The Blue Taxi

by N. S. Köenings

  Bibi’s fingers hurt and Nisreen wasn’t pregnant, but overall, life was not so bad. Nevermind about the maybe-meaning of her threads or the problems in her household. The pineapple was just a pineapple today. Out here on the balcony, she had a country of her own. It would be good to have a rest. Bibi felt serene. Nothing there just yet, nothing to perk up her secret-seeking sense. She rubbed her fingers in her lap and thought about Majid Ghulam, poor old widowed Ghuji, and how sad his fortunes were. She wondered, too, about that European woman with bare legs, who now regularly stepped into Hisham’s Food and Drink with the little girl beside her and, upon stepping out again, didn’t head back home.

  Mama Moto came out of the parlor with a bowl of lentil broth and a brand-new red clay burner to place under the rope bed—onion skins and basil, to soothe Bibi’s old hands. Bibi spread her skirts apart and let Mama Moto slide the burner right below her bottom. Bibi, as she sometimes did when there was little going on and nothing to be stitched, told Mama Moto to stay with her a moment. She had something to say.

  Mama Moto, Bibi thought, was a serious woman, too. They were not so far apart in age. And they’d been together for as long as Bibi could recall living in Kikanga, all her married life and after. She’d been hired by Bibi’s husband, who, as proper husbands did, understood that wives needed some help. How right he’d been to do it, Bibi thought. She and Mama Moto had lived together through some of the same things: the arrival of the radio, ration cards and blackouts, electricity and taps, the golden times of Hollywood, freedom, revolution and kung fu, Independence, telephones, motherhood, and age. They’d see television soon.

  Each of them had an only son: Bibi’s darling Issa, and Mama Moto’s Idi—born not long after Bibi’s final child was washed and wrapped and buried, but in his own way brave, successful just as Issa was, if in a less official world. People called him Moto (and it had come back to his mother, and her new name had stuck) because with his hot hands he pilfered things, because his goods were hot, and because now and then he vanished, like a fire’s rising smoke. Mama Moto’s Moto is a thief, thought Bibi, but human shapes are many. God gives each a star. She’d long stopped teasing Mama Moto for her child’s escapades. She tried to call him Idi sometimes and not Moto, to show she understood that he was not all spark and flame. And it was true he’d lately grown so able at his trade that he got caught only rarely, was really rather cool. But names don’t disappear. Mama Moto didn’t steal, in any case. She was temperate and upright. She’s almost like my sister, Bibi sometimes thought.

  When Bibi told her stories, Mama Moto listened. She also learned things on her own. If Mama Moto gave out what she knew, she was most often direct; she didn’t spin things into tales that had to be unraveled before Bibi could decide exactly what was what. Mama Moto was not, at heart, a gossip; and while this troubled Bibi in Nisreen, in Mama Moto it was a posture she approved of. Mama Moto was reliable and, thought Bibi, truthful, in a way many other people weren’t. She named her sources when she could, did not take things on faith. And because Mama Moto’s social world was different from Bibi’s, because she didn’t care too personally about the Jeevanjees and the Hafizes, the Tannas or the Mehtas, Bibi, if she was uncertain or bored, could make a story up and Mama Moto might accept it. She was also, Bibi didn’t like to say but often thought with pleasure now and then, easy to make fun of. Bibi thus began: “What do you know, Ma, about the white woman who lives around the corner? That white Mrs. Turner?” Mama Moto set the soup down and looked up. Her knees creaked as she rose.

  Despite Bibi’s now-and-then great love for her, Mama Moto didn’t feel as close to Bibi as Bibi did to her. Though she had never once pointed them out, she was more attuned to the differences between them. There was, for instance, the fact that Issa had an office for his business and Idi’s office was the street; that Issa had four neckties and Idi, she thought, only one; that, Freedom notwithstanding, Issa could walk into almost any shop and be given some credit, and other things besides. That the two loved and only boys were not exactly friends. And that this state of affairs was due not to any difference in their brains (which Mama Moto thought were equal, at the very least) but History, which was never really just; and that Mama Moto slept downstairs in a corner on the floor, while Bibi, coddled, lay on her besera in a high up, breezy room; and so on and so on and so forth, though Mama Moto didn’t like to say. But at the same time it was also true that she didn’t dislike Bibi; sometimes she even loved her. They’d been together for so long that she was used to her. And she was glad to have a job. They did sometimes have fun. And although Bibi thought she always had the upper hand, Mama Moto had some methods, too, for achieving satisfaction.

  Mama Moto rubbed her long, long fingers up across her face, over her long skull, and pinched her narrow neck to soothe where it was sore. She pulled her working cloth tight around her shoulders, then, screwing up her lips, looked out at the New Purnima Snack. “That woman?” Mama Moto curled her nostrils and furrowed her high brow. Mama Moto, as it happened, knew far more than Bibi did about Mrs. Sarie Turner, and Majid Jeevanjee. But she was not ready to say. She lied: “Nothing, Bi. She is a white woman, that’s all.”

  Bibi understood without needing to be told that Mama Moto knew more than she said. “Come on, Ma. Tell us what you’ve heard.” Balanced on her arms and feet at each wooden end of the rope bed, Bibi lifted up her chest and hips and pulled her dress up so the smoke would reach her better. She gave a hollow grunt and settled down again while Mama Moto sniffed the morning air and peered across the way into Salma’s open window, where a pale blue curtain shrugged.

  Mama Moto sighed. “You think I get out to hear things, with all the work I do?”

  Bibi let her wrist hang in the air and shook it back and forth. “Ah-ahh,” she said. “Listen to you, just! As if your life was hard. You run up and down the stairs as if you were a girl!”

  Mama Moto laughed. “You think I have time to go outside and listen at the walls, with your washing to be done?” Bibi plucked her tongue quick from the roof of her wet mouth and made a clucking sound. Things were warming up. Still considering the curtains, Mama Moto said, “All right. All right. I’ll tell you something new. Idi says she goes to look in on that boy. The one from your own accident. Those Indians. Up on Libya Street.”

  Bibi was surprised. It wasn’t often that news came to her through Idi. “Moto?” Bibi said, and Mama Moto frowned. “How does Moto know?” Mama Moto pressed her lips together and set her shoulders straight. “My Idi’s a good boy,” she said. “He knows what’s about.”

  Bibi sniffed, said, “Heh.” The two were silent for a while. Mama Moto checked the onion skins and righted Bibi’s pillow. “So?” said Bibi. “What does Idi say?” Saying “Idi” helped her. Mollified, Mama Moto almost smiled. She rubbed her ear, got ready. “Not much,” she said. “She must be bringing him some medicines for pain. Just like I bring you. You know, I heard that white lady’s a doctor.” Sometimes, to get Bibi excited, Mama Moto said the opposite of what she knew to be true.

  Bibi bent to take the little bowl of stew, which smelled, she thought, much better than those onion skins. “Medicines, eh? Do they stink like what you bring me?” Bibi made a face and set the bowl back down. She plucked at Mama Moto’s dress to get all of her attention. Here was Bibi’s talk, getting off the ground: “Look at me, I’ll tell you.” Bibi’s eyes grew small. “I’ll tell you what medicine she’s taking over there!”

  Mama Moto did her best to look as blank as the flat floor, but, in this case of the Jeevanjees, she was at least one up on Bibi. What Mama Moto knew, she’d gotten almost from the source. But she wasn’t going to say all that, not right away, at least. She liked how Bibi’s mind worked. She said: “Tell me then, why don’t you? Mrs. I’m-a-teacher-on-the-balcony. Mrs. I-know-all. Quit your bragging now and tell me how it is.” Bibi liked it when Mama Moto teased her. It made her feel much younger. She waited for a little more, and Mama Moto gave it to her: “Come on now, old l
ady. Let it out or your sour mouth will pop. I’m not living at the Mountain Top Hotel, you know. No one brings me breakfast. I’ve all your work to do.”

  Bibi nodded and then grinned, her little mouth as open as could be. “Brings him medicines, you say?” She held the bowl close to her mouth with the heels of her bent hands. She drank up all the soup. “Medicines, you say?”

  Mama Moto took the bowl from her and shook the last drops out into the street. Mama Moto knew Bibi was guessing, that she might have ideas, but that she didn’t really know. “Medicines. That’s right. That’s exactly what I said.”

  Bibi coughed and spit. She gestured broadly with her arms, looked up into the sun as if she had an audience in the sky, and said, “Remedies!” Round eyes hard like coins. “Doctor?” And now, loudly, so that someone on the street might easily have heard, “Doctor. Ha! I’ll tell you what she’s fixing.” And announced that she had known before anybody else that Majid Ghulam Jeevanjee (a peacock, after all) had recently convinced that sunburnt, freckled woman to spread apart her legs and give him British juice—which, as everyone has heard, is potent, and exciting.

  Repeat: Cities don’t split people up so much as bring them all together. Which is why Mama Moto, though she said nothing to Bibi, was aware not only of the news at work in Majid Ghulam’s heart, but of who his downstairs neighbor was. Here is how it went.

  Sour Maria had a story, too. She was not a city girl. She’d been in Vunjamguu two years, had moved in with her brother, who’d come out well before she did. He’d done six months at the Secretarial College for Government Assistants and then secured his future with a rare and steady post at the National Tourist Board, shelving maps and postcards. When the Housing people did their famous reclamatory work, the whole first floor of grandiose Kudra House, for the people’s revolution, went to this humble man. Maria’s brother had moved in not long after Majid’s two had fled for London and Toronto, leaving poor Ghuji behind. He had treated that first floor as if there were nothing just above it. He’d done his very best to ignore Majid, and Hayaam, and all the growing boys, and lived his own life rather quietly. Incurious—a good citizen, he was—Maria’s brother was uninterested in Asians, who, as far as he could see, had gotten where they were by stealing other people’s things. He had not made any mark with Majid Ghulam Jeevanjee, had not stirred when Hayaam died; nor had he interfered when Mr. M. G. Jeevanjee became Mad and Sad Majid. But Maria was quite different.

  Soon after Maria came, her brother took a wife and went to live with her (her people had a larger house a little out of town, and her mother, unable to walk, needed help at home). But who in their right mind could willingly give up a little city flat? He did not provide the Tourist Board with his new address, and he left his sister there to settle in so firmly that no one could uproot her or take the flat away. Maria, respectful and obedient, promised that she’d spend a lot of time at church, not speak to men in private, and wouldn’t ever get in trouble.

  By herself and young, Maria needed patrons. And so, in addition to the selling of sweet buns in the morning and the evening, by which if she was clever she could meet most of her needs, she did things for the Jeevanjees in exchange for Majid Ghulam’s—she thought—power to protect her from any thing or person that could harm her in the street. She washed their clothing, made them tea, and kept the courtyard clean. Sometimes she cooked meals. And, although they didn’t know it, she also prayed for them; because she prayed for them, she monitored their progress.

  She approved, at base, of Mr. Jeevanjee, and even his wild sons. As time went by, in fact, she cared for him quite fiercely, the way a young girl might for an uncle she admires. She was not like her brother; in her view, Mad Majid was a person who had suffered and who needed her somehow. As she would say to anyone who’d listen, anyone who had bad feelings about Asians: unlike the bindi-sporting Hindus who cared so much for gold, and unlike the Goans, who all whined about cathedrals and gave up their rare earnings for new steeples, at least the Jeevanjees believed, without much fuss, in God. They are as good, Maria thought, as any Asians get. She especially thought this because Mr. Jeevanjee did not joke with her about how she went to Church, or ask her to stop singing hymns and modern gospel tunes when she was working in the courtyard. He was uncivil only, thought Maria, to those who told him how to be, and this Maria wouldn’t dare, not openly, at least. If that Ismail or Ali teased her and he heard, he shouted and the boys left her alone. He was not actively unkind to her, and in return, Maria felt protective.

  Because Maria was often home during the week (selling sweet buns in the mornings and only sometimes before sunset), she knew exactly when Sarie Turner came and exactly when she left. Maria did the washing for the boys, and she sometimes sat with Tahir, who had at her prompting also told her that when Mrs. Turner visited, he didn’t always hear much talking from the parlor. That they had gone into his father’s room. Maria had not pushed him further, but she had taken note.

  It is important to recall that Maria was not simply a good girl with a basic faith in God; she had been reborn. At the Emmanuel Revival Tabernacle House, off Mbuyu Mmoja Park, Maria spent her weekends reading and rereading the Good News. Anxious about Evil, she was thus equipped to know what was innocent and wise. Sarie Turner, she could tell, was neither of those things. Did she not always come when Mr. Jeevanjee was by himself, but for his newly crippled son? Did Mr. Jeevanjee not look newly bathed at the white woman’s departure? Maria knew all about loose women, women who tripped men up with lust, then killed them in their sleep because they wanted power. Mr. Jeevanjee, she’d known almost from the first, was in the clutches of a viper.

  If she saw Mrs. Turner coming down the alleyway when she was working in the courtyard, Maria made a kissing noise between her lips, looked away from her, and spit. She wished that she could talk with Mr. Jeevanjee and urge him to slow down, to think, and consider his own God. Four wives notwithstanding, Allah had no soft spot for adultery, of this she was sure. But say such things?—she couldn’t. Unlike her big brother, Maria felt the Jeevanjees might throw her out if she spoke her thoughts too clearly. They were Asians, after all. But how she wished to put her two pence in! Sarie Turner’s lack of morals and the way that she was leading Mr. Jeevanjee to Hell were two of right-thinking Maria’s principal concerns, and they took up a good deal of her time. But Maria did not have a simply one-track mind; no, she worked on several fronts. Another thing she thought about was the upcoming salvation she was planning of a boy who would, if she did not act fist, become a viper, too. Maria was in love.

  Beside the Emmanuel Revival Tabernacle House at Mbuyu Mmoja Park, there grew a certain mango tree under which Kikanga’s ruffians met: slit-eyed boys with open-collared shirts and necklaces that shone, sunglasses to shield their roaming eyes—boys who milled around. Boys, Maria thought, who were dangerous and sly and in need of the Good Lord. While some of them, Maria understood, were well beyond the reach of one so recently rebaptized as herself, she also knew (impulsively and therefore with some certitude) that there was hope for that band’s leader. The handsome one: a boy named Idi Moto. Idi Moto could be saved, Maria knew, because, despite the less-than-legal things he liked to do, he cared about his mother. Mothers, children—the sweetest ties that bind! How could a girl not be reassured by a boy who thought about his ma and stole nice gifts for her? Oh! A boy whose name meant flame and fire was too much to leave alone.

  For his part, Idi Moto was observant. While Bibi’s Issa might get by with noticing the signs in obvious news that was spoken on the radio or decreed by his superiors, Idi Moto, in order to survive, had learned, in subtle ways, not to miss a thing. “That Issa might read papers and reports,” he often told his mother, “but I can read a person.” And so he could identify targets for his tricks, and other folk whose weaknesses might help him: policemen who were idle, night-watchmen who took long naps, or tea girls who liked gifts. Idi was astute. In his private, sensual life, he mostly liked to fool with eager girls or k
nowing women who could improve his technique. But he also liked a challenge, chaste and unformed lovelies whose plump hearts were abrim, who thought they couldn’t fall. He therefore liked Maria. When she came out of Meetings and sat beside him on a bench, he let Maria talk—for talk and jokes and gossip from a girl, with boys like Idi Moto, cannot but lead directly to the language of the heart. So Maria told him all the things that made her mad and sad, and Idi Moto stroked her thumbs and earlobes when she got carried away.

  Thus juicy news does fly. While he fingered her warm neck, Maria warned her maybe-man about the ways of women. And spilled the beans on Sarie. And went on and on and on. And was only interrupted in her speech when Idi, looking at his fancy watch and working down his hair, said he had to go; had promised, he said sweetly, to look in on his ma. But how nice of her to sit and talk with him so long. Maria squeezed his hand, let go, and, with a tingling in her throat and eyes, told him he was blessed.

  Thirteen

  Sarie woke up with a start, as though her heart had skipped. Inside her, locked tight in her chest, the warm red shape at work reminded her of Majid. Outside her, Gilbert slept. She nudged the pillow up to hide his head from view. He felt her move and sighed. Against her husband’s flank, the mirror (already aglow with city light), the heavy dresser, and the door, Sarie closed her eyes and thought about her lover: a poet, a man with serious wounds, kissing her at last! Though she tried to feel again as she had with Majid’s lips upon her, and as she had before she woke—tried remembering the hot point of his tongue—she could not manage it completely. Could not see him, quite. Something in her, Sarie thought, had shifted, and she was not certain what. Slow, perplexed, aiming with her stretching to put herself in order, Sarie stiffened all her toes and cracked her neck into the pillow. Between what went on outside of her, at the surface of her skin, and what sat immobile, locked away inside of her, she discovered a new gap. As though those limbs she felt, spreading from her joints—hers, of course, not anybody else’s—were a little foreign to her. As she brought her hands up to her face and touched her own warm cheeks, ran her fingers through her matted hair, she had, throughout, the odd impression that she was being touched by someone other than herself. As though, indeed, there were two Saries, not one.