Read Online And Home Was Kariakoo by M.G. Vassanji - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: M.G. Vassanji
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appropriate tools. But the statement said much about the speaker’s faith in the abilities of his own people.
Postscript
Twenty years later Tanga still looks as laid-back, as neglected, as forgotten.
I sit with a taxi driver called Taju on the large veranda of a seedy old hotel called the Sea View, waiting for the rain to let up; it’s falling in sheets. The only other person around is the young Arab manager and a European guest consuming instant coffee. Inside the hotel, the paint is peeling, the furniture is shabby, the lighting is gloomy; a staircase goes up to the rooms, which have balconies. This is all that remains of the Kaiserhof. I ask the manager if there are any mementos in the hotel from olden times. He says no. And then, an afterthought: he points to a cello hanging high on the wall above reception. Perhaps in the past they heard Bach here on Saturday afternoons.
Across the road is a well-tended garden overlooking the sea; at one end of it is a modest clock tower marked with the year
1901
, only a few years after the Germans first arrived and took over the town. There appears to have been a coat of arms on it that has been removed. At the other end of the garden is the impressive-looking King George VI Memorial Library built in the 1950s, a long single-storey building with arched verandas, still in good shape. It was a gift to the town from the philanthropic Karimjee family. Here, on my previous visit, I had met a friendly librarian, who proudly showed me a small cabinet with a glass door containing rare editions of Stanley, Burton, and the like. Aware of their value, a predecessor had locked them up. I wonder now if the cabinet still stands there or has been “moved,” as used to be said of theft, but that’s impossble to ascertain on this Union Day holiday when everything is closed. The avenue and the streets behind contain a generous though rickety display of the old architecture—wooden buildings with latticed verandas and balconies, sloping roofs—of the kind that have been crushed and erased from the landscape of Dar. The wreckers won’t be long getting here, though: a container harbour is planned andthe Usambara Railway will be rebuilt, bringing new development. Soon will come the concrete high-rises—turning the town into what? A mock Boston to Dar’s mock New York?
Taju’s car is an ancient Toyota, to which the man himself, unshaved and unkempt, is a fitting match. My window doesn’t close and rain pours liberally onto my lap. Pull the window up with your hands, he advises. I try, with partial success. We speak in Gujarati and there’s a casualness to our relationship, a kind of familiarity. He says his father was from Punjab but died when Taju was three; he also says he was brought up by his grandmother who was from Tanga. I conclude that he is not sure, or is embarrassed by his origins, but since he affirms to being a Sunni Muslim he must be partly Bhadala or Baluchi. He has a heart condition and has recently had a consultation in Dar, but cannot afford to go to India for treatment. We pass Hindu and Sikh temples, stop at a chai shop. It is actually the front room of a house, with an ordinary door for entrance; inside, a man in his forties serves from behind an iron cage of the sort one might find housing a bank’s vault. Chai is excellent but costs two and a half times what KT Shop charges in Dar. The man in the cage is chatty. He affirms that there have been robberies in the area. He’s from Moshi originally; his mother died recently after a leg amputation from diabetic complications. She used to walk barefoot and one day punctured a foot. The chevda and the burfis look fresh and mouth-watering. The bhajias come straight from the pan in the backroom, where someone, presumably the wife, is cooking.
The European cemetery is in a densely overgrown area where the ground is so muddy and slippery it reminds me of going home from school in Dar. The old German graves, green with mould,
Postscript
Twenty years later Tanga still looks as laid-back, as neglected, as forgotten.
I sit with a taxi driver called Taju on the large veranda of a seedy old hotel called the Sea View, waiting for the rain to let up; it’s falling in sheets. The only other person around is the young Arab manager and a European guest consuming instant coffee. Inside the hotel, the paint is peeling, the furniture is shabby, the lighting is gloomy; a staircase goes up to the rooms, which have balconies. This is all that remains of the Kaiserhof. I ask the manager if there are any mementos in the hotel from olden times. He says no. And then, an afterthought: he points to a cello hanging high on the wall above reception. Perhaps in the past they heard Bach here on Saturday afternoons.
Across the road is a well-tended garden overlooking the sea; at one end of it is a modest clock tower marked with the year
1901
, only a few years after the Germans first arrived and took over the town. There appears to have been a coat of arms on it that has been removed. At the other end of the garden is the impressive-looking King George VI Memorial Library built in the 1950s, a long single-storey building with arched verandas, still in good shape. It was a gift to the town from the philanthropic Karimjee family. Here, on my previous visit, I had met a friendly librarian, who proudly showed me a small cabinet with a glass door containing rare editions of Stanley, Burton, and the like. Aware of their value, a predecessor had locked them up. I wonder now if the cabinet still stands there or has been “moved,” as used to be said of theft, but that’s impossble to ascertain on this Union Day holiday when everything is closed. The avenue and the streets behind contain a generous though rickety display of the old architecture—wooden buildings with latticed verandas and balconies, sloping roofs—of the kind that have been crushed and erased from the landscape of Dar. The wreckers won’t be long getting here, though: a container harbour is planned andthe Usambara Railway will be rebuilt, bringing new development. Soon will come the concrete high-rises—turning the town into what? A mock Boston to Dar’s mock New York?
Taju’s car is an ancient Toyota, to which the man himself, unshaved and unkempt, is a fitting match. My window doesn’t close and rain pours liberally onto my lap. Pull the window up with your hands, he advises. I try, with partial success. We speak in Gujarati and there’s a casualness to our relationship, a kind of familiarity. He says his father was from Punjab but died when Taju was three; he also says he was brought up by his grandmother who was from Tanga. I conclude that he is not sure, or is embarrassed by his origins, but since he affirms to being a Sunni Muslim he must be partly Bhadala or Baluchi. He has a heart condition and has recently had a consultation in Dar, but cannot afford to go to India for treatment. We pass Hindu and Sikh temples, stop at a chai shop. It is actually the front room of a house, with an ordinary door for entrance; inside, a man in his forties serves from behind an iron cage of the sort one might find housing a bank’s vault. Chai is excellent but costs two and a half times what KT Shop charges in Dar. The man in the cage is chatty. He affirms that there have been robberies in the area. He’s from Moshi originally; his mother died recently after a leg amputation from diabetic complications. She used to walk barefoot and one day punctured a foot. The chevda and the burfis look fresh and mouth-watering. The bhajias come straight from the pan in the backroom, where someone, presumably the wife, is cooking.
The European cemetery is in a densely overgrown area where the ground is so muddy and slippery it reminds me of going home from school in Dar. The old German graves, green with mould,
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