in a long white kanzu and white kofia, strolling up and down his small dark street with a tasbih in one hand. And calling out. A lone African mystic, a great soul. His cry periodic in strength, as he approached and receded along a parallel road. Then it ceased altogether, and complete silence returned; only to be broken in less than an hour by the sounds of the first bus of the day trundling along, announcing the dawn.

When I finally set eyes on him, he was as I had imagined him, the African mystic. In robe and cap, a tasbih in one hand, tall and distinguished. He was sitting sideways on the ground outside the open door of a local mosque – a whitewashed building of baked earth – playing bao by himself. I had wandered into this sidestreet in my haste to get to the mosque. Not his but ours. It was grey dusk, grim Maghrab, the time for evening prayer, not for straying into strange, dark places. Mysterious things could happen at this hour, spirits would be at large from some of these local African mosques which harboured old graves in their compounds. Yet I had stopped hardly two feet away from the man and stood there mesmerised. He would pick up all the stones from a hole and in a single movement across the game board drop them one by one in the succeeding holes.

He glanced up and I caught his look, deep and searching. I was in the presence of a great soul whom I felt I knew, I who had heard
him from my window and followed his call in the night. And I waited for him to speak to me as I knew he must, even though he’d dropped his eyes back to the board. I thought I must tell this great soul that I knew him, I had heard him when he called out to God and His people.

‘Where are you going to, child?’ he said.

‘To the mosque.’

‘The Indian mosque. What do you do there?’

‘We pray.’

‘You don’t pray, you make fun!’ He started mocking. ‘Ai-yai-yai-nyai,’ he sang in a high-pitched voice.

Partisanship got the better of me and in a rage I cried, ‘We don’t make fun! We pray! It is
you
who makes fun!’

All this in one breath at the end of which I unclenched my fists, realising what I had done. I had offended the great soul. The look on his face had changed from startle to an acid severity. I was afraid and I stood fixed as if awaiting my punishment, a curse to fly out from his angry lips. He was still working his lips as I turned my back on him and ran.

‘Watch whom you’re talking to, child!’ he called bitterly after me.

I ran as if the devil were after me, jumping over ditches and stumbling over stones before finally reaching the sanctuary of our mosque. I was in a sweat, flushed, and gasping loudly for breath. My socks and shoes were filled with sand and my legs were covered with dust. The caretaker seated me on a bench, gave me a glass of water and when I was rested told me to wash my legs and feet and go in.