Gravel Heart(56)

You might wonder how my father ended up being a government school teacher. The colonial government had had to agree to the teaching of Islam as a way of reassuring parents that schools were not going to steal their children’s minds and turn them into unbelievers. It was not easy to persuade the parents at first. Nobody wanted the government schools anyway. What was the use of them except to turn the minds of the children? There were well-known stories of the mellifluous boastings of the missionaries and their ruses, and no cunning could be put past the British when it came to getting their way. The parents stood firm, keeping their children away from government school until Islam was put on the curriculum. So Maalim Yahya, who himself had never been to such a school but could discourse on the hadith and its interpretation over centuries, and could recite chapters from the Koran and the funeral prayer without a text, was recruited to teach in one of the colonial government schools. Other scholars were recruited to fill similar posts in other schools, in order to allow colonial education to enter their children’s lives. It is such an irony, isn’t it, that it is religious scholars like my father who made colonial education possible.

When I was quite young I used to accompany the Maalim to the mosque and to other events where he led people in prayers and in the observance of the rites. Then I would carry his loose-leaf books for him or pass him his spectacles or his tasbih when it came time for him to tell the rosary, and carry messages back and forth as required. I knew that my father liked to have me beside him on these duties, and I won smiles and affectionate pats from many people, and I loved the feeling of belonging and being one of many. They called me the little saint and predicted that I would follow in my father’s ways, laughing at my precocious piety but pleased with me too. I eased away as I grew into my teens, blaming schoolwork for my absence from my father’s side. It must have been obvious to him and to everyone else that I was lying, that I was making my escape. I studied in the same school as my father taught, and he would have had a very good idea of what work was expected of me. He must have been deeply disappointed that my love of religion and its scholarship turned out to be so shallow.

Those were the years of independence and then the revolution, and so many things changed after that.

*

Baba paused in his recollections and looked away. I remembered Mama struggling with memories of those times, and when Baba’s silence had lasted for several minutes I told him that, to bring him back from wherever he had gone. He looked up but continued to sit silently for a while longer. Then he took a sip of water and continued.

*

A year or two after the revolution my father lost the government school job, as did so many senior teachers and civil servants. He would have known it was coming. The government announced that it was to save money and to sweep away the privileged remnants of another era. That was how matters seemed to the new rulers and their fraternal socialist advisers from the German Democratic Republic and Czechoslovakia, who had allocated themselves the education portfolio in our affairs (while the Chinese took over the hospitals and the Soviets advised on security and the armed forces). The advisers probably used stronger words than sweep away the privileged remnants of another era. They probably used muscular and cruel words like purge the system and excise the rot, cut prune incinerate, just as the Soviets had done to them in their mania for slash and burn as a process of reform. The only reform possible for those you suspect is extermination or expulsion, cut prune incinerate. In short, most senior administrators and teachers tainted by any association with the previous era knew that sooner or later they were to be removed from their jobs. Some of them were people who had become used to a dignified and wealthy existence, and could not imagine themselves or theirs reduced to such an extent. The disregard and poverty they subsequently felt no doubt seemed harder for them by contrast with their old existence, although in reality it was just as hard for people like my father, whose life had always been close to the edges of decency: cramped spaces, humble food, and hardly anything left over when all was said and done.

There was no choice but to sit silently while history was narrated anew, no choice but to wait in a dumbly unenthusiastic silence for the mocking dismantling of our old stories, until later when we could whisperingly remind each other what the plunderers had tried to steal from us. As times became harder and the humiliations and dangers mounted, the search for work and a place of safety made many people remember that they were Arabs or Indians or Iranians, and they resuscitated connections they had allowed to wither. Some of these connections were works of the imagination or fantasies in the minds of people made desperate by need, but many were real if long-forgotten. That was how people lived, with relatives and acquaintances all along the shores of the ocean, obligations to whom they preferred to ignore most of the time but whose addresses they now anxiously searched for in old letters and scraps of paper. The government did not prohibit this frenzy. The politics of decolonisation could not tolerate these divided loyalties, and required commitment to nation and continent. With the revolution, that politics turned violent and punitive, and forced many people into flight because they feared for their lives and their futures. To the government, this search for connections across the ocean demonstrated the underlying foreignness of these people and it waited patiently for their departure, stripping them of whatever it could in the meantime.

In time, Maalim Yahya was offered a job in Dubai, and received a passport and permission to leave, which was not easily done at that time, not for any good reason but because nothing was easily done at that time. He had found a good job in Dubai where they sought and rewarded his kind of scholarship. He made his preparations as modestly as he could so as not to draw the attention of anyone in authority. He left on the ferry, carrying only a small suitcase as if he was going away for a few days. He bought his airline ticket to Dubai in Dar es Salaam, where no one knew who he was and no one would have any reason to wish to delay him. Maalim Yahya was not one of those ascetic religious scholars who worried that the wrist watch was a challenge to God’s mastery of the day, and that flying in an aeroplane was a blasphemy because it mocked God’s design (if God wanted us to fly He would have given us wings). But nor did he give a second thought to the ingenuity which provided the aeroplane which was waiting there to take him to Dubai. It could have been a donkey or a dhow, any means of travel that God provided. Allah Karim. For Maalim Yahya, the builders and operators of the aeroplane occupied faraway fringes of the everyday and did not live real lives. They were no concern of his. It was still possible at that time to live in a small place without television or the internet or email and to be cut off from the world and its hectic enterprises, and yet to live a life of vindicated self-assurance.