The Blue Taxi

by N. S. Köenings

  In the meantime, unimpeded by someone else’s sharper mind, advice, or realism, Sarie’s visions soared. How clever she was! How amazing that she had in all those years of living in the city, of sitting with her child, of cringing at the thought of garden parties and of functions, not thought even once about going into business, of setting, so to speak, up shop. She’d spent years sitting at home, moving slow through rooms, wiping things, folding and unfolding washed and dirty clothes. She’d only had one child, and late—and for this Sarie was glad, grateful for whatever it had been that had kept her insides free. But free for what? she asked herself, feeling now that she must hurry. She’d had so much time!

  Lots of people started businesses, so it seemed to her. Even, no, especially, in the Jilima highlands (Where, in some way, Sarie thought, I am really from). Men sold everything they could, transformed trash into commodities (rubber tires for molding into shoes, beaten tin for making mixing spoons and lamps), and women, too, did things. Women sold tomatoes, onions, woven fans, and carpets; they fashioned brooms from twigs, and ladles from palm husks. In Sarie’s new conception of herself, she, lost child, little Belgian girl, had grown up at the breast of enterprise, suckling acumen and savvy from everyone she knew. She began to think more deeply of herself. Of how she’d come to be, of who she might become. And in that other part of her, the part that she had felt so still and quiet when she woke from her idea, she thought about Majid Ghulam, whom she hadn’t seen for several days. But, oh, how she wished to share her thoughts with him! How she missed her other man! She’d go, she thought. She’d go see him alone, and revel in their limbs.

  Fourteen

  After bathing, wet hair dark, Majid Ghulam took up the little scrap of mirror Ali kept stored on the sill. Ismail and Ali thought a lot about their looks. They battled over hair oil and pomades; they each owned a comb. Ismail had recently acquired aftershave, a dark brown, slick concoction with a sharp metallic scent. Inspired by his brothers, Habib, too, sometimes checked for acne in the glass. But Jeevanjee had not ever, not since Hayaam’s death, and not since what was like her second death (the wraith; a living woman’s body; his brand-new filling-out), really taken stock. And yet, he thought, remembering a poem, there comes sunlight on the ruins. Another: Peacock males do strut. What did he look like this morning?

  The slender shard, broken in the sideways shape of a lateen, felt light between his fingers. Like a person holding a soft creature, examining its fluff and checking it for fleas, he held the mirror with his palm and brought it to his face. No fleas, indeed, but a hard-lined face and some rather sagging skin. His eyelids seemed enormous. He rubbed a flake of white stuff from his upper lip and assessed his thin mustache; it was tufted, not as neatly shaped as a dapper man would like. But he could find some scissors, or a better blade.

  At first conscious of the effort, then with greater courage, he smiled into the glass. It didn’t matter so much what he looked like. He knew that eyes and mouths and skin and hair, and the cut of a mustache, weren’t all there was to romance. He knew that manner, bearing, mattered almost more. It was poems taught him that. He’d often written long and hard about the way a person walked, the sway of certain feet, the shape of shoulders tensed. The way a cherished voice can pump the smitten heart. He’d once known something about love. He’d always had, he told himself, a sense of deeper things. Of spirit. Sarie Turner’s recent, unexpected absence had given him the chance to think: How should he understand it? Was it romance? Was it love? Majid wasn’t sure.

  He thought of how, the other day, Sarie Turner had dissolved beneath him on the bed, how she had met his limbs with kindness and with, he thought, a need that was something like his own. How, resting her head in the very heat of things, upon his shoulder, she had bitten at his skin and caused him a sharp pain. He’d felt a recognition. Was that it? Was that the source of pleasure? That something in tall, hard Sarie Turner felt like something in himself? Perhaps Sarie, too, had sorrows in her life, things she couldn’t speak of, that had ruined everything, turned her plans around and given her thick jolts that she had never wished for. Perhaps she too had long been torn from how it should have been. She was an orphan, after all, and she did not, except for her small flat, Majid thought, really have a home. What if they were, together for a moment, on the edge of a rebirth? Each to find new things?

  He did like to think of love, of being in love, feeling love. He hadn’t, in so long. And yet how thrilling it could be! He had wanted only, in those first days after the eager battle on his bed, for her to keep coming to his house, and touch him as she had. His skin shook with it, his legs and back and chest. How grand it was to feel a woman in his arms. Hayaam lurked no longer in the corners of his sleep. He could look in on Tahir without guilt. He didn’t know if Sarie Turner was the end of things—if she was what the feeling that he had (lambent change, a freshness!) meant, or if she was more like a signal, a signpost on the road. He didn’t know what his boys knew or if they had suspicions. And he didn’t care, even if Maria, with her strutting and her scowling, was issuing a judgment. He didn’t want to know. Shutting many questions out, Majid wished just this: to bask. Lust had made him strong, determined. And virility had brought another sense, a slowly growing feeling that he, Majid Ghulam Jeevanjee, might have some things to choose from and that he might stage, at a not-too-far-off date, a bright reentry to the world he’d left so long ago for grief.

  Sugra came that morning. He knew she’d come before she called to him to say that she’d arrived. The metal doors below gave out a squeak and bang. He heard the thump of Sugra’s feet, then Sugra shouting to Maria, to say “Hello, hello!” He walked slowly down the hall and greeted her from the top of the dim stairs. “Come up! Oh, I am glad that you have come.”

  At the bottom of the steps, Sugra placed her elbows at her hips and peered at him through the fust in an exaggerated way. Majid had surprised her. “Glad? You are, are you? Glad? What? Can you say that again?” Sugra’s voice was loud. Sometimes, Majid thought, she hollered. And on some days he lacked the strength to please her. But he didn’t mind saying it again, not today, when he was feeling brave. “I’m glad, I’m glad,” he said. He took a step towards her. “Have you heard me now?” Sugra cocked her head and waited. Something in her cousin surely was ashift, and though she did not know the cause, she had decided to be gratified to see it. “Say it one more time.”

  Majid laughed at her despite himself and heard his laughter echo on the walls. He found that he was not only laughing at his cousin, but also at his laughter. He teased her. “I cannot believe the sun can rise when you are still asleep. Your husband must have sunglasses; your children all must squint. I am so glad to see you I feel I’ve not been glad before.” By this time, Sugra was halfway up the stairs. She brought her face close to his and frowned. She twisted up her mouth and raised an eyebrow, steep. “Who’s this?” she asked. “Who’s this man I see?”

  This was a bit too much for him. Majid looked away, moved back up the stairs. Glad. How long had it been? A silence passed, and sobered him. He led her to the kitchen. She straightened her long dress and looked down at her bag. More seriously, she said, “Ghuji. You are sounding like a poet. What is happening to you?” Majid swallowed, turned away from her and asked, “Have you been to the clinic?”

  He had not gone himself. He’d promised Tahir that he would, that he would secure crutches, and that he would personally hurl any doctor who was slow to give an answer out the nearest window. But everyone who’d heard him—the aunts, the older boys, and his smallest son—had known he did not have it in him. He hadn’t left the neighborhood for as long as they recalled; he never left the house. When he’d made the promise, Sugra, from across the room, had given him a gentle look. She had raised her hand and pressed her fingertips just slightly to her chest, bent her head a little, before turning away to offer someone sweets. He had known that she would do it. Get the crutches for his boy. She was the type to make connections, after all, to remember
people’s names. And she’d once studied with the doctors, long ago. If anyone could get something tricky done, she could.

  Sugra had been trying. She’d gone down to the clinic now three times. “The first time, that big doctor was not in. The second time he was, and he did all the dancing-dancing that a good doctor should do. ‘Yes-yes,’ he said. ‘I promise you.’ We’ll see. It’s because he’s scared of you, you know, that he said he’d do his best. ‘Mad Majid!’ he is thinking.”

  Sometimes Sugra’s forthrightness could startle him, make him feel that she was seeing things in him that he would have rather hidden. Other people didn’t say, “I see that you are changing,” for example, or “People think you’re mad.” But Sugra let a person know. She was looking at him still, and Majid turned away. She shook the dust out of her skirt. “What—what happened this time?” he asked. She was now considering her sleeves. “This time,” she said, “I went into the reception and saw a girl I went to school with. She works there; what do you think of that? I go in to get crutches and instead I see a friend. She’s married now. No kids.”

  He was thinking about Tahir’s missing leg—not as an event, not quite as a condition, but in a concrete sense, as an absent limb. He thought about the thigh that ended in a stump, the emptiness below it. Very briefly, he thought about the shoe. Sugra looked at him again and saw that any glumness he had lost was welling up again.

  “Oh, Ghuji!” Sugra said. She had liked his teasing! Wished he would stay bright. “It’s not the end of things.” Sugra’s round face shrank a little. It was hard work visiting a cousin who’d been gloomy for so long. It would have been easier for her if Ghuji hadn’t teased her, hadn’t seemed, somehow, to be edging out of grief. Having laughed with him, after sorrow for so long, it was harder not to wish that he’d be really glad again. She took steps towards Tahir’s room. Majid, helpless, shuffled after. “Come on,” Sugra said. “I’ve heard Habib is working on a cane. For in between, so at least your boy can move.” Majid blinked at her. Sugra shook her head and groaned. “I mean, until the crazy doctors give us something nice.”

  In the afternoon, Sarie made her way to Kudra House alone. She was, she’d said to Gilbert, to meet with Hazel Towson for a British Council Luncheon, followed by a lecture on the Public Health Campaign, and afterwards a tea. And couldn’t Gilbert see his way to watching Agatha awhile? Gilbert had said, “Sarie, no. Not really? You’re not going to that?” He’d laughed. “I thought it was a joke!” But Sarie said she’d promised, and Gilbert finally shrugged. No matter what he really thought of great big Mrs. Hazel, no matter how she made him feel, he thought: if they were going to have a business, come into real money, it couldn’t hurt for Sarie to have some proper lady friends. Why should Sarie not get used to being close to all of that, get ready to step in? Once they were in business, he’d be more than equal to Jim Towson’s brash wife; he could look her in the eye, say, “No,” or, “I don’t think so,” and not feel terror in his heart. And so could Sarie, yes.

  “All right,” he said, still scribbling. Sarie was already at the door and about to move into the stairwell when Gilbert raised his head. He’d almost forgotten. “But what will you tell her about…” He gestured to his stomach. “You know. The baby.” He looked shyly away. Sarie frowned a moment, then pretended she was thinking. She’d forgotten, too. But she knew what Gilbert didn’t: she was not going to attend any British Council do. “Something, I am sure,” she said. And Gilbert, thinking of spare parts again, did not ask her what.

  Outside, the earnest, jovial sun was the color of a lemon. A light breeze tickled the high buildings, and the hot swath of the sea was the happy kind of bluish-green that is reported here to keep bad luck at bay. Sarie walked to Kudra House with a frothing in her heart. She felt as though she hadn’t seen her new man in a year. So very much had happened!

  On Mchanganyiko Street, Sarie’s stride was easy. She did not worry that she would be seen. She thought, without knowing who “them” was: Let them all see me! And she held her head up high. Something about those four days, her walking in the park and that productive visit to the Mountain Top Hotel, made Sarie hope she would be noticed and remarked upon. She felt present, happy with the air, prepared to notice things, and, why not, to be noticed, too.

  She passed the narrow paan shops and the green-mango-chili stalls and thought how sharp they smelled. As usual, on Mosque Street, the mendicants were out; the weaving woman registered her passing with a pause. Before the man with one blind eye, Sarie, feeling generous, dropped a shilling on the sheet. He blinked, and shifted slightly. On Mahaba Street, Sarie stopped before the window of the New Purnima Snack. Kachoris! How hot and good they smelled.

  As Sarie moved along, she felt exceptionally alert. How busy and how nicely colored this day seemed to be. The soft blue of the sky; such bright doorways and trees! She craned her neck to see the high fronts of the old houses: at one, thick plants on the roof; at another, four pink windows, shut. At the balcony of a blue mansion, Sarie noticed an old woman looking down and almost smiled at her. On Libya Street, Sarie walked more quickly. She passed the hardware men, mechanics, mamantilie women who sold red beans by the ladle, cane-juice-coffee-oatmeal men, little boys, and bus touts, and felt part of a great pattern—in motion and ashift. Everyone, she thought, yes, everyone, had business to take care of, lots to think about and do. Her purse bounced lightly at her side; the rubber heels of her kandambili shoes snapped hard against the bottoms of her feet; her own fresh cadence pleased her. Oh, how big the new world was! And how unthinkable, how lucky, that she was going to see her lover on her own (she almost hugged herself), that she had one at all.

  Once beyond the metal doors, Sarie was relieved not to see Maria right away. It was one thing not minding how she looked, out there, on Mosque Street and on Libya. But in Kudra House’s alley, Sarie was unsure of Maria. When upstairs with tea or sweets, Maria did not seem like a threat, no, was simply Majid’s house girl. But if Sarie saw Maria by herself out here in the courtyard, she had the sharp, unpleasant feeling that she was being weighed. Maria made her nervous. She could hear Maria on the other side of Kudra House, running water from the tap. Not in sight. Occupied elsewhere. Today I am so lucky, Sarie thought. She closed her eyes, sighed with her mouth open in a tickled, private way, and stopped for just a moment at the threshold. Next, to bring her heartbeat back to center, she held her breath and counted slowly to sixteen. Then, both hands curled over its mouth, she pressed her purse tight against her stomach and walked up those cool stairs. She felt almost pretty. To bring some color out, she bit her lip with her top teeth until she could feel the lower ridge come near to popping through the flesh.

  On the second-to-last stair, she called out “Hodi,” in the local manner. Once. The parrot’s cry rang out, “Who? Who?” There was no other answer. Hm. Has Majid not heard my voice? Sarie stepped inside, confused. Where was he? “Hodi!” Twice. Surely he would come and greet her, pull her towards him and squeeze deeply at her fingers. Sarie could see the shadow of the parrot’s cage swaying clearly on the wall, marking out the pattern of the talking bird’s excitement. “Guests now! Guests now! Guests!” Remembering Maria down below, she called out rather formally: “Hallo, Mr. Jeevanjee!” Then, with tenderness, a lightness in her heart, she called out more softly: “Majid? Majid?” The caged bird had gone quiet. Majid did not answer.

  Is he not at home? Sarie felt a pang, a momentary sinking, called again; and then (relief!) Majid Ghulam’s clear voice rang out from fir back in the house. It said: “Come in! Come in! You’re welcome.” Sarie thought how different his way of speaking was from Gilbert’s, how much more in charge of words he was. He said, voice steady, “Come in all the way, please, until you are inside.” She set her purse down on the settee, checked her hair with happy hands, and smoothed out her short dress. She stepped with ease out of her negligible shoes and slid them with her toes to rest beside Majid’s leather sandals and a pair of worn-out cleats shared by Ali and Habib
. Affectionate, she thought: Their shoes.

  “Majid?” She was aware as she pronounced his name that it had become one among the sweetest, softest sounds that Sarie-in-the-present could imagine (others: night wind through the leaves of plantain groves, her footsteps on the ground). Passing, for the first time unaccompanied, beyond the coffee table and down into the hall, Sarie felt, without quite knowing how, that she had undergone a subtle alteration. What new status, whether she had slipped up or down the scale of honor, she could not decide. Was she from here on in to simply saunter up the stairs and step through the blue parlor, dispensing with hallos and welcome-welcome please? The idea of it thrilled her.

  She came out on the high balcony and saw her lover squatting. Huddled at the end of the veranda, Majid was examining the henna seedling in its rusted metal tin. He looked, she thought (and she approved), like a nurse about to give a patient a massage, assessing the stiff limbs before making a first move. He tugged lightly at the thickening stem, then patted at the earth with both his palms spread out. With a wave of his ten fingers he sprinkled water near the roots. Satisfied, he urged her to come near. Eyes encouraging and nice, he nodded. “You aren’t a guest here anymore.” Sarie shivered, thankful. All her doubts were gone. It didn’t matter if she came to see him every day or only now and then. He’d greet her, she thought, just like this, any time she chose.