And Home Was Kariakoo by M.G. Vassanji Read Free Book Online Page B

King of the 4th South African Horse, and W. Dawson of the Calcutta Volunteers Battery, and many other young men of Smuts’s British army who died far away from home and were left buried here in Moshi.

5.
Tanga, Decline in the Sun
    L ATE THAT AFTERNOON IN M OSHI I took a bus bound for Tanga. When earlier in the day I bought my ticket, the company agent had confidently brandished a seating chart, and with the wisdom of a seasoned traveller I had put my name on an ideal place; to my chagrin the actual seat arrangement bore no resemblance to the one on the chart. Nothing to be done, a shrug of the shoulders by all concerned. That agent was nowhere to be found, and that too was par for the course. The bus terminal resounded with a football commentary: a Yanga–Simba derby was concluding, and a large crowd had gathered outside a stall to follow the match on radio. Yanga were the Young Africans and Simba were the former Sunderland, both Dar teams.
    We departed at sunset, headed east, the mountain behind us, and night had fallen. Nothing else stirred on the highway, the bus the solitary creature grinding through the thick foggy darkness, its headlights sweeping across the hills and forests. There would be the occasional flicker of light, an only lamp at a distant habitation, drawing you in like a spell. Who lived there up on the hill, how would they spend the evening? Could one but peep into those lives and in some way share them. Did this habitual craving turn me intoa novelist? What makes this primitiveness, this forbidding solitude of the jungle so wrenchingly attractive from a distance? There is in this stillness a certain spirituality, a welcome loneliness that I’ve often treasured in my travels, in which there seems to be only the universe and I, an endless moment devoid of fear or death. Perhaps it is death.
    In the middle of the journey, in the pitch-darkness ahead a cluster of electric lights appeared in the distance, at which the bus arrived and abruptly stopped. It was a roadside restaurant. We were in Mombo, at a stop that was familiar to me from trips taken long ago in childhood; one always arrived here at night, it seemed. The place was still owned by an Asian, probably of the same family. The men’s facility consisted of a dark windowless backroom with a stinging stench. You held your breath, did your job, and rushed out. I had a Coke and took my seat, and our journey proceeded
    We reached Tanga at 2:15 a.m. instead of the scheduled 5 a.m.; some of us, who had no home in Tanga, opted to stay inside and snooze until morning broke. At 5:30 we were summarily cast out and the bus grumbled off to the depot. Outside, in the humid coastal coolness, I accepted a taxi with trepidation. It was an old car and had to be push-started. Barely a hundred yards on it turned off and came crawling to a stop, and started again after another push, then decisively sputtered out. “What now?” I asked, somewhat nervously. At this hour no one was about except the two of us. “No petrol,” the driver said. “Isn’t there a station nearby?” No. What to do, on this dark street, in a town in which I knew nobody? But I could see that the man had no evil purpose, he had only tried to eke out a fare in difficult times and his vehicle had betrayed him. I had not even seen his face clearly in the dark, though he was a small person and sounded as sleepy as I was.
    “Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ll take you there.” We got out, he picked up my bag and put it on his shoulder, and we walked together to the Khoja prayer house, where I presumed I would be directed to the guest house. There was a mukhi there, the headman, chatting with two women after the morning’s meditations and prayers; the guest house had been closed for some time, he said, and sent me with a worker to a local hotel where, however, there was no vacancy. I returned, had a wash in the shower in the ladies’ room, and waited until seven, when two old men walked me to