Patel answers his cell phone in what is obviously a bustling shop with voices bargaining in the background and the regular
ker-ching
of a cash register. I put my case to him: that I need to cremate my father before the end of the week, or they will put him in a mass grave. He repeats the ordinance banning pyres for non-Hindus. “I’m sorry,” he says. “We can’t burn whites.”
I plead and plead, repeating that I’ve come all the way from New York to do this, and that it was my father’s dying wish.
Finally his voice softens. “Well, there is
one
way around the ban. As head of the Hindu community, I suppose I have the authority to declare him an honorary Hindu, and then you could go ahead and burn him on our pyre.”
“How would you do that?” I ask.
“Well, I would just declare it, and then it would be so,” he says.
“Will you do it?”
“You buy me a beer sometime if I come to New York, OK?”
“Absolutely,” I say. “Several.”
“All right,” he says. “What’s his name?”
“Godwin, George Godwin.”
He clears his throat and asks for quiet in the shop. The hubbub dies down and then in a formal voice he says: “I solemnly declare that your father, George Godwin, is hereby an honorary Hindu.”
I thank him profusely.
“You come to our temple and make the arrangements there, OK? And remember my beer sometime in New York?” He laughs and turns back to his shop, where the background
ker-ching
ing has started up once more.
I find Mum in the dining room puzzling over documents.
“Dad is a Hindu now,” I tell her.
“What?”
“He’s been declared an honorary Hindu so that I can cremate him at their site. Otherwise it’s illegal. Only Hindus can be burned there. It’s a pyre.”
“I’ve always liked the Hindus,” she says, “I think there’s a lot to be said for their belief system.” And she wanders off to see if she has any books on Hinduism.
It seems oddly appropriate somehow. My father is born a Polish Jew, becomes an English Christian, and is cremated an African Hindu. That’s enough shape shifting to impress Dambudzo Marechera’s manfish, the
njuzu.
R
OBIN
W
ATSON
arrives the next morning in a Nissan pickup truck he is looking after for a farmer from Chinhoyi who’s fled the country. Mum doesn’t want to come to the Hindu temple, she says, and Mr. Patel has told me that traditionally women here do not attend a funeral.
“We’re not going to make you commit suttee, and put you on the pyre too, you know,” I try to joke, and she makes a face. “Wait a minute,” she says as we get in the truck. She goes inside and reemerges with a big round Quality Street chocolate tin, decorated in electric shades of mauve and pink, and featuring a grinning soldier embracing a maiden in bustle and bonnet. “To put his ashes in,” she says, and waves us off.
We drive down Samora Machel Avenue out to the suburb of Belvedere, in the old days a designated “Indian Area.” During World War II, this was one of the main bases of the vast Empire Air Training Scheme, a production line for fighter pilots (and aircrew), most of them from Britain. Here they were out of reach of German bombers, and the climate was perfect for flying. They would take a young man who’d never been behind a joystick, start him off in a Tiger Moth biplane, and a few months and 130 flying hours later, he would have wings sewn on his chest and be on his way to battle the Luftwaffe. After the war, many of those surviving airmen came back to settle here, which is why so many white farmers can fly.
“This was the actual runway,” says Robin as we swing onto a very wide, straight paved road, now called Ganges Road. We turn onto Boeing Road and left onto Cessna Drive, right onto Anson, and there before us, like a spaceship that has landed on the veld, are the towering brick tiers of the Hindu Omkar Temple, topped with gold turrets and fluttering red pennants. We park next to it. There are offerings of frangipani petals and grains of rice on its front step. Inside I can see the statue of the Monkey God, Lord Hanumanji, and off to one side, the Elephant God, Lord Ganesha, with his four hands. In his curled trunk he holds a golden lotus blossom. I find myself thinking that in our in extremis sect of postmortem Godwin Hinduism, Lord Ganesha might represent a deification of a box elephant.
At the office I pay a fee of Z$200,000, which includes my license and the wood. Robin backs the pickup against the woodshed, and a gang of laborers appears, herded by an elderly Indian caretaker. The men load a medley of tropical timber, musasa, mopani, eucalyptus, wattle, and some conifers too, fir and cypress. In the background, a piano plinks, as piping voices learn the new national anthem, “Blessed be the Land of Zimbabwe.” When the truck is groaning under a great pile of timber, we set off for the burning ground with two of the laborers perched on top of the wood.
From the Hindu temple we drive down Bishop Gaul Avenue, past the fading gold edifice of the Yugoslav-built Sheraton Hotel, and the ZANU-PF party headquarters next door on Rotten Row. “A rather apt address,” Robin says. The building, Jongwe House, is topped by a triangular facade, in the center of which stands a rampant crowing cockerel —
jongwe
in Shona — the ruling party’s symbol. We turn into Remembrance Drive, past the Mbare single men’s hostels, and then into Pioneer Cemetery, the city’s oldest graveyard.
At the gatehouse, we pick up a municipality foreman, Tapera. He is a tall, imposing black man dressed in a long-sleeved green shirt, pin-striped gray pleated trousers, and suede desert boots. Tapera escorts us slowly through the vast graveyard, pointing out its different religious precincts: Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, Catholic, Dutch Reformed, Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian — all sects are represented among the run-down graves. From time to time we encounter a blue-fatigued laborer slashing away at the tall canopy of elephant grass that threatens to overwhelm the place.
“We have too few people for the upkeep of sixty-five acres,” says Tapera as we drive through the Jewish quarter with lichen-covered Stars of David peeking through the tangle of African foliage. It is home to some two thousand Jews; the oldest grave here belongs to David Henry, who died in 1895, aged one year and eight days. Nearby, a mass mausoleum, shaded by the dense dark green crown of a thunder tree, a natal mahogany, contains the bones of white farmers killed in the Mashona Rebellion — the first
Chimurenga
— the following year.
We arrive at the Hindu section, and unload the wood from the truck. Then we start heaving the logs into a large iron crib, which sits on wheels on a railroad track. Tapera explains the science of pyre making as we work. Alternating layers of slower and faster burning wood, our pyre slowly rises until it reaches the top of the sooty crib.
“It used to be, in the old days,” says Tapera, “you had to shout to be heard here.” He points over at the factories that surround us, as Pioneer Cemetery is in the industrial part of town. “But so many of these factories are shut down now, there is no more noise. No more jobs. It is just quiet.”
Overlooking us to the south is Rufaro Stadium, “where our independence ceremonies were held in 1980,” he reminds me. “But now it’s all gone sour,” he says. “We’ve gone from bread bin to dustbin. Mugabe’s persecuting his own people. But our time will come. Every dog has its day.”
M
Y FATHER
is now more than an hour late. We sit on a mossy stone bench under a giant fig tree, waiting for him. We have finished the little Chinese thermos of coffee that my mother prepared, and the sandwiches.
Tapera looks up. The motion pleats the base of his shaven skull into an accordion of glistening brown flesh.
“At last,” he says. “He is arrived.”
The car, long and low and sinister, glides slowly toward us, only the black roof visible above the reef of elephant grass. It passes us and then backs up into position.
Keith jumps out of the passenger side.
“Sorry we’re late,” he says. “We were stopped at a police roadblock up on Rotten Row. They wanted to check inside. Can you believe it?”
He hands me a clipboard. “Sign here and here.”
The driver reaches down to unlatch the tailgate. It opens with a gentle hydraulic sigh. Inside is a steel coffin. Together we slide it out and carry it over to the concrete steps. Keith unlatches the lid to reveal a body tightly bound in a white linen winding-sheet.
“Why don’t you take the top,” he says.
I ease one hand under the back of my father’s head and my other arm under his shoulders, and I give him a last little hug. He is cool and surprisingly soft to my touch. The others arrange themselves along his body, and on Keith’s count we lift it out of the coffin.
We shuffle up the concrete stairs that lead to the top of the iron crib. We have woven fresh green branches through its black bars. And on top of the tiers of logs inside it, we have placed a thick bed of pine needles and garnished it with fragrant pine shavings. Upon this bed we lay my father down.
Gently, Tapera lifts Dad’s head to place a small eucalyptus log under his neck as a pillow. As he does so the shroud peeks open at a fold, and I get a sudden, shocking glimpse of my father’s face. His jaw, grizzled with salt-and-pepper stubble; the little dents on his nose where his glasses rested; his mustache, slightly shaggy and unkempt now; the lines of his brow relaxed at last in death. And then, as his head settles back, the shroud stretches shut again, and he is gone.
Tapera is staggering up the steps with a heavy musasa log. He places it on top of the body.
“Huuuh.” My father exhales one last loud breath with the weight of it.
“It is necessary,” Tapera says quietly, “to hold the body down in case . . .” He pauses to think if there is a way to say this delicately. “In case it explodes because of the buildup of the gases.” He looks unhappily at the ground. “It happens sometimes, you know.”
Keith slides the empty coffin back into the hearse and drives away down the lane, where it is soon swallowed up again by the green gullet of grass.
The old black grave digger, Robert, has his hand in front of me now. His palm is yellow and barnacled with calluses. He is offering me a small Bic lighter made of fluorescent blue plastic.
“It is traditional for the son to light the fire,” says Tapera, and he nods me forward.
I stroke my father’s brow gently through the shroud, kiss his forehead. Then I flick the lighter. It fires up on my third trembling attempt, and I walk slowly around the base of the trolley, lighting the kindling. It crackles and pops as the flames take hold and shiver up the tower of logs to lick at the linen shroud. Quickly, before the cloth burns away to reveal the scorched flesh beneath, Tapera hands me a long metal T-bar and instructs me to place it against the back of the trolley, while he does the same next to me. We both heave at it. For a moment the trolley remains stuck on its rusty rails. Then it groans into motion and squeaks slowly toward the jaws of the old redbrick kiln a few yards away.
“Sorry it’s so difficult,” says Tapera, breathing heavily with the effort. “The wheel bearings are shot.”
The flaming pyre enters the kiln and lurches to rest against the buffers. Robert, the grave digger, clangs shut the cast-iron doors and pulls down the heavy latch to lock them.
We all squint up into the brilliant blue sky to see if the fire is drawing. A plume of milky smoke flows up from the chimney stack, up through the green and red canopy of the overhanging flame tree.
“She is a good fire,” says Tapera. “She burns well.”
FIN
As I have made clear in the text, some parts of this book draw on reporting I did in Africa for
National Geographic,
the
New York Times Magazine, Reader’s Digest, ForbesLife, Men’s Journal,
Channel 4 TV (via Windfall Films), the
Observer
(London), the
Guardian,
and the
Times
(London). I’m grateful for their assignments. The passage on Dambudzo Marechera appeared in a somewhat different form as an introduction I wrote for the Penguin reissue of his novel,
The House of Hunger
.
Without the cloistered retreats of MacDowell and Yaddo, the artists’ colonies in New Hampshire and Saratoga Springs, I would still be procrastinating. I acknowledge my debt to them both.
I thank my agent, Andrew Wylie; my editors at Little, Brown, Judy Clain and Marie Salter; and my British editors at Picador, Ursula Doyle and Nicholas Blake. And I am beholden to my wife, Joanna Coles, who has stoically borne my literary preoccupation.
The enormous help provided by my mother, Dr. Helen Godwin, and my sister, Georgina Godwin, has been essential to this book. Without their contributions, I could never have written it. Which isn’t to say they necessarily approve of all that is between these covers. That responsibility is mine and mine alone.
Peter Godwin
N
EW
Y
ORK
2006
P
ETER
G
ODWIN
is an award-winning author, journalist, and filmmaker. Born and raised in Zimbabwe, he studied at Cambridge and Oxford and became a foreign correspondent for the
Sunday Times
(London) and BBC TV, reporting from more than sixty-five countries. Since moving to New York, he has written for many publications, including
National Geographic
and the
New York Times Magazine.
He also teaches at the New School.