Bibi frowned, and forced herself back into the world. And though behind her eyelids still that Morris taxi danced, she pushed its form away. She stood, rubbed her armpit absently; the breeze twitched at her hair. She cleared her thickened throat and tried to smile into the city, which she sensed bright and fine and steaming out the open window. Just there, Hisham’s Food and Drink. Just there—there, far off but not too far—the light green shape of dusty Kudra House. No, she thought, and so suppressed the truest thing she’d seen, I’ll make a pineapple instead. She wouldn’t give it words. She’d make a plain, clear thing. And pineapples were good. “Pineapples,” she said aloud, “can only bring a very general, unobjectionable luck.”
By the time Bibi was calling for Nisreen to help her down the stairs, Nisreen was putting on her shoes and Issa was already by the door. Nisreen was slower in the mornings than her husband. She liked breakfast more than he did, but not because she ate a lot; in fact, they were both thin and not as interested in food as (so Bibi told them when she could) normal people should be. Nisreen was slow because she liked to stretch her legs and hold a cup of tea while Mama Moto did the washing up. She liked the smell of porridge, the gentle light of the low rooms. She liked to hear the street begin to hum and clang and toot before she put her feet upon it. Nisreen liked to linger. Issa didn’t, never had, not even at the start. He liked, as he often said, “to bring the street the day.” When Nisreen woke, her eyes were sour mangoes, sharp and gummy, and her limbs always felt numb. She always woke up wishing that she hadn’t, that she could roll over in bed and go to sleep again. But Issa’s eyes were always crisper than a rose apple, bright as life itself
“Come on,” Issa was saying. “What if there’s another accident out there and you’re late answering the phone?” Nisreen looked at him and sighed. She smiled, and tried to slow him down. He was not being unkind, she knew. It was just that he was eager, wallet, briefcase at the ready, the busy world already knocking at his heart. He looked lovely, Nisreen thought. That mustache neat and gleaming, white shirt buttoned up. Efficient. She blamed herself for making Issa late. “Just now, just now,” she said. The one leg that had troubled her since childhood felt a little heavy. She balanced herself on her husband’s arm to get into her shoes. Issa paused, made sure she wouldn’t fall. And Nisreen thought, He’s gentle, yes, I know. She also thought, as she always did when he was still, and part of him was touching her, that she loved him very much.
They heard Bibi from upstairs, and Issa rolled his eyes. “My mother’s also late today,” he said. “The both of you, slow-slow.” Nisreen squeezed his hand and thought how nice it was when Issa teased her. Sometimes she teased him, “Why don’t you go help her?” Bringing Bibi down the stairs could take a while, especially if she had a lot to say. But Mama Moto, who liked being in Mansour House the best when the two young ones were gone, was already rising from the dishes. She came towards them with her arms out, as if shooing chickens from a yard. “You go on, go on,” she said. “Get out. I’ll take care of her. You have things to do.”
Mama Moto—with her old unsmiling face and her flapping, bony arms—made Nisreen and Issa laugh. Issa held the door, and in a moment they were out of Mansour House and in the yellow day. As they walked, Nisreen thought that she was glad Bibi hadn’t been there while she and Issa drank their tea. She felt guilty thinking so, but she was growing tired of Bibi asking how she was, asking with that look she had, A look that begins just below my chin and ends under my skirt. Bibi used Nisreen’s lingering against her. “It means you shouldn’t go to work,” she’d say, peering at Nisreen over her porridge. “It means that you should lie in bed with your knees up for a while. It’s standing up so fast that keeps your belly empty. Leaking, don’t you know?” Nisreen had grown tired of trying to explain that standing up and getting dressed and going out to work didn’t stop babies from coming. When she tried to argue, Bibi asked, “If it isn’t that, my girl, what is it?” And Nisreen wasn’t sure.
Nine
After years of hoping vaguely for a turn in his own luck towards the success he felt was due, Gilbert had, despite his dreamy talk, resigned himself to the idea that fortunes did not change. That nothing ever happened. At least not in real life, and surely not in his, not at the close, familiar scale where he woke up and ate and slept and opened up a book, then ate and slept again. Out there, elsewhere, great things did occur, of course. One only had to tune in to the VOA or BBC to know so. Independence and Uprisings took place. Colonies disbanded. Wars were won and treaties signed, cities smashed, rebuilt. But as far as he could tell, topplings, accessions, and other transformations primarily took place at the level of the State or of the Natural World (disasters and the like). In History writ large.
In his story writ small, the world moved slow and usual, and nothing ever changed. Indeed, Gilbert thought of change as something brought about by Presidents, or War, or by what some called Acts of God. If brought about by men, then it was brought by men who’d done things and knew how the world worked. Men, Gilbert thought sadly, other than himself. Unless a person did appear—a knowing Englishman or German who might spot him at the Palm, a history professor who might admiringly look up the modest essays he had published—and offer him a deal, a ready-made solution, nothing, Gilbert felt, could transform his little life. Certainly nothing that originated there, or near him. Much less from within. Or so Gilbert thought. But as Sarie’s visits to the Jeevanjees continued, he began to feel a shift.
He had gotten used to Sarie’s presence in his life—their life—which, while by no means ebullient or smacking of rich love, was in important ways reliable and steady. How long had it been? More than fifteen years now, more than fifteen years of Sarie in his life. Sometimes it surprised him, seemed much longer or much shorter than that. Sometimes Gilbert counted: four years before the end of Colonies, and eleven after that. And those eleven, endless, slow, not thrashing with adventure or delight but still not, either, Gilbert thought, disastrous, were a considerable stretch.
The ordinary tempo was, yes, sometimes interrupted by what Gilbert called Sarie’s “little tantrums” (those days when Sarie pulled at her own hair and stomped on the red carpet, urging him to please, monsieur, why not get a job), and now and then she shouted and she snapped and, he felt, damaged him. But he had gotten used to what he had; it was a constant, known; in that constancy, he had found some comfort. For instance: he was used to waking up alone but knowing she was in the other room; accustomed, too, from the threshold of that tiny chamber, to watching Sarie read to their one child, and not stepping inside. He liked to know that she could be presented with his laundry and that it would be cared for. That she would make him dinner as expected. That she could be persuaded now and then to pluck a tune out with one hand on the broken old piano while he stood behind. That she would roll her eyes at him sometimes. He had even made his peace with her recurrent gloom.
With Sarie out so often in the early afternoons, at first he felt at sea. Her absences surprised him. Now and then he wondered: what could she be finding in a house he hadn’t seen? He pictured her. Sarie was a woman of good size. Strong-boned. But of all those burly bones, he thought, not one—not one!—contained a deep curiosity or the kind of nimble smarts with which all his limbs and noggin were really rather full. Not Sarie. Unlike the man she’d married, Gilbert thought, she was not an intellectual. For example: she didn’t care for books, or History, or Knowledge, or Fascinating Facts. One day—Gilbert winced, remembering—she had even thrown a precious tome by Justus Grand (The Portuguese in Africa) down onto the floor and kicked it half across the room to end under the table, so that he had had to fold himself in three to get it back. Why was she insistent, suddenly, on throwing herself so regularly out among the people? Did she expect to learn something that Gilbert didn’t know? He had that pamphlet, after all, about Dawoodis, and a recent master’s thesis (a commercial history of Ismailis and Ithna’asheris in the town of Vunjamguu) that a man from the local univ
ersity had once generously passed along. Why should she be on the loose out there in the sun, taking his small daughter to an alien home without good information, which he could have found out for her, had Sarie only asked, among his many books?
Part of him was mildly roused. But another part of him excused her daily visits to Jeevanjee and Sons (Gilbert, with what he read about such families, was imagining a Store, an Inc., a Sundries Shop or Co.). He put on a generous hat: It is, he thought, smiling, a little competition. She wants to show that she knows something, too. He even took some pity on her: she had had an exciting time in the mountains of Jilima with the Sisters; living in the city, Gilbert knew, had been difficult for her. But what could he have done? Poor Sarie, looking for her youth. Let her try, he thought. She might learn how Muslims eat. He smiled. But she will never understand the reasoning that lies behind it all.
And yet another part of him, a quiet part, was glad. Sarie’s absences exposed him to a different kind of silence. Sarie, if at home, was quiet, this is true. But in another stillness, the one left by her outings, Gilbert found a strange and not unpleasant peace. Sarie’s ordinary silence, no matter how maintained or smooth, had a roar and rumble to it. Without Sarie there, the flat was truly, fully still. It seemed to him almost as if the place had never been entirely at rest. Consider: he could read his books and putter without feeling Sarie’s eyes upon him. He could put his feet up on the coffee table, not caring how they smelled once he had taken off his socks. He even found that his attention span increased a fraction, so that a book he might have once put down to fetch another in its stead could lie open, cared for, present in his lap much longer than was usual. He didn’t feel unhappy. In this other part of him, he didn’t mind that she went out! How odd! And so he opted not to mind too much what Sarie really did. Something small was changing.
As Bibi, down the road and just around the corner, gathered up supplies for her brown fruit, Sarie told her husband that she and Agatha were going to make another visit. “A good thing for our daughter,” she announced, rounding up the peach and lemon sweets that she had bought the day before. “She needs activity and walks.” This, though a new concern for Sarie, Gilbert could in no way deny. Agatha, despite the lectures they received sometimes from Council folk—enormous Hazel Towson, most of all—did not go to school. She roamed. She hid in hollow places, sometimes scared her father. He could not but agree that Agatha might benefit from outings. As Sarie said, so plaintively, accusingly, because she liked to blame her husband for anything she could, “She has not even here the easy tree to climb.” Sarie expected him to quibble. But to her surprise: “Indeed,” he said. “You’re right.” And so the two set off
Once his daughter and his wife had made their way into the courtyard, he opened up the tin they kept in a corner of the kitchen and took out several bills, which he slipped into his pocket. He replaced the tin responsibly, then counted slowly to one hundred to make sure that no one would come back. Oh, he didn’t mind this privacy at all! His skin, his limbs even felt good. Satisfied, he pulled on his socks and shoes and organized his hair so that it hid a great part of his scalp. He was going to buy a book.
Gilbert’s stepping out into the courtyard, hand in pocket curled around his cash, coincided with the appearance of the Arab from the islands, tired Mr. Suleiman, from the light blue door of his own first-floor flat. Gilbert had just then been about to move with some determination directly towards the street, but now he paused, unhappy. He was not adept with neighbors, not at all. He hoped that Mr. Suleiman was not going to walk, too. What should a person say to an old man like that when one lived beside him? He’d known what to say to Arabs in the courthouse, how to make them wait—but things were different now, and that wouldn’t quite do. He didn’t like to think about two neighbors taking the same route, not saying a word. Uncomfortable, indeed. It was not, he thought, as if he could ever buy the Arab drinks at the Victorian Palm, or expect the same from him. Arabs, Gilbert thought with satisfaction, are well known not to drink. Mr. Suleiman, in bright-white robe and fine-stitched cap, fumbling with a cane, frowning at the sandy ground through spectacles done up with silver tape, occupied, thought Gilbert, quite another world. Shy, hoping that the darkness covered him, he hid behind the door.
Ah. It seemed that Mr. Suleiman was not planning a stroll. Instead, the narrow man made his slow way in the opposite direction, tottering towards the plum tree in the corner of the courtyard where the old Morris taxi stood. Once there, he set the walking stick against the fender and peered inside the cab. As Gilbert watched, the old man, half-bent in the sunshine, opened up the driver’s door, which, crooked at the hinge, jogged down with a creak. He did not get inside—rested one palm on the frame and cocked his grizzled head. A little breeze picked up his gown and showed a slender bit of unfit, bony leg.
Gilbert shook his head. Watching from the darkness, he felt a little sorry for his neighbor, for the old dead Oxford cab. He thought, Old men! Nothing works these days! Perhaps Mr. Suleiman would find what he had come for, turn around, go back into his flat. Should Gilbert hide and wait? But the old man simply stood. A damson fell down from the tree and landed not far from his feet, but still he didn’t move. Gilbert sighed. Wondering how long Mr. Suleiman would be there in the sun, communing with his car, he rubbed his fingers at the cash roll in his pocket. He didn’t want to wait. No, he thought, I mustn’t let him stay me. So that an onlooker might think he had not seen Mr. Suleiman and was therefore not being impolite at all, he held his breath and turned his head towards the building’s wall. Without looking behind him, he marched into the street. And now, now to find a book! Released, he headed towards the sea.
As Gilbert walked under the awnings, hiding from the sun, Agatha and Sarie, seated comfortably beneath the fans at Hisham’s Food and Drink, were waiting. Ismail and Ali, who now and then helped out a man who ran a shop of largely smuggled goods on Urasimu Road (a Mr. Essajee, who had enjoyed Majid’s literary paper and been sad to see it fold), had been encouraged by their father to step their helping up. They’d started working every day, and on some days even took Habib. The boys came home sometimes at lunch but did not stay for long. At Hisham’s, Sarie waited.
Agatha sipped passion juice through a red-white pinstriped straw and watched the sweet brews bubbling in their cases at the wall. Sarie ordered ice, the thick kind, kulfi, with cardamom and cream (which the Frostys did not make, which Sarie knew from long ago, Jilima, a cool place by Mukhtar’s Drink Emporium), and eyed the clock above the door. Thinking of her husband’s library, Sarie estimated that ten days of such treats for herself and her daughter were equal to a medium book, or a pair of heavy pamphlets. It is my right, she thought, with a new sort of satisfaction.
She looked down at Agatha. Her single daughter baffled her. She had never been quite certain what to do with Agatha, what one did with children (growing up with Sisters had not helped). Though she would not have refused any good things for her child, it wasn’t quite that Sarie sought them out. But thinking now and then that Agatha had needs, deserved things, as she did, made her Sarie’s ally. We need something, too, she thought.
Sometimes she made motherly attempts: at Hisham’s, she tried giving Agatha a wink, but she was not rewarded. Agatha ignored her, and Sarie turned to the bright clock again, now tapping her heels against the tiles of the scuffed floor. Finally. Time turned. Mr. Jeevanjee would now be by himself—except, of course, for Tahir, who, though he had brought them all together, Sarie thought did not really count. She wiped Agatha’s wet mouth with the corner of her dress, pushed their dishes to the edge of the long table, and took her daughter back into the street.
All this Bibi saw from Mansour House, where she was sitting on the balcony. When Hisham’s door opened down there, she’d shivered, stopped her needle short. As a cook might keep an eye on cakes that still have some way to rise, she watched the two with care. She’d seen them come and go. She knew they’d gone to Mad Majid’s that once. But she wasn’t
certain yet that this was a routine. She slipped the needle twice into her sheet to keep it safe and narrowed her sharp eyes. She saw that Sarie stepped not left but right, and was now taking her daughter up Mahaba Street. If only Bibi could keep track of the European woman’s short lavender gown, if she saw them pass that mosque… ! Then she’d know that she was right. She watched. Indeed. Eywah, Bibi thought. From there, from there to little Kudra House. Imagine, oh, yes. Yes! But isn’t he insane? She was so happily considering the British woman’s fate in Majid Ghulam’s house that she did not respond when Mama Moto called her down for lunch. She scooted to the balcony’s edge, slipped each arm through a concrete-bounded heart, and, for just a moment, clasped her hands together. Mama Moto called again, but Bibi didn’t answer. Let Mama Moto wait, she thought. I’ve other foods to eat.
The book stand Gilbert liked the most was managed by a Christian from Fufuka who stayed at the cathedral grounds and took his morning tea with the French and Belgian Sisters. The salesman, proud of his association, often said, Que la paix soit avec vous and Que Dieu vous bénisse, whether passersby bought books from him or not; he was apt as well to give out blessings in several local tongues, some he’d known himself, and some the Sisters taught. Like Sarie, Gilbert thought, the bookman, too, was given to inscrutable, surprising formulations, but from him these were charming. And also, he had style. The bookman wore a bright green fishing cap high up on his brow, to which he now and then affixed a modest paper bloom. And, even more important, his chosen volumes (some missing quite coincidentally from the Mission’s well-stuffed shelves) often suited Gilbert. He felt buoyed by that hat, which he could see already, bobbing, from the corner. He felt free, satisfied, and pleased. Today, thought Gilbert, I will make a find.
The Blue Taxi Page 14